Session 1

TRANSCRIPT Spiritual Healing Journey November 18, 2023

Table of Contents
The Spiritual Dimension in Our Lives............................................................................................ 2

Home Practice...................................................................................................................................... 3

The Frame of Spirituality and the Self-Healing Mechanism of Life...................................... 4

In-Formed.............................................................................................................................................. 6

Ecosystems of Healing, Ecosystems of Nature........................................................................... 7

The Web of Trauma.......................................................................................................................... 10

Being, Belonging, and Becoming.................................................................................................. 11

Journal Exercise and Reflection Period....................................................................................... 12

The Spiritual Practice....................................................................................................................... 15

Begin Meditation............................................................................................................................... 16

End Meditation................................................................................................................................... 19

The Principle of Humility................................................................................................................. 19

Q&A....................................................................................................................................................... 22

Question 1: Fear and Resistance in Daily Meditation............................................................. 25

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 Session 1
Spiritual Healing Journey November 18, 2023
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Thomas: Thank you, Robin, and a warm welcome to everybody. Yes—as Robin said
already—we have, I think, more than five months time to really dive deeper
into the interrelatedness between healing, trauma work—individual, ancestral,
collective trauma work—the spiritual dimension, and the various aspects of what
we call the spiritual dimension.

We are also having here a huge community. Maybe we can open the chat just
for a moment and if you want to type where you’re dialing in from so that we
get a bit of a sense of the global nature of our community. We have many, many
countries here represented. We are truly a global community; as you can see if
you can still read what comes up in the chat.

You can stop it if you put your cursor on top of the chat and then you can see
the different continents and different locations, and also get a feeling of what
it means that from so many different cultures, places, cities, continents, we are
creating a global exploration. And still keep writing. We always collect our finger
or location print, our collective fingerprint, because I think it’s beautiful to also
feel part of a community and that for five months, we are a global community of
exploration, studying, learning.

Great. So we see, and we not only see, but we can get a feeling. As you still keep
writing, I want to talk a little bit about why I think this course is important, why
we invested a lot of energy in creating this beautiful program; which I believe will
take us deep into this intersection of healing and the spiritual dimension.

And one is, I, by myself already as a boy, felt very much connected to the Divine,
to a bigger context, but I wasn’t so related to the outer form of the tradition where
I grew up in Austria. And then when I was 19, I felt a very strong pull to meditate
every day. So I did, and I think from that day on, I spent thousands and thousands
of hours in meditation, including from when I was 26 to when I became 30,
approximately four years.

I had a very deep time of meditation over four years to really deeply explore,
because I felt very called to deeply explore different states of consciousness.
And that was a not always easy time, but it was a very profound and deeply
transformative time that took me then out into the world. So from four years
being way more retreated to a time to begin to teach all over the world.

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The Spiritual Dimension in Our Lives

The reason why I said that is because it was very clear to me that something is
calling me. It was very clear to me that there is some inner pull—and I think this
inner pull might appear, of course, differently for various people and many of us
here—but something’s pulling me.

Before we go deeper into content, I would love you to take a moment to just
contemplate: why did you sign up for a course that includes the spiritual
dimension, that includes the mystical teachings? I will say in a minute what I
mean by mystical teachings. But what pulls you?
[00:05:00]

Most probably many of us do have some kind of spiritual practice—of various

intensities, obviously—already coming into this course. And I would love you to
feel into the part of you that keeps you going. There’s some sort of motivation.
Also, once we establish a regular practice, for example, something is strong
enough for us to do that; when we read books, when we take courses, when
we connect to how the spiritual dimension shows up in our life. So something is
strong enough to do that.

Maybe you can take a moment to feel how that feels and how that shows up in
you when you allow yourself to listen within a bit and say, “What’s my interest?
What’s my motivation? What’s my calling? Is something calling us?” Then you
can take a look, how does this calling express itself in your life? Is this calling very
strong? Does it show up from time to time? Does it rarely show up?

How do you feed the part of you that has a calling towards the spiritual
dimension, towards a deeper practice? How do you feed that part? How do you
nourish that part? What do you do in order to respond to that calling? And maybe
already for decades, because I’m sure some of us have decades long practice.

And so we map a little bit. It’s like a mapping, that I see what aspects in my
life, which interests, which relationships, which activities, and also my overall
movement, “Where does my spiritual calling, if it’s there, show up in my life?”
Even if I am on the outskirts, I’m interested but not so engaged, so then I feel a bit
into that I’m kind of resonating with something that I can’t fully describe, but I’m
interested, I feel an interest, I want to learn more.

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There’s a whole spectrum from being deeply immersed in the long practice to
feeling a new resonance because I’m looking for answers or I’m having questions
that I can’t get deeper with with my current tools. Just to see the overall kind of
ecosystem of your life and how spirituality is part of that ecosystem that you
create around yourself, meaning your family, your work, your life as a citizen,
your friendships, all the relationships, your relationship to nature, maybe your
relationship to your ancestors, maybe some of your ancestors carry deep spiritual
qualities, traditions that you feel connected to.

[00:10:00]

And we will talk about it more, also ethics and values. What are my ethics?
What gives me orientation in life, how to live? What’s appropriate? What’s not
appropriate? What are my values in life? And maybe if you have something to
write or maybe you remember and come back to it, I would love us to develop a
little bit of a journal over this time, these five months, that you can come back to
after and see also the work that you did during the course.

Home Practice

Sometimes it’s really good to listen to some of the sessions later because we hear
only part, and maybe new things show up and we listen to it again so that it’s a
course material that you can work through. And one would be as a practice after
this session to look at what I ask you right now to look into, “What’s the ecosystem
that I’m living in and where is what we call the spiritual dimension already present
and has effects?” That your spiritual practice already affects your life.

Sometimes consciously asking that question shows us the extent of how much
is actually based on the spiritual dimensions. That’s kind of an ecosystemic
mapping so to speak. And the other part ... So there is the calling, and the calling
is—when it’s strong enough—moves us to act, moves us to do something. Even
signing up to a course is an action. It’s moving us.

When there is enough motivation for something in our life, it moves us to engage,
to be active, and to connect. And in that place—and I think that’s going to be a
second home practice until next time—where I feel interest, where I feel a calling,
there is already a form of knowing. And I would love us to honor that where I
feel called, I already know something, even if sometimes I cannot specifically say
what, but I feel that I feel called, which means I recognize something in myself
and there is already a connection.

