Trauma & Art

Awakening through quietening the mind and tapping into the body

“One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, and compassion” Simone de Beauvoir

There are many people I feel gratitude for their presence in the world and for the impact of their work in today’s world. In today’s brief and hurried post I will refer to Dan J. Siegel’s huge work, which literally created a route for me to walk back to the more authentic parts of myself. In particular his Wheel of Awareness is a tool I have returned to almost everyday for the last four years or so. As I have mentioned before I came across his work during an online CONFER course, with many other great teachers, most of whose work I have referred to in things that I have written and posted on this site. For the last four years I have engaged with various mindfulness practices and meditations, but this tool or technique is something I keep returning to. More recently I came across an audio by Pema Chödrön of a guided meditation of tonglen, which I found most appropriate to do for my mother, who died about nine months ago and whom I was prevented access to, despite my thirty month or so struggle to reach her. This last inhumane deprivation of rights allowed for a long string of assaults on identity to become clear and visible, whether that was the right to have: an identity card and the right to vote in my youth, access to personal early records and documents more recently, the right to express ideas within a safe context, respect to dignity and privacy or the right to earn a ‘well earned’ degree, etc, etc. What also became apparent was the connection between the private and the public realm and the underlying belief systems that have held all this injustice in place. Anyway, as I understand it, tonglen is a meditation practice for connecting with suffering, ours and that of others and for dissolving the tightness of our hearts. It can be done for those who have died, those who are ill, or for those who are in pain of any kind. I suppose it is a practice for awakening compassion within us both for ourselves and others. Then at some point I found myself incorporating the tonglen practice into the Wheel of Awareness, replacing the connectedness part with this deeper, more powerful and more demanding practice. To sum up, I’d like to send a big thank you to all the people whose courageous work and words are healing the world a little at a time and filling our bowls with light and hope.

Hit and run

I try to engage in some sort of meditative gratitude practice everyday, and more or less it is grounded in the present or the focus is mostly on the now, but a few days ago an intense sense of gratitude arose related to a distant past event, in some sense – a stored memory of gratitude of a past event, became salient in my current experience. So, very briefly, in the nineties I was hiking in the countryside with my young son and collie dog. I was walking on the right side of a quiet village road, holding my son with my right hand and the dog’s lease with the left. A driver in a white car hit the dog and fled the scene in a similar way I was hit by a motorcycle while walking on the pavement during my university years. The dog landed on the hood of the car and then bounced up and crashed on the asphalt at the rear of the car. The thump of the dog’s body and my simultaneous cry pierced the afternoon silence. The car disappeared as fast as it had arrived and our dog lay motionless showing no sign of being alive, As I stood motionless and in shock and to my utter amazement, she stood on her legs, shook off the shock and resumed walking. I think the man who was watching the scene outside his repair shop was just as amazed as I was… Fortunately, this pet got to live many more years and accompany us on many walks and hikes. The reason I am writing about this today is that as one engages in processing traumas or re-evaluating their life one starts to notice repetitive patterns, a kind of recycling of responses and occurrences.

We get caught in repetitive loops of unhelpful behaviours, thoughts and responses to triggers and we often attract the same types of people in our life and allow familiar dynamics to occur. I think Jack Kornfield refers to this as the repetition compulsion. Peter Levine claims that another symptom that can develop from unresolved trauma is the compulsion to repeat the actions that caused the problem in the first place. He writes ‘we are inextricably drawn into situations that replicate the original trauma in both obvious and less obvious ways’ and that ‘re-enactments may be played out in intimate relationships, work situations, repetitive accidents or mishaps, and in other seemingly random events. They may also appear in the form of bodily symptoms or psychosomatic diseases. Children who have had a traumatic experience will often repeatedly recreate it in their play. As adults, we are often compelled to re-enact our early traumas in our daily lives. The mechanism is similar regardless of the individual’s age’. One reason we may experience repetitive mishaps, accidents or pet victimizations, for instance, is because we are neither fully conscious nor wise observers of events and we fail to connect the dots or see the broader picture and connectedness of instances, contexts and people. We tend to minimize the significance of events and push our gut feelings and knowing aside. We move on and we often do not ask the question, for instance, of why we are rammed or hit by vehicles every so often even though we drive carefully or are waiting for the red light to turn green after a peace march or we are simply walking on the pavement. We tend to get lost in our grief for our pets or other losses without daring to ask why and without raising dust about things that happen to us. Exploring the underlying reasons behind recurring events, practices and dynamics through meditation, guided writing exercises, etc, etc, can give us clues about the facts we are missing or insight about our relationships, context dynamics and our own disempowering ways of responding. Finally, my gratitude practice evolved into something more powerful than I had anticipated. A deep sense of gratitude spread over me as I realised how many times I was held or I returned from the white light that was beckoning me at the end of the tunnel.