THE FINE ART OF SELF-DISCLOSURE

Yemaya, 16 January, 2020


Our shadow-parts are not monsters, and if you hold the belief that any part of you is bad or wrong, it’s a red flag that you are subconsciously operating from distorted cultural conditioning. The fact is that we are relational beings and our development, particularly in infancy and childhood, depends on our relationships, from the amount of care, empathy and guidance we receive from those around us to the quality of the air we breathe and food we eat. In order to belong and survive, we adapt to and develop in response to our environment, therefore although we are each a unique part of a greater biopsychosocial whole, the qualities of our environment, relationships, and the practices and customs of the cultures we are born into, dramatically shape us. Why do we reflexively blame and censor ourselves or each other for our suffering? Let’s discover how fear-based beliefs, values and choices lead to self-abandonment.


The Maya’s had a beautiful way of greeting one another, it honours the first universal law:

"In Lak'ech Ala K’in” ; "I am another you.


Close your eyes and hold the image of yourself as you where when you were a child. Sense your innocence and openness, know that we all carry this part within at all times. When our inner child attracts negative attention or the rejection of others, we swiftly adapt by censoring and submerging the inner child into our subconscious, which is why in myth, the ‘underworld’, is filled with immense power and treasure. Enlightenment, or making the subconscious conscious, emerges naturally from voluntarily relinquishing attachment to our emotional security and going beyond our fears, in this way we become ‘twice born’ or ‘reborn’, religious people call it redemption, but in any spiritual practice, our ability to rest peacefully in a knowing that is beyond our suffering, means that we are no longer bound by the fear of death, and thus to making poor choices.


Prior to the externalisation of God via organised religion, planetary cycles, Earth’s seasons, climate and weather patterns were understood as powers beyond our control, and we lived, expressed ourselves and died in accordance with them. The gift we each have to offer in life is the sharing of the magic and beauty of the dream as it moves through us, in every one of our thoughts, breaths, movements, conversations, prayers, songs and stories, the first people of Australia lived this way, in continuous communion, with the sentient land they belonged to for around 60,000 years. Imagine the empathic intelligence of a descendent being whose nomadic people had been living in such exquisite accordance with Earth, completely surrendered within their Dreamtime for around 1200 generations.


For millions of years prior to the last few thousand, humankind lived in a continuous state of reverence and communion with the entire cosmos, an interconnected way of being that is available to anyone that chooses to recognise the value and spirit of each of their soul-parts and the same within each person, animal, plant, place or object that they interact with. For some, soul-part retrieval and integration, or ‘shadow-work’, might lead to a part of them finding the will to live, for others a part might re-member how to receive love, but for all of us, the process of personal transformation and re-empowerment requires us to let go of control, feel our way through the dark with our instincts and intuition, and trust that we will arrive exactly when and where we are meant to. Caterpillar doesn’t know they're going to dissolve into liquid and become butterflies, they instinctually find a quiet spot to surrender their entire sense of reality and allow natural magic to unfold, we, on the other hand, are conditioned to doubt our intuition and suppress our instincts, thus we’ve lost contact with the metamorphic nature of soul.


Like a ruined church in a forest being consumed by vines, it is in our design to overcome outdated structures and re-wild that which thwarts and limits the evolution of our consciousness. Yes, being human is a monumental task, but look in the mirror, evidently we were born for it! Service, prayer and meditation are all actions of surrender, but to let go of that which we base our entire mental and emotional security upon is not a daily practice for most. The greatest irony of our humanly dilemma, is that by virtue of being alive, we are already in surrender, so just get into the habit of asking yourself daily; how consciously am I holding the tension between my past and future, how steadily can I be here now, and how gracefully can I transition?


The Misunderstood Wisdom of Dissociation


Our subconscious psychophysiology hold latent imprinted memory and soul-parts that, due to trauma and conditioning, split-off from our conscious sense of self, in psychology this is called ‘dissociation’ (‘depersonalisation’ or ‘derealisation’, now too) and is considered solely as a dysfunctional disorder. Viewed from my lens, dissociation is a mostly undiscovered and misunderstood phenomena, of course it is a natural psychic response to inescapable overwhelm, but it is far more than that. I define trauma as separation of self, full-stop, therefore I place all cultural, familial, religious, social and institutional conditioning well within that definition and I sense that not doing so is why so many of us are unaware of our trauma, and therefore, our true identities.


