Yoga, Taoism and the Intelligence of the Yin Organ Systems

Posted on September 25, 2020 by admin

Introduction

In the previous post, we introduced the seven karmic lessons of life and some explorations of these using the microcosmic orbit and some anatomical references on the front and back body. Keep working with whichever of the lessons is relevant to you in your life right now. Our next exploration of these lessons will come from the interior perspective of the yin organs, but that will come in a future post as first we will need some preliminary work linking Yoga, Taoism and the Organ systems to help keep us on track.

Remember that our karmic lessons pertain to every moment of our lives. Fall of 2020 is going to be a turbulent and challenging time and we all need to remain grounded, heart centered and clear, no matter what arises. Keep resting in Being and allow Life to flow through you, as best you can. Stay safe, support small businesses, be kind to one another, and do what you can to help get out the vote. Don’t waste energy worrying about things you have no control over. Keep the the loving open heart channeling into the human energy field and we will get through this.

Before we continue, I have to pass on Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s wisdom, as presented in the introduction to her Fall 2020 series of classes on the Spine, offering us a clear vision of inner dimensions of our somatic explorations. She is the voice of Somatic Spiritual Awakening.

CELLULAR CONSCIOUSNESS
Each cell in our body has living intelligence. It is capable of knowing itself, initiating action, and communicating with all other cells. The individual cell and the community of cells (tissue, organ, body) exist as separate entities and as one whole at the same moment. Cellular consciousness is a state in which all cells have equal opportunity for expression, receptivity, and cooperation. Attuning ourselves to our cellular consciousness brings us to a place in which we can find the ground from which flows the intricate manifestations of our physical, psychological, and spiritual being.

EMBODIMENT
Embodiment emerges from our cells’ awareness of themselves. It is a direct experience. There are no intermediate steps or translations. There is no guide, no witness – just the fully known consciousness of the experienced moment initiated from the cells. Here, the brain is the last to know. The process of embodiment is a being process, not a doing process. It is an awareness process, not a thinking process. There is complete knowing and peaceful comprehension. Out of this embodiment process emerges feeling, sensing, thinking, witnessing, understanding, compassion. The source of this process is free; it is love.

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Patanjali and Lao Tzu: The Meeting of Yoga and Taoist Practices

In general, the cellular consciousness referred to by Bonnie is unconscious in most of us. The journey is to awaken to this always present flow of energy and information and then allow any and all sense of separateness to dissolve into this fundamental embodied aliveness. Patanjali, in the beginning of the Sadhana Pada, the second chapter of the Yoga Sutras entitled “On Practice”, lists three essential practices known together as Kriya Yoga, that guide our journey. They begin sequentially, but then intertwine into an evolving spiral of awakening and integration.

Taoism has many parallels that take us right into the organ systems. Chinese Medicine is process based. Rather than referring to anatomical structures such as kidneys, it refers to organ systems, including all metabolic and integrative processes associated with the organs and their related hormones. Organ systems also have a subtle psycho-spiritual component unseen in Western medicine.

The first essential practice is discipline or tapas in Sanskrit. Without discipline, there is no practice, or no ability to sustain practice when difficulty arises, and this is true no matter what the subject matter, no matter what level of experience we may have. This is very true in spiritual practice, and Patanjali introduces the more advanced expressions of discipline, abhyasa and vairagya, in chapter I, the Samadhi Pada, sutras I-12 – 16. Abhyasa is the constant directing of our energies to create layers and levels of stability. This includes grounding in the world of form, through bones, fluids and mind, and also stabilizing our awakening in the formless. Vairagya is the constant directing of our energies away from habits and patterns that perpetuate unconscious delusion and suffering, and transforming them towards into patterns that are stabilizing and Awakening. Abhyasa and vairagya are tow sides of the same coin

Discipline is a form of will power, and In Taoism, Will is one of the five Shen or Spirits and resides in the Kidney Organ System. In Taoism, will has a yin and yang component. The Yang Will involves both the day to day and major life decisions and its active and dynamic energy helps us stay focused on the tasks at hand. Yin Will is quite different. Ted Kaptchuk, in his book on Chinese Medicine, “The Web That Has No Weaver”, describes it this way.

“Yin Will is the other side of Will. It is the deeper encounter with the inexorable and ultimate destiny that already exists hidden in the undifferentiated seed. It is the recognition that the deepest force requires no effort. The Yin Will is elusive, almost intangible. It is noticed in stillness. It has a quality of irreducible mystery. The Yin Will is about the inevitable, about a direction we each move toward that can only be seen when we turn around and look at how we have developed through time. It is about fate and destiny. It is about the unknown and depth.

Recognition of Yin Will allows for the creation of the virtue of Wisdom. This Wisdom is not about knowing things. In fact, it is more about being deeply connected to the unknown. Wisdom is a recognition of the fact that life is an intertwining of known and unknown.”

We will soon see how Yin Will links up with the third practice, but Yang Will will leads to the second practice of Kriya Yoga, svadhyaya, Self-study or Self inquiry. Yang Will involves choices (when and how do we apply discipline) and for this we need to cultivate discriminating intelligence. The first stage of Self study is the examining the rules and laws that govern the world of form (known as Prakriti in the Yoga Sutras) and the nature of our own habits and behaviors. In learning what aspects of our lives and mental activities to cultivate and what to eliminate, we discover a discriminating intelligence that can be awakened and refined to guide us in our day to day and long term decision making. This is very true on the collective level as well and is a life long endeavor also as our habits have layers and layers going back through our ancestors.

