The Metamorphosis Of Trauma: Finding Gold In The Dark Night

38:04

38:04

The Metamorphosis Of Trauma: Finding Gold In The Dark Night

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In this conversation, I am speaking about the alchemization that can occur when we take care to integrate the shadows of our traumas, our pain, and our wounding. I dive deep into attachment styles, nervous system regulation, and healing deep-seated neurological wounding.

Meet your Teacher

Mazunte, Mexico

Meet your Teacher

Mazunte, Mexico

Transcript

Just want to say I have such deep gratitude for this work, Such deep gratitude for this mission and this path that we walk as space holders and as those here to receive and it moves in both directions and so being given this space gives the opportunity for that symbiotic relationship and what I really love with this program and with Metamorphosis that I'm just getting to know is the story of you know seeing myself in your story and you seeing yourself in my story and that when we share that we're able to not tune out but to tune in to what aspects of a person's story touch us and there might be different characters there might be different challenges but that we notice like oh there's a need here there's a need of acceptance there's a need of love there's a need of being seen being valued being a part of and that is universal and we realize that our needs that we have are not so unique that they are very universal and our pain is not so unique and in the moment when it can feel severe and it can feel pointed and it can feel very individual and unique to ourselves to remember that we are all reflections of one another and that that suffering is collective and so is that ecstasy that joy on the other side of the spectrum so as we move into stage one and the connection to the dark night of the soul and this connection to trauma there's some questions here that I asked myself when I'm tuning into what I want to share and so this will just be a free flow there's no organized answers here questions and I do encourage you as things come up to write them into the chat box if something feels alive for you and I'll do my best to look at them and what I don't get to I'm sure that I'll be directed to covering them in some other way as well so keep an eye on that first I'll communicate about my story a little bit and who I am and why I'm here speaking about this and for some of you some of you have worked with me before some of you have not and so thank you for trusting me to to be in this space as well and to share and something that I heard that's quite corny but very true when I was beginning to study trauma and trauma therapy and getting deeper into my path of healing I read somewhere that any research is me search I thought this was really corny but quite quirky because it's true the things that I feel that we deeply deeply research and that we go into these portals and these places of curiosity and introspection they start with ourselves and that's not a selfish endeavor but it is self-serving and self-cherishing there's a desire to understand ourselves more to understand our minds to understand our bodies to understand what our experiences mean to us and what they can mean and so truly the journey to being where I am today and teaching and holding space in these places that I like to say are kind of the balance between the underworld and the overworld you know I imagine a Persephone the goddess of the underworld who was you know tricked to come into the underworld eating the pomegranate seeds that would have her coveting to be there in the underworld and spending half her year in the darkness and the shadows and half her year and the over in the overworld I too have a deep desire to be seeped in both aspects of the human experience I didn't come here to be comfortable I came here to be alive and to experience the vast spectrum of sentience you know that's what we are known as is sentient beings feeling beings but for some reason along the way we were taught that there are some feelings that are appropriate and acceptable and enjoyable and there are some to avoid at all costs and because of that avoidance we tend to suffer even more deeply because in the corners and in the shadows of our own being in our own psyche and our complexity and multiplicity so much of our golden shadow is hidden and so the golden shadow which I want to communicate about here before I go into my personal share is we speak a lot about shadow work as the darkness the rage the sexual suppression like the anger the disappointment the shame and we're getting to know that more in in the world these words are becoming buzzwords we're hearing them in different programs we're becoming familiar with them but we don't hear as much about the golden shadow and the goodness that's put into the shadow and that comes from being told things when we're very young either in inaction or inaction meaning maybe we were told we were too loud or we were too boisterous or too flamboyant or too happy or that we were too independent or we were very independent this was something to be proud of and so we hid away in the shadows that submissive like loving feminine energy because we were told we needed to be powerful we needed to enable that Shakti energy that Kali energy that Durga energy or you know in the same in masculine and feminine so many of us are told that anger is so unappealing and it's not sexy and to be an angry man is to be feared and to be an angry woman is to not be accepted and to be left and so that drive that solar energy that exists in all of us that speaks up for our boundaries and that is fierce gets pushed into the golden shadow and so we become complacent and we're pacifying and we submit without truly surrendering and this is submitting against our consent really like if we look into the wheel of consent there's an imbalanced state in our universal community of submitting but not surrendering meaning it's very easy for us to follow we've been led to be really good at following to fall into line to be accepted and to be loved to be worthy is to not make too much of a ripple and definitely that anger makes a ripple so in the golden shadow exists a lot of our warriors like exist a lot of our driven creators like our expressive energy our voice like how many of us have been told or have been shown from consumerist nature and the creative expression in