In my deepest wound,
I saw your glory
and it dazzled me.
---
St. Augustine
Our incarnate bodies hold already the message of God's knowledge and will.
We can learn to listen to our felt sensate experience and through this to discover once again the place of our own true joy, glory, hope, love, and pain.
We can return home to that place within us that is deeply divine and deeply true.
As we bring awareness to our physical selves, the holy spirit finds its home again within our body-being.
As we return to our senses, we return home to God.
The bodies we have been given to inhabit during this time "in between" hold the key to our deeper knowing of ourselves and through ourselves also God.
Sensate awareness comes in many forms and under many names, whether from Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing, Gestalt Awareness Practice, Eugene Gendlin's focusing, etc., but the practice of giving a name to what is prior inchoate and unnameable is a time-honored and well tested process that helps us to allow God to manifest in us.
All sensation is to be welcomed, none shunned.
We receive all felt experience without judgment or effort to force change.
As much as possible, we learn to honor our felt experience in our tissue, inasmuch as possible, through the compassionate acceptance of God's love.
It is through that love that the natural unfolding of our true nature begins to blossom and heal.
We aim not to push away unpleasant feelings, but to move into and through them.
The more we fight against who we are, the less whole, the less at peace, and the more fragmented we become.
Congruence can only come through full acceptance of all aspects of ourselves -- in that place beyond labels of "good" or "bad" where we're left only with the pure honesty of grace and the world and ourselves known through the love of God.
OVERCOMING TRAUMA
Oftentimes when we have experienced trauma as a child, we seek to relive the traumatic experience as a way of completing it, healing it, and moving on.
Children who were abused by their parents often find themselves in abusive relationships.
People who have been abandoned in the past find the same pattern repeating itself in their lives over and over again.
We place ourselves in situations that give us the opportunity to heal. But so often, we simply repeat the cycle. We reenact the traumatic experience, rather than use it to transform our childhood wounds.
In order to complete the cycle -- and not just repeat it -- we must renegotiate the trauma and enter into the experience with full somatic awareness.
We must turn towards our pain, not away from it. Only when the traumatic experience can be fully felt can we finally let it go.
We can use the wisdom of our bodies to tell us where the traumatic residue lies.
In a safe, controlled environment we can open to the traumatic experience bit by bit and reintegrate the fragmented aspects of ourselves into our lives.
We can digest those experiences which we have heretofore been unable to assimilate. All we need to do is listen to our body and let its native wisdom show us the way.
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