In Taoism, this discriminative intelligence is another of the five Spirits and resides in the Spleen-Pancreas Organ System. The Spleen-Pancreas, in Chinese Medicine, extracts the ‘pure from the impure’. On a biological level, in the digestive process, the nutrients and anything else that is beneficial are separated and absorbed into the blood stream, while the rest is sent along for elimination. The blood is also filtered and monitored for potential infectious agents, engaging the immune system. The Spleen-Pancreas also discriminates at the psychological and spiritual level, helping us make intelligent descisions about all aspects of our lives. This processing is analogous to the Samana Vayu in Yoga.

The second stage of svadyaya is inquiry into Who, or what am I. What is this “I – me – mine” mind set that drives my behavior? What is change? What is stillness? Can I discover my innate True Nature, as and in the Stillness at the core of my heart? Self study includes reading sacred scriptures that discuss this question, such as the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, The Upanishads, the many Buddhist Sutras, and mystical poetry. It is about Being and not doing, as Bonnie described above. In the Yoga Sutras II-26 – 27, Patanjali discusses this deeper dimension of discriminating wisdom. In Taoism, is the recognition of the small Shen, the ruler of the Five Spirits that resides in the Heart Organ System and the fullness (purna) of the Big Shen, one of the Three Treasures.

The third practice, Ishvara Pranidhana, is the dissolving of the egoic structures into Being. It is allowing Life in its Wholeness to flow though you effortlessly. This is Yin Will in action. Egoic structures are energetic habits of thought and belief that perpetuate the illusion of ‘separateness’ that causes so much suffering. The energy held in these patterns can be transformed by first seeing them for what they are and then exposing them to the direct realization of True Nature, where they dissolve like a wave returning to the vast ocean. Because of karmic momentum, the egoic patterns will keep coming back. But if we can recognize them as just waves, transient phenomena arising out of the depths of True Nature, and stop feeding them by resisting or giving into them, eventually the karmic momentum resolves back into the Source and they come to an end.

The fact that in Kriya Yoga Ishvara Pranidhana comes after Self Study is crucial. It is easy to ‘let go’ into unconscious habits and believe that the ego is letting go. This is one of the great tricks of the ego. You can see obvious examples in spiritual teachers who have had a powerful ‘waking up’ experience, but haven’t done enough ‘growing up’ emotionally. The results are not pretty. The cultivation of discriminating wisdom helps keep all of us from our own self delusion.

Ishvara is a Sanskrit word that points to Divinity as manifest in the multiplicity of forms in the Universe. It is infinite creativity in action. As my Vedanta teacher Swami Dayananda used to say, “What is, is Ishvara”. There are many layers to the practice of Ishvara Prahidhana as demonstrated by Patanjali using this expression in three different sections of the Yoga Sutras. In the first chapter, sutras I-23 – I-29 are all devoted to Isvara. And all three of the Kriya Yoga practices are included as part of the Niyamas, one of the eight limbs of Ashtanga Yoga described later on.

There are two more Yin Organ systems associated with the Five Spirits that we need to consider and they are linked together in a quite interesting Yin-Yang way. The Lung Organ System is associated with the Spirit known as Po, the corporeal soul. Po is the denser yin expression of embodiment, associated with the five elements, concerned solely with this body and this incarnation, and returns to the Earth at death. There are seven Po, related on the physical plane to the seven sensory openings: two eyes, two ears, two nostrils and the mouth. The are also related to the seven Karmic lessons of life discussed in the previous post.

The Liver Organ System is the home of Po’s yang counterpart Hun, or the non-corporeal soul. The Hun is lighter, more expansive and more subtle than the denser Po. It is the aspect of spirit that has no attachment to the physical body and at death leaves the body to dissolve into more ethereal realms of existence. It is the Hun that is the vehicle for shamanic journeying. There are three Hun, sometimes referred to as three spirits or energy fields of differing densities surrounding the physical body (the 7 Po). The ethereal is the densest, the light and finally the true spiritual plane. Taoist master Jeffrey Yuen also teaches that Po is related to space and Hun to time.

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An Overview of our Inner Anatomy

Let the Kriya Yoga of ‘Discipline/Self Study/Letting Go’ guide our explorations as we use breathing, the leverage of different postures and micro-movements to bring attention/conscious awareness to some of these inner spaces of the body, the organs that embryologically emerge within them and the energetic flow of the organ systems. These micro-thin spaces between fascial layers surrounding the organs are also in relationship to the organs through the flow of fluids, Qi and intelligence. Yang Will focuses the attention and keep sit from wandering. Yin Will allows the innate intelligence of the Qi/Fluids/Cells to reveal itself in Being, without any attempt of the ego to manipulate the situation. The habits of the ego are relentless so be patient and compassionate with your Self when working at this level.

We’ll begin our journey into the intelligence of the organ systems by feeling the the anatomical spaces of the torso. The illustrations above left show the three anatomical spaces of the abdomen into which our inner organs emerge during embryological development. These comes from one of my favorite books, “Spark in the Machine” by David Keown, an English medical doctor and acupuncturist, who tells the amazing story of how embryological development serves as the foundation of the acupuncture channels, and much much more. My fascination with embryology, thanks to Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, has become a spiritual journey into the roots of creation itself as it manifests, here and now, in our embodied Presence.

Translating into Western terminology, Jue Yin, the most anterior, is called the peritoneal cavity; Tai Yin is the anterior para-renal space, and Shao Yin is the retro-peritoneal space. For somanauts, these three spaces provide a way to differentiate the depth spaces of the body, the most challenging of the three spacial directions. Head to tail is simple with the three Dantiens the starting point. With side to side we have the innate bi