Transcending Trauma, Realizing Truth
Summary: Shunyamurti speaks to transcending trauma through an alchemical process: Face the dark shadow energy and bring it to light through the healing power of love, allowing the wounded ego to die in the fire of transformation, and the true healer to be reborn.
Because we can assume that pretty much everyone from every background is touched by trauma, and that much of that trauma has never been processed, or at least incompletely processed in whatever sort of therapeutic ambiance one has entered into—because at some point, most therapies become a collusion between the unprocessed traumas of the therapist and those of the client—that there will always be an area that the therapist cannot enter into, and so this will be avoided, and it will become something other than an exploration of truth. And it’s this that we must be on guard against in this work of Atmanology that we do here and be able to bring up whatever needs to be seen, and spoken of, and spoken about, and transcended, and it’s the most difficult aspect of our work. But this is the essence of alchemy, and it is this kind of an alchemical process in which we start with that nigredo, that dark shadow energy that the soul doesn’t even want to admit is present, and work with it, and gradually transform it into the Philosopher’s Stone, into the diamond in the heart of the lotus, that must be willing and able to deal with the toxic energies of the repressed ego, and through that transformation of those energies, open the portal to the Real Spirit.
Because we live in a world of generalized trauma, the only way that the souls of such beings can be recuperated and healed is to work outside of any of the constructs of society. A completely different kind of social structure has to be created, that does not trigger those same traumas—or if it triggers them, it processes them at the same time, and doesn’t deny them—but works with everything that arises in consciousness, and finds its inner meaning and significance, and raises it to the reverence that it deserves as a part of the wounded self that alone is capable of turning into the wisdom, and the power, and the light of a true healer.
And in the tribal societies it was always those who were most wounded and traumatized who became the shamans, but only after they worked through that trauma on a vision quest and transcended it though their own process of death and rebirth. And as every spiritual lineage teaches, there is no way around that death and rebirth. But the death of the traumatized ego cannot happen until there has been a complete examination, an autopsy you could say, of that structure, that logic, the traumatized images and energies, that only through a knowledge that is without duality—in other words, one must not only own the trauma, one must be the trauma—in order to then dissolve it. It can’t be an object that’s still separate from you that you’re looking at through a microscope, or in some way feeling as an inanimate memory, or something that has no relationship to you—no, it has roots that go deep within your own soul—and so by being that trauma, and allowing it to speak from its roots in your soul, you can reach those roots, and those roots can take you to the essence of your eternal and undefiled Self. But there has to be that willingness to encounter fully, without duality, those energies of the shadow and turn them into light, through love.
So, that’s all I have to say about that issue, but that is, in a sense, the cornerstone of our methodology here, and I think without the willingness to enter into the roots of trauma and the darkness, the black hole at the core of the egoic identity, we can never reach the light for real. We can get glimmers of it, we can have experiences of pseudo, crypto-nonduality for moments, but we won’t be able to abide as the Real Self until we have gone all the way through that darkness—through the valley of the shadow of death as the Bible puts it.
And in our process of meditation, which is inwardization, we will encounter all of these elements in one way or another, but we will also encounter the supramental angelic forces of love and light that are also present—in the same way that the prophet going through the valley of the shadow of death held the rod and the staff of God, and therefore would fear no evil. And it’s that faith, and that surrender to the source of goodness and of love, that enables us to transform the non-goodness, the evil, the toxic feelings that have been implanted and have festered in depths of our soul, and that have brought about this structural splitting of the ego into a Jekyll and Hydekind of structure, in which the toxic part is repressed—but repressed only from the knowledge of the conscious mind so it can have plausible deniability about its own ulterior motives that its split off unconscious still pursues, without let up, and can pursue in a sadistic way, or a masochistic way, or in any permutation thereof. And so it’s this split-off nature of consciousness that, if you meditate only with the conscious mind’s frame of reference, you’ll never reach, and your meditation will never go very deep. You have to heal that split so that both Jekyll and Hyde die, and the Real Self is reborn.
And it’s because of the resistance to facing this split-off, internalized darkness that the various kinds of techniques have been formulated to help people who are beginning meditation to calm down the anxieties that tend to arise. People think “Oh, I want to meditate to become more peaceful,” but very often what happens is you become more anxious when you sit to meditate, and that’s because you’re getting closer to those repressed shadow forces.
And so we need to be able to face them, knowing in advance that they’re there, in the same way that the hunter with the spear knows that he’s going to meet the lion and is prepared for that. But we must also do that with love and compassion for ourselves, and for our own traumatized inner-child energies, and to be able to come with the peace that passeth understanding, that is forgiving and is all-accepting, no matter what label of toxicity, or evil, or unworthiness that we may have put on different fragments of our consciousness—including other people projecting such statuses upon these fragments of our consciousness. And through that acceptance, those aggressive energies that were provoked into aggression through adverse circumstances, and those depressed energies that were made hopeless and depressed because of the inability to have an authentic relationship, perhaps in one’s family system, can be finally healed of their wounds, and turned into the capacity to be a healer.
This Post Has 5 Comments
Mick
25 May 2021Love this teaching 🙂
Thank you so much.
Vanessa Neshama
26 May 2021This is a beautiful explanation of the heart and the TRUTH of the REAL “therapy”; the transformational imperative experienced and inperienced at Sat Yoga and with Shunyamurti.
Love and Light
Carol Livezey
26 May 2021I am wondering a person has trama in some way, aren’t they also a helper to heal that trama in others?
Jade
27 May 2021At one point early on in the first minutes, you say; ‘this work of “opthamology” … I couldn’t make out the word used here. Could you please clarify for me? Thank you.
Vajra Sat Yoga
28 May 2021Hello Jade, thanks for asking! The word is Atmanology, a modality of training the consciousness to tap into its highest levels and multiple modes of intelligence, intuition, sensing, and feeling faculties, leading to decisive upgrades in refinement of personal and inter-subjective functioning. You can learn more about it here: https://www.satyoga.org/healing/