the way that it's marketed that your voice isn't pretty and that it's not nice enough to be heard by many people nobody wants to hear that someone's always more beautiful and someone is always more skillful in their creativity and so the artist gets pushed into the golden shadow and so maybe we say we can't paint and we can't draw and we can't sing when really we've never tried and we wouldn't dare to try because who are we to try there's this thing that comes in that limiting belief that exists in the in in the fascia of the body when it gets frozen in that fright stage of I couldn't possibly show myself I couldn't possibly be imperfect and be vulnerable in this space and so so many of us grow up to be adults that hide so much of ourselves away from even ourselves that we become identified with the roles that we have most comfortably fit into and the people that love us our families and our partners and our communities without even knowing that they're doing it a lot of times subconsciously and because of their own golden shadows and their own limiting beliefs they keep us in those cages and they don't let us touch the golden shadow because if we were to touch that part of us that's unlimited and vast they wouldn't know how to connect with us anymore they wouldn't know how to identify with this aspect of us whether it's more submissive and surrendering or if it's creative and more expressive or if it's more fierce being consistent becomes a complacency in a way and it's more accepted globally because when you're consistent people know how to deal with you your co-workers know how to deal with you your lovers know how to deal with you your family knows how to deal with you and if you step outside of that it makes it really complicated for people to understand what they what how they connect with you so moving into a bit of my personal story you know I don't need to go into the graphic details it's been said in many many places and within my programs and on my channel and so the story has been told and the book is being written and so there's a desire for me of like if you want to know the story here's the book just read this and then you know but what's important to know is not the story and not all of the details but what came after the story and with the story came a lot of victimization which is also really common in our world a lot of victimization and I had every reason to feel myself to be the victim I had every reason to be upset to be angry to be hurt to be upset yes but in concreting that role of the victim I took away my own power and the thing is is moving through the kitten caboodle of trauma I don't know if anybody studies aces but aces is the adverse childhood experiences test if anybody doesn't know what that is I encourage you to look it up you can find it online you can take this test there are some additions that I have made to this test when I'm working on it with clients but there are 10 questions and you get a point for each question that you're in and it's like the worst test that you can take you don't want a good grade on it but to have a 10 is to be highly traumatized and to be diagnosed in the DSM which is a trauma manual to be to be pathologized as CPTSD and CPTSD is post-traumatic stress disorder but complex and so this means like developmental meaning that we've had multiple issues so it's not one instance we can have a traumatized experience by just one instance but CPTSD comes from developmental trauma where things happen multiple times or multiple incidences create an experience for an individual to not feel safe in the world to not feel loved to not feel a part of and so on this aces test anybody that has more than four points is considered to have CPTSD and I have 10 and so on this test it's the highest score that you can get and I haven't met anybody else that's a 10 but I know that they're definitely out there and I have worked with some severely traumatized individuals but essentially it is you know experiencing homelessness experiencing sexual abuse experiencing physical abuse experiencing mental manipulation experiencing dysregulated attachment meaning where people that you sometimes felt safe with also were your abusers in either sexuality or mental or physical physical abuse and so the mind the neurology gets wired that people that you love will also hurt you the people that you love will abuse you and so the reason that I'm speaking to this is without the all the details of that you know my mother was a monster but also my creator in my mind as a child now I know her as also traumatized individual but as a young girl and as we are all young men and young women our parents are our gods you know we are these little beings that do not have the power to regulate ourselves our nervous systems and so we have to co-regulate with the nearest nervous systems and if that nervous system is dysregulated you are downloading faulty software onto the computer that you are because we are all organic systems and that happens within the first seven years of life and it's happening even as soon as you're in the womb as soon as conception happens and I've remembered and had these past experiences of feeling rejection even in the womb knowing that I wasn't accepted coming into this world that I wasn't wanted and so to feel that kind of experience and that connection with the mother with the maternal is incredibly traumatizing and to have the absentee of the father and the masculine who holds the space it's that abandonment so it's the lack of acceptance it's the rejection it's the abandonment and all of the limiting beliefs come into the space but the upside there is an upside to this because sometimes when we talk about trauma it's so dark and it feels so heavy and it feels like such a burden to carry and something that again we need to talk more about is post-traumatic growth you know we have the golden shadow with the golden shadow gives to us when we take the initiation that is trauma especially with the specific flavor of childhood trauma when we can step out of victim consciousness and acknowledge that our parents were also just beings with needs that weren't met in some way and that they are not our perpetrators even if their behavior was incredibly of a perpetrator if we can step out of the drama triangle of the hero the perpetrator and the victim and we can see that now as adults yes we're no longer that dependent child