Huge waves and ACEs

Hi. In my corner of the world it is summer; so, I have been going to the beach more frequently. The weather has been hot, but quite windy recently, which is ideal for those who do water sports like wind surfing. Others like me can watch them glide and move through and on the sea with grace and skill from the safety of their beach towel. When I was very young I was shown slides of huger than life waves. I was convinced the surfer had died when the waves swallowed him out of sight. In adolescence I sat on the beach and watched while my cousins surfed.  Later in early adulthood I played with this fear as I tackled the waves on a beach in Crete, Matala, a hippie destination in the sixties and famous for its big waves. As I think about early events and memories I realise that the journey of healing, changing and waking up is like re-viewing the books, slides or videos in your bookcase. It is absolutely essential that you eventually visit the bottom shelves again to shed more light on what truly happened then in order  to release fears, emotions and cellular memories of the most distant and vulnerable past, which compromises our future and sets us up for a repetitive loop of similar experiences.

With this in mind I have been re-engaging with material on trauma, its effects, research and statistics while also painting to unlearn early lessons. In doing so, I have been reminded of some basic truths about trauma and its impact on every area of our life; including its adverse effects on our physiology and health.

In a nutshell:

Trauma impacts our physiology and causes epigenetic changes  Read more