Are you someone who is finding it hard to move past a threshold in your trauma healing process?
You’ve done the research, you’ve put in the work to understand the basics of trauma, you enrolled in communities and subscribed to helpful channels, you have a vocabulary for the fog…
…but now you’re finding it difficult to know where to go next.
If you’re anything like me, all of the articles, the books, the videos, the meditations seemed to touch on individual fractures in your understanding of yourself, filling in gaps here and there, but nothing really felt holistic enough,
nothing pulled it all together in a way that inspires you to affirm a lifelong commitment to self-compassion, to experience a sense of belonging not only to yourself but to both the natural and social worlds.
And maybe it makes you feel lost and that triggers those feelings of isolation that you already struggle with.
Nothing has truly started shifting those maladaptive, ingrained perspectives and beliefs you have about yourself, fixed firmly to your shadow.
But, because we don’t know how to resolve that creeping fear of meaninglessness or where to go to engage more meaningfully with ourselves, we’ll stick to the discipline and the reassurance of the basics.
Say you’ve picked up a journaling habit since you came to understand how important it is to incorporate a mindfulness activity into your daily schedule. And yes, it’s absolutely wonderful to journal.
That’s a great place to start when getting to know yourself, a small action you can take for yourself everyday. We need those kinds of self-care routines especially when we’re dysregulated, trying to break out of a downward depressive spiral or an anxious rut. But if its merit is waning for you, if it’s hard to keep it up,
maybe you need a greater why.
For me, nothing made me deeply commit and integrate journaling and other self-care things into my way of life until I…
took the reins,
reclaimed my sense of agency,
defined my values,
and challenged everything I took for granted. I asked myself what I thought the Self really was, and that changed the course of my research.
I asked myself how I could better think about my relationship with myself, one that would encourage creativity and compassion. And I let myself make free associations across subjects which included the books I was reading, the videos I watched, the art I was absorbing, and the concepts that kept refreshing and expanding the questions.
I remember stumbling upon a metaphor of the self as a river. It took me back to my own beloved river from childhood. The one I visited often when life was especially chaotic.
I could always spot a heron fishing near the rocks. Sometimes, I’d hear the wind push through the feathers of a bald eagle above as I walked across the deserted bridge that spanned the water.
It was comforting to see them there also enjoying the river’s constancy. It’s the same river that shaped the novel I began writing years ago and I called it, befriended it, gave it the name: Rivensong.
But I abandoned it to follow paths that led to those rites of adult passage, on into college and traditional work life, after relationships that I should have never began, and finally, into a primal abyss, the nadir, the swansong of an entire version of myself.
And ever since then, I’ve been burning to completely reorganize my heart and mind, to speak myself into a more truthful and authentic existence.
But journaling, in the valley of deep shadow, just wasn’t cutting it.
I felt like I was saying the same things over and over again. It made me uneasy. What was I hiding from myself? What was I lying to myself about?
So, when it failed, I’d walk for hours at a time. Walking cleared the air a bit but when I returned to this daily practice of writing my thoughts, writing my emotions, it felt like stasis. And stasis threatened destabilization because I couldn’t sit peacefully with myself yet. My sense of self was in shambles.
Sometimes, that journaling thing gets repetitive, seems pointless, disjointed even.
But what if you could continue to build upon and enrich the self-exploration process that journaling begins?
Writing in general can be boring, intimidating, or even impossible especially for those times when the last things that come to us are words.
What if you could borrow some tools from more diverse domains like visual art or fiction writing to gently tap into your own resources of creativity?
What if we could further systematize this process to glean more from it, using research and tested methods to go deeper, mining our own memories and inner intuitive landscape to make symbols and metaphors that actually could help us visualize parts of ourselves or help us see the way out of a dark period?
What if we could better produce our own questions rich with insight-potential specific to our story, questions that break down the walls of our resistances?
I wanted to dedicate this project to the survivors who keep learning to choose themselves, who fight self-abandonment everyday, who work hard to take responsibility for their healing.
Life will spur emergencies of the soul if you’re determined to play small, to hide, to run from yourself. So, I’ve been using this system to create more of a home inside, one that I never want to run from again.
See you at the riverside.
Asha Gowan 