but now as adult we have the opportunity to be accountable for how we show up to be accountable for the choices that we make when we take that power back all of the pain that we saw all of the challenge all of the darkness becomes an initiation into even deeper levels of the human experience because in this world of eight billion people we are walking around but we are not all on the same timelines some people are deep in that victimization and we don't I I don't want to blame them for being there because I walked that path for 35 years it took me 35 years to come out of victim consciousness it's having compassion and saying like your pain is relative I get it like I feel you brother I feel you sister and what are you gonna do about it because you are no longer that child crying in the corner desiring your mother to hold your hand or your father to tell you that you're safe we have to or we get to learn to take the initiation to become the eternal family that our families never were because I can tell you this belief that we're so unique in the trauma that we've lived out as children I have worked with and I am friends with so many people that have had the most supportive families with people that have had the most unsupportive families and we are still traumatized because that's what part of the human experience is it's to experience challenge in pain and why does it affect some people more intensely than others trauma is not quantitative it is qualitative and for so many of us we're not given the resources of embodiment we're not given the lecture when we're children that hey when you're scared and you dissociate and you leave your body because you're no longer safe to be here because someone is taking control over you or someone is abusing you in some way you need to come back and when you come back how can you move that through your body how can you move that through your body and not numb out to life's experiences because they're not always going to be this incredibly painful but what happens for so many of us as we are younger or even into teenage years or into our adult years if we go through really traumatic intimate relationships is that we create this superpower which dissociation is a superpower to leave the body how incredible is it for the essence of you whatever that may be to leave your body and to go somewhere that is safer in a time where you do not feel safe into your body and then to come back at the time that you again feel that you can be in your body without being overwhelmed it's incredible but at some point as adults we are given the opportunity some of us when we educate ourselves and we come into spaces like this to see that we're dissociated that we've numbed out that we're avoiding the intensity of feeling that we can feel and we think and we tell ourselves we identify with our trauma and we just say I'm too sensitive I'm too needy I'm I can't handle anything I just had anxiety I had this and that and that is identifying with the story that's identifying with the trauma and in yogic philosophy we call this the samskara the story and so how many people do we know and ourselves like how often does something happen that doesn't feel good and we tell ourselves it's because this this and that and we confirm that the story is true that we're not lovable that we're not accepted that we're not a part of that we're never gonna find that person that we're never gonna find our purpose and we just reestablish and deepen that neurological groove in the mind that connects with the limiting belief and so it is so important in healing from trauma and coming into this space and coming out of the dark night of the soul to know that you could never be broken that you can never be destroyed that the true essence of you is like the internal aspects of the camera and that the lens gets a little dirty and there's dust on it and there's water on it but the truth of what you are is untouchable and the moment that you can remind yourself and catch yourself in hyper vigilance or just vigilance and observe become the observer of yourself and hear when your mind says that I'm not beautiful I'm not lovable I'm not good enough and you take a breath and you hold yourself and you hum or you shake or you hand scream you know screaming into your hands hitting a pillow dancing whatever you need to do to disconnect this story that you have in the mind we have to interrupt the patterns and to interrupt the patterns we've got to get weird you know a lot of healing is being happy and joyous to be weird and to do things that are odd I'm gonna look at some of your comments here yeah yeah and trauma gets passed down as traumatized parents then traumatized their kids and yes there has to be compassion and there doesn't have to be but my invitation to you is that there is compassion for your parents it took me my mother dying to finally have compassion for her and you know I didn't speak to her for 14 years before she died and just looking back at the mid 20-something echo it's unbelievable to me how I experienced my mother's death because in the moments that she was dying from her own addictions or her alcoholism and her own undoing when I got the call that she was going to die I said she's not my mother I don't care let her die and so this was a deeply like imbalanced response but it felt so true in that moment it felt so deeply true to me that I didn't care and that I didn't love her and that I hated her I had all this hatred and we carry that sometimes our entire lives and what I would like to say is that when I saw my mother on her deathbed that it shifted and that she had empathy and that she said sorry and she said I love you but she didn't that didn't happen she was still as unkind as she always was and she still didn't like me and she was still very unkind even till her last breaths but what I came to realize in letting her go and after her death through aspecting which is another part of of working with trauma is and some of you may have done this and some not but getting a pillow and putting that pillow across from you and really going into a meditative state you know I like to call this the hypnagogic state or the theta state the hypnagogic state and like breathing and coming into that space with yourself in evoking your mother or your father or whoever it is that you need to have a conversation with that you can't have in this life and that you can't