“Trauma Culture” and Consciousness
By Coming Into Consciousness Founder William StCyr
One of the things that is coming out of the increased consciousness about trauma in our culture and society is a shift in the way we look at trauma and in how we look at trauma in regards to the broader culture.
Extrapolating out on the cutting edge work that is being done around intergenerational and personal trauma, we begin to see a different way to look at our society and our own personal/spiritual paths. We begin to see trauma not just in the clinical sense of the work being done around PTSD.
But instead we begin to see how deeply trauma is embedded within the roots of our western culture.
In that way “trauma work” has the possibility of teaching us all to go beyond the normal split between personal healing, spiritual practice and social justice work.
For the unprocessed trauma within our culture may very well be at the root of how power is lost to the abusiveness of the dominant culture. Learning to process that trauma in a way that is safe and empowering is not just about personal healing but also about empowering a movement toward real power, rooted in our relationship to the wisdom of the earth and of our own bodies.
In that way all the work we do is part of the process of healing trauma culture.
Isolation is at the core of how we experience reality from a traumatized perspective. In our own loss of deeper selfhood we lose relationship to ourselves and we lose much of our capacity for relationship to earth and to each other.
Community is at the core of healing.
Being held in ceremony with the sacred fire, in community and in the drumbeat of that fire, we begin to open to our own memory of what is needed for ourselves.
For like so many things, the body holds memory of what we may have consciously forgotten. Given the space to be in ceremony, to be with fire, to be with breath, to be with dreams - our own knowing comes to life. Our own capacity to move through the trauma cycle and to deepen our own knowing of our deepest soul selves finds footing and begins to blossom.
The village, in that way becomes the container for personal/spiritual healing and for a kind of broader social transformation.
Extrapolating out on the cutting edge work that is being done around intergenerational and personal trauma, we begin to see a different way to look at our society and our own personal/spiritual paths. We begin to see trauma not just in the clinical sense of the work being done around PTSD.
But instead we begin to see how deeply trauma is embedded within the roots of our western culture.
In that way “trauma work” has the possibility of teaching us all to go beyond the normal split between personal healing, spiritual practice and social justice work.
For the unprocessed trauma within our culture may very well be at the root of how power is lost to the abusiveness of the dominant culture. Learning to process that trauma in a way that is safe and empowering is not just about personal healing but also about empowering a movement toward real power, rooted in our relationship to the wisdom of the earth and of our own bodies.
In that way all the work we do is part of the process of healing trauma culture.
Isolation is at the core of how we experience reality from a traumatized perspective. In our own loss of deeper selfhood we lose relationship to ourselves and we lose much of our capacity for relationship to earth and to each other.
Community is at the core of healing.
Being held in ceremony with the sacred fire, in community and in the drumbeat of that fire, we begin to open to our own memory of what is needed for ourselves.
For like so many things, the body holds memory of what we may have consciously forgotten. Given the space to be in ceremony, to be with fire, to be with breath, to be with dreams - our own knowing comes to life. Our own capacity to move through the trauma cycle and to deepen our own knowing of our deepest soul selves finds footing and begins to blossom.
The village, in that way becomes the container for personal/spiritual healing and for a kind of broader social transformation.
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Come heal, sing, pray & dance
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