In the intervening year, I have further refined my practice of healing, and thus releasing, trauma. One of the things that we do as children when we experience trauma is that we do not acknowledge it. Because it is unbearable, we repress the immediate pain and shove it deep down our throat chakra, never to have the light of day shine on it again. But of course the trauma is still there and causes us enormous suffering.
So the first step I suggest is to engage in the exercise, during meditation, of opening up your throat chakra and allowing the pain to rise and express itself. This part of the process is global, it does not relate to any specific trauma.
When you are sitting, focus on opening up your throat chakra and allow the pain to rise. When I do this, I feel/hear a rumbling noise getting louder and louder til it reaches your mouth and explodes in cries of anguish. Since I am meditating, this all happens within the body; I “hear” the screams, but they are not verbalized. If you don’t experience this at first, don’t be discouraged; it doesn’t always come right away. Or you might experience something different. Just keep doing the exercise.
I have been doing this exercise in connection with another exercise … the heart’s embrace (see my post of that title). As part of the heart’s embrace, I visualize specific points of my past trauma, as a child, a young man, and a mature adult. It is very important that you visualize specific trauma points (not all of them! just a few representative ones) so that your inner child or adult is embraced at these points and the trauma released. I visualize the trauma points first, and then I open up my throat chakra.
In my post, “Trauma Denied No Longer,” I relate how when I had visited my inner child as part of an earlier healing process I was surprised to find that when I witnessed the various trauma points, my inner child was not crying. At the time I interpreted this as meaning that my true Buddha nature had given my inner child the inner strength to not cry, to react with dispassion. Only in a later meditation did I release that was definitely not the case. What I had witnessed was the result of my inner child repressing the pain by shoving it down his throat chakra.
So when I started doing the heart’s embrace exercise combined with the throat chakra exercise, when I visualized the trauma points, my inner child was not crying; the pain was still repressed.
But several days ago, after several months of doing the throat chakra exercise, I found that when I visualized each of the trauma points, the child/adult was crying! I realized that meant that he was no longer repressing the trauma and that healing, the release, had begun. I am profoundly grateful.
There is one more exercise I do that relates to my trauma and my healing. I reported in an earlier post, “Walking on the Beach,” that at the end of my meditation, after my true Buddha self says “not me” to the five skandhas for the last time, I visualize myself emerging from the depths of the ocean, free of the burden of the skandhas, and join my unborn Buddha mind and true Buddha self on the other shore. We hold hands and dance around in a circle, with the music from La Strada playing in the background! (At times, movie images have been part of powerful revelations I’ve had.)
Since beginning my trauma meditations, I have added something to that scene. My true Buddha self beckons to my inner child/adult at each of the trauma points to join the group on the other shore, They see a bright light, smile, and join me, my unborn Buddha mind and true Buddha self. I see all of them holding hands and joyfully dancing in the circle. And I say the mantra, “My unborn Buddha mind leads me away from the world of my ego-mind which is dark and filled with guilt and shame, fear and anxiety, doubt and confusion back to my natural state which is light, love, faith, trust, compassion, gratitude, joy, contentment, strength, courage, and wisdom.”