have because either you're unwilling to see them in person or they're no longer here but visualizing them sitting on that pillow and looking across to them with the eyes closed and just asking the questions that you need to ask and something that came through for me that for me was so real it didn't feel like I was having this hippie airy-fairy therapeutic moment of pretending and creating a story that my mom was saying it was real she was there in front of me when I really really evoked that and really took it seriously of like if I could be in her if I could see from her mind if I could really be in her story where does her pain come from and I just said why do you hate me so much like why I'm your daughter like why do you hate me so much and she looked back at me with like tears in her eyes and she said I never hated you I just hated myself and it was and I still get chill bumps when I say I just started sobbing and it still like brings tears to my eyes because that in that moment I knew it was true I knew all that time all the hatred all of the abuse all the pain it was a projection of the hatred that she had for herself the self sabotage and there was so much compassion and love for her and a desire that she were still here so that I can be an ally to her but that wasn't my job as a child and we have to understand that when we are children it is not fair to be parentified meaning to to make us grow up from such an early age to be parentified at such a young age and have to care for ourselves it's not fair but it happens every single day and it happens to so many of us and so we have the opportunity to either for the rest of our lives hold on to that and cry and grieve and grieve and grieve or move through the stages of grief and ask ourselves what have I learned from this how can I relate to others how can I turn my pain into poetry how can my wounds become the wisdom how can this become a medicine like how can I channel this into medicine and so at some point in my mid-30s going through one of the most toxic intimate relationships I've ever been been in with a modern-day shaman that my very pacified and submissive me went into relationship with because I wasn't able to touch my own fierceness and my own boundaries and see my own power I was weak to that kind of energy and I attracted my mother in male form as a lover and I got to dance with the deepest aspects of shadow and I had a deep deep initiation and the most painful the most painful way that I could ever imagine through manipulation and abuse and gaslighting to the point where when you get to the very very bottom there's nowhere to go but up and so when that relationship ended and I was 16 pounds lighter from being anorexic and not sleeping and giving all my power away to a man that I thought was going to be my hero because I didn't think that I could actually be my own hero that I could take care of myself and I projected that on to someone that was also in his own wound of needing to be glorified and externally validated and we were playing into this trauma bond and just sucking the energy out of each other that when we fell apart there was literally no more energy in me and at that point I either could go back into my same loops or I can go to where it all started and so in that space of my darkest night of the soul I chose to go back to my childhood home after almost two decades and to do a healing ceremony at the house in which my mother died where a lot of other traumatic experiences and characters from my past lived because my mother's home was a drugged-in and a place of a lot of fear for me and a lot of sexual experiences that I did not want to remember when I went back with this new perspective that I was no longer a victim that I had power that I was a conscious creator it wasn't scary anymore when I came to this house this place that had been a black hole to me that I had traveled the entire world to escape from that I had literally traveled all corners of the world and left the United States for seven years without stepping foot into it it was like my little girl was running as far away as she possibly could from the source of her pain that when I went back with this new perspective that no one could hurt me now that I was in my power that no one could take advantage of me that I had fierce boundaries a light had lifted and all of a sudden I saw that there was always beauty there as well and I walked through the forest in which I lived when I didn't have a home and I was homeless and all these stories of oh I was homeless I didn't have food I didn't have love I wasn't accepted I remember I loved the forest I loved sleeping there I loved the I loved the animals I swam in the river every day I was like Mowgli from the jungle book it was like camping as a child I remember actually enjoyed so much of it but I had covered all that up and made this the black hole of my existence and it had had power over me for 35 years and so going back to that space with this new perspective lifted all this weight and really opened the world to me and it can happen that quickly and that's the beauty of integrating from our traumatic experiences and our dark nights of the soul we think sometimes that we have to do seven years of therapy and that we have to get 15 life coaches and then we have to have all of these experiences but in programs like this it can be one lesson it can be one teacher it can be one sentence it could be one quote one song that turns the light on and completely changes your world and so what I've noticed is that since I've come out of victimization and since I've stepped into my power I definitely lost a lot of friends because I'm no longer easily boxable I'm no longer easily identifiable I'm no longer accessible to everyone that's for sure I'm much more discerning about how I spend my energy but let me tell you my my relationships are much deeper they're much more authentic and I'm not in them because I need to be in them I'm in them because I want to be in them and this is the reality of coming out of victimization we get to choose our lives we're not just going into what life presents us we actually get to choose from all these different options and what don't you want to be in a relationship where you're actually chosen out of desire and not out of need because most of us are in relationships through a trauma bond it's completely normal and so again it's not something