Remember when trauma was only considered a physical event? Thankfully we've come a long way, but there's still much further to go.


The causes and effects of trauma are wide ranging and relative to many factors; age, mental-emotional capacity and conditioning, the intensity level of physical, mental and emotional overwhelm, individual sensitivity, the duration of a traumatic event, our environment, relationships and the support, if any, that we had at the time or thereafter, altogether inform the subjective experience and objective outcomes of traumatic stress. No individual or group can have a monopoly on trauma, anyone with memories or parts of who they are missing from their conscious awareness and expression, is in a state of trauma, and whether our inner separation is caused by the suppression of authentic expression (conditioning), or from an experience that shook us to the core, what happens internally is the same. The trauma response is a highly intelligent mechanism that separates and sends affected parts of us into our subconscious in order that our conscious and cognitive parts remains operational and in charge in order to survive. Survival includes doing what is necessary to maintain inclusion in our families and communities, whom without, as children, we would die. In extreme situations, the brain can powerfully immobilise us, snap-freeze a moment in time and jettison an experience or soul-part into total obscurity. 


Latent memory and soul-parts can exist just below the surface within the subconscious or be totally submerged in the deep unconscious, but regardless, the point is, they cannot cease to exist.


It’s necessary to enter altered states of consciousness, or trance, in order to access our subconscious realm, this is the foundation for clinical hypnotherapy, past life regression therapy, some forms of meditation and shamanic journeying etc, and dissociation is the point of access to ‘the passage back to the place we were before’, to who we were before we were conditioned. Pink Floyd’s Hotel California is a reference to cultural conditioning, in case you didn’t realise. Now, I’m all for the safe use of therapeutic substances to induce trance and dissociation, but the fact is we naturally enter this states of open-mindful-ness everyday without even realising, we’ve just abandoned the innate, mind-boggling, tripped-out, psychedelic parts of who we are, the parts that were suppressed by organised religion and authoritarian tyranny throughout the last 2000 year age of Pisces. The natural ‘gateway drug’ that is the extraordinary and curious phenomena of dissociation, needs to be understood from a whole, holistic (and holy!) perspective, one far beyond the prison, that ‘we can check out at anytime we like, but can never leave’. Dissociation is multifaceted, multi-functional and insanely complicated, there is not one section of Body or Brain that governs it, it’s an intuitive, autonomic, psychosomatic, collaborative process, that in a very basic sense, separates our objective and subjective experiences, but not all of them, not all at once and never permanently. Dissociation is how the psyche ‘hides' from aspects of experiential reality in order to avoid melt-down, but imagination can also induce dissociation, and in safe and peaceful environments and with a relaxed mind we can easily merge so completely with sensual stimuli, thoughts or feelings, that parts of us are, in a very real way, elsewhere. Tools for therapeutic induction into alternate states of awareness can include music, chanting, drumming, a somnambulistic guiding voice, swaying objects like pendulums and finger tapping etc, anything that gently lulls the conscious mind out of focus and brings subconscious imagery to the fore. Our intuitive subconscious perception is designed to seamlessly separate and emerge into alternate, but thematically connected inner dimensions of which our experience can be subtle or feel totally real. At any time, we can begin practicing our ability to shift our consciousness and sense the interconnectedness within, with each other and with our environments, just like our pre-patricultural ancestors did.


Are we ready to stretch our minds to accord with what the mechanism of traumatic dissociation is teaching us about who we really are? 


Intense trauma, out of body experiences, near death experiences and plant medicine induced psychedelic experiences are, shall we say, less subtle ways of consciously accessing our natural ability to bear witness and come to know ourselves as embodied soul, and there are many accounts of people that have had their lives completely transformed for the better through intense dissociative experiences, this is very well documented. By supporting and guiding the phenomena of trauma away from a disempowerment and victimisation towards awakening, re-empowerment and re-sacralisation, we can begin to heal. Once we have re-established that the human spirit is immutable and incorruptible, our full creative and regenerative potential can uncoil, we can return to resonance with nature once again and reclaim our significance as a living breathing part of the entire material world. The more of our memory that we are able to awaken, heal and share, the more meaningful, beautiful and ecstatic the experience of being alive becomes.