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That’s a place to come back to. My calling is a place to come back to and my
calling is, so to speak, a spiritual resource also for my healing work. We will talk
more about resource—what are different resources for our healing work—but
the place that calls me, the place that lets me practice is already connected to
something bigger and we want to honor that, we want to honor that there is
already a connection, and that’s something I can come back to.

So the home practice will be that you sit a few times until our next session, and
even if it’s just 10 minutes to feel into your calling and the place that knows
something, and stay connected to it. It’s like resonating with it, with that place.
And we will unpack that, over the next few months, how that actually can be
unpacked, unraveled, deepened to become a significant resource in our life.
[00:15:00]

That’s to start with. Two places, mapping life and connecting deeper in your
meditation or contemplation or when you sit somewhere. Just feel that which
calls you.

The Frame of Spirituality and the Self-Healing Mechanism of Life

The next step I would love us to clarify—because today is also a session where
we set the frame—what is spiritual healing, maybe what it’s not, and why it can
be so powerful, and why it can be also used sometimes as a bypass to actually
bypass our healing, and I will talk about this more.

Spirituality is very much about walking our talk. Spirituality is not just reading
books and having intellectual knowledge about different states of consciousness,
different principles, different teachings. That, of course, is important. But if I want
to engage in a serious mystical practice which is, mystical refers to the essence of
big wisdom traditions.

When you have spirituality, or ... The awakened spirit is codified in the mystical
essence of big wisdom traditions, for example. And what it means, codified: it’s
being transmitted from one generation to the next through awake consciousness.
We can learn from that consciousness directly, which means it’s completely the
word and the action and the state is the same. That’s a deep mystical practice,
when what we say and what’s inside of us is the same.

Having read about certain aspects, of course, is the beginning, is the invitation,
but then our practice is going to the party. So there’s always an invitation and
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then we are going to the party. And in this course, we want to talk about going to
the party because the invitation is already out.

We are already here and now we are looking, “How can we go to the party that
we can actualize the spiritual dimension and feel the benefits—which is the
healing power—feel the benefits of the spiritual dimension in our life.” There are
certain principles that we will connect to that unfold certain qualities in our life.

I think no matter if I do this course for myself or I do this course for myself and
my professional work as a coach, as a therapist, as a teacher, whatever is my
expression in the world, we will see how these spiritual principles actually begin
to unfold and affect an agency or qualities in our life that become healing. One of
them is what Robin said already in the introduction. Robin referred to the self-
healing mechanism of life.

We all know when somebody cuts their finger while we are cooking, then after
a few days the body heals itself, or in other places. So there is a self-healing
mechanism built into life anyway. But it seems like sometimes that self-healing
mechanism doesn’t activate itself properly, but it wants to. So another point is
that we all, everybody who is interested in healing, we have a big ally, which is
the self-healing mechanism of life. That’s our big ally.

I believe that some of the spiritual or mystical principles hold the key to activate
the self-healing mechanism when it’s blocked. When something blocks it, then we
have some deeper understanding, maybe why it’s blocked and how to unblock or
unstuck certain blockages in order for the self-healing mechanism to restore life.

[00:20:00]

When we say restore—which is, I think, a very important word—restore doesn’t

mean going back to a state that was before we were hurt. In the spiritual and/
or mystical understanding of restoration is always that when life got hurt
or traumatized, to restore means to integrate that hurt into a new state of
ourselves—or of our cultures or our family systems—and that new state is one
that we don’t know because the hurt and the integration of the hurt actually
adds wisdom.

I think many of us know or also have seen, and I think many here also might have
seen our Collective Trauma Summits throughout the years, and some question
that we ask many speakers during the Summit is: tell us a little bit about your

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life story. And we see that many of the speakers actually by working their
traumatization and integrating it, they became remedies.

Their work in the world is a remedy because of the wisdom, how trauma has
been turned into learning, and that’s amazing. There’s always an added piece
of information by going through something difficult and healing it. We are
not going back to the former version of ourselves, we’re going back to a wiser
version of ourselves.

That’s why the healing arts are so beautiful, because every time we really heal
former wounds, we actually become wiser, more compassionate, we become
a remedy, we transmit our own healing into our ecosystem, and we grow our
perspective. Our perspective literally gets bigger and so we often say that more of
the world can land in me.

In-Formed

I want to speak about this a bit because this is a very important principle in the
spiritual evolution. What does it mean, more of the world can land in me? Means
that I can be in-formed. So when I look at Robin—when Robin spoke before—
Robin’s information, Robin as a being in-formed me, which means Thomas has
a Robin inside as perception. The Robin that I felt, that I saw, lives in my central
nervous system.

When I open myself to Robin and really listen to him, then my body feels his body.
Same as you. When you listen to me right now and my information, Thomasness,
informs you, then there is a certain depth how that information goes deeper.
Sometimes we listen intellectually. Sometimes we listen intellectually but we are
also touched emotionally.

Sometimes we are listening intellectually, emotionally, and we can also feel the
physical transmission of a teaching or an interaction or a relationship or a deep
moment when we listen to a friend, so we are being in-formed. There’s a form of the
outer world—a person, a group, an event in society—in us, and that’s called intimacy.

A lot of spiritual practices, when we practice compassion, when we practice

loving kindness, when we practice deeper radical open presence, it’s often about
receiving the world and becoming aware that we carry the world already inside.

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That we are always already interconnected, and trauma sometimes distorts or

shuts down that information stream.

[00:25:00]

Over the course of this course, we will also explore how, on the one hand, trauma
fragments the narrative. Trauma has a fragmenting power. Like you read the
newspaper and suddenly it goes [expanding gesture/noise] and the newspaper
comes back in small fragments, rains down onto the floor. And then we try to
read one fragment and then we try to read the other fragment in order to read
the article.

So trauma is this dispersing or distorting dimension of the information flow. And

when we practice a deeper spiritual practice, we actually train and integrate. So
we integrate those fragments, we integrate the power that fragments life, and
we train our nervous system to become more perceptive or perceptive on finer
levels so that we begin to participate in more subtle dimensions of life that maybe
before we didn’t pay attention to because nobody really showed us the entry gate
to that.

