Written by: Sandra Ehlers, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
We are used to seeing joy as elusive and inapproachable. What if that’s not the whole truth? Is it possible to go from trauma to daily joyfulness?
Imagine that your heart is a bottle of champagne.
You shake it vigorously. And when you pop open the bottle, you rejoice at the abundant overflow.
This is what heart opening to joy feels like to me.
And from my experience with joy, this overflowing elation doesn’t have to be fleeting. It is true that we cannot force it – but we can remove what stands in the way of its natural flow.
Perhaps surprisingly, one thing that I see time and time again, in working with deep trauma healing with others as much as in my own journey, is that we are capable of moving from deep, heavy trauma straight into joy.
In fact, the people who have undergone the deepest and most testing trials and transformations are often the ones who go on to experience the most liberated joy!
The key, of course, is in surrender of our pain. It is in the depths of our struggles that we find the deepest surrender. That liminal space where spiritual awakening happens – in the case of joy, an awakening of the heart.
To see how, I invite you to join me in one such journey.
Rooting in nothing
Time is blurry around the experience, but it was sometime in 2010 that I experienced my first Dark Night of the Soul. Back then there were no resources available, no one to help me understand what I was going through. I fought it in silence.
Externally, it must have seemed like depression. That overpowering heaviness of the shampoo bottle in my hand as I battled fatigue. Or how, as I stepped out of bed in the morning, the struggle to access the compartments of 'likes' and 'dislikes'; not knowing what to wear or what to do, or how to figure it out. It was exhausting, yes. But this was only the beginning, the surface layer.
More than memory was lost in those shadows. As much as I strained to remember what made me happy, or even to hold any thoughts in my mind…
It was as if all that had previously formed a "me", a bundle of identities to navigate life, were dissolving. I didn't quite remember who I was, or how I came to be here.
This was a first encounter with the more internal, profound experience of 'nothing left to hold on to'. It felt as if floating in a sea of nothingness, with no anchor and no direction – being nothing within a sea of nothingness.
Little did I know that this was one of the most blessed experiences of my life.
Laying in bed too exhausted to get up, and with all identities I'd normally take for granted now brutally ripped off; for the first time I experienced how we can completely step out of the narrow perspective of our own human self, and play with the infinite perspectives of reality.
…If only it hadn’t been such a scary experience!
It would take a dozen more years to fully integrate this experience for what it was: a spiritual awakening that needed to be anchored into the body.
I will return to the deeper realizations that this was a first taste of in an upcoming article. For now, there’s good reason to linger with the reality that laid before me to integrate:
The searing pain of disparity when our minds are capable of limitlessness, but the body is holding on to the suffocating limitations of the past.
The hidden blessing of pain
"Awakening is encompassing. We are more of everything. More open. More sensitive. We feel more pain."
Igor Kufayev
Awareness expansion is a double edged sword. We become more sensitive to the pains of life – from physical to emotional to mental – as much as we expand our capacity for joy. And because of the human tendency to dwell on our problems in attempted self-protection, we often linger with the negative.
In my work, I notice two common tendencies with people who come to me with cPTSD. First, and not surprisingly, they have been greatly disassociated from their body, and struggle to re-enter full physical awareness. This is especially acute after awareness expanding experiences. When our minds have been opened, accepting and working with the messy reality of our physical experience is a daunting task. And yet, this is the very task we need to take on.
In retrospect, if I had to choose only one life lesson from the many I've had in my awakenings, it would be this:
We cannot fight or abandon physicality, and embody love.
The problem is, we generally don't even realize the extent to which we fight our physical life experience! The disassociation protects us from having to know or feel the struggle taking place inside. And even if we know, we are often not aware that the first step into freedom could be so simple.
Going back to my own example; within the lostness of that first awakening experience, my first and most important step of healing was so plain that some will not recognize the depth it holds:
To re-learn how to feel sensations at the soles of my feet.
Online yoga was new back then. I could not explain where the inspiration came from when I looked it up. By some grace I immediately stumbled upon the yoga teacher that would change my life, Adi Amar.
With all the grace, strength and peace I could only dream of at the time, she stood in mountain pose with the Sedona summits towering in the background, patiently teaching me to bring my awareness back into my feet.
Through this basic daily practice, I slowly learned to re-enter and be present with my body again. And over the following years, I would learn that the reason I hadn't been present without the practice, was that the awakening had made me inescapably sensitive to all the pain my body held on to.