Every night when we enter the deep trance state of sleep, our psyche actively conjures images, symbols and sensations, imagined subconscious realities that are for some real-life in nature and for others abstract and fantastic, we might be in the past, present or future, but unless the date was a symbolically relevant clue in our nighttime soul-quest, who could say? Founder of psychoanalysis, Carl Jung, thought dreams happened to us, but I feel that the conspiracy of dreaming is more elaborate. I believe in a personal soul that simultaneously reckons with waking life phenomena and interfaces with the source-code of consciousness to produce our desires, and thus that dreaming is how ego is subliminally programmed, powerfully hypnotised, by soul to guide us toward expressing ourselves in accordance with our personal, generational and collective purpose. To me, all is divine, especially desire and our imagination, visions, ideas, all intuitive uploads and downloads, including our dreams, are varying conduits or channels for the same task; carrying the evolutionary current of creation through us. Now, can we please stop the conditioned scapegoating, gaslighting, invalidating, bullying, witch-hunting and assassinating our sacred and divinely inspired ego-selves? Without a sense of identity and physical boundary of self, who are we? According our dominant philosophical and cultural mindset of Materialism, we are inner resources to be moulded, hacked and commodified. Unfortunately due to the colonisation of all aspects of life by our patricultural values, our rituals for achieving ecstatic cosmo-spiritual communion have shifted from shamanic trance, fireside dance and sacred love-making, to herding ourselves into sports stadiums, get intoxicated and participating in all manner of unconscious and dangerous behaviours and rituals. I’m not judging, I’m pointing to the fact despite traumatic individual and collective separation from divine interconnectedness, our need for deep and profound intimacy, meaning and belonging remains an inborn and irresistible part of human nature, we will never cease yearning and questing to discover and express the contents of our inner realms, to merge with the wholeness of who we are. 


The way to engage with our subconscious memory and soul-parts is intentionally, soberly and regularly; practice leads to fearlessness and effortlessness, or in other words freedom. 


We’ve always known that we exist within a quantum unified field of potentiality, from which our manifested 3D reality arises, returns and arises again ad infinitum, but over the last 6000 or so years we’ve denied the sacredness of matter, desecrated our temples of Body and Earth and shredded the cosmic web of consciousness that we all belong to. In our efforts to become 'civilised', we’ve suppressed our nature and become neurotically obsessed with dividing and labelling the entire material world, as if when we do, we somehow possess it and not the other way around. There is no balance and harmony in this story, and all scientific and technological advancement born of a mainstream reductionist and materialist mindset, can only separate us further from empowered wholeness, which is what we've lost and unconsciously crave. Gautama Buddha said; “If you see Buddha on the road, kill him!” A powerful warning against worshipping external and therefore false idols, for he and others came to remind us of what we know to be true, that the sacred is within. The wandering Gnostic healer, Jesus, was far more gentle (and with 6 planets in Pisces, he was a sublimely gentle, yet also fearless in his faith), when he delivered the same powerful message; “The kingdom of heaven is within”. By conjuring and adopting a worldview that does not value the sacredness of nature in all forms, we’ve lost our integrity and our way, what is said and how we act, what is felt and what we believe, all rationale has, in action, become inverted and it’s no surprise that the most common astrology questions I get asked is: “What is my purpose in life?” 


Our collective trauma is an amplified reflection of our failure to realise and resolve our distorted individual conditioning, it is not our fault, but resolution becomes our responsibility the moment we awaken to our mistakes. The offering of unique gifts, talents, ideas, solutions and innovation based on new perspectives and dimensions of system dynamics are often felt as an attack upon the mental-emotional security of a status quo, however acceptance, integration and evolution always prevails.


Self-reflection and the full and accurate disclosure of the past, exposes our adapted modes of behaviour, in light of which, our true nature and the truth of our reality is revealed. We avoid this process called 'disillusionment', because it marks a total collapse of the framework of our belief systems and psycho-emotional security which, from the point of view of the conditioned parts of our ego-self, is the equivalent of death. When we realise that we can no longer go back or pretend who we are in the eyes of the world, soul take our hand. I can understand how the loss of sacred connection to nature and thus faith and trust in a power beyond our control, has turned out to be so fatal to humanity, but can we stretch our consciousness to realise that Rumi, of course, was right and that the medicine is in the wound? To heal the origin of our trauma is to remember our divinity. There is also the enormous responsibility of healing, harnessing and channelling the potential being focussed through us by Cosmos, but if we can start practicing being still and acknowledging the whole of what is presented to us in any moment, especially that which is the most triggering, the process of disillusionment becomes our best friend, the kind that sees the best version of us, and holds us to it.