One part of the spiritual practice is also refining our perception and adding that
refined perception to our healing skills. I can do that where my nervous system
is integrated, I can refine my perception. Where my nervous system is hurt,
where my body is hurt, or my emotions are hurt, or my mind is hurt, or where my
relational capacity is hurt, or my spiritual capacity is hurt, or when my ancestral
capacity is hurt, I cannot perceive life the way it is.

Either it’s limited or it’s shut down, which is okay because we are living in a
world where, I think, there is a pandemic situation of trauma in our world and we
are looking how to turn that into wisdom, we are looking how to turn that into
healing, and we are also looking how to turn that into healing containers that
develop a much deeper collective architecture of healing around the world.

Ecosystems of Healing, Ecosystems of Nature

One reason why we did different healing journeys—collective healing journey,

the ancestral healing journey, now the spiritual healing journey—is to give tools
that we can use for ourselves, that we can use in our work, but also how do we
create collective environments, ecosystems of healing where we can heal in many
different places around the world, create this architecture to take care of our
individual ancestral and collective wounds.

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So for this course, we have two streams. We have training for spiritual practice.
One part of it is a deep training and the other part of it is integration, means
healing. I believe a good spiritual path combines both training and integration,
and both of them make us more whole. Make us more whole individually but
also collectively.

I believe that the underlying reason for separation ... And I think in many—
especially also modern or Western societies—there’s a hyper focus or a hyper
individualism that is a mix between being individuated and feeling separate.
I think if we can release the separation, the individuation is not the separate
self. The individuation is the beauty of a concentration of intelligence that is the
ecosystem at the same time.
[00:30:00]

It’s not just part of the ecosystem. Because many people would say, “Oh, I’m part
of an ecosystem.” I would say, “Yeah, maybe we’re not just part of an ecosystem,
maybe we are the ecosystem.” And what does that mean? When you go through
nature, I mean some of you might have heard me say that, when you go through
the forest, for example, where is nature? And sometimes we hear, “Okay, nature is
all around us.” But what’s with me? My body is nature too.

I am nature and all around me is nature, so there’s nature through us. We are the
ecosystem of nature. We’re not just looking at nature, which makes the whole
conversation around climate change very interesting, or biodiversity, because are
we really hurting nature out there where we see it? Or is that perspective already
part of the wounding, the ongoing wounding?

That I don’t feel myself anymore as nature. That I am that ecosystem, not I’m just
a part of, which means I’m like a cup in a cupboard. I’m part of the cupboard. No,
I’m not a separate mechanistic thing that also stands in the forest. There’s life,
there’s nature. Our bodies are the biosphere. I think the same is true for society.
Society is not just all the other people, or society is not just around us. Society is
through us.

And spirit is not just all around us. Spirit is through us. So spirit is not just
something I need to connect to. Spirit is already, to a certain degree, awake in
us through the fact that we are alive. Living is spirit in action. That’s why life is
sacred. Living is spirit in action. Spirit is not just somewhere to connect to. Spirit
runs through our veins, runs through our energy channels, runs through our
whole being.

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It is not something that I’m looking out for. Same as nature is not just there. It’s
always an interdependent or interbeing as Thich Nhat Hanh framed it. Whereas
Dan Siegel says intraconnected. There are more and more different words that
describe, bit different but also similar, understanding of the transcendence, of the
separate sense of self, and not just intellectually.

What I’m saying now is not, “Oh, I understand that we are all interconnected.”
Yeah, great. But if that’s not my experience, I will act like feeling separate and
I will think that we are all interconnected but when I’m triggered or in certain
situations in life, I will still operate from a separate sense of self.

And here is one element that I think is very important, that because of trauma
creating isolation, creating dissociation. In dissociation, we feel separate from.
Because when we feel—and we will do a meditation afterwards together—when
we feel connected we connect through our self contact to our core. We feel life
pulsing, flowing. We feel connected through our inner core where spirit is flowing
through us.

[00:35:00]

At the same time when I’m hurt, I feel dissociated from that inner flow. So
sometimes I ask myself, “Oh, where is that core?” Many people say, “Oh, I don’t
feel that connection.” Or, “I don’t feel what’s my purpose in life. I don’t feel what’s
my place in life. Where do I belong and express my gifts?” And that’s because we
lost that feeling, but that feeling can be restored.

In opening that separation, we actually gain access to the tremendous healing

potential of spirit. Why? Because it dissolves separation and allows us to
reconnect and feel again some of the energy flow states that we are made out of,
like our deeper nature. And so dissolving separation brings in a resource that we
can use for trauma healing work and that I think is very essential, especially if ...

That’s important for the individual trauma work but it is very important for our
ancestral and collective trauma healing work, because these are already in some
sort of transpersonal state. It goes beyond our personal experience. So when I
connect to my ancestry, I’m opening myself up to a bigger context already, and to
have some kind of spiritual foundation for that is very important.

The same is true with collective trauma work because my collective self, when
we deal with the collective, it’s so vast that if there isn’t a deeper spiritual anchor,
we might get lost in it. So having a deeper spiritual presence or centeredness is

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important to work on those levels. And maybe a last thing and then it would be
great if we can let some of the things sink in a bit and do some practice. I will ask
you also some questions for journaling.

The Web of Trauma

For our work here, we refer to trauma work as of course individual trauma.
Individual trauma can be from attachment trauma to shock trauma, any kind
of strongly overwhelming adverse impact that happens within our biography,
within this life, and it leads to the trauma symptoms of hyperactivation, a massive
escalation of stress, a shut-down often of the overwhelm, the pain, in order to
survive better, to stay in a place of action in very adverse situations, but also
often a full freeze in order to protect ourselves.

And in between there is a crack. In the moment something gets split off, there’s
a crack. So we feel separate because we separated the part of ourselves. And
so there’s individual trauma, but I believe in order to understand the system of
trauma, which I believe is a web. Imagine a web that goes from my life, through
our lives and then through our ancestors’ lives.

The cultural impacts of big wounds, that’s all a web. Thinking trauma just as
individual incidents I think is too small in order to unfold a much deeper healing
effect. That’s why we call this in our work individual, ancestral—my parents,
my grandparents, great-grandparents, the ancestry I’m arising out of—and the
collective, which means the cultural body that I grew up in, that I’m part of and all
its legacies. So trauma is like a archeologically layered aspect of life.

