The more I continue on my journey, the more I observe how utterly blind we can be to the obvious. How our ego can blind us to our own shortcomings, and to certain behaviours of others. Only when we take steps to diminish our ego can we really hope to permanently change our programmed behaviours, or our behaviours that we constantly re-enact through a trauma response.
Trauma response is something that I hope to write a lot more about. I strongly suspect that unless we deal with it in the appropriate manner, it lives within us like a parasite, feeding on our energy and in a way, controlling certain actions. We may be utterly unaware of this as it is something our egos prevent us from seeing somehow.
I cant say I really understand the mechanisms of the ego, or the point of why it wants to keep us so blind, so asleep. I will say though, that any sort of “awakening” may well come with discomfort, shock, pain and so on.
What I want to expand upon in this post is the matter of pain after an awakening, and also the subtle (or not so subtle) behavioural changes, and changes to ones perceptions it can cause.
Now when I say awakening, what I will classify it as is a step away from the ego. I have also called it “the monster” in this blog, but for simplicities sake I will continue to refer to it as the ego, as most people have a basic understanding of what that is.
To step away from the control of ones ego is to awaken. Before I started this undertaking, I had hoped that it would be some sort of one shot wonder, some sort of road to Damascus moment, spiritual energy shooting through my body, bright lights and heavenly music. I labour the point, but you understand. Of course, this wasn’t me. It was another trick of the ego. It was that need of the ego to get a big reward without doing the necessary work, and the need to feel accomplished, superior and special. In fact we can see a lot of the latter in the field of spirituality, a big ego driven competition to see who is more gifted, woke, advanced, evolved, than anyone else. It’s another ego trap.
I’m not saying that awakenings will be the same for everyone, or that it will be the same reason that someone starts to put the work in. For many, the real work starts when the pain of being wrapped up in the ego just gets to great. A need for something real emerges in the core of someone and they might start to bury into their difficulties in exploration of that reality. For some it may be the consequences of their ego driven actions, an acknowledgement of pain they may have caused themselves or others and a conscious decision to try and stop this cycle. For me it was the breakdown of a relationship. It doesn’t matter what starts it, it will be different reasons for everyone. What matters is how we tackle it, and I’d say our expectations upon awakening.
I can only speak for myself, and I dislike being a harbinger of doom, but what I’ve experienced after starting this work is a great deal of challenges, frustration and pain. It’s certainly not been a quick and easy fix. Just as a brief counter to that, I’m a lot more able now to see when I am in ego mode, and it has also helped me shed some seriously toxic relationships!
I wanted to circle around to the subject of pain that I mentioned earlier. This year for me it has been a major factor. My back has been causing me a lot of trouble and its been a long and arduous process of recovery. It got so bad earlier this year that I was essentially crippled for over a week and the pain was like no thing I ever felt before. An all consuming pain. I was down for a month and lost 10kg, It’s one of the reasons I’ve been away from the keyboard.
It pissed me off for a number of reasons, my ego was wounded “I’ve put in so much work on my spiritual journey, I thought the path would be up and up, that I’d be feeling better and better.”
Of course this was an ego based, victim mentality thought process, and one I’ve been trained to ignore. In fact the way of the spiritual warrior is to embrace all challenges and move through them. In doing this it becomes it’s own reward and builds us as people.
“It ain't about how hard you're hit, it's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.”
And moving forward looks different for everyone. It’s not a straight line. I feel like I’ve been knocked around a fair bit of late and just trying to take some more steps forward now. But that’s the point, it’s about taking those steps.
Now I feel I’m in a place where I can reflect upon the last half a year of experiences. My conclusion is that trauma can manifest itself as physical pain. I have had a few quite serious accidents in my life also, and I’d say that the back pain was certainly related to them. However, I would say that the spiritual work I’ve been taught has enabled me to release emotion and trauma on a very deep level. As the body adapts to these releases it may well have to change physically and this can cause pain.
I also want to mention here that a physical accident may well carry an emotional trauma also. For an example I had a motorcycle accident many years ago. I wrote the bike off and dislocated my shoulder. But it wouldn’t just be the shoulder damage. I loved my bike and I loved riding. Also the accident would have signalled a great sense of danger to the body. This would translate as a deep loss and a sense of deep danger, which I am sure can be held in the body in various areas such as the heart and also the root chakra.
I would also say that trauma can do one of two things. It can either manifest as physical pain, or it can create mental issues (perhaps a mixture of both). I have observed hurt and damaged people behave in extraordinarily strange ways that can also hurt and traumatise others. This is how the cycle repeats, perhaps for generations, until this trauma is released. It is especially observable in a familial scenario.
My partner, who has also learned the same tools as I have, is also a qualified psychologist. We have been talking a fair bit of late about personality disorders (due to some personal experiences which I may share on this blog). It has become quite apparent to us that these disorders have come to people who have a great deal of trauma. Now back to ego and the blindness it causes. Ego comes largely as a response to unpleasant situations, a defence mechanism as it were. If left unchecked we continue these ego patterns and reinforce them to the detriment of ourselves and those around us.
A simple example would be a hurt child who is told repeatedly that he is the most important, that he is different and special. A parent may say this for the best reasons, but that notion may be carried on by the ego until adulthood and boom, all of a sudden, a narcissist is born, who genuinely believes that it’s only their needs that should be served. I don’t need to explain why this can be so damaging!
Whatever way trauma has nestled in to our being, It is greatly important to undertake some kind of spiritual work to release it. From my experience, what I learned is simple and effective and it is the one thing that's really worked out of many modalities that I’ve tried.
See “The spiritual picnic”
I’ve been fortunate in terms of healing my back. My circumstances and finances allowed me to get some good physiotherapy, chiropractor work, and my partner gave me a lot of SHEN therapy (which I’ve also blogged about). I feel I’d have transitioned a lot faster had I been super disciplined in the work I’ve been taught, but that is also something that I have phases with.
But hey, feeling stronger now, blogging again, and as I’ve said before, I write this blog not as a superior teacher, but just as some flawed and still slightly egotistical man on his own unique journey of shedding the ego and real spiritual healing.
Footnote: I said that I wanted to talk about our perceptions being altered after an awakening and I’ve really just talked a lot about pain! I will blog more about those subjects soon, for now I think this post is long enough. See related articles.
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