WAYS IN WHICH THE HEALING CAN TAKE PLACE
HEALING TRAUMA
“Throughout recorded and oral history, it has been the task of the shaman, or tribal healer, to help restore balance and health to individuals and communities where it has been disrupted,” writes Peter Levine. “In contrast to Western medicine, which has taken its time in recognizing the debilitating effects of trauma, shamanistic cultures have acknowledged such wounds for a very long time.”
A pioneer in the treatment of trauma, Levine adds: “Shamanistic cultures view illness and trauma as a problem for the entire community, not just the individual … People in these societies seek healing as much for the good of the whole as for themselves.” (Book: Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma)
Trauma is a fact of life. It has become so commonplace that most people do not even realize its impact or presence. Trauma is felt by all of us at some stage in our lives and does not result only from what is commonly thought to be its cause: shock trauma from abuse or attack. Trauma can be experienced through misfortune or during routine passages of life, such as surgery, medical and dental procedures, anaesthesia, illnesses, and accidents and injuries. Inappropriate or harsh behaviour by parents, teachers and peers, as well as betrayal, financially hard times and the pressure of societal and cultural expectations can all cause trauma, not only events such as the loss of a loved one, robbery or witnessing violence. These are just some examples. Fetal distress and birth difficulties can also cause a level of trauma in the system that deeply affects the way we view and live in the world. Traumatic symptoms are not caused by the “triggering” of the event itself. They stem from the frozen residue of energy that has not been resolved and discharged; this energy remains trapped in the system, where it can wreak havoc on our mind and body. However, we can remove this energy by working in ceremony.
THE GIFT OF TRAUMA TRANSFORMED
Held within the symptoms of trauma are the very energies, potentials and resources necessary for their constructive transformation. Western medicine and culture typically block our innate healing process – by using drugs to suppress symptoms, by over-emphasizing adjustment or control, or by denial or invalidation of emotions, feelings and sensations.
The same energies that create the symptoms of trauma, when properly engaged, can transform the trauma and inspire new levels of healing, mastery and wisdom.
This residual energy persists in the body and is expressed in a wide variety of symptoms: anxiety, depression, sadness, disassociation, fear, panic, and other psychosomatic and behavioral problems. These symptoms are signals from our mind and body that there is undischarged residual energy that needs to be addressed and cleaned. If we don’t deal with this energy and ignore the warning signs, dis-ease will then often manifest as a final warning system. Trauma resolved is a great gift, returning us to the natural world of ebb and flow, harmony, love and compassion. In order to release the energies caused by trauma, we need the help of caring and experienced healers, and to be surrounded by the protection and support of Nature. We can then trust and honor the process that will bring us to completion and wholeness ‒ and eventually peace. The Temple offers exactly this kind of environment at our healing retreats. Trauma has the potential to be one of the most significant forces for psychological, social, and spiritual awakening and evolution. How we handle trauma (as individuals, communities and societies) greatly influences the quality of our lives. It will ultimately affect how we will survive as a species.
ADDRESSING ROOT CAUSES
Our natural human state is joyful, harmonious, and peaceful. However, for most people, deeply unconscious and long-suppressed fears, anger, and negative emotions drive our lives, causing us typically to “try to feel good.” Yet this very attempt is self-defeating and serves only to repress the pain we are carrying.
Our minds are masters at masking inner pain through a multitude of mechanisms that we develop in our formative years. We learn to disguise, suppress, control, sedate, escape, and “defend” ourselves against the painful experiences imprinted upon us. Life can often seem unfair. These defense mechanisms stay with us for life unless we delve deep to find their cause – a negative residual energy that manifests as an emotional blockage. The majority of people carry negative energies originating from core painful events (either acute or developmental traumas) that occurred between 0 and 7 years old. On a basic level, this is the period of developing the emotional body, which is followed by the development of the mental body (7 to 14 years old). When working with ayahuasca, we are typically taken back to reflect upon (either emotionally, mentally, or physically in some cases), integrate, and then release these negative memories, emotions, and their energetic counterparts.
Working with the plants is like “bungee jumping” into your inner abyss – you will always come back but it is difficult to fall into and face the darkness within.
This is the process of becoming whole: seeing the whole of yourself – both light and dark. It is normal to struggle during these deep healing and cleansing experiences because we are accessing causal events (and their memories and emotional charges) that exist at a point in consciousness when we didn’t have the mental capacity to form a concept of the experience. We effectively re-enter those states and re-experience those suppressed feelings. Therefore, when healing these energies and the consequent emotional blockages, the mind tends to become confused and attempts to find ways out of the healing process. (The mechanisms, again, are numerous: running, suppressing, blaming, controlling, sedating, denying, avoiding, resisting, or attacking). True emotional healing requires us to face our shadow and surrender to the healing process. This means entering the darkness willingly, in a state of naked vulnerability, in order to integrate then release its hold. This work is the gateway to transformation.