Insights & Reveries

iChing 49. Conscious [R]evolution

By Yemaya Olokun • September 4, 2024
With conscious revolution karma becomes negotiable, fate can be ended and blame, guilt, shame and remorse extinguished.

Disempowerment, an unconscious fear of self.

By Yemaya Olokun • December 17, 2022
We used to practice initiation rituals, we used to ceremonially challenge our youth to foster physical and psychological resilience and come into adulthood, strong, tuned in and turned on, but the shadow journey to personal empowerment, was recently patricized into a hero’s journey of slaying the monster lurking 'out there' and His story’s ‘war on everything’. The hero’s journey is arguably our most gravitated to myth, the archetypal story of personal growth takes us to the core of our fears and doubts and urges us to muster the courage to face them head-on, to dig deep into the ground of our being and grow beyond our conditioned limitations. Who wouldn’t be drawn to that? In real life, pretty much only people who need the money, most of us choose to perform idiot rituals instead like watch action movies, have dress up parties and wear the costume of our hero, and watch sports. Still, the profound depth to which we resonate with this ‘holy grail’ story of stories (the golden chalice that Indiana Jones was desperate to possess by the way, is a patricized metaphor for Womb, the origin mythos of empowerment is in fact the story Venus) teaches us to place our trust in an outcome that is beyond our control, and to work with, rather than against, the irresistible nature of consciousness evolving through us. Ultimately the journey reveals to us that the most terrifying confrontation we can have, is the one with ourselves, between who we are and who we are becoming, between our adapted selves and who we truly are. When reduced to its elements, disempowerment is an unconscious fear of our own potential, of embodying the power we know we have. Epic tales of overcoming adversity are all symbolic of the personal psycho-spiritual quest for evolution through significant healing, a process that requires us to master our inner resources and find out what we are made of, and why. If we become aware of how this myth is active in our own lives, we can be inspired rather than enamoured or entranced by external saviours and cease projecting our power onto them, and we can consciously accept and seek out the challenges in our lives that offer to reunite us permanently with latent super-soul-parts itching to be summoned from within us. The reason phoenix rises from its own ashes, is because we alone are the source of our own empowerment. The Astrological Fixed Grand Cross - Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, Aquarius - Life’s Backbone By the way, all of our stories; from pre-history, religious and all the way to Disney, are borne of our natural astrological archetypes and the timeless, pan-cultural mythos of the hero's journey represents the maturation process of a life cycle, a full trip around the natural zodiac. The climactic theme of the story is self-reliance, personal growth and transformation; the Yoga of the Taurus (fixed Earth) and Scorpio (fixed Water) axis. To complete the backbone of life that is the astrological Fixed Grand Cross, the Leo (fixed Fire) and Aquarius (fixed Air) axis, is also significantly imbedded into this ancient story. So, whilst the Taurus/Scorpio axis represents the cultivation and use of material and psycho-emotional resources, the Leo/Aquarius axis correlates to our creativity and mental stability, strategy and stamina, the parts of us that understand that if we trust our hearts and stay with the process, we will arrive exactly where and when we are meant to. Finally, the journey culminates with our return ‘home’, the image of the matured and wiser hero, the Aquarian water-bearer who pours out revitalising waters of elevated consciousness, symbolising sharing our new perspectives and experiential wisdom for the good of All. The level of commitment, courage and fortitude it takes to bear our 'cross' is significant and touching, we respect and celebrate our heroes for this and take solace in being reminded by them of the strength of spirit that humanity shares. The founder of Evolutionary Astrology, Jeffrey Wolf Green said: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate; our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” Because owning and standing in our true power, takes a lot of courage and responsibility. The psychology at the core of the deliberate confusion of who we truly are, or gaslighting, robs us of the awareness of ourselves as powerful and unique creations of immutable origin, and thus creates and recreates our subconscious, pathological powerlessness, one traumatised generation after another. We are born, often surgically removed, and assigned roles and privileges based on our place of birth, heredity, race and gender and for the sake of survival and belonging, we assume the identities assigned to us, quickly abandoning any of our parts that threatens our primary care attachment and social inclusion. ’When I do this, I get rewarded, but when I do that, I get rejected, and if I get rejected, I won’t survive.’ Keep in mind that of all of the mammals on Earth, humans are born the least developed and therefore the most co-dependent. And so it is, that the unconscious seed of deathly fear of who we truly are is planted and evoked through the mythos of our hero. Whether we abandon the soul-parts we were programmed to believe were a threat to our survival, or we suppress our emotional overwhelm due to insufficient empathy or fear of rejection, punishment or isolation, patricultural conditioning is the origin of our trauma. Nothing makes this clearer than what we have learned from the few prehistoric tribes still left on Earth, to whom the concept of trauma does not exist. “Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety.” - Sigmund Freud The biggest mistake ever made by humanity was to believe that if we suppress consciousness, in any form, it simply goes away. Man vs Nature is a competition that was never going to end well for man. So, what happens to blocked energy? It naturally builds, becomes distorted, exaggerated or deficient and toxic. That recurring illness or that person that makes us uncomfortable is a mirror to the parts of us that are lost, rejected or hiding in our shadow, and war, genocide, poverty, pollution and the election of ruthless dictators are simply reflections of said individual shadow-parts en masse. Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Author of Women Who Run with Wolves, and Spirit Mother to humanity, says: “It’s not by accident that the pristine wilderness of our planet disappears as the understanding of our own inner wild nature fades.” So, is the state of the world our individual responsibility? To the degree that we are unconscious of our shadow, yes. Ignorance and victimhood are temporary residences, and as soon as we realise that; ‘no-one deserves that, I was an innocent victim’ or ‘I really didn’t mean to do that, but I did’, it’s our responsibility to start taking steps towards healing and improving our situation and in this way become the change we want to see in the world. If a culture exists to condition and suppress what is natural and normalise and enforce what is not, then that culture has become distorted and harmful to life. Breaking free from mainstream cultural possession, often results in being personally, professionally and socially ridiculed, cancelled or even scapegoated, one such individuated soul, Albert Einstein, explained why: “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.” For a time, the ancient mainstream cultural ritual of purging the psycho-emotional affect of accumulated unresolved trauma onto scapegoats before exiling or executing them, offers temporary catharsis and the illusion of social cohesion, however our continued bypassing of the origin of our chronic biopsychosocial and now biospheric dysfunction, has lead to ever worsening repetitions of our darkest times of the past. When cultural distortion becomes extreme, brutality in the form of fascism, dictators and the gruesome phenomena of war and genocide emerge, and whilst individual, family and community bonds are torn apart, in a total flip of reality, humanity's most free-thinking, truth-speaking and innovative individuals are declared mad or a danger to society. Scapegoated heroes endure the worst suffering imaginable for a human; betrayal, persecution, abandonment, exile and death, all by their own kin and collective, this is a focal archetype of our times, so as we watch western democratic culture crumble, it’s interesting to note that in the West’s own man-made religious mythology (the Holy Bible) the hero (Jesus Christ) was a scapegoat. Talk about an unresolved karmic complex! Archetypally, wrath is employed to transform illusion, in patriarchal tales, we would all be familiar with a hero embodying a kind of ruthless savagery, to clash with unreasonably gigantic opposition. Anger, aggression and rage are primal instinctual responses that quickly enable us to assert protective boundaries, physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually; who would question the use of violence in self-defence? Hanna Arendt, arguably the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century reminded us in her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, that rage is the natural response to injustice, defining it not as irrational, but as an appropriate response to hypocrisy, stating that: “When words don't match action, it is impossible to respond in a reasoned way.” Anyone that has awakened to the realisation that they were betrayed, deceived or gaslit, knows rage. Anger is a raw, life affirming creative force, it mobilises our defence, protection and discipline and ignites our passion for expression, adventure and joy, so why then is it arguably the most gaslit part of our nature? The unapologetic, individual, autonomous parts of self that assert; ‘I am’ are powerful and so feared by controlling cultural systems, that it is wounded early. In fact, there was a recent addition to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) called Oppositional Defiance Disorder (ODD), so according to our modern culture, basically anyone that challenges authority or opposes mainstream narratives, has a clinically mental illness. So, what happens to collective repressed rage? As mentioned earlier, consciousness, especially powerfully charged emotion, cannot simply disappear, therefore it does what it can; accumulate, distort and continually seeks to be activated and cathartically released. Repressed rage either turns in on itself causing inflammation, disease, depression, addiction, suicide, self-harm or gets projected outward and discharged onto vulnerable others; women, children, pets, employees, stigmatised minorities, just look around. Fire pulls the spirit up from demoralisation, despair and depression, it melts the protective ice fortresses we build around our broken hearts, it lights the way and brings us together, it is the hearth at the centre of our homes and of our bellies, but Fire can also seriously injure or permanently destroy whatever it touches. When we accept our anger and take responsibility for its transformative capacity, it can be socialised, practiced and mastered, and humanity's most destructive and creative force can finally start to be used wisely. Rising up, speaking out and being willing to stand alone in the flame of our truth is terrifying, but it’s the work of everyone that wakes up from the nightmare of cultural oppression in order to help liberate others and cultivate change. It is our duty to become the hero of our story. I once had a highly traumatised Buddhist client question whether aggressive self-protection was loving, to which I reminded him; compassion has teeth. Leaving home and learning to fend for ourselves is the first major test of our inner hero, the stakes are high and we begin applying risk, making sacrifices and accepting consequences. Integrating our hero-parts is an especially daunting undertaking for those that have both suffered severe ego violations early in life or had an overly sheltered upbringing, because when we lack a solid self-identity, we lack the will or confidence to take real risks, and therefore it’s natural that so many of us engage with our heroes on big screens, battle fields and in sporting arenas, because in this way we are able to pacify our soul’s desire for self-empowerment. Of course, most people resist the insecurity of heading off into the wilderness to find out for themselves if empowerment really does arise from the ashes of their former selves, I get it, but at some point our fears and doubts must be confronted, it is natural law and is why the Tibetan Buddhists taught us to practice dying, metaphorically, every day. Our real-life spiritual quests often begin with a major trauma like the death of a loved one, a major disillusionment or betrayal, divorce, bankruptcy, serious accident or illness, simply because sometimes only an existential cataclysm can force us to rescue ourselves.

