The Healing Trauma Summit continued….

‘I’ve allowed my clients & students & spouse to be good tor-mentors with a hyphen between the tor and mentor. So, by tormenting me what they’ve taught me is what I need to heal and what I’m proud of is that instead of blaming them I’ve actually gone to all the parts that they bring up in meRichard Schwartz

‘When implicit memory returns we know that it is the trauma within us…. (Healing occurs) when the embodiment of the memory, within the window of tolerance, is met by the embodied offer of what was needed at the time, but was not available…’ Bonnie Badenoch

Visualization to increase resilience: In short: sit comfortably and focus on gentle breathing; imagine safe place; imagine someone wise and strong coming to visit you in this place; imagine how you greet each other and where you talk; then what worry or problem you want to share; what they say, and finally, a goodbye and closure scene by Linda Graham

Love your Brain featuring Kevin Pearce-lululemon at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGdplb7kTjk

“This research reminds us that we hold many of the levers of healing in our own hands. It makes us aware that it is not doctors, hospitals, acupuncturists, homeopaths, chiropractors, energy workers, or other health professionals who determine our sickness and health. They can tilt the balance, but not nearly as much as we can. Each of us, as individuals, creates a big chunk of our emotional and mental environment, thereby turning genes on and off in our cells. This opens up vast and exciting potential.” Dawson Church

The poem of the hands by Christian McEwen

‘….And hands are stars / which shape the empty air / The woman stares at them / They sing her song’

Inspiring sessions on healing trauma from The Healing Trauma Summit hosted by Sounds True at: https://www.soundstrue.com/mycourse/oce/healing-trauma-summit/live/?utm_source

* ‘Cultivate alliance with wisdom of bodily sensations…… empowerment and agency come through being in our body’ Peter Levine

* ‘Holding patterns or constrictions are the frozen moments of trauma, which hold emotional charge and the mentality of our age at the time’ Judith Blackstone

 * Trauma is what happens inside us as a result of what happened to us… it is a constriction, a narrowing…’  Compassionate inquiry and body based approaches Gabor Mate                                                                       

* ‘How do we not reduce women in the healing process to only being the victim; & how do we actually see their strength, resilience and creativity and how they survived, rather than reduce them to that one image…’ Zainab Salbi                       

* The threat of trauma runs through life like an underground river; none of us are invulnerable and no one is impervious to change and our emotions operate on neurofibres that are faster than thought. Trauma impacts us even if we do not want it to; we cannot think our way around it’ Mark Epstein                                                   

*‘Healing in and from our original, innate wholeness not towards wholeness….’   ‘Resilience is hard wired in us, but experiences block it…’ Richard C. Miller

* ‘Trauma centre trauma sensitive yoga (TCTSY): a) everything is an invitation (no one is coerced); b) shared, authentic experience (no one is abandoned / sharing power): c) choice making (agency); d) interoception (brain impacts)’ David Emerson                    

* The necessity of a public discussion of aspects of trauma for: ‘unresolved trauma lies all around us; traumatic residue in cellular body; trauma modifies expression of DNA; collective & familial cellular transference of trauma; consider versions of suffering that the offspring of Japanese nuclear bombing survivors; holocaust survivors; veterans of wars; racism; slavery; refugees; indigenous people; addictions; abuse and neglect; imprisonment; trafficking; natural disasters; hunger, etc, etc, carry at a cellular level; cultural amnesia is dangerous – it creates the possibility of repetition…’ Elizabeth Rosner

* Resource tapping: imagine what you want to activate, e.g. peaceful place; joy; resilience; ideal mother, etc. Exercise: ‘tap in imaginal womb, birth & nurturing / attachment through developmental stages using ideal mother one develops to tap in’ Laurel Parnell

* ‘These social traumas are caused by experiences of discrimination and prejudice on a personal level, as well as, cultural and structural inequities based on factors, such as, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion and disabilities. Our nervous system reacts to prejudice, discrimination and inequity, as a matter of survival because they are an assault on our fundamental sense of safety and right to exist in this world’ Thea Lee and T. O. Wound  quoted by Leslie Booker:

* ‘Reconceiving trauma not as pathology but as a tragic reality and universal transformational force that is a: portal to the luminal; rite of passage; initiation; call to the Real; call to community; rebirth and recreation of self and identity’ Ed Tick

* ‘We work with leftovers of past experience…we work with unmetabolized responses…we are released from past when the body does not have to carry past defenses…. We need to pay attention to the preparatory movements before trauma, like tension in legs, for instance, in order to reinstate capacity for the flight response, & also, consider the impact of trauma on our proximity seeking actions…’ Pat Ogden

* ‘Look at everyone you encounter as a child. When you can see the child in a person, you can be empathetic’ / ‘The importance of touching the innocence of childhood….. There’s nothing more dangerous than a broken boy in an adult man’ Shaka Senghor

* ‘Through such devastation there is a level of power, creativity, resilience, purity’ Jeffrey Rutstein

* ‘Traumas create a growth experience, not when you are in the midst of them, but when you walk through them’ Sandra Ingerman

This image with a poem by Maya Angelou is my contribution to the collaborative mosaic as part of the Tate Exchange Programme, in the Blavatnik building at Tate Modern in London from May 30th to June 3rd. The opportunity to participate in this activity was provided by the ‘Politics, Art and Resistance’ course by the University of Kent. For more information you can visit the following links:

https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/polir-news/2018/05/23/politics-art-and-resistance-tate-exchange-workshop-other-at-tate-modern/

‘Walls and fences are not the only means used to separate people and turn neighbours into strangers. Everyday life practices and routines often place people into opposing categories such as us/them, inside/outside, included/excluded, old/young, rich/poor. Join us in exploring how art can be used to reveal, explore and question the processes that make us define others in terms of how they differ from ourselves. Workshops, interactive displays and live art interventions will interrogate the many complex ways in which we relate to otherness. Can we make connections and find what we have in common?’ http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/tate-exchange/workshop/other