How Do You Know?

How do you know when you're being true to yourself, living your own life? Can you tell when you're doing the right thing based on who you are AND what is most needed & beneficial in the moment? In other words, how do you know when you're expressing your unique, personal authenticity AND SIMULTANEOUSLY your transpersonal authenticity as a member of the human race? Most of the time, you don't! Most of us, most of the time, are tangled up in fallout from trauma & other forms of conditioning, so we don't have a clue who we are or how to behave wisely.

“Today we know that trauma is not limited to relatively rare events of extreme horror, such as rape, or war, or a terrible accident. Contemporary psychologists speak of ‘relational trauma.’ This is the result of painful interactions, especially in one’s childhood, that are too overwhelming to be fully experienced in the moment. These ‘unlived’ moments of fear, anger, grief, and confusion become bound up in our bodies, along with all of the various bodily attitudes that occur during these overwhelming encounters, such as cringing away from danger or deflating the chest to suppress sadness.

These events of relational trauma, especially when repeated over time, become hardened in the tissues of the body, constricting and fragmenting our body and mind so that we cannot experience ourselves as a whole within our bodies. Even though they affect the body’s physical anatomy, they actually occur in a more subtle aspect of our being, in which the body and the mind are in close relationship. In order to contact and release the traumatic memories bound within our body, we have to contact ourselves inwardly.

Embodiment is a shift from living on the surface of the body, or even in front of or above the body, to living in the internal space of the body. This shift changes our identity, our sense of who and what we are.

… when we realize this dimension of ourselves, there is more spontaneity in our perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. They seem to arise ‘on their own,’ without our usual strategizing and manipulation of ourselves. This is because fundamental consciousness is a dimension of disentanglement. As this dimension, we pervade our experience but we do not obstruct it. We allow life to happen, to flow.”

Judith Blackstone. “Belonging Here. A Guide for the Spiritually Sensitive Person.” Sounds True, 2012.