I talked about taking care our bodies. Let’s now go deeper and talk about what happens when we have trauma. When we suffer a traumatic event we store that trauma somewhere in our body. When Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, first started out as a psychiatrist his profession didn’t have much to offer traumatized people. They didn’t even really recognize PTSD as a thing. That has changed. In the second half of his book he describes the many, many different, promising therapy options for trauma we have now. This is huge. Maybe for the first time since the start of Red empire we have the chance to finally stop the cycle of one generation passing it’s trauma on to the next. And as different as all these therapy options are they do share two thing – first, they help people connect their bodies back into the world, and second, they do it with the help of others.
I worked with a very, very traumatized young woman struggling to recover from extreme childhood PTSD. When she told me her history I would weep with horror – it was just too much. How could anyone possibly recover from that!? She suspected her crippling illnesses were all that trauma still living on inside her body. We used MDMA as sacred medicine and she had an amazingly rich journey. She discovered a nurturing, holy connection with her body and her face glowed with joy. Up until then her body had only been a source of pain, something she had to learn to manage and hold off. Her body never had enough heat and was always cold. Now she had plenty of heat. For over a year after that journey our Hakomi sessions had her finding her way back to her body. Simply remembering her sacred journey was all that it usually took. It profoundly changed her life. She still had her medical challenges, but now she was able to step into the world in a much bigger way. It starts with the body.
And then there is sex. Our society does not handle sex very well. Most of us have unprocessed sexual shame. We have a lot of healing to do here – sex is yet another way we are disconnected from our bodies. But sex is so fundamental. We can not get to the world we want without reclaiming the sacred nature of sex. Because we have such a weird energy around sex it blocks intimacy with others. It holds us back from something as simple and basic as touch – something all humans need and yet we are starving ourselves for it. In my first HAI workshop I found myself naked, straddled with another naked man, and stroking his face with deep love. It was very hard. I had never done that with a man before. It was so clear to me that this was not sexual, but it was so intimate. I had never been so intimate with someone without it leading to sex. And I had a big aha! moment – sex and intimacy are different. Maybe I sort of understood that in my head, but now I finally got it all the way. Got that deep down I had thought that the only way I could have true intimacy was sex. What a limiting story that was! It meant that the only possible source of intimacy I could have was with my wife when we were having sex. No wonder I was so desperate for sex! Yes, I had a strong sex drive but what was really driving me was my desperate need for intimacy. And our sex life was not working – that hurt so bad and I was angry about it. When I got home from the workshop a miracle occurred. In one wild moment I was able to let go all of that anger and hurt. Suddenly I understood that having sex didn’t mean my wife didn’t love me. I knew that she did. Sex and intimacy are related but different.
People need to feel strong in their bodies before they can do the bigger healing work. The new culture we create has to start with this. An important part of this is healing our relationship with food and drink. We need to help people find a way to eat and drink in a way that best supports them. Have them really pay attention to what happens when they eat or drink something. For example I was in denial about my developing pre-diabetes until one day I took my son and his girlfriend out to a Thai restaurant. When we came back to his dorm room I had to crash on the couch – I was in a food coma. He started talking to his girlfriend as if I were not there saying “This is not right”, and there I was feebly thinking “I am still right here you know!” but not having the energy to say it out loud. It turns out that my body can no longer properly do the whole insulin thing that happens when you eat sugar. I do much, much better when I eat low carb. Most people don’t have it as bad as I do, but many people would find they feel much better if they cut back on their sugar/carb consumption.
And our bodies need to move. The health benefits of even mild exercise are very well documented. And yet many of us don’t exercise enough. Why is that? It is because exercise is treated like an extra thing to be tacked on to an already busy schedule. The trick is to weave it into our lives. For most of my working life I made sure that biking was part of my daily commute. And at work I always took the stairs instead of the elevator. Simple but very effective. No willpower needed to do exercise it was just part of my daily routine. We do so much better when we feel physically strong. I started weight lifting at a gym and noticed how much stronger it made me feel mentally. I struggle sometimes with depression, and I notice that if I can just manage to go on a short run that I find energy to do other things and it starts a virtuous cycle that pulls me out of that depression.
But sometimes we need to listen to that depression – it is trying to tell us something is off. I went through years of depression before finding out that it was partly because my testosterone levels had plummeted way below normal levels. The first day my testosterone was back up to normal level I had so much more energy I couldn’t believe it. Why hadn’t I gone to a doctor earlier? I had just assumed it was all in my head but it wasn’t.
All of this is pretty obvious. We know all of this already. But what we are not doing is bringing all of this together. Instead we hold all of these things separate. Therapy is kept strictly separate from nutritional counseling is kept strictly separate from body work. That doesn’t work. The new culture we create has to bring the body in as the place we start from. Where are you with your body? How are you treating it? Where do you feel shame about your body? Are you regularly moving your body? Are you in touch with your true sexual nature? Are you getting enough touch? Before we heal the world we have to heal ourselves. And a big part of that healing is healing our relationship with our body.
Once we feel safe enough we can find our truth by noticing in exquisite detail what is going on in our body from moment to moment. Huh. I’m feeling sad. Where is that showing up in my body? Maybe my chest? Maybe my throat? Our emotions always live somewhere in our body we just need to notice where. Let’s just sit and breathe with that for a moment. And then we get curious – what wants to happen next? There is an incredible wisdom to listening to that. That brings us back to Organicity.