The way that when we experience a trauma influences our ability to feel spiritually connected. When we feel split from our spiritual self during traumatic experiences, learning to find our way back home to the truth of who we are is an important part of deep healing work of repairing the places within ourselves that we’ve been harmed by trauma.
Before I dive into that, I want to let you know that I wrote a book for you, align: living and loving from the true self as a comprehensive map of how to come back home to the truth of who you are and how to honor this deeply sacred place within yourself, as you connect with the people in your life. Align is available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I also create these self-guided alignment cards for you. There are 48 cards in the stack, and each card has a wisdom, teaching, and a sentence done to support you, living and loving from your true self. These cards are only available on my website, the spiritually aligned.com, and they are wonderful for your own contemplative practice. Work with clients or engaging with the people in your life.
So I’d like to begin by defining trauma. So if you were to Google the definition of trauma, you would see that it is most frequently defined as a disturbing or distressing experience. And while that is partly true to really expand on that definition, we need to see how the person has held that experience within themselves, so an experience might be disturbing or distressing. But if we have adequate support, either internally or relationally, we can integrate that experience and stay connected and in contact with ourselves, and not hold it as trauma. So when we experience a disturbing, disturbing, or distressing event, and we don’t have adequate inner-resourcing or relational support. That distressing experience makes its way into our personality and our ego patterning and affects our spiritual connection.
And so we split from our spiritual self as our nervous system contracts, and we start seeking safety in the world around us because we feel so unsafe. And this is the main way that trauma shows up in daily life. So as we experience trauma, the nervous system contracts and we first go into a fight response. It’s the first place, we go into hyper-arousal fight or flight and we mobilize to find safety. And if the threat continues, then we go into hypo arousal, which is a freeze response or a fawn response to trauma. And so when we are in that experience of trauma as we are feeling the dysregulation in our nervous system energetically, we feel split from our spiritual self. And this is partly what makes the experience traumatic is that we don’t feel the safety and the love and the presence of our spiritual self. And so, if we hold that experience in our body, and we continue to engage in the world from that unresolved trauma from that unfinished business of that distressing or disturbing event. We essentially start to create ego patterns that has us think of other people as God, or and or we play God.
So because we aren’t connected to our spiritual alignment. Vertically, we shift horizontally, and we try to get other people’s approval have belonging out here which essentially is making other people God. We try to find safety with other people, and we might betray ourselves to find that safety. And so those ego patternings and those personality patternings are an expression of that trauma. And if we stop doing those patterns, what we find beneath those patterns is a lot of dysregulation that needs our attention. The inner resourcing that we need to fully feel the way that our trauma response is being held in our nervous system needs us to have that capacity to hold ourselves and our experience without clinging to it without resisting it and without projecting it out onto other people, so to turn towards ourselves, be loving with ourselves, give ourselves what it is that we need, and find our way back home to our spiritual alignment.
So once we stop assigning our safety and our belonging and our enoughness outside of ourselves, and we start looking within to see how we can find our way back home to our spiritual self, to the truth of who we are. There is a contraction in the nervous system that has been held since that event happened. And so, if there’s many events that are being stored in the nervous system, there might be more contraction, and as the nervous system is contracting our energy centers of the midline of the body are also holding stored emotional energy pollution. And so it’s a combination of the nervous system and the subtle energy that correspond with the nerves that are physically in our body as they relate to our nervous system, regulation and dysregulation.
And so once we begin to make more space around the dysregulation. We can start to feel that stored emotional energy pollution and that might feel like terror. It might feel like grief. It might feel like anger. It might be so many things that we find within ourselves, and so to have the capacity to make room for the full range of our experience can take time. It’s not something that we do once, and then we’re done. It’s something that we start to touch. We start to make room for, and we stay within our window of tolerance, where we can really integrate and feel these emotions and allow the energy to cathart that stored emotional energy to move out.
And as we do that, as that energy clears and our nervous system becomes regulated, we have more clarity of thought. So we’re not looking outside of ourselves anymore for safety and belonging we can start to open up vertically and remember who we really are. We can remember the purpose of our life, why we are here and how we want to serve humanity, and we can feel our wholeness of our being, and we can feel our heart begin to open those barriers that we built around our heart during trauma that are part of that stored emotional energy pollution can start to open.
And it’s not that we open up and we don’t have boundaries, it’s not about being open and confluent. It’s about being open to source and clear about our boundaries. Oftentimes what happens with trauma is we become boundaryless to try to find a sense of safety and when we are doing this work we recognize that we keep ourselves safe by saying No being able to say no is a reflection of a healthy Vegas nerve, which is what’s responsible for our nervous system, and actually saying no tones, the negative, the vagus nerve, and begins to allow us to create more health an energy toned energy of our boundaries. So the work is really about following the way that the mind has been patterned to look for safety outside of ourselves, to leave to split from our spiritual alignment, and look outside of ourselves for safety, love belonging, and so on.
Follow that thread back home to ourselves, and start to feel the dysregulation that is beneath that make room for our full experience. Allow the subtle energy stored in our energy centers to start starting and moving and come back to that deep repair with the alignment with the source that beats our heart. This alignment is actually unbreakable. It’s not that it ever goes away, but we split from it when we start clinging to our thoughts that have us looking horizontally for love, safety, and belonging, that actually comes from our birthright, from our connection with source, and once we are back home to our alignment with who we truly are.
Staying here in contact with ourselves, as we relate with other people, is also part of healing trauma, because most trauma happens relationally when somebody that we think that we trust, or that we’re in their care actually harms us, and if we don’t have that in our resourcing or relational resourcing to integrate we might be very young when that trauma happens, which is why we don’t have the ability to really be with ourselves in that resourcing way. So we heal our trauma by being our own secure base, and remembering to look vertically when we feel unsafe to stay here within our body, within the midline of our body, the core of our being, and move through our emotional experience in a way that is really loving and this work of healing trauma and creating an internal repair is actually amplified when we are in the presence of a really attuned and skilled therapist.
There is so much healing that happens when we have that relational support, as we are also cultivating that internal support. So when we are with somebody who is attuned and present in contact with themselves. As we are coming back into contact with ourselves, the healing is actually amplified and then we get to discover what is actually true about us, separate from what we’ve learned from experiences. So the mind might make up a narrative that there’s something wrong with me, and that’s why this bad stuff happens to me. But that’s just the way that the mind is making sense of these experiences, because there wasn’t adequate resourcing to really integrate the experience and see that the way another person is their pain. They were spreading pain. And this this happened, and I get to discover what I truly believe about it, not the held reaction of the narrative of the unprocessed trauma of the deepest, clearest, most aligned truth that is congruent with who we really are.
So, through the lens of spiritual alignment, trauma has us feel split from our spiritual self. We look to the world around us, and unconsciously are making other people our God. We are playing God by trying to give our energy away and rescuing and saving other people. But we’re looking horizontally. And the more we do that, the more we have unresolved emotional experiences and dysregulation beneath those patterns that we’re not tending to. And so, following that thread back home to ourselves learning to be available for our nervous system, dysregulation.
allowing energy to hart and move, and coming back to our spiritual self is where that internal repair happens.
So thank you for listening, and if you would like to learn more, I want to invite you to take one of my courses, living your alignment, or spiritually aligned relationships, can really support you as you are healing your trauma and learning to find a truer way to stay connected with yourself as you move forward in life, and if you are wanting to facilitate alignment, I also have a training program with my signature course that can really empower you to support your clients and that deep internal repair, as you are also deepening into your alignment. So thank you so much for listening to me to this video, and I wish you so much beauty and grace and ease as you come back home to the truth of who you are.