REVISITING CHILDHOOD EMOTIONS
We can be transported back to childhood emotions to integrate and clear them in order to change the quality of our experience in adult life. Pain and discomfort are words we often use to describe an energetic condition within our emotional body. This condition contains unintegrated charges that we perceive as physically, emotionally, and mentally uncomfortable. Our childhoods typically teach us to run from this feeling, but we need courage to face and “be” with whatever is surfacing. We must trust that the medicine and the healers will help us to release the charge. Needless to say, it takes determination, strength, and willpower to face our inner shadow. Unless we reach back into our childhood to rescue the stranded aspects of our child selves that still carry pain, that pain will persist throughout our lives and we will perpetually manifest physical, emotional, and mental discomfort. Once freed, however, our adult self is able to return to authenticity and presence. When our child self comes to peace, so do we.
An attitude of surrender is strongly advised when entering any deep emotional and spiritual development. Surrender doesn’t mean to “giving up,” but laying down our resistance and taking responsibility for our own healing and wellbeing. This means being an open channel for the healer and medicine to do their work.
WE ARE NOT OUR THOUGHTS
Beware of the mind during the healing process. The mind prefers familiarity, which is why patterns and programs are so hard to disable. Simply put, we cannot get our heads around the healing process. When we use our minds to understand, analyze and comprehend our emotional issues, we are using the wrong tools for the job. The mind often doesn’t approve of change and appears to discourage us from our healing. Instead, we must work at a deeper level – directly through our emotions and into our energy body. This process develops our emotional intelligence. When suppressed emotions are either triggered or being released, we feel them and then tend to immediately interpret them with our minds. Generically, we conceptualize the discomfort as our issues. Our thoughts then become a symptom of the problem, not the product of reasonable observation. This is a crucial and tricky distinction. It is very easy to identify with our mental struggles and their version of “the truth” but we must recognize that they are an effect of our emotional blockages. These blockages can make us feel uncomfortable, angry, sad, panicked, judgmental, and/or blameful. These feelings must be faced, not run from or acted upon. A classic externalization and usually first consequence of these emotional charges is drama. Drama is reactive projection – whether physical, emotional, or mental. When we face drama in our life, it is typically a warning sign to look within and not blame the person or circumstance that is acting as the trigger. Working with plants is very similar – it is a mirror. When we are healing emotional blockages and residual negative energies, the participant can sometimes manifest physical, emotional, or mental experiences that mirror what is being released internally.
PROJECTION AS A DEFENSE MECHANISM
We can also often experience visions in ceremony that seem to represent external issues, people, or spirits attempting to affect us. Most often, though, these visions are a projection of our internal issues. Our minds cannot interpret the pain, negative energy, and difficult emotions that the medicine is mirroring, so they project the inner experience onto a vision that puts the blame or reason outside of ourselves. During our experience with the medicine, we can frequently be taken to a place that reflects our childhood – typically emotionally and mentally. Again, projection is a defense mechanism against difficult childhood memories that an external event or agent has caused us to reflect upon. This is so common that it is worth reiterating. When suppressed memories and emotions are being cleaned by the medicine, we can often be “triggered” externally. The ongoing circumstances in our life and our surroundings are essentially a reflection of our inner landscape. When we change our inner landscape, our outer landscape changes too. We see the world through our own eyes. When the energies have been cleaned from our systems, our visions change and we no longer project our “inner demons” onto the external world.
By working on our suppressed emotions and feelings, we are slowly able to move from being reactive to being responsive – consciously choosing to contain and constructively integrate the triggered emotion. We begin to release blame or judgment of others for any dramas in our life.
FACING YOUR SHADOW
A retreat can be intense and often one of the most challenging yet ultimately rewarding experiences of your life. It takes courage to face your shadow and to bring light to many painful aspects of yourself that have been suppressed and unresolved in your past.
Our shadow is everything inside us that we have disowned, avoided, and kept in the dark. We all turn away from pain at some stage in our life, especially during our childhoods, yet whatever we have not processed gets relegated and hidden in our shadow. Our shadow is where our life-force gets trapped and is no longer available to us. It is energy that is not integrated with the rest of our being, akin to pieces of ourselves that have become compartmentalized, pushed aside, and treated as an unwanted child.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” – Carl Jung
Shadow work is counter-habitual; we turn towards pain, not away from pain. We access that place of pain within us and slowly bring it into the open, becoming acquainted and then intimate with it until the estranged pain is not a dreaded “it,” but a reclaimed “us.” There is a well-known Sufi story about Mullah Nasr Id’n, out at night under a street lamp on his hands and knees, frantically searching.
