Trauma in the Here & Now - Georgi Y. Johnson

Georgi Y. Johnson describes how Nondual wisdom is critical to the understanding of trauma and the development of modalities to support the integration of unbearable aspects of experience into the flow of wholeness.
Trauma disrupts the flow of sensory information through all dimensions of life, opening the existential questions:
"Who am I?"
"What am I?"
"Where am I?"
The rupture of trauma also exposes that which can never be broken - the source of consciousness itself. Our ability to stay open within the experiential field of these questions ennables us to re-center in deeper dimensions of ourselves, opening te pathway from trauma to resilience.
Extracted from a series of teachings on Nonduality and Trauma given in Israel by Georgi Y. Johnson and Bart ten Berge  in  the aftermath of October 7th, 2023.

Transcript

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♪♪♪♪The reason we're here for this spontaneous intense training in trauma is because of what happened on October the 7th and because we are facing across the world, not just here, but especially here, challenges which never have been in terms of how to really work with compassion, how to find each other, how to keep our centre, how to stay in touch with what's most essential. And there's a feeling that this is going to accelerate, not just here, but around the world. This is going to accelerate. And with that, the evolution of what it, the work with trauma really involves, what trauma really is, is also going to speed up. And this was already happening before Covid, before October the 7th. Already there's been an acceleration in the understanding of what trauma is, and that trauma matters, and how much trauma is affecting our well-being, physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually. And like every wave in which there are breakthroughs in understanding, there are more questions than there are answers. And this is where we believe very strongly in this place where non-duality is a worldview, it's an understanding based on experience that basically we know nothing at all, except through the process of direct experience, which is a kind of after-effect of our consciousness, of our being here in the first place, our existence, about which we know nothing at all. We don't know who we are, what we are, where we are. That's it. We're one in that. We can find each other in that. Who am I? What am I? Where am I? Who is this? What is this? Where is this? Holding these questions is like holding doorways to a deeper dimension of not-knowing where we can breathe as some conscious, alive, existing, experiencing, belonging, loving, caring presence. Also, there's been a great rise in talk about non-duality and consciousness and conscious awakening and non-dual awakening and the benefit of that. A little bit similar to the Renaissance which was there before World War II, which Jung talked about this in the 20s, fearing for what was going to come because he saw the of development and awakening as if to meet a need of the future. And what does it mean conscious awakening? It means, according to Ramana, following the question, Who am I? And following the question, not answering it, not expecting someone to tell you, asking the question, not outward but also inward. Asking the question, what am I? What is this? What is this substance of me? What does it feel like? So I'm present. So what's this presence? How am I known? How am I felt? What is feeling it? Because if I can feel my own presence. I'm not my presence, I'm the one that can feel it. My own energy. So who's that? So can I be more that? This is why we can't answer the question, because to say, OK, if I can smell my own perfume, then that perfume is not me. Then I'm the one that's able to smell. In a regular scenario, what we say is, I say, this is my perfume and this perfume is who I am and if somebody else wears that perfume, I will kill them. We identify with the effect. Juliet has a gun for everyone. Where am I? Where am I? You know, we spend We spend so much time talking about the world and then like I just did two minutes ago, about humankind, about what's been, about what's coming, about place, displacement, migrants, refugees, homelessness, belonging. Where are we? Where are we really? The earth, the planetary crisis, all of these insecurities around where am I, where are we? And again it's an open question because we can stand here in this room and say, okay, I'm here in this room in Zipan Yaakov. Again, it's like the perfume. It's not ultimately true. It's not only true. I'm here in this land which we call Israel. Well, that's a belief. Like that I'm called Georgie, it's another belief. I'm here in this district, on this earth, in this universe and before we know it we're getting into the cosmic I don't know where I am. Just that I am here, at the centre of it somehow. And the more we ask these questions, something more real starts to come online and there is an acceleration in the grasping also. Because the more we realise this, I don't know who, what, where I am, the more we tend to, oh I'm a spiritually enlightened person, cosmic, in the sixth dimension, that we grasp at something that tells us who, what, where we are. Why do we do that? Do we do it out of fear or do we do it because we love to experience it, like we grasp a cake, yum yum yum yum yum. Do we grasp because our parents grasped and because our ancestors grasped? I'm a Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew. I'm a long line of because we love our ancestry, our culture, the magic of belonging with our people, to our people. Does it come from fear or does it come from love? Does it come from fear, does it come from freedom? I choose for