Hidden Structures

Fundamentally, consciousness structures who we are and everything we experience. The physical world has been built up in layers. There are 7 primary layers (koshas) in this process. And there are 7 primary chakras (energy centres) in our body that support those layers in our experience.

Most relevant to this article are the 3 final layers:
– the solar plexus chakra, supporting the fire element, sight, and the mental body.
– the sacral chakra, supporting water, taste, and the emotional body.
– the root chakra, supporting earth, smell, and the physical body.

These are the chakras that support much of our personal experience: our sensations, emotions, and thoughts. Also, our mind processing the senses and interpreting these experiences.

When we develop as a child, the intellect distinguishes self from mother and our core identity is born. This lives with the fire chakra and takes a protective role.

Ideally, we recognize and grow into our deeper nature as we mature. But in most cases these days, this doesn’t happen. We instead become invested in the identity. Then we build emotional resistances and charges to anything that threatens this self-sense. Then we build mental narratives about who I am, what I’m good at, what I do, what I believe, and so on.

This 3-level ego-self takes an out-sided role and behaves like any threats to its sense of self are life-threatening (the dramatist). Our nervous system responds accordingly, triggering fight/flight/freeze/fawn for what can be the silliest reasons.

For example, someone makes an off-hand remark that doesn’t match our inner narrative. To feel in control, ego needs to be right, so it makes anyone who thinks or acts otherwise wrong. Fight mode is triggered. We see this all over the Internet. Many news shows embody this: what’s wrong and who’s to blame.

Or, someone makes a remark about us we take personally, triggering shame. We freeze or go into fawn mode, trying to people-please.

As we rarely experience actual life-threatening issues, the identity, over-reacting with its self-importance, triggers most of this and abuses the body.

Even though a little self-reflection would let us see through many of our narratives and dramas, ego is threatened by that too, so it’s avoided.

(This is perhaps a little harsh, but so much suffering is self-imposed like this.)

When experiences arise that exceed our capacity to process, we become overwhelmed and accumulate the residuals as trauma in our lower bodies.

The impression of the experience has a quality of space and is stored in its own bubble of nested space.

Some of it will have a charge and be reactive (vasana). Some of it will lay in as habit patterns (samskara) to avoid similar in the future. Or a combination.

Naturally, those unresolved experiences will surface again later, when we have more resources to process and complete the experiences. The body wants to heal.

However, because we rate those experiences as unpleasant, the protective part of us often learns to suppress those residuals away from our experience. They become “exiled” as “orphaned parts.” We may add an overlay to the original charge, like using anger to suppress fear, or vice versa.

The unfinished experiences are stored energetically in a nested space. But then, to help hide them more, they’re planted into other levels.

For example, the mind can see and label emotions but it can’t process them. By storing emotional content in the mental body, our mind becomes more unsettled and reactive, but the actual cause is hidden. Similarly, if we store fiery reactivity in the pre-physical, it’s also hidden. But it means the body has an extra source of heat that can become inflammation. In time, this can develop into systemic diseases.

Clearly, it’s much better to resolve our unfinished experiences than carry them around, messing up the balance of the bodies. Not to mention, passing them on to our children.

It’s not always easy to face our past, although a lot of it is childhood fears or ideas that are easily seen through once recognized as an adult.

Key is having the right space to be with ourselves. Not going in to “fix” our “brokenness.” We’re not broken nor need fixing. We’re just carrying some extra weight we can discard.

If you have an established effortless meditation practice or similar, you’ll develop a safe inner space you can step into. But you may need to shift gears from escaping there into being present with your body now.

This is an energetic and somatic process, so it’s about being present in your body, not in infinite space. 🙂

Then, bring a curiosity about what’s in there. What is ripe to resolve? When did this begin?

I don’t recommend going on a mission to dig things up. Better to just step into your safe space, then notice what sensations or emotions are arising in the body. The ones popping up are the ones that are ripe, ready to be seen and released. Digging may expose other stuff, but there will be more resistance with them.

Once we get the hang of this, there will be no hiding. We’ll recognize the sensations that mark an unresolved experience. Simply following the trail brings us to the ripe fruit.
Davidya