Runnin' Free N' Joyful

In the comments section of the last post named Racism, PTSD, and Nature, someone asked, "Does trauma ever go away?"

It occurs to me that the pain may never go away entirely but with grace and heavy dowsing ourselves in love around it, the suffering of the trauma diminishes, and yes, the suffering of it even goes away.  How to have pain and not suffer?   Pain is pain.  We'll never get away from it entirely while still in the body.  But suffering is the resistance of the pain, the wrestling with it.  Its no easy thing to just divorce the two, but its possible.  I've experienced it from time to time thanks to various kinds of mindfulness practices (www.dhamma.org, www.mooji.org), sometimes just moments of spontaneous grace.  Also when it comes to emotional trauma like the one I shared, it can really take movement and/or sound, something vibrational to move it out of the body.  For me, I needed the cries of that young hawk to stir it up. then allow it to move through me, actually release it out from my body in the form of full body convulsive cries.

Healing of trauma can happen, for sure.  But there will likely be scars, scars that with practice and time, when touched, no longer trigger a person into spiraling into the hells like they did before. 

Sometimes we have the fear of even giving the wounds any air because we're afraid if we feel the pain, it will be forever, that if we start crying, we'll never stop.  But its not true.  I thought reliving the pain would never stop when the red tail hawk would start up again.  It took months of those spontaneous cries and releases but it did stop.  To this day, this same hawk has come by and cried when I need it.  No longer do I have knee-jerk full body convulsions from it.  Now the hawk cry is a gentle reminder to really honor what Im deeply feeling, my inner softer voices. 

Now its a joy to hear that hawk.  We even had a time yesterday late afternoon.  He flew above circling, circling.  I ran out to the yard and flew/ran with him around, around 'til he flew beyond the pines.  What was before a trigger for releasing convulsions of pain, is now a trigger for running free and joyful. 

That's what happened to me.  It can happen to anyone.  I was just gifted a disease for many years that allowed me to slow down enough to hear, connect, and release in this way.  Maybe we can avoid severe illness and heed the calls of release as they happen for us.

But as I stated here and other places, the disease was a gift.  Whatever the path youre on, its a good path.  The freedom is fuller after being in suffering-prison.  The joy sweeter after high doses of sorrow.  The good news is that one way or another, in body or in spirit, like the hawk and me, we will together run free n' joyful.