A friend comes along and asks: “What are you doing?”
The Mullah replies: “I am searching for my keys”.
His friend asks: “You lost them under the light?”
The Mullah looks up, grinning and replies: “No, actually, I lost them over in those dark bushes by the door, but the light here is so much better for seeing.”
Healing is a journey to the heart of what really matters – an opportunity to face and integrate our shadow, transmuting trapped energies and making them available for life-affirming purposes. The medicine helps us search for the keys where they have been lost – in the darkness. True healing with ayahuasca can be very hard work, requiring courage to face fears, determination, and commitment to your healing journey. Ayahuasca is also an amplifier that will bring to the surface patterns and programs that do not serve you.
Ayahuasca is not a recreational drug taken for entertainment, relaxation, or escapism. The medicine does not allow us to suppress issues and escape reality. In fact, quite the opposite is typically the case. Ayahuasca compels us to face, resolve, and release issues that have been buried throughout our lives.
As pioneering psychologist Ralph Metzner, PhD states:
“The fact that Westerners will seek out a foul-tasting jungle medicine in a faraway environment and culture, a medicine that frequently leads to violent purging and can include terrifying visions, is a remarkable paradox.”
Our healing work is to clean, clear, and transform trapped energies that hold you back in life, cause emotional distress, and create perpetual discomfort that often manifests as “dis-ease.” Surrendering to the healing process is essential to cleansing and integrating painful memories, deeply embedded emotional blockages, energetic imprints, and self-limiting patterns. It is the accumulation of suppressed memories, blocked emotions, and energetic imprints that prevent us re-discovering our true selves and living a life filled with joy, abundance, and inner peace. During and after the process, perseverance, courage, a strong will, and patience all significantly help facilitate the healing journey. The results are highly beneficial with the end goal to come back into alignment with our true nature, find balance between our heart and mind, balance between our sub-conscious, conscious, and super-conscious selves, and to re-awaken self-respect, self-worth, and ultimately, self-love.
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” – Rumi
MANAGING EXPECTATIONS
Healing with the plant spirits is a journey and not a one-off event. A retreat initiates a much longer commitment to healing, integration, and increasing awareness. After completing your retreat, it is necessary to process and integrate the healing and lessons learned during the retreat into day-to-day life.
Healing is a “two-way street” – you are not a passive recipient of healing but an active and willing partner. The significant healing that can be achieved from taking part in a retreat is the beginning of a much longer process that can accelerate one’s spiritual development and re-awakening. Before booking a retreat, it is essential that you are fully and passionately dedicated to changing your life. You will typically be returning back after retreat with an increased level of awareness and it is important that you understand what this entails. Having an increased level of consciousness means you become more aware of patterns and beliefs that no longer serve you and that which is no longer beneficial in your life. You will be presented with ongoing choices to change various aspects of your life with an increased awareness, moving away from charged reactions and towards consciously responding to life. You must be resolutely prepared to commit over the long-term to your integration process after retreat.
When working with plants, it is important to not hold on to expectations. Healing and transformation often unfold differently from what we expect them to look like. Our tendency is to avoid painful experiences we think of as negative, to shy away from situations that may be hurtful, and to suppress our real feelings. The heart can only come to our aid if, instead of running from what we dislike, we become fully present with what we are experiencing during our healing process. When we accept the unacceptable instead of pushing it away, we discover that the flip side of psychological and emotional pain is personal growth – and that our pain is simply our healing wanting to break through.
You get what you need, which isn’t always what you want.
Our facilitation style focuses specifically on guiding participants through the deep and often difficult experiences faced at some stages during a ceremony and integrating them. Our healing programs work with traditional techniques to help guests move through the process with determination and grace. We have learned these techniques through the trials of our personal deep healing and work with the medicine over many years. Healing is a process of self-awakening, with a significant helping hand from nature. The pathway is through the shadow, which is often reflected and projected both during and outside of ceremonies. In short, the best way “out” of emotional pain is through – by surrendering to the healing process. It is important to understand that deep healing can be challenging. You will be embarking on a journey into the unknown, which ultimately is a journey into yourself. Your experience with the plants typically reflects only what is contained within – your emotions, pain, patterns, programs, and fears. In many ways, it is a powerful system of emotional development and mastery. It is a very difficult yet exponentially rewarding process if we stay committed.