[00:40:00]

And we’re also, over the course of this course, we will also look into these
different dimensions and get a taste of these different dimensions and reflect
how they affect our lives. And for this, I want to say that—what I said just at the
beginning—spirituality is about walking our talk. It’s about embodying higher or
deeper states of consciousness in the way we live.

Embodiment means individual embodiment throughout the part of our nervous

system that is individual and codes our individual experience. And then I believe
our nervous system is not just individual, our nervous system is ancestral. The
information of our ancestors is encoded in that part of our nervous system.

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And then we all have a collective nervous system that we all share. There is
something much bigger in our nervous system that has the capacity to sense
systems, to sense into collective spaces, to be aware of larger groups, to be aware
of organizations, to be aware of parts of our societies, communities, nations.

Even if we didn’t learn much how to practice that, because we’ve often not been
invited to, or because of the fragmentation in our societies, that a lot of collective
trauma hurts the collective nervous system. And I believe in this time when we
look at all the things that are happening in the world, we are being called to
global collaboration.

Global collaboration is the transcendence of our individual, ancestral, or national

selves and being able to hold the global space while we are still also living locally
as human beings and individuals where we live. A global collaboration is an
effect of a certain level of consciousness that can live globally.

Globally, it doesn’t mean that I need to fly around the whole world all the time,
but that my awareness—and not just my cognition, my awareness—is big
enough to embrace that reality. And we know how hard—we have seen this also
through COVID—how hard it is to just operate within our national selves when
it’s about national processes around stress factors like COVID, there was already
a lot of fragmentation.

And so I think the work we are doing over the next five months is individually
healing, but is also collectively healing because we need a bigger expansion
to deal with the big topics that we see at the moment in the world. I think the
spiritual dimension and the trauma integration dimension, they are a coin with
two different sides.

Being, Belonging, and Becoming

Individual embodiment is an ancestral embodiment is a collective embodiment. So

we walk our talk in these different layers. Yeah, so before we go a bit deeper we
make some space, because the dimension of space is being. I will come back to
some of the terms that I used today and unpack them for us a bit deeper. But in
the mystical work we work on being, becoming, belonging.

That’s kind of essential for human rights, the right to be, the right to become, the
right to belong. And being is space. Being is being in life, being alive. But being is

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also being contemplative. Being puts my nervous system into a state of reflection.
When I have enough space, I can reflect.

[00:45:00]

When I have enough space, when I reflect on my life, certain parts of my life, I
activate my digestion, I can digest my experience. Healing work needs space
because space activates digestion. In one way we could say trauma healing
means digesting one’s adverse experiences we had in our life and be able to
digest and integrate the digestion, the digested material, into a bigger self.

Integration in that sense means also learning, post-traumatic learning. So,

maybe I said many things and now we need a moment of space to reflect on
what you heard and to digest a bit what resonates, what doesn’t resonate,
what aspects of what I shared with you resonate with your experience? What
resonates more or less?

And maybe for everybody who joined the course for the first time, we might need
a little bit of time to get into the terminology. Maybe I used a certain terminology
that needs to be unpacked and understood, also to make space for ... Give it
a little bit of time. And then through reflection and digestion, we can slowly
integrate, either knowledge, practices, tools, skills into our daily life and live them.

Journal Exercise and Reflection Period

If you can take again something to make yourself a few notes and then take these
notes also after this session, or whenever you have time between this session
and the next session, come back to it. And so there’s a little bit of home practice,
exploration at home in-between the sessions.

So my first question to you is, what are the areas in your individual life that you
feel can benefit from this course or in general, your healing work? So what are the
areas where you feel the need for new movement, change, updates, healing? And
so you can scan a little bit the map of your life. Sometimes we call it the mandala
of your life.

On the individual level I will ask you also about the other two or three, so that you
can look a bit, “Okay, if I look at my individual life, what are the main subjects that
I think need my attention, need for me to make space for them, for me to generate
some new insights, perspectives, healing?”

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[00:50:00]

And then you can also look into which aspects of the ones that you’re writing
down now you feel you have already some support with, and what are the
aspects that are pretty unexamined and there’s also very little support? Just make
yourself a note. I will come back to that later.

And then when you look into your ancestral—so this was “I” for individual, “A” for
ancestral—when you look into the ancestral dimension, your former generations,
your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, or even before, where do you
see maybe the biggest need? Maybe there are many things that you can come up
with and you can also map those territories later even deeper.

What’s in your ancestral stream that needs attention, where you feel there are
some aspects that you haven’t looked at or you have looked at but it didn’t
generate maybe new movement or insights, healing, integration. And if possible,
we are looking at all these questions as like with curiosity and there’s an
exploration, not, “What did I fail to do, or what should I have done, but I didn’t
until now?”

But more to be curious, to be, “Oh, I can expand my awareness into different
parts of my life.” And obviously you took the space for it, being part of a five-
month journey. You’re investing some time and space and curiosity to look what
are the relationships to various of your ancestors that would benefit from some
healing attention?

And then to make yourself some notes around the collective or cultural dimension.
When you look into the collective trauma fields and the culture that you’re coming
from, that you were born into, first of all.

[00:55:00]

If you changed your places of living, start with the one that you were born into
and then continue with the ones you transitioned into. But what are the bigger
collective trauma fields in the culture and can benefit from a healing attention?

Okay, and then two more questions. One is, what’s the ecosystem that you have
built for yourself for healing? When you look at ... What’s your ecosystem of
support that supports healing in your life? This can be, of course, parts of your
family. This can be great friends.

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It can be that you’re part of a community’s sangha in different places, or part

of various groups, of course now you’re a part of this community here. What’s
your healing ecosystem that you built for yourself already? This can, of course,
be going to a therapist, I’m going to a body worker, I’m going to all kinds of
professionals. Map a little bit the resources of your ecosystem.

The ecosystem can also be nature, for example. I mean, it’s very resourcing for
you to take a walk on the beach or go to the woods or take long walks or go for
hiking or ... That’s also part of the ecosystem. There’s the social ecosystem, there’s
the natural ecosystem.

