Medicine Wheel Healing

25/06/2023

For Someone Awakening To The Trauma of His or Her Past by John O’Donohue

For everything under the sun there is a time.
This is the season of your awkward harvesting,
When the pain takes you where you would rather not go,

Through the white curtain of yesterdays to a place
You had forgotten you knew from the inside out;
And a time when that bitter tree was planted

That has grown always invisibly beside you
And whose branches your awakened hands
Now long to disentangle from your heart.

You are coming to see how your looking often darkened
When you should have felt safe enough to fall toward love,
How deep down your eyes were always owned by something

That faced them through a dark fester of thorns
Converting whoever came into a further figure of the wrong;
You could only see what touched you as already torn.

Now the act of seeing begins your work of mourning.
And your memory is ready to show you everything,
Having waited all these years for you to return and know.

Only you know where the casket of pain is interred.
You will have to scrape through all the layers of covering
And according to your readiness, everything will open.

May you be blessed with a wise and compassionate guide
Who can accompany you through the fear and grief
Until your heart has wept its way to your true self.

As your tears fall over that wounded place,
May they wash away your hurt and free your heart.
May your forgiveness still the hunger of the wound

So that for the first time you can walk away from that place,
Reunited with your banished heart, now healed and freed,
And feel the clear, free air bless your new face.

12/04/2023

‎Show The Emerald, Ep The Revolution Will Not Be Psychologized, Part 2 (Interview w/ Báyò Akómoláfé) - 7 Apr 2023

04/02/2023

“The thing about the shadow is that, the more you suppress it, the more it comes out sideways. Scolding little boys for playing rough, or telling men that the way they express themselves is wrong, only serves to drive those shadows deeper. Men need to go into their frustration and aggression, not away from it. To connect to it with presence and love so that it can be owned, made part of us again and transform from frustration or passivity into life-force. When we own and then express our aggression in a healthy way, it becomes a powerful and noble ally. What doesn’t work, and why so many men feel something is missing, is to say that aggression itself is inherently wrong. I believe the problem lies with its unconscious expression; when male aggression is used to bully, demean, control or abuse.

When instead we work with these aspects of masculinity, we can channel them toward something meaningful, respectful and supportive. In my experience, masculine aggression can be transformed most effective when it is owned, and then directed toward a virtuous higher purpose. That might be family, or society, an ideal, a mission, or anything in-between.”

Alexander Beiner

What our most popular stories about men tell us about modern masculinity

18/01/2023

Still a few places available for our closed shamanic IFS therapy group starting next week. Payment plans available so please do get in touch

Small group Shamanic Internal Family systems therapy group near Isfield, Sussex

30/12/2022

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How the mainstreaming of trauma is changing culture

30/12/2022

Has the concept of ‘safe spaces’ and trigger warnings’ gone too far. Is it actually harming more than it is healing? Working with people shamanically, transpersonally (e.g. IFS), or using psychedelics is often most powerful when it moves a person out of the rigid narrative of their biographical trauma and the associated self-limiting beliefs and cognitive traps this can foster. Sometimes it feels almost impossible to let go of our ‘story’ and the paradox of safety at the expense of feeling alive / thriving this can create.

Alexander Beiner writes in a recent essay on his substack:

“Trigger Warnings’ are an interesting case study of what happens when trauma notions enter into the mainstream. Ostensibly, the point is to let people know that content might be coming up that could make them uncomfortable, or ‘trigger them’ into a full on trauma response. Already, there is a moral choice here that ‘care/harm’ is a high enough value to warrant the needs of the few subsuming the needs of the many. However, it’s unclear they actually work, with a 2020 study on trauma survivors suggesting that they may actually increase anxiety.

That study suggests that trigger warnings may be detrimental because they increase the narrative centrality of trauma among survivors. ‘Narrative centrality’ or ‘event centrality’ is very important concept: it means the degree to which someone identifies with their trauma, and to which it’s central in how they understand their own life. Decreasing narrative centrality, so that people see a life and identity beyond what happened to them, is largely seen to be therapeutically beneficial, according to multiple studies like this one. Increasing narrative centrality is then counter-therapeutic: it risks keeping people ‘stuck’ in their trauma.”

How the mainstreaming of trauma is changing culture

27/11/2022

“Our masks are the personality structures we build to adapt to our environment, temperament and many other factors, but they don’t necessarily represent our deepest needs, our unconscious desires and feelings. When we’re discussing polarised issues, we are often doing it from and to one another’s masks and get inevitably get stuck. What brings us into generative, creative, compassionate conversations is when we can find ways to speak to who's beneath.

When we do, we come into contact with a complex, dynamic, contradictory human being instead of a set of ideas and ideological positions. That brings us to a meeting of essence, that place where the real deep down you lives. The you that was free as a child, the you that can express anything in any way without shame or guilt. Some spiritual traditions teach that this core deep down essence brings us into a sense of unity with one another.”

( Alexander Beiner 2022 )

Are you struggling with inner or outer conflicts and polarisations in your life? I work with clients to befriend the masked ‘parts’ of themselves with the intention of integrating them and discovering their underlying deeper essence. From this place conflicts and polarisations soften and lose their ability to drive impulsive behaviours and cycles of shaming and blaming.

Book in for a free 20 min consultation today