Beyond The Pain

Jane Sonnenberg explains how Integral Awareness can be used as a tool for understanding and healing trauma

There are many debilitating symptoms that people suffer from that come from life-threatening or overwhelming experiences. What may traumatise one person in one way may not be the way another person may be affected either. Children can be overwhelmed by seemingly everyday events and a series of “minor mishaps” can have a cumulative and debilitating effect on anyone.

Often symptoms and effects of trauma only express themselves later in our lives. Often we don’t even associate a particular trauma with our symptoms. The impact of trauma and stress can sometimes be very subtle and yet also affect the way we live our lives and express ourselves profoundly.

Most of my own sensitivities and eccentricities I attributed to being “different” and even “special” or “spiritual”, until I realised how my autonomic nervous system had been affected by various pre-natal and childhood traumas that held me hostage to certain tendencies in spite of many years of working with different therapies and yogas. Now I understand how many of these therapies either drove the trauma deeper or, in the case of meditation and yoga, helped me avoid dealing with the expression of this trauma altogether.

Integral Awareness
Integral awareness is a combination of three distinct approaches to understanding how trauma and stressful life experiences are imprinted on the body. It shows how we can only truly heal, transform and evolve through the felt sense of the physical body and not through the convolutions of the mind however elevated, spiritual or profound.

The first approach is Sat Nam Rasayan which is an ancient healing art taught by healer, mystic and yogi Guru Dev Singh. It uses awareness and resonance through the felt sense to modify any state in the mind or body. The second is Integral Yoga, and is a yoga that profoundly challenges the hold of belief systems in the body, as taught by The Mother and Sri Aurobindo, both mystics and saints. And the third, Somatic Experiencing, is based on 35 years of biological research on how stress and trauma impact on the autonomic nervous system, brain and body, as taught by Dr Peter Levine, who holds a PhD in medical and biological physics and psychology.

Recognising Trauma
Peter Levine’s definition of trauma is that “we become traumatised when our ability to respond to a perceived threat is in some way overwhelmed”. The first symptoms that we may experience after an overwhelming event are: 1. Hyperarousal – increase in heart rate, sweating, difficulty breathing, tingling and muscular tension or increased repetitions of thoughts, racing mind and worry. 2. Constriction then occurs, which alters muscle tone, breathing and posture, inhibits digestion and causes numbness or the feeling of being disconnected or shutdown. 3. Dissasociation and denial – the denial of the importance of an event or even the event itself.

These are the ways that the brain, hormones, muscles, etc. are activated to protect and warn us, but which often stay switched on because we were not able to defend ourselves effectively. So we either stay on high alert or hyper-arousal, which is the nervous system’s accelerator; or the opposite – freeze, the system’s break when we are rendered helpless, which often continues to express itself as collapse, immobilisation and inertia.

With stress or trauma our bodies can no longer self-regulate naturally between our sympathetic nervous system, which is the accelerator, and our parasympathetic nervous system, which is the brake. We are not taught to listen to our bodies. The purpose of discomfort in the body is to inform us that something is not right and that it needs us to pay attention. If these prompts from the body are ignored they can evolve into symptoms of trauma.

Using Integral Awareness to heal
In Somatic Experiencing we understand that with sensation-focused mindfulness we can access where we are “frozen” – those places where we are unable to flow through trauma and complete instinctive responses. Dr Levine says that until we understand that traumatic symptoms are physiological as well as psychological, we will be inadequate in our attempts to heal them. The heart of the matter lies in being able to recognise that trauma represents animal instincts gone awry. When harnessed, these instincts can actually be used by the conscious mind to transform traumatic symptoms into a state of wellbeing.

As Jean Genet in a Thief’s Journal says: “Acts must be carried through to their completion. Whatever their point of departure, the end will be beautiful. It is (only) because an action has not been completed that it is vile.”

In the healing art of Sat Nam Rasayan we understand that stressful life experiences can eventually express themselves as symptoms and behaviours until, through meditative awareness and the neutrality of allowing, the consciousness behind the tendency is modified. This healing art is unique in the sense that the healer can also actually track the patient’s experience through their own awareness and modify the condition in their own awareness thereby affecting the patient. This is helpful for those who are unable to access their own felt sense.

To quote Guru Dev Singh: “A spiritual person is a person who meets reality”. In other words, a person who experiences reality within themselves as a felt sense without the buffer of preconception. The Mother and Sri Aurobindo took the view that we need to “spiritualise matter” not transcend it. And that in order to bring “spirit” into the body we need firstly to experience ourselves in the body and bring our awareness to that experience. Dr Peter Levine then uses the process of pendulation between comfortable and uncomfortable sensations through the use of the felt sense to encourage the body to self-regulate.

These technologies make it very accessible for us to experience and stay present with ourselves and to unravel what holds us in a sense of hopelessness or limitation and bring back the spirit into our bodies. They are very empowering and can be used as practices in themselves.

We learn through the Somatic approach to transcend the opposites of comfortable and uncomfortable in the body. We are normally only focused on either positive or negative experiences and in this way we perpetuate what we are focused on, and negate what we are not focused on. The pendulation between positive and negative automatically brings us to a state of neutrality.

Beyond the Pain
“Our lives are like streams. The currents of our experiences flow through time with periodic cycles of tranquility, disturbance and integration. Our bodies are the banks of the stream, containing our life energy and holding it in bounds while allowing it to freely flow within the banks. It is the protective barrier against stimuli leading to feelings of overwhelming helplessness” (Dr Peter Levine).

When we learn to live in our bodies, we naturally create a barrier for any shock of an external force that might threaten to rupture our protective container. And when we are embodied and present in the face of life’s vicissitudes and challenges, we become more resilient and can return to flow more easily in spite of the punches.

It is the body’s natural tendency to self-regulate – it just needs some facilitation and awareness to express its full potential for us to live our lives more fully and authentically. The simple of act of allowing and bringing our awareness to our experience helps us start to develop a meditative mind.  There are two aspects to being human: the one is the ability to experience what we are experiencing, and the other is to bring awareness to our experience. By developing a stable, meditative mind together with our “felt sense”, we grow in our capacity to be embodied and aware, whereas when we only develop a meditative mind, we invariably become detached and disconnected from day to day reality and become spaced-out.

We also often feel that being emotional will change us, but it doesn’t. Change only happens in the moment that we are stable in our awareness. It is then that we have the power to modify or change our lives through our intention. When we learn to focus on emotions through our sensations and stay present with the experience, we begin to understand that the world is in us and not outside of us. Only by modifying the experience of the external inside can there be any real change to the external. We really are the co-creators of our realities. “Only that which is involved can evolve,” Sri Aurobindo.

Tell-Tale Trauma Signs
These can present immediately or some­times even years later

1          Hypervigilence

2          Extreme sensitivity

3          Abrupt mood swings

4          Rage reactions

5          Crying

6          Shame and lack ofself-worth

7          Reduced ability to deal with stress

8          Difficulty sleeping

9          Panic attacks

10        Mental blankness

11        Feeling spaced-out

12        Attraction to dangerous situations

13        Inability to commit orto be intimate

14.    ADD and others types of hyperactivity and an inability to focus (particuarly in children)

Jane Sonnenberg is a facilitator of Integral Awareness and its techniques. She also teaches meditation and uses Family Constellation Therapy as well as Cranial Sacral Therapy. She has studied many different healing traditions and has been healing people professionally for over 15 years. Contact Jane on 083 537 7751 or email juanalila@hotmail.com