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Resolution: Beyond Processing
© 1999 by John-Michael Dumais
Originally published in Convergence Magazine
"When will I be done with this issue?" is a question I often hear myself and others ask. Since the time I was 18 and blowing off
college classes to read Castaneda’s accounts of his escapades with indigenous shamanism and psychopharmaceuticals, I have eagerly sought the magical keys of release from the iron grip of my negative emotions. Or
perhaps I should say I was hoping for escape – escape from my Roman Catholic programming, from shame-based contracts, from an impoverished self-image. The harder I ran, the more desperate I became. The weight of
the ball and chain hadn’t been so apparent when I was just moping along.
In those days I thought I could just "figure it out" mentally. A good dose of Seth’s philosophy had me convinced if I could just
change my beliefs I’d arrive at the gilded portals of Shambhala. But my affirmations felt like meteors bouncing off the atmosphere of my conditioned mind, all dazzle and fizzle.
Sometime later I got hooked on stories of near-death survivors, marveling with not a little envy at the core transformations they
experienced. Encounters with Beings of Light, remembrance of life missions, feelings of ecstasy, love and expansion – and the purging of past baggage!
There’s the ticket, I thought; if I could only induce a Near Death Experience my problems would be over! The death urge in that thought
didn’t escape me. But it was something deeper in me that really wanted to live. I knew that the NDEers had fallen into a core truth about the nature of consciousness and spirit. And I wanted the same quick fix, sans blood and pain. Later I thought that having an out-of-body experience would do it. I was reaching for any way to leave myself behind. Nothing worked.
In 1987, I met a woman who channeled the Ascended Master Djwal Khul ("DK") . I still have the humbling lists of limiting beliefs
that DK urged me to "please remove!" Sitting in my crystal grid I dutifully visualized the dark accretions of these beliefs shattering against a brick wall. Add to this some intense journaling and therapy,
and in a matter of weeks I had a transformative spiritual opening. I walked and breathed inside of soul space – expansive, loving, creative, and impersonal –while the tiny skiff of my "identity"
safely, sometimes anxiously, floated in the vast ocean.
Several days later my skiff came ashore with a thud, and I tumbled out with the look of someone who had stared at the sun too long and
suddenly went blind. Alas, I was not ready for heaven-on-earth. The memory of paradise lost was like a sword that cut me in two. Yet the template had been revealed to me; it was my initiation. The real work had
begun.
Desperately, I tried to recapture heaven. But I soon knew my efforts would be fruitless. Any effort to "get there" was an
affirmation that I wasn’t there. Any effort to "escape here" only reinforced my perception of being trapped and limited. I grudgingly came to accept that I had a great deal of deep inner work to do in
order to anchor that higher consciousness I had stolen a glimpse of.
I needed to learn to love those frightened, guilt-ridden, wounded and frozen inner children within me. How could I possibly do this when
I’d spent 27 years running away from them?
Luckily, the skill set I needed arrived in an eight-pound package some months later. My first child, a son, taught me invaluable lessons
about being in the present moment and loving the innocence of the child, resources that I had buried far beneath the winter snow. Thus began in earnest my long, unpredictable, miraculous, never-ending process:
integrating spirit and body.
Over the years, I’ve learned ways to release beliefs and emotions, memories and habits that block my spirit from joining my human self.
Many people call this "processing" – working through reactions, fears, and limitations. Often, I feel like a detective searching the past for clues to current behaviors, often with the intention of
understanding "why?" Why am I addicted to approval from others? Why do I have trouble communicating my feelings? Why do I freeze up in front of a group? Was it a childhood pattern? A traumatic incident? A
past life imprint? A tribal belief system? Often this form of processing over-emphasizes the mental. The need to understand, as understandable as it is, slows down one’s evolution to the speed of the logical mind.
Spirit, on the other hand, moves faster than light.
Freudian psychology says if you talk enough about a childhood trauma, you can get free of its effects. My experience is that while
understanding brings awareness of the pattern, it leaves subconscious triggers in place. Even if we learn to cope more effectively with these triggers, coping is merely a strategy to manage the effects, not to
transform the cause.
For example, extreme feelings of shame often cause us to freeze or withdraw emotionally. Shame says we’re "not okay" in contrast
to others being "okay." Processing our reactions, we might discover the roots of shame in our social conditioning. The defensive ego may then learn to cope with shame triggers by resorting to an
"I’m okay – you’re not" mentality, seeing others as causing or reinforcing our shame. But the roots of shame remain buried in the subconscious , unchanged. Processing as understanding, while
it can be valuable to the healing process, often results only in such higher-level coping strategies, and not the core transformation we are ultimately after.
"I’ve cried about this so many times, shouldn’t I be over it by now?" is another common complaint. Cathartic discharge of
pent-up emotion is a common by-product of processing. As we look in the mirror and explore our deeper feelings, we often stumble into the sinkholes that our denial had neatly paved over. I remember laughing too
loudly when my therapist first suggested I had deep "mother issues" to resolve. Who, me? The next session I was neck-deep in grief over the double-binds and rejection I experienced in that relationship. Grieving brought me closer to the truth and helped me recover a respect for the primal gifts of the emotional body. But my co-dependent need to please didn’t shift, nor did my anger resolve. My inner child now had more conscious reasons to be angry and to feel victimized. Deeper levels of resolution and forgiveness would take many more years.