this. Is it awake? Is it a choice? Does it have space around it? Or is it a compulsion, a kind of slavery, a limitation on the very form of what we are? So that's non-duality in a nutshell. There are many possible ways to describe it. Trauma. What happens when normal life suddenly is disrupted and shit hits the fan and we don't know what's going to happen next and what we thought would be is not going to be and what we thought was, was not we thought we were safe, we thought we could trust the army we thought it will never happen. We thought we would know what to do if it does happen. We thought we would never be afraid again, like that. We thought we would never hate. We thought we knew what we thought. But our beliefs were, politically, who we vote for. So, something happens, there's an event, and all of these questions are thrown up. Who am I? Who the hell am I in this? Because who I was has collapsed. I'm not the same person on October the 8th as I was on October the 6th. And we're not only going to talk about that, but I'm not the same person today as I was the day before this horrible thing happened to me. Which means that neither of these persons is who I am. Not the old one, not the new one. They are practically competing. Or the new one took the life hostage from the old one, so the child will never come back, or the innocent one will never come back. So the question, who am I, is up for grabs, but now it's a kind of terrible question. I don't know who I am. And it accelerates again, the karma, accelerating, like I have to grasp at who I am. I'm the one that helps. I'm the one that knew this would happen. I'm the victim in all of this. I'm the one that suffers most. I'm the one that doesn't let myself suffer because I have to be there for everybody else. A lot of programming comes online from traumatic awakening. What am I in this? So often when there's been a shock and part of reality has broken down, this question, what am I in this? becomes a kind of like... you ask what do I feel in this? It's just like nada, because part of us exits, because we don't know who we are, so for sure we don't know what we are, there is just this feeling, if you can call it a feeling of suspension, stunned. Something's not moving. It's almost like space changes and time stands still. In the level of feeling, what am I in this? Well, I'm part of this. I'm in it. It's like feeling is a luxury. We have no time for that. Feeling later. And then where am Well first, am I safe? Am I safe now? The body wants to make itself safe now, to find ways to make itself safe now. Before it asks where it is, it needs to be somewhere safe. And the body is looking constantly, hyper-vigilant, to try and make sure it's safe. But if it's not allowed to do that, because everybody around us is like, because let's say it's not a collective trauma but an individual trauma, and everybody around us is just getting on with life as usual and we're like this, like this, like this, behaving like an animal that's been shocked. Then there's another layer of unsafety which is that we're behaving a little bit crazy. You're no longer married to him. So we lost something of the where I am, certainly, and it becomes very contracted just into survival. And maybe what comes forward in moments through all of these levels in trauma is this like existential wow. We really know nothing. We come to that non-dual space because something very real is coming online, something very real is awakening, which is the life in us. The fact that we are here alive. Maybe another kind of care, not the kind of care which is all about guilt and belonging and trying to get a place to exist, but another kind of care which is that we are responsive in this and that something very refined is attuning. When an animal looks around, it's a care connection. Care goes with protection so often. So there can be this awakening in what can be a kind of dark, light, light. And it can be like a yumminess of trauma, like, wow, I feel so alive. Something feels very real suddenly. I actually am going to talk to my neighbour in a collective trauma. Show care to them. Is everything okay with you? Having ignored them for 10 years. I'm not going to be an asshole to people on the road when I'm driving, because who knows what, maybe they're directly affected. So a gentleness comes forward. I want to do something to help. Compassion starts to come forward. All of these are qualities of true nature, coming from a place when all of the reality, all of the identity, all of the form of the personality is broken down, but we're still here. We're still here existing. The reality out there collapsed, but the reality of us is here sensing the collapse of the reality out there. So it's a traumatic awakening. Any reality that can collapse, that we can be conscious of, is not an ultimate reality. And this is one of the incredible gifts of trauma, because when that is experienced, the amount of fear of reality collapsing goes down enormously, because there is this knowing beyond any doubt that we are not the thing which can collapse. When it collapses it's just a reminder. We are that which is able to experience its falling apart. And it's a reminder because we know this in the body. Every animal knows this. Every living thing knows that it was born and it will die and that it's precious. It's a celebration to experience life in a circulation. And we know it too, so there's something that feels very right about it as well, and that's part of the yumminess. But hey, who's going to admit that on October the 8th people were having the time of their lives? That they felt more real, more purposeful, more awake, more belonging, more free, more collaborative, more there for each other than they had done