Then you can look into, what’s your spiritual ecosystem? And of course for some
of us, this will be new. It’s a new question that we just tap into. And maybe for
some of us, the spiritual ecosystem has been opened to certain degrees. What
gives you faith? What do you feel connected to as a bigger context? What gives
you inspiration, in the spiritual dimension? What gives you strength?

[01:00:00]

And of course, our course is, let’s say, transdenominational so we welcome all
kinds of different streams of spiritual resources. Whatever is giving you strength,
whatever you feel connected to, whichever name you give that, maybe it has no
name, whatever. What’s my spiritual ecosystem of support?

My last question for this reflection period is how much space do you have in your
life? Our lives might be pretty busy, many commitments in life, many things to
take care of. Also, many global questions that might have local reverberations. So
there’s potentially a lot of activity in our life, for some of us more than for others.

But when you look at, if you’re really interested in spiritual dimension, spiritual
dimension is based in our inner spaciousness. The healing of trauma needs
space. We need to slow down in order to onboard the unintegrated past, the
unintegrated information that is stored in trauma.

Even if somebody goes to a trauma therapist, you need to take this hour off your
other activities or two hours and make space, otherwise, we don’t go deeper.
There’s a certain amount of space needed, which also is already part of our
commitment and is part of us activating a spiritual resource. Spaciousness is a
spiritual resource and I’m curious how much that is part of your daily life flow,
that you implemented spaciousness.

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And for some of us, implementing spaciousness is having a regular practice, but
also having practice can be contemplative prayer, meditative ritual, but can also
be for some people the practice is doing sports regularly or having space through
listening to music. But how much space? What are the elements that insert
space? Just note for now.

I think it would be very good to come back to that mapping later whenever you
have time or space and maybe add stuff to the mapping. We can work with that
mapping over the course of the course. Okay. And then we want to move into a
little bit of a practice that helps us to go a bit deeper.

[01:05:00]

Every course session, we will also do a practice that you can re-listen to later,
that you can come back to either through listening or through going through it
later. They’re not so complicated. Various practices give us access to various
dimensions of also the spiritual realm. Today, we’ll start with what we just did. A
little bit the space that transcends my daily experience, because one element of
the spiritual practice is transcendence.

The Spiritual Practice

Another element, for some of us, the spiritual practice is incarnation, like coming
fully into life. Not everybody that is in life really came fully into life. And in modern
ways, we call that maybe attachment trauma or either pre or perinatal trauma.
What happened before, or before when we were kind of still in the womb of our
mother, through birth, through attachment, certain processes are conducive of the
soul landing in the physical body and some processes hurt that connection.

So for some of us, the spiritual practice is, at the beginning, not so much about
transcendence but it’s more about embodiment, incarnating fully, bringing our full
light into the world and anchoring our light in the matter, which means our body;
in the cells and the atoms of our body.

That connection is not, “Oh, I have to do that first and then I can do the
transpersonal practice.” No, because if that’s part of our life, then often exactly
that process opens up already some of the other dimensions because that’s what
I have to do in order to create a good container. And we’ll talk about this in the
course more.

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What are the essential principles of spiritual healing and how they connect
to modern trauma therapy, for example, and what are the similar and maybe
sometimes different approaches? But building a vessel for the spiritual practice is
important so that our light can fully land. And I will speak more to what light means.

That’s why for some of us, the healing work is not, “Oh, I have to heal myself and
then I will get to my life.” No, if we have—and many of us have—a package of
trauma to heal, that is our spiritual practice. It’s not the obstacle, it’s the path.
And that’s very beautiful. There’s nothing in the way. Everything is the way.

And even if I think that other people, “Oh, other people have it much easier
because they seem like they’re developing so fast and I need to deal with my
trauma and I would like to be there as well.” No, no, no, no. We will talk later a bit
about humility. My humility is to bow down to my path. That’s my contract with
life, that’s my path.

I can be inspired by other people’s path and at the same time, I need to walk and
I walk my path. That’s a commitment that is the highway for our development.
And so that we see, okay, everything that is in our life is already in our life. So
the discussion if it should be there or not, is not the point. The point is to say,
okay, humility is also I bow down to my path and my path is not an obstacle. It is
the path.

[01:10:00]

There’s a beauty in it. There’s warmth in it, there’s compassion in it. There’s also
an acknowledgement of the difficulties and a deeper resource that says, “Yes. I
can walk this, I will walk this.” That’s just an important distinction. But today we
will look at this space that helps us to be aware of inner processes. And for this ...
I know you listened already for quite some time.

Begin Meditation

Let’s take a moment to connect to our breath and to connect to your body. And
just notice how you feel right now. Calm inside, busy inside, stressed, relaxed,
cold, warm. And then with your ... You can focus a little bit your attention on
your exhalations.

Every time you exhale, let your attention follow your exhalations into the body.
Notice where is most of your aliveness, where you feel most connected to your
body? Warm, open, maybe you feel some streaming, pulsing, tingling.
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And then through your body sensations, where you feel you feel connected to
the body, let’s see if through the open, more energized parts of the body you can
connect to the ground. Sometimes when we are relaxed enough, it feels easy to
feel the ground, not just to imagine the ground, to feel the ground.

When there’s stress in our body, maybe it feels like it’s harder to feel the ground.
And just respect both and only notice the way it is. One is not better than the
other. Just want to notice where your nervous system is at the moment. Respect
it, but also bring attention to that.

I feel my body is warm and open and I can easily connect to the floor, to the
ground, can feel the ground. Or I feel my body and I feel like it’s harder to connect,
feels a little bit blocked. Or there’s a strong upward movement and we are
somehow stressed, it’s not so easy to feel the ground. And then we respect that,
but there is already some awareness around that process.

[01:15:00]

You can ask yourself, what’s my current emotion? What’s my current emotion?
And also notice here, sometimes we feel subtle emotions, strong emotions.
Sometimes we don’t feel. All of it is good, we just want to be aware of.

Notice also what’s aware that you feel yourself right now? I feel my body and
emotions. I’m aware that I feel myself and I notice that which in me is aware or
that which in you or that which is aware.

Not to think too much about what’s aware, just to notice in yourself there’s a level
of awareness that is aware of the information that we feel, the perceptions we
have, the thoughts that we think. Something is aware.

And then, as you’re in that kind of inner awareness or space, I’m curious if you
can reflect a bit on what you know about spirituality. Either opinions that you hold
or thoughts that you have about what spirituality is and what it’s not. What do
you know about it?