This is also what I see in my work: we can be very aware of our dissociation, and yet simply not be able to reintegrate. Because as soon as we try to return to bodily presence, we begin to feel that pain. Any shame, guilt, sorrow and anger that has been left unresolved, lives on in the body as if not a day had passed. When before awakening we were able to numb ourselves from it, the more we awaken, the less we are able to deny the living truth in the body.
This is why, if we want to experience joy, more than spiritual awakening we must focus on self-integration.
In my work, I get to witness how every time we take that leap of faith to fully hold space for our pain; meaning every time we integrate it not only mentally, but deeply through our feelings and sensations in the body, the resulting release creates a kind of vacuum inside.
And in that vacuum, what naturally bubbles up is joy.
A joy that is no longer held back by that which we've now integrated. A joy that is liberated, free to flow from the inside out.
Solving the problem
I mentioned that I've seen two patterns with clients coming to me for support with healing cPDSD in combination with spiritual awakening. The first, as we have seen, is the work to reintegrate awareness of the body when we have become greatly dissociated from it.
Secondly, people who experience deep trauma tend to be more invested than most in untangling their complex past. They may end up developing their own refined methodology for doing so; beginning to see life as a multi-dimensional puzzle, where all the lost pieces are to be somehow fitted in.
Why this urgent need to solve the whole puzzle of life? Why can't we "just let go" as so many people advise us?
Complex trauma in childhood results in never being allowed to grow into our own identity as a child. Instead, we come into adulthood with a weak sense of self, with disconnected and lost memories that leave us unconsciously grasping for that inner anchor we never had. In my view, nothing feels as unsafe and dangerous as being unanchored in life.
There is an intuition that rediscovering, understanding and resolving what was lost is key to help us create the identity that never got to unfold – and to find the safety in ourselves that was never given from the outside.
And it works: in every aspect of life, whether we explore emotions, memories, consciousness, or any everyday problem; we can better understand any object or concept by picking it apart, carefully investigating each part. Once we have seen each piece clearly enough, with that new understanding we can piece it together into a more desired form.
That final, zoomed out perspective of the whole, is a key part of our deepened understanding with which we can "solve the problem".
In healing, "solving the problem" means learning whatever we need to know to be able to surrender the pain we carry.
Perhaps a part of us just needs validation for existing. Or maybe there is a more specific need to be met. It is not a new idea that a major part of healing is to provide ourselves with unconditional witnessing and validation so that our hidden parts, or inner children, feel safe to resurface – making the unconscious conscious.
To heal, we need to actively guide these parts of our consciousness out of tunnel vision, through the gentle guidance of unconditional witnessing, validation, somatic release, learning our needs, and setting new healthy boundaries. Guiding our parts through actions – taking action to meet our needs as we discover them – is also a part of this.
However, it doesn't end there! If we want to experience states of joy or pleasure that have felt inaccessible before, then we must also integrate the fact that a different state is possible.
Surprisingly often, parts of us cannot even imagine a different reality as possible. An unresolved trauma can keep a part of us stuck in a tunnel-vision perspective which we cannot escape – even when we "know better". And having been buried so deeply in the unconscious, how can we expect such a hidden part of us to keep up with all that has happened since? It will still feel like that lost little child – it truly doesn’t know better.
So, let’s add a piece to the guidance we provide ourselves in order to heal: Show the stuck part that a new reality indeed is possible, now.
A reality where joy is allowed.
Try it! Provoke your being with this new possibility: what if I could experience joy right now?
What if, independent of the circumstances I currently find myself in, I could simply sit here and experience joy?
You may be surprised at the resistance you feel when you actually try to imagine this. Be with that resistance. It is part of the reprogramming. If you can overcome that resistance even just once, even with a limited part of your consciousness, you'll know that you can do it again.
And from there, it can become a positive spiral that leads you forward into more moments, days, and a life of joy.
For personal guidance, whether around trauma healing, joy, relationships or sexuality, Kundalini or other spiritual awakening, see my offers and contact me.
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Sandra Ehlers, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Sandra Ehlers is a Self-Integration & Kundalini Awakening Guide, Trauma Informed Yoga Meditation Teacher, Event Facilitator, Reiki Master, and Writer. Her work is dedicated to inner union – not only through expanded awareness, but as a lived, embodied experience of wholeness in the world. The focus is on transforming and integrating all levels of conscousness; physical, emotional, mental, energetic and spiritual – creating a foundation for deepened present-moment awareness, equanimity, aliveness, and ultimately, bliss. Alongside workshops, classes and retreats, Sandra offers 1:1 support to self-alignment through the Completion Process and other modalities.