Remember, your life is sacred

By Yemaya Olokun • November 18, 2021
Humans are highly intelligent, relational beings, for us, healthy attachment, empathy, compassion and a sense of belonging are crucial factors for our health and wellbeing, throughout life, but particularly during infancy and childhood. In over a decade of working with clients, I have never met anyone with chronic pain, disease or mental illness, that had not experienced significant trauma, particularly in their early life. Trauma describes an inner separation, dissociation or fragmenting of our sensate experience and our cognitive reality, it is a natural intelligent survival response that enables us to postpone immense pain and stress in the moment, however this functional altered state of awareness is not meant to be permanent. If the opposite of separation is togetherness, naturally the antidote to the dissociative or detaching phenomena of trauma, is congruent relationship, thus trauma cannot be healed alone and when left unacknowledged, it literally carries on recurring generation after generation, inherited via chemical coding within our DNA. For avoidance of doubt, the recently scientifically proven phenomena of 'Generational Trauma' and the ancient knowledge of 'Ancestral Karma' are synonymous (welcome science, so glad you could make it!) Humans are adapted to living in relatively small multi-generational communities, growing and sharing food, marketing wares locally and contributing to a system of economy aimed at sustaining and preserving Earth’s material resources. It was once our understanding that we belonged to Earth, the Mother Goddess, and not the other way around, we also used to understand and accept that the Mother Goddess was autonomous and didn’t need us, but that we needed her, so what happened? According to Professor of European Archaeology and Indo-European Studies, Linguist and Anthropologist, Maria Gimbutas, a dramatic shift in our worldview happened. Maria's advanced and thus ridiculed estimation, which have since been vindicated, was that our transition to patriarchal values began conditioning our psychology around 6500BCE, when Proto-Indo-European warrior tribes, who had not integrated the trauma of the apocalyptic events bookending the Younger Dryas ice age, began carrying out invasions across Europe, and the rest is literally his-story. It is very important to note that although parts of humanity were not able to process its trauma, and subsequently became barbaric in their struggle to survive, other parts were, for example recent archeological findings have revealed giant flaws in our mainstream origin stories and scientific theories, and unlike humans, Earth cannot lie. The truth of our origins and deep ancestral knowledge is emerging and being shared, it is clear that our ability to maintain our humanity and thrive rests on our ability to transfer our wisdom through the ages. Right up until the very end of the Neolithic age, when the first invasions started marked the beginning of colonisation, we lived in peaceful, co-regulating relationship with Earth and each other. Imagine hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, of continuous and consistent refining of our species inherent and extraordinary capacity for adaptation based on instinctual empathic resonance with both our environment and each other, thriving in intimate self-sustaining communities that were egalitarian in nature. The Greek Island of Crete was the last place in Europe to remain this way with the Minoan culture ending at around 1500BCE. So, what happens when this level of instinctual and intuitive intelligence is brutally overridden, oppressed and required to exist in great, noisy, over-populated and electrified ‘smart’ cities, where food is invented in labs or forced into being in lifeless soil with toxic chemicals and delivered to us premature and unripened from all over the world? Trauma. Numbness where there was empathy, lethargy, atrophy, pain and disease where there was vitality, vigour, passion and joy, and a gnawing, psychosomatic torment caused by the subconscious schism between all that is felt, seen and heard and the shared delusions we desperately cling to in order to avoid disillusionment. Under our current value system of ownership, control and profit, whether we observe the results of our separation from nature in terms of Earth’s ecosystems, collectively in terms of our societies and