And then I want you to honor what you know, that we honor together. So many
people from around the world, we all hold already some knowledge and some,
not only knowledge, but also inner experience. And we want to honor that and
we also want to look at, do I allow some space that there is more to it than I know
and that it might be different than what I know.

[01:20:00]

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We’re not saying what that is. We just look at how open am I to hold what I know
lightly so that I can open a space of inspiration. I can open a space of learning.

I can also open the space that new dimensions can speak to me that my knowing
might prevent. We honor what we learned and know so far and we make some
space around it that new, higher, deeper dimensions that might be different can
show up.

Not only as intellectual knowledge, but as deeper aspects that I become aware
of by making some space for it and say, “This is what I know and I bow down to
what I don’t know yet. I bow down to not knowing. That life reality, the mystical,
spiritual dimension is deeper, vaster, maybe also more complex than I can
comprehend at the moment.”

And I’m willing to receive that. I’m willing for these more profound layers of life
to show themselves in my life. And because I partly don’t know, I’m touching the
innocence of my being that can learn. There are many things I might know and
there are many things I don’t, and in that is beauty.

If you want, before we come back, you can also use that moment, this moment
to ... Maybe for the next five months if you want to invite insights, if you want to
invite deeper revelations, want to invite more healing power from the spiritual
dimension into your life, you can can either set an intention, maybe formulate like
an inner prayer if that’s close to your heart or just invite that in your own words.

[01:25:00]

See, feel into what that is that our mutual global container can amplify for you
and you for others. And then take a couple of deeper breaths and feel your body
again well, the way you’re sitting. As you slowly open your eyes, do it slowly so
that you can stay connected to your inner space.

Orient yourself in the room, maybe look a bit around. So feel your body position,
the way you sit on the chair or wherever you sit and stay connected to your inner
sensations as you open up to the outer sensations so that you can feel both at the
same time.

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End Meditation

Great. In some of the sessions we will also do some rituals, some rituals of healing
where we’ll activate some of the spiritual dimension to come in and affect our own
healing process, that we can get a sense of that together, in later sessions.

The Principle of Humility

One last thing, and then I would love to open the space for questions. There were
already some written in questions and then some ... I’m sure there are lots of
other questions in the room. I want to speak a bit—which we did already now in
the practice—about humility, because every session we will touch a principle.

For example, one element of humility is that I know that I only partially know,
which means I might have a lot of acquired knowledge in life, which is really
important and good, and there’s always a dimension of not knowing. There’s
always a dimension that life is much bigger and I’m a lifelong student of life and
by being a student of life, I bow down to the person that I meet.

And it’s not just bowing down as a physical act, it’s an inner attitude of learning.
That everybody I meet, different situations I meet, different things that happen
in my life, there is an inner attitude, “Oh, there’s something here for me to learn.”
And learning allows a mutual data flow.

When I am in a position of knowing then I reduce somehow the mutual data flow.
But when I am with all my knowledge in the room but I also know that I always
learn something .... For example, I learn every group I give, every one-on-one
session, every session teaches me something, even if it’s small things. But there’s
always more to learn to refine the huge mandala of life.

Humility is a quality that many wisdom traditions deeply cherish. Why? Because
it is a horizontal bowing. It means that I know that I’m learning from life all the
time and if I’m open, I see more and more synchronicities. I see more and more of
the things that ..

The questions I walk with, I become more aware of the different forms, the
multiple ways how life speaks to me to answer these questions. They’re not
coming through one person or one specific channel. They’re coming through
different incidents, different situations where life shows information.

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And I think humility and being in an inquiry all the time, it’s not a compulsive
inquiry. I’m open to inquire and that reveals information to me. And so that
mutuality on the horizontal level, but it’s also part of the vertical dimensions.
Where I come from, my ancestors, and where I go to, the higher potential
dimensions. And we’ll talk about this more.

[01:30:00]

What’s the embodied part of us and what’s the potential part of us? That’s the
part of us that comes in through creativity, that comes in through insights, that
comes in through revelations, through innovation, through new impulses that we
bring into life, into our work, into our relationships. So that’s potential light.

Embodied light is the light that is awareness of life. I use embodied light to feel
my body, and I use embodied light to feel Robin. That’s embodied light. That’s
where I feel life that’s already in existence, that’s already manifest, but we all
carry potentiality. That’s what we are growing into. That’s what we are becoming.
That’s what makes us happy and feels like creative fire when it’s active in us.

Through new impulses, we create new things. That’s how creation is active in
us, and that’s also the part that holds a lot of healing potential. When I become
more aware of my own potentiality, then I can also feel yours more because the
same part that I use in my own practice becomes like an awareness also of other
people. The dimension of potentiality is a tremendous resource in this spiritual
healing dimension.

Humility is not a low self-esteem. Some people think, “Oh, humility means I’m
not strong in the world. I’m not self-confident.” No, not at all. Humility is an inner
attitude of openness to learn, openness to bow down, openness to not know.
That not knowing is not just a shortcoming, not knowing sometimes is exactly the
true honest expression in a moment. But it doesn’t mean that I’m not present in
the not knowing. It’s not just an absence, it’s a bowing.

Like the Tao Te Ching—I will quote more often Steven Mitchell’s translation—says,
“Do you have the patience to wait until the mud settles and the water is clear?”
Sometimes we don’t see clearly, sometimes we don’t know, and we can be in that.
And sometimes it’s not time to see.

And in one prayer that came to me once in the Himalayan mountains with a
group says, “I’m grateful for what I see, I’m grateful for what stays hidden,
because this is thy will and that’s why I’m here.” I’m grateful for what I see, many

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people might agree. I’m grateful for what stays hidden is already less obvious.
But we will also learn that in trauma, not seeing, not feeling, not experiencing
was and often is still the intelligence that was needed.

Not seeing is not a shortcoming, not seeing is a process—an intelligent process—

that was needed and maybe can be changed today. But that also means, as we
go through these five months, that when we go through a course the fact that we
start to feel more and become aware of more also means that more beauty will
show up, but also more of the parts where we stop feeling will show up. It’s both.

As practitioners, we need to be aware that every kind of regulatory process

reveals more of life. And part of it is also it has a reason why it’s hidden, because
at certain times it was too much. I think it’s just good that we are aware about
that, that comfortable things might show up but also uncomfortable things might
show up as we grow our radius of awareness and embodied living.