to shame but it's something to recognize most of us are in codependent relationships and I was in them most of my life where we are feeding off of our different wounds and we're just spiraling deeper and deeper and deeper until there's a combustion and then we convince ourselves that it's their fault or it's not the right container and then we get out of it when the work is there you know that's the initiation when you see all the junk you can either sit in the junk and find the gold in it and see like okay where's my part like how am I accountable for this mess or you can get out of the relationship go into a new one experience the honeymoon phase have really great sex have all the dynamic fiery explosive energy that is so amazing about trauma bonds and then go right back into that spiral and take the initiation or not so life will keep giving you those initiations until you take them or until one day you spiral so deep that you have no other choice but to take the initiation so that's what this is that's what metamorphosis is you know and that is what Chelsea and Jessica have created here with their team is they've given us an opportunity to fucking spiral just go as deep as you can go and something that one of my students said to me in a call a few weeks ago and I was like oh like so many snaps and he's like I visualize it as you know if you were if you were swimming to the bottom of like a deep deep lake and you go down three-quarters of the way and then you're like shit I need some air and you try to turn back upwards and you're swimming and you're trying to get up and you use all this energy if you were just to go all the way to the bottom you could kick off the bottom and shoot up to the top and so that is what we're doing here is it's uncomfortable it's really uncomfortable but the more that we allow ourselves to be deeply uncomfortable and have incredibly challenging conversations and to cut the relationships that no longer serve us and to get the sword out and just say no more like enough is enough and to be fierce and ourselves and to piss people off and to take ourselves out of the box and no longer choose to follow when we take that power back and we dive to those deep deep layers life becomes so much more rich and what I know about my life now is I wouldn't change anything you know something a lover told me a few years ago is he's like I'm so sorry that you went through everything that you went through and I was like I'm not like I'm not sorry I would choose it all over again like I am who I am I chose this because I can do it because I'm strong enough to do it and depending on what your belief systems are for me in the tantric Buddhist path I chose to come here I chose to be this echo of myself I chose to come into this certain frequency and to share whatever it is I share to channel whatever I channel and to experience what I experience and the amount of pain that I can feel without being overwhelmed is immense but the amount of ecstasy that I can feel is just as similar and I like them all like the moment we can drop preference and we can just like be with it all is the moment that life becomes so expansive and that time slows down like time really begins to slow down when we're no longer surviving but we're thriving and like our purpose and our path and so the last thing that I want to say before I open for Q&A's as well is another thing that a dear brother of mine said to me when I was deeply in my codependency and seeped in my trauma bond in my relationship is I was a highly independent woman at this time still I was successful I was running a yoga school I was doing a lot and I was commending and having a lot of respect but I still was codependent I was still deeply dysregulated and even though that wasn't seen from the outside and there was this pretty you know picture like the peacock that spreads its feathers I was still anxious I was still in need of external validation I was still thinking that another person was my entire universe and what my friend said to me I was like I don't know what to do he's my entire universe like I love this person like I can't live without him like he's my everything and my friend said Echo that's too much like that's too much for anyone no one should be your everything and he said you need to remember this you are your number one you're your number one priority you're number one relationship your path and your purpose is number two and then your relationships are third and sometimes they don't even come third because maybe you have a child maybe you have a parent that you're caretaking maybe you're a community member that stepped into a leadership role but that lover is not number one you're your own lover you're your number one and taking that simple statement that this friend made changed my entire trajectory after that it just took hearing that like you are your number one priority and it was like nobody had ever told me that before I thought well when you're in love they're your universe they're your number one and I had completely forgotten that I have needs that I have desires that I need spaciousness and so yeah I encourage you if you feel that you get into those relationships that that comes generally from a deeply dysregulated childhood and it's nothing to be ashamed of but it is to recognize and put yourself now in the seat of prioritization I am now number one and if there are any relationships in your life that don't agree with that then you get to change them and you get to say I know that it's been a certain way for some time but this no longer works for me and if you can't shift with me and evolve with me then this might be the closure or the transition of this connection so the dark night of soul and moving through trauma and coming out of victimization is kind of like a twin twin flame garage sale it's like everything is just flying away you're like I've lost my job I've lost my friends I don't know what I'm doing who am I don't have I don't know what my identity is I feel like this is just the starting point like when you feel like you're having a mental breakdown sometimes it's like a spiritual awakening and we can either become schizophrenic and freak out about it or we can go okay good starting point like everything is on the table let's see what we want to keep and what we want to throw away so that's that let's move into some Q&A's and I'm gonna read through these amazing