for decades, since the Yom Kippur War. It's terrible, I say dirty blasphemous secrets, but really, there is a pleasure in it because we are coming to life as something more real, and because true nature, the dimension which doesn't get lost, the love in us, the care in us, the peace in us, the freedom in us, the belonging in us, the real thing, it's coming online in a very real way. And this is a delight. And it wants to express. And it wants to meet the other. It wants to look the other in the eyes and see it reflected back. So there is clearly a lot in common between non-duality and trauma. And karma. And we are in this group in a place of working with something which the regular world is hardly able to contain, which is that creation and destruction are one movement. That there is something, a different dimension, a deeper dimension of quality of life beyond the local preservation of the stuff and my mortgage and my house and then my pension and then I die. And that this has a healing power. So it's revelation, the revelation of who we really are, of true nature, isn't the end of the world, it's an opportunity maybe of lifetimes to become again ourselves, to feel the reality, the power which moves through us, the authority which moves through us, that doesn't have to be afraid of what the other might think, the love which moves through us, to be able to allow it to be there. So we have an opportunity here, but what happens in a traumatic awakening is partly that because we awaken, the consciousness has a shock and it awakens to this place of like, I don't know who I am, where I am, what I am, there's this reset. It awakens in an atmosphere of horror or abuse or violation or murder or chaos and this is an energy. is fused with trouble, danger. One pathway, the danger pathway, is dominating over the awakening, conscious awakening pathway. So this is a little bit like the plant is waking up and moving towards the sun but then it decides the sun is full of toxic rays and is going to irradiate it and the sun is now a curse and not a blessing. So there's a danger that we become, a danger within the danger that we want to become less conscious. Because awakening consciously means trouble, it means trauma, it means revisiting that place where we have been shocked in our lives. And we blame consciousness in a way for this. So better get more Netflix, also Disney Plus, also HBO. Because in no time you've seen everything that can put you to sleep. Or everything puts you to sleep and you need a little bit of excitement from it. So now we've got a crisis, it's a spiritual crisis. Do we want to know that we're awake, that we're alive, that we're free, that there's a real love, that we exist? Do we want to come from our own centre? Can we be curious about who we are, what we are? And trust in the yumminess of that? Or is it better not? Let sleeping dogs lie. Don't rock the boat. There's lots of English expressions. It will all end in tears. I think the sun shines out of your ass. I can just start speaking English dialect at this point in terms of why not awaken? But it gets worse. The place of naturalness that we were in, the place of freedom or home or true nature or innocence or purity, that place of true nature that we're in, because we're in it most of the time. In our mind's attempt to not repeat the trauma, we blame that place, we blame that experience for the shock that happened. And this is where the core of trauma is. This is where we're going to be working from through all of these six days. This primal rupture. There's lots of ruptures but this basic rupture between ourselves and our true nature. So now, let's say we were totally relaxed. We were relaxed on the beach in Thailand. We went to a safe place. We were finally letting ourselves take a break, feel the warmth of the earth beneath our feet, our back relaxing, letting ourselves be happy. And then comes, the sea goes back. And we're so busy relaxing and just unwinding from all of the things that we've been pressured with and stressed with, we don't notice the sea is coming back. And then it very, very, very fast, it all starts to unravel. And this giant wave is coming to us. And we start to run like hell. We see our children running like hell. And we can't see our husband. And like nothing, this event takes us to maybe to the edge of death. This event has, the wave of trauma has picked us up and deposited us in a whole other position. And the mind is an animal, it's a physiology, it's a programming, it's looking like hell to have this ever happen again. So what happened? What was I doing? Because we're like magical thinkers, like children. What was I doing in that moment before the wave came? Oh, I was relaxed. Never again will I relax like that and trust. I will always have one eye on the ocean, one eye on the sky to see if the birds are running away, radio on and my... Never again relax. And it's not just a belief, it's a belief, but it's also an energy. This energy of relaxation comes, it's like, oh, fucking way, you want to kill everybody? It's almost like you become the wave if you let yourself relax. You're responsible for all this devastation because the mind isn't that the unconscious is not that rational. It just associates this quality of relaxation with the horror which came after that. And this is very commonplace. We know that we go into nature, you say, okay, I really, really love nature. As a little kid, you take off your shoes, you can feel the earth beneath your feet and the sun on your skin, and then a snake bites you. You end up in hospital, nearly die, toxins being brought in to save your life. So what's the conclusion? Never again go to nature. Without speaking and making lots of sounds and doing everything we