We’re designed to be programmed. For example, in learning to speak, walk, ride a bike, and drive a car. Once we learn, the habit pattern allows us to do it almost without thinking. Automatic.
However, trauma can also lead to patterns or ruts we fall into, also called samskaras. Perhaps we’re trying to find and develop healthy relationships or lose weight or save money.
If we have a pattern in there that our goal conflicts with, we’ll unconsciously sabotage our efforts, like in breaking our diet or spending what we had planned to save.
There will often also be a vasana or charge, a point of reactivity. We’ll notice that we balk or crave or otherwise have an impulse to act against our interests. Often, it won’t be rational or obvious why. This is because to cope, we’ve carefully hidden the unresolved impressions out of sight.
Sometimes, like through meditation, we can heal that reactivity without healing the habit pattern. What remains is just somatic, a body program. There won’t be much reactivity, just resistance and thwarting behaviour.
This is where somatic healing approaches come in. By following sensations in the body into where the impressions are stored, we can bring in the light of attention and resolve them.
However, because we’ve carefully hidden them from ourselves to cope, we may need a little support to get at them. When we learn what works for us, then we can become expert at bringing the light into our deepest history.
Davidya
[I had a great Gandhi quote to close this article, but the only place I could find it was on social media. He probably didn’t say it.]
In the last months I’ve been exploring emotions, traumas, definitions and their effects on the human psyche ( creation of outer and inner habits and patterns) more than I ever did in my whole life.
Among my “discoveries” and insights regarding this vast area of Reality the ”deepness” of patterns is one of the things that baffled me the most. We might have one specific inner unbalanced attitude, like a specific way of approaching or seeing reality, be it emotionally or mentally, that we never paid attention until this moment of clarity because it was so ingrained in our way of being, thinking and doing that we never considered the possibility of it being a subtle artificial pattern, a pattern that we initiated and cultivated so long ago in our spiritual journey as an entity that it “sunk” deep into our consciousness and became our “second nature”.
These types deep patterns are not the typical ones that we humans tend to discover in our journey to emotional and mental health meaning that they are not heavily emotionally charged.
They are not related to narratives and ideas or the more common ones like crystallized wrong conclusions and erroneous concepts that make us suffer.
They are more like inner actions and reactions , ways of seeing, doing and “dealing with”. Subtle inner habits and automation that diminish our clarity, balance or presence in an also very subtle way.
Even though they are personal and individual I found their manifestation much more similar to our collective traumas and concepts (like our inner attitudes towards pain and death) than to the personal ones (narratives, wrong ideas, conclusions and concepts, desires and aversions) in the sense they are more like primordial on going inner habits and not activated occasionally to specific occurrences.
Because they are so subtle their roots are also subtle and almost abstract, they are not a product of a wrong understanding that was took as truth long ago, but simply cultivated inner habits that were created a long time ago through the natural living process of evolution.
Among other variables, these types of subtle inner patterns are the final barriers between the individual and its integration with the whole and the ever deepening embodiment process.
Because of their subtlety and seemingly harmlessness they become blind spots, making it much harder and slower for us to consciously recognize them without an active process of inner observation and reflection, but that’s not all bad because they are also at the same time much less harmful than the most crude ones.
Its good to read and talk about these things.. great article David!
Wonderful insights, Gui. Thanks for sharing. What I’ve been most fascinated by are which of these subtle impressions or patterns is driven by a historical choice that can be resolved, as you describe, and which are baked into our nature for this incarnation… That’s often unclear.
I remember being surprised by what fell away and what didn’t. Sometimes, there was a concept that something should fall away that was actually baked in. An early example was thinking my strong intellect was something to get rid of. But then I realized it was there, even in deep experiences.
Thank you for your kindness. You brought up an interesting point there David.
I’m also very “intellect-oriented” and I’ve been having a lot of difficulty to deal with this trait of my personality.
In my life I have expressed this inner tendency to not only want to expand my experience of reality but specially to comprehend it in many different distorted ways, many times turning it into a thirst instead of a spontaneous ever-present and always active trait of my personality.
Many times in my life I wanted to comprehend things that I didn’t experience yet, other times I was trying to fit my experience inside preexisting systems and perspectives while not realizing that this was actually impeding my full understanding of what I just experienced and many times the deepness of the experience itself.
But when this type of intellect is balanced, driven by the cosmic Intelligence, Will and its perfect timing and not interfered by the standards, beliefs and ideas of the entity it becomes a blessing with how easy it comprehends, synthesizes and expresses to others the wisdom acquired through experience.
I might be wrong, but I sense that this inner tendency that we have to deepen our understanding of reality as much as we want to expand our experience of it is connected with a future role that we might play in the future, maybe translating knowledge of one dimension of reality and transmitting it to beings of a different one, beings that are developing and expanding through space and time just like we are doing now.
I’m starting to realize that the “energetic configuration” of the age that we are living together with our current capacity to comprehend it is a conjunction that probably never happened before in human history, therefore we have to question ourselves if our adherence to the knowledge, definitions, teachings, perspectives and systems created by the sages of the past haven’t become a hindrance.
I believe we are living the beginning of an age of clarity, the Internet phenomena is a product of it (which, if you think about it, is basically a physical representation of the astral realm).
The internet brought chaos through its misinformation and apparent infinite amount of possibilites, but its decentralization brought freedom and human connection trough communication, it brought loss of privacy but it also made impossible the long duration of lies.
Now I believe that this clarity is already available spiritually too, and we are gonna see its fruits in the last 50 years of the century with human beings going further in their embodiment of divinity and comprehension of reality than ever before, but only if we survive the clean up phase initiated by this new dimension of collective clarity that we are living right now, with the exposing of all the existing chaos, contradictions, falseness and “sins”.
Yes, for most, the intellect is associated with the mind and sense of personal self. As such, our attachments and wants pull it around. This makes it unreliable. However, after consciousness is established in our experience, the intellect comes to associate with that and becomes much more reliable. It’s called “resolute” and very fine discrimination becomes possible, like subtle perception and understanding.
The identified mind wants to feel in control. One way it does that is by thinking it knows. So it wants an answer for everything. Often, this means dumbing things down, which leads to bias, discrimination, bigotry, and more. IDeally, we can recognize this tendency and not take it too seriously. We can’t really understand anything we’ve not experienced. So, for example, after we wake up, we often realize many of our ideas about it were wonky.
So yes, when balanced or even, our personal dynamics don’t interfere.
And yes, this is not to say the drive to know is false, only that when it’s attached and is wanted to control, it gets a little corrupted and we crave certainty.
I agree that an age of clarity is coming. And yes, the Internet reflects some of the inner landscape and lots of unresolved junk. But it is helping make it conscious if people can learn how to process rather than resist. Those wiser that I have said that we’ve made it over the hump. The question now is how smooth the transition will be.