Recently I worked with a sexual abuse survivor who had been in therapy for years. She had recovered all her buried memories and had
discharged considerable stores of anger and sadness. Yet she remained stuck in fear, grief, and victimization, issues that were now threatening to topple her current marriage. Her many experiences of catharsis, and
her understanding of what happened, were not sufficient to resolve the trauma. If anything, being pulled back into those emotions was traumatizing her even more, and inducing a state of hopelessness. While catharsis
is often spontaneous and may be a necessary part of emotional and spiritual house-cleaning, it does not by itself alter the underlying emotional imprints and belief systems. This woman’s healing would require a
new level of empowerment.
Healing means "to make whole." True and lasting resolution requires the removal of the core imprints and the recovery of our
wholeness, the re-collection of the full spectrum of our capacities, feelings, powers, and creative being. To become whole means to remember who we really are – eternal, infinite, creative, loving and perfect just
as we are. The core imprints that block this awareness are memories of being less than who we really are. What is a memory? A memory is a creative act of consciousness, an act of will. Memories are
mental-emotional snapshots frozen in our nervous systems, the remnants of past acts of will. Memories of traumas or wounds or shame are crystallizations of moments of perceived helplessness, moments when we
did not have sufficient resources to believe that we could survive. Moments when the truth that we are innocent children of God was veiled. These imprints stubbornly persist, if only unconsciously.
Recent advancements in trauma research demonstrate that our nervous systems go into "freeze-frame" at the moment just prior to a traumatic event, and that accessing this "T minus 1" moment through the body’s holographic, multi-sensory imprints can retrieve full awareness of the original memory. This is the key: once you are vibrating in resonance with the original memory/experience, you can change the way your nervous system holds that experience. That is why mental understanding alone or rote affirmations are not effective; we cannot change a subconscious imprint without first accessing the original "trance state" – the part of our will that is encapsulated in the dissociated memory.
Once we connect to the imprint in our nervous system, we can begin to release the trauma by authoring a different outcome. To do this
we need to access inner resources to empower the inner child or the "lost fragment" of ourselves. By definition, at the time of the trauma we do not have the resources we need to survive. Activating those
resources, then, is a new act of will that changes the way the memory is held in our bodies. This is what soul recovery is all about. The release of the imprint can usually be felt as energy or pain or heaviness exiting the body and aura. The cycle of healing is completed when we replace the old imprint with the missing frequency or energy, through color, sound, affirmation, and/or movement. The traumatic re-living of the original episode is not necessary!
In the case of the sexual abuse survivor, the continuing effects of the imprint showed up in a dream as the perpetrator and menacing dark
cloud shadowing him. In her visualization to re-pattern the dream outcome, she knocked the perpetrator to the ground, then asked the angels to divide up and remove the smoky cloud. This helped but wasn’t enough,
as the darkness still seemed overpowering. So we went into the body’s multi-sensory imprint, which appeared as a brown, hot shield in her lower abdomen. Standing in a medicine wheel image protected by angels, she
was able to remove this imprint and release the accumulated charge (which also showed up as hot red energy in her head) back to the imprint, then had the angels carry the imprint into the light to be dissolved. Her
transformation was astounding. Her body was no longer shaking, her voice no longer tremulous. She felt lighter and freer than she had in a long time. She finally remembered: I am one with God’s creative and
protective spirit.
Nowadays when my old issues re-surface (as they regularly do), I recognize that, beyond understanding and beyond discharging emotion, I have
the work of bringing a part of myself back into wholeness. All I have to do is remember that I can nurture and protect myself, love and heal myself, and that I have infinite resources on the inner planes with which
to accomplish this. Every negative reaction I have is like a care package from my soul. The lost and wounded parts of me are saying, "You can take care of me now." And they tell me exactly how to care for
and heal them. What a surprise... wounds are the doorway to love!
Beyond processing, catharsis and resolution lies the ultimate trump card, Divine Grace. Just as a cut finger knows how to heal itself
without our conscious knowledge, so does our psyche. But in our urgency to expunge our pain, it’s easy to get caught up in doing and trying, and to fall prey to the illusion that we have to do it ourselves. Divine
Grace lifts us out of our need to understand and control, and offers us the whole ocean when we would beg for a cupful for water.
To beckon grace is to affirm our connection to Spirit and to allow a higher power to do the work. We can open ourselves directly to Spirit
through breathwork, prayer and meditation, or just by walking in the woods or appreciating the beauty around us. I have watched people release major accumulations of heavy emotions simply by praying and breathing,
then letting their bodies shake and dance, and their voices shout, wail and sing. Others, having encountered angels and divine beings during deep inner journeys, later discover that their pain or confusion or
depression has miraculously lifted. Grace also reveals itself through synchronicities and dream messages. Everything in the universe is conspiring to heal us. The question is, will we open our arms to receive
it?
If our traumatic life events are like quarantined neighborhoods in our psyche, then our soul is simply asking us to walk those streets –
to stop denying our emotions and feel again, to feel the fear, anger, and sadness as well as the joy and love. In the book, Conversations with God, author Neale Donald Walsch asserts that "love is all of
the emotions." Our capacity to experience love is equal to our willingness to let our bodies vibrate with the full spectrum of emotions. Feeling is healing as we remember that, right now, we’re safe. And that
as spiritual beings we are always safe, well, loved, and free.
My healing sojourn has become more and more like a walk along that beach my skiff washed up on so many years ago. The sand is dotted with
many beautiful seashells, the old abodes of living beings that once lived in the ocean. As I see, touch, and listen to the sound in each shell, I am electrified with the life that lived in it. I can love those
memories, and release them back to the ocean from which they came. Within and beyond these smaller shells of my identity, a deeper wave is calling me to a greater life of love and healing. And the journey begins
again today. Thank you, God!
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