[01:35:00]

Yes. So with that ... I know it was also a lot of content but we need to create a
foundation for our exploration. And it’s sometimes good, as I said, to relisten to
portions of it and walk with it a bit, contemplate different aspects—some of it
might be very clear to you already, some of it may be less—and to go through
the home practices so that next time we can continue maybe from a more refined
level of the home practice. And with this, I hand it back to you, Robin.

Robin: Well, thank you so much, Thomas. It was a lot to absorb, and I found it, I have to
say, utterly compelling. Fantastic foundation for our course, so thank you so much
for that. And as you say, really important that people take time to digest it and
integrate it later and listen to the material again and again. I think there was so
much in it.

In a moment we will—we hope—we will take a live question in a moment. And

there’s also, people have been writing in questions and we want to bring one or two
of those also. If you would like to ask your question live to Thomas today, please
submit your question via the Q&A button at the bottom of your Zoom window.

After you submit your question via that Q&A button, you can then raise your hand
by clicking on the raise hand button. And if you don’t see either of those, the Q&A
or the raise hand button, please click “more” and you should find the buttons
there. And when you are asking a question live—and it’s not just for today, it’s for
the course as a whole—please use headphones if possible.

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Now before we move into questions, it’s important we think to just remind
everyone of our shared agreements for the course. And so, Digo, maybe you can
bring up a slide that has our shared agreements. We want to really invite you into
this and not to see the agreements as something that binds you in a tight way,
but more as part of the practice, really.

So some of the essential guidelines ... And there are more details on the course
website because they’re also related to how we are with each other in the
mentoring groups and other small group sessions as well as on the community
site that you might become active on also.

Just a few of the core agreements that we want to invite you into. Firstly,
recognizing that we’re a community, and as a community we want to of
course treat each other with respect and civility. And as Thomas said earlier,
understanding that discomfort may arise in my interactions with others or just in
myself as I listened to the material and welcoming that discomfort as a possible
signal of where I might grow.

As Thomas said, there’s nothing in the way, everything is the way. Speaking from
the I perspective. So attending to and speaking from your own experience and
responses and not expressing assumptions about the experience of others, and
therefore also being open to the different viewpoints of others.

And lastly, respecting confidentiality by taking home learnings but not identifying
others’ experiences personally; not naming other people who might’ve shared
something quite personal and deep and intimate. So we invite you into these
shared agreements. We’ve found them very helpful in terms of creating a safe
container, a safe vessel for our learning.

Q&A

As I said before, there’s been a lot of people writing in questions both before and
during. And Thomas, I wanted to bring maybe a couple of the written questions
that were submitted before the session started for you to reflect on and then we’ll
bring on one or two live callers before we close.

One I think you already spoke to some degree, but you might want to amplify
it. It’s around a question that [Participant] brought, and she says, “What is the
relationship between personal healing and spiritual awakening?”

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And then a question also from [Participant]. They say, “Though I’m very
committed to healing traumas in my life that have contributed to lack of financial
and social success—still healing and growing at 75—I have to ask, how much
of this pain is personal and what I’ve caused? How much of that pain is my
karma—” He says, “I’m not sure if that’s the correct word to use—and what I’ve
needed to experience to wake up and open up my heart.”

When we were reflecting before the session started, we thought that was an
interesting thing to address also. So over to you, Thomas, and then we’ll bring on
one or two live callers before we close.

Thomas: The relationship to the question with the relationship between healing and
awakening, we could say awakening is our being waking up through different
states. The big mystical traditions in a way describe maybe four big states, which
of course have multiple substates.

[01:40:00]

One is the awareness of the physical universe. One is the awareness within the
information universe. One is waking up into the causal unformed dimension and
then like an awakening, an absorption in the Source, or we could say like a non-
dual state. And so, as we ...

Maybe through contemplative practices but not only, some people have
spontaneous awakening experiences doing all kinds of things. And often some of
the people don’t have even a spiritual practice and never heard about it before, so
it’s not connected just to spiritual practice but spiritual practice induces more of
these awakenings.

So we begin to be aware in these dimensions, but then we also have a

psychological makeup that interprets those awakening experiences. So that’s one
thing. Most of the time, we come back when we touch such a state into a kind of
understanding of that state, bringing this in connection with our life narrative.

That’s one translation point and the other translation point is that the big wisdom
traditions also speak about that not only awakening is spiritual practice—like an
openness, having a reference experience of some of the big states—but being
able to live those, and living those means embodying.

That’s what some people say when they say to bring heaven and earth together
means to be able to walk our talk and to live states in our daily life. And

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sometimes we use spirituality to go to the state experience because it’s hard to

live in life but then side effects of death practice are that people say, “Oh, it’s a bit
hard to be with unconscious people.”

That’s like a sign that the integration process of the bigger dimension of spirit,
also shared maybe with people that also experience that, and the rest of the
world creates a dualism that I think that’s where we need the healing work in
order to be able to ground those and create the seamlessness in our experience.

That’s why in our work here, we are very much for inducing, of course, higher
state experiences but at the same time very much for integrating our trauma or
our karmas, however we want to see that, and that we are able to transform the
world. Because through our bodies, we actually transmit more consciousness into
the world.

And this can only be up here than it’s great in states and meditation states, but
it actually doesn’t work so well when we go to the supermarket, when we see
conflicts in the world, when we need to change our approach to climate change,
then we need the embodiment and that’s where trauma and shadow plays a
role. In living, an ethical, sound life I think is important and embodiment is a big
part of it.

To the other question, to keep it short for today, because I will talk about karma in
the next sessions also more, but we could say karma is postponed experience and
trauma is also postponed experience. What I cannot experience in the traumatic
moment gets shut down, packaged, split off, turned unconscious, but it’s still
there. It doesn’t disappear.

And the big wounds of racism, the big wounds of colonialism, of holocaust, and
other big wounds in other parts of the world are still residing in our collective
unconscious. We all have been born into postponed life. We all also have been
born into integrated life, which is present. Presence is integrated life, or we could
also say integrated history is presence.

[01:45:00]

Integrated history is all of us being in the same space and being present with
each other. Unintegrated history is all the stuff that is working in us either
unconsciously or having effects in between us. And so, when of course we have
been born into postponed life, that’s why we have issues. The question is just
again, how we interpret that.