can. And there is a logic behind this. It's a kind of building of resilience. We're in a process of building resilience. And we tell people, don't go barefoot in nature without being very careful, because snakes, we are there for each other. There's a compassionate drive behind it, but we get stuck in the process of healing at that stage where we can never enjoy nature again, not really, and be vigilant at the same time. We can never relax again and be vigilant at the same time. We can never be at peace again and maybe fight a war at the same time. We get stuck because we are stuck there in our evolution between the personality which has to act and be here in this world as it is with the government and everything and our true nature. It's a basic rift and it will always come back to that. So we blame our innocence for the fact that we were robbed. We were too innocent. Of course we were cheated on. We blame our trust for the fact that we were hurt by our parents. Never trust anybody. We blame togetherness because our government became vile and toxic. So you can't really trust the togetherness of the community because they could all be voting for that government and some of them we know did. We can't trust, can't have community. And we literally cut off qualities of our true nature of who we really are, the qualities of consciousness we cut off, these qualities are part of consciousness. It's like the Carmel forest fire, when everything burned down, for sure, inevitably, without any human interaction, came the sprouts of life again through the soil. That's true nature coming through. Even in an apocalypse, it comes to life again because it's encoded. It's encoded into our souls, but this dimension, it doesn't exist. So we get affirmed again and again in this cynical space that we are the person. So more and more narrow, more and more contracted, more and more miserable, almost happy, but what about next weekend? Will I still be happy? Not in the here and now, because we can't trust the here and now, because trauma, the here and now, is associated with the here and now. That's the shock, the here and now. Oh, it wants to go there. Awful. You see how it's all mixed up? These basic questions of what it is to be alive. So in non-dual therapy, from the beginning to the end, in a way, we're talking about this basic trauma. And in these six days, we're going to work directly with techniques, as many of them as possible, that we can impart, sometimes exercises inside which can be done inside in order to begin to understand the incredible healing power of these qualities that we stop trusting. For example, we believe that love is in a competition with hate. So if love is fighting hate, then we're fucked. Because love can only be here on condition that there's no hate, and there is hate, so forget about love. If freedom can't be here as long as there's slavery, then you're fucked, because we're all enslaved. Forget freedom. And these qualities, I'll just name a few, love, peace, innocence, freedom, purity, these qualities of consciousness, they come wherever there is consciousness, there are these qualities available. They are healing agents. Happiness, joy. They invite the whole system, including the personality, including the experience, including the memory, towards well-being. The very thing, the very real, cheap, infinite, boundless medicine which can heal us, we learned to blame for our suffering. And what we want to do is turn this around by using, show-seeing the healing effect of these qualities? Coming to a position where the qualities of true nature and our consciousness can be here in the here and now, which is the safest place to be, together with whatever suffering is happening in the here and now, that they can be here together. So, I just close with a simple formula which is based on the belief that if love causes pain, for example, if love is the cause of hatred, and our reflex is therefore to love less, then what we want to do with non-dual formal work is to actually bring about an environment for our clients where they're able to love more. Instead of cancelling out themselves, their heart, their true nature, they actually up the volume. So maybe Peter betrayed Jane and so she doesn't love him anymore. So she doesn't love anybody anymore ever, ever, and that's the end of love. And what we want to do with Jane is that because Peter betrayed Jane, we're going to work with the quality of love. Not just necessarily anything to do with Jane and her personality, love how it looks like, how it would be if love was an ocean, what love looks like, what it feels like in the world, what it feels like to touch something with love, even if it's just a stone. What generates the energy of love for Jane, and we're going to make it more and more free and unconditional using what other qualities are needed for that. We're going to love more, not less. And you know what? Peter can be part of that, but he doesn't control it. The fucker. Also, he can be loved, because we're so busy loving the skies and the oceans and the universe and consciousness itself. We fall in love with love. We come to peace with peace. We find freedom within freedom. You want to turn the hell loops into healing loops. To feel the innocence of feeling innocent. So that's an opening of what we're going to be working with. It's not as easy as it sounds because so many beliefs have come into play in our conditioning which says things like, you should be grateful, you should be happy, you have to be compassionate, you have to be powerful or not. And this is not the qualities, the qualities is an experience, it's a sensory energy, it's part of what we are, who we are, where we are, part of consciousness itself. the the the the you