communities or individually in terms of our life-force and creativity, the devastating consequences are abundantly clear. There’s a golden rule in the realm of rehabilitative therapies: “Move it, or lose it”, take this into account and consider that our archaic ancestors had smaller frontal lobes, but much larger brains than we do now. Has our innate extrasensory perception atrophied as we’ve adapted to value logic, rationalism and materialism over our senses? Of course our evolutionary imprinting, being far more deeply coded than our man-made customs, rules and laws, means that although our psycho-sentient abilities have been suppressed into latency over the last 12,000 or so years, like bulbs buried in soil, they live and are eager to rise up when nourished and nurtured. The human spirit is immutable. Born the least developed of all the mammalian species on Earth, our physiology, psychology and ways of relating have necessarily evolved in close harmonic resonance with our universal laws. Without empathy, instinct and intuition, as well as a careful dedication and attention to child-rearing and mutually beneficial interpersonal relationships, our species simply would not have survived, let alone thrived, and believe it or not, we did until very recently. Through our archeological discoveries and learning from our few precious ancient tribes, with their original cosmologies and ways of life intact, we have begun the process of re-membering ourselves beyond the records of His story. We know that our ancient ancestors hardly put their babies down, the average age a child was breast-fed until was four and whenever it became known within a community that a member had experienced an overwhelming event and was showing signs of psychological distress the shamans and shamankas gathered the tribe to share the individual’s suffering and help them discharge their emotions and grieve their loss. In fact, it is still understood by our native American Brothers and Sisters that of all human experience, it’s grief that brings us closest to the 'Great Spirit’ or ‘God’, thus communion with those who are grieving is considered a scared privilege. We once naturally embodied compassion, which literally means; ‘to suffer together’, because it was well understood that the survival of a tribe relied on the health and wellbeing of each of its members. Traumatic distress has become a chronic disorder (PTSD), illustrating our journey from resonance and response to distance, denial and distortion. What if we accorded to our inner wisdom, without delay? From 1995-97, the world’s largest governmental study into the long-term health effects of childhood trauma was carried out in the US by the CDC and the Kaiser Permenente Institute. The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study collected data from 17,000 patients during GP visits and found that childhood trauma causes disease, addiction, shortens our life-span and that the higher a person’s ACE score, the worse their health outcomes are in adulthood. The expression of heart disease, mental illness, inflammatory and auto-immune disease, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, phobias, eating disorders, self-harm, suicide and addictions is rooted in the stress of the suppressed neuro-emotional charge of all that is unfelt, unprocessed and unexpressed. Panic attack or unacknowledged need to stop, be and breathe? Addiction or suppression of pain? Nocturnal teeth grinding an unconscious attempt to complete suppressed pain? Depression or denial of the grieving process? ‘Dark night of the soul’ a summons to evolve beyond stupid question like this? Our reclaimed soul-parts end up serving as our most needed, extraordinary, formidable and sublime characteristics, when integrated they know exactly what to do, they resolve and complete our memories and stories, and open new psychosomatic channels for energy and expression to flow through us. Our authenticity is, without exception, necessary for our health, inner peace and creativity. The first step towards wholeness and becoming who we really are is the rejection of cultural conditioning and self-abandonment. When we commit to our individual journey of becoming, we unapologetically shape-shift, we shed the adapted skins of the past and pour our life-force into the new evolutionary karma that is seeking to be imprinted within us and contributed to our collective. And it's never too late to start.
Share by: