Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Treating the pain of Trauma


I first met Maggie Phillips at a workshop organised by Nanyang Siang Pao foundation last year.
At the end of this workshop, I had deepened my experience of somatic healing, which for me was spiritual healing since I used breath, focused awareness and zikr which is a form of affirmation.
Integrating it with energy psychology , I had been able to help my clients deal with pain without resorting to drugs or surgery.

Today and yesterday , I again attended another workshop, this time with a much smaller group and while I was quite familiar with what she had taught, I volunteered as a subject for her to work on. I had in fact volunteered the last time as well but the bigger group and the short session did not have as much an impact on me as did this session.

I think I had very many clues as to what was a habitual problem with my energy . I tended not to be grounded . My healing teacher had pointed it out to me last year, an energy photo had shown the same , when doing healing I sometimes felt too hot, a sure sign I was collecting the energy and not sending it back to the Source. Maggie confirmed my bad habit of not grounding myself. At one point while I was talking she said, " I have to stop you right there, I am not connecting with you and the reason can only be you are not connected to your body."
I understood immediately. I was not connected to my body in a moment when anger took over my thoughts and emotions, when anger made me disconnect from God.
My intellect tried to rationalise and I told her, " How can I not get angry at those @%&*#!!
She then replied, the problem is that when you get angry you disconnect from yourself and when you do that, you disconect from the people you want to communicate to and also, you feel emotional pain which hurts you."
It took me another day before I could work through my anger, sadness and lack of acceptance of a lot of what was happening with me at this point in time.
A lot of it has to do with the work I am doing this month , preparing documents for a Bachelor of Science in Homeopathy for a local IPTS. It brought out a lot of my insecurities , being among academicians made me acutely aware of my lack of scholarship . I was what Maggie said : Dissociated in relation to this particular role , while I was whole and quite comfortable and functioning optimally as a therapist and homeopath.
Why should this be? Indeed I knew the answers but it took a session with Maggie to become aware of this.
On my way back to Seremban , I got caught in a traffic jam when I took a wrong turn and a journey that should have taken 90 minutes took me 4 hours! Even so, I was energised after unloading a whole lot of negative energy interactions within my body and was able to see a client who was waiting for me in Seremban ( I did expect to be back much earlier) .
I feel different within me and was not sure I had left off the anger and sadness and insecurity so I kept checking myself by recalling the people and incidences that upset me and finding myself unaffected in my body. Somatic healing focuses on how our body reacts to triggers and stressors. These stressors can become quite permanent when we hold our bodies the " ready for stress modes " by keeping negative thoughts and negative emotions in our emotions and thus , in our body. One of the ways my healing teacher would address a client when they say " I feel sad or I feel angry is " Where in your body do you feel this emotion"

I will have to keep working on my grounding and also on centering my 'wires ' so they do not swing into active sympathetic mode or active parasympathetic mode and what will help me is REMEMBERENCE...Zikrullah....

You can read more on Dr Maggie's work HERE

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dr. Suriya,
Very interesting post. I've always interested in grounding self practice. A few years back I attended a workshop where we were taught a few ground self technics. One of my fav is to visualize a solid cord attached to the base of my spine and the cord drop a few hundreds below the earth add the cord wraps around the bedrock.
Like yourself, sometimes I tend to let my emotional (anger/upset)take over when I work with very challenging clients, and I find myself get overwhelm.

Suriya said...

Dear Anna
THat never worked with me.What does work with me is to imagine I am breathing through to my feet!Another tip from my teacher is to center myself lower in the body, ie at the root center rather that hanging up nearly outside the body.
Somebody commented I sounded less shrieky after I managed to do that!