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Because some people say to other people, “Oh yeah, that’s your karma. That’s
what you need to go through.” We hear this sometimes in spiritual circles. It’s
a disconnected way to relate to somebody’s suffering and then it creates this
feeling, “Oh, I am wrong when my health is not good or when other parts in my
life are not in place, then I did something wrong.” And I think there is a big need to
reframe those elements.

But yes, karma is postponed experience. We could also say a more modern word
for that that matches it a bit is intergenerational trauma transmission, that we
have been born into trauma that pre-existed our existence already, and there are
ways to bring healing into that dimension and to open that up.

And yes, whatever is already in our life is the path for us to grow as a human
being and spiritually and to transcend. The question is only how we hold
that when we are with each other and how we can bring skillfulness or more
compassion into our relationships.

Question 1: Fear and Resistance in Daily Meditation

Participant 1: Thank you. Oh, it makes me kind of nervous. Well, my question is that I’ve been
experiencing resistance to my daily meditation practice. I’ve been having periods
of meditation for about 10 years now and last period started somewhere around
October, November last year.

And somewhere around April I noticed, without me doing anything for it, tears
just started to run down my face. This I welcome because I noticed, wow,
something’s opening up, so that’s great. And after a few months, fear also started
to manifest and I’ve been more aware of certain blockages that I have on my
diaphragm and my back.

Also been working with therapists in different approaches like osteopathy, like
physical and also psychotherapeutic approaches. And however ... So this has been
my daily practice. So it was like every day for over half a year, tears constantly
running down my face and it was very tiring and I also noticed that many days
afterwards I was in a triggered state of mind throughout the whole day.

For about last month, I noticed more and more resistance to my daily meditation
practice to the point that for about two, three weeks I stopped. I tried last week
and, again, tears and fear and so on. So I’m trying to weigh how much is this

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Spiritual Healing Journey November 18, 2023
26

resistance an intelligent response of my mechanism saying that’s too much.

But at the same time, I do expect or I do have high regard for a daily meditation
practice. So I’m trying to balance those two things.

Thomas: Yeah, it’s beautiful. First of all, thank you for coming online and speaking in
front of so many people. I want to honor your courage and everybody else who
raised their hand. I always say that listening to somebody is generous, but
bringing something into the community is also very generous, so it’s two forms of
generosity, and so thank you for that.

And also thank you for naming something that is pretty widespread. I have been
with many, many people that go through intense meditation practices and it’s like,
imagine you have a big balloon, an air balloon, in a room and you pump it with air
and it grows and it grows. Let’s say that’s our awareness.

[01:50:00]

At a certain time, that balloon starts to touch the walls of the room up and down
and on the sides and the more you pump air into that balloon, the pressure on
the walls will get stronger. Our unconscious trauma is like the walls and our
awareness is like the balloon, so through our meditation practice, we actually
expand our awareness and then exactly what you described starts to happen.

That we begin to become aware of what before was in the dark, in the
unconscious, slowly starts to come into our conscious awareness because our
awareness is growing. That’s what I said before. When we become aware, more
aware, we become more aware of something. And so, when you started to speak
about the tears and then about the fear, it’s very clear that you start to touch
some deeper trauma content in your nervous system.

I think the meditation practice is important and it seems like—you said you are
doing this—having professional support for this transition period to be able to
bring with some relational support that trauma into relationship so that you can
integrate it and then it will even deepen your meditation experience.

That’s a skillful process. I just don’t know, you say you have support, so maybe it
just needs more of that. But doing that, even if for sometimes you say, “Okay, the
intensity is too strong in my meditation, I will slow it down a bit and maybe do
different kinds of meditation, go for walks or walk slowly or do something that’s
more physical.”

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I don’t think you need to let go fully of the meditation, but see if you find maybe
different forms. Or do some drawing and do it mindfully, just that you continue the
contemplative part, but a bit more interactive with the world. And then look at the
pain and the fear and have somebody help you to integrate those fears.

Because you’ll see in the moment they are being addressed in the right way.
And always knowing that fears ... One thing that really helps when we sit with
ourselves is sometimes to soften the way we feel, because getting harder is a
way to feel less and then when the emotion comes up, we meet it with a harder
focus so it kind of stays in a recurrent loop.

When we soften the way we feel it and we make our nervous system softer
around the fear, sometimes the fear starts to melt and get digested. And that’s
also maybe what the therapist can guide you with, but softening ... And then to
know that fear is like when you go to the interior designer, for many people, fear
is just fear.

But when we do it professionally, fear can be very young, can be five-months-old,

can be three-years-old, can be seven-years-old. It has shades. Sometimes it’s
helpful when you adjust and ask yourself, “Okay, how old is that fear and how old
are the tears?” And then you adjust your nervous system a bit more specifically to
the age and the softness of that age.

That might help your nervous system to let the fear become a movement, like an
integrative movement versus a circular movement. When energy is stuck in the
trauma, it circulates inside and then it feels like it’s coming over and over and over
again, this similar experience. That means that we are not meeting the energy
with the right focus.

Changing the focus a bit might help us to say, “Oh yeah, I’m getting scared, but I
feel I’m actually digesting the fear.” So it goes in and joins the central flow of the
central nervous system and becomes part of the fountain. That’s where trauma
healing and, for example, the Kundalini energy that some spiritual traditions talk
about, is the flow through our central nervous system like a fountain.

Trauma is like a split off package and there’s fear and when the fear comes back
into the central channel gets digested, experienced, and integrated. That’s the
movement that is helpful.

[01:55:00]

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As long as it keeps coming back in the same way, it means you’re aware of the
fear but the fear can’t reenter an integration process. Relationship is good so
that you can feel safe enough. Sometimes we, alone, we don’t feel safe enough in
the meditation to do that so we need the presence of an attuned person that our
nervous system can relax a bit more and then let go of the fear and integrate it.

And the other one is the focus, the age, and the softness that the emotion
needs. And so maybe, I know, otherwise we don’t have enough time to go
through a process right now, but these would be a few things that I think can be
helpful for you.

It’s great to hear that you’re so committed to your meditation practice. And if you
let it a bit looser because you need something else right now and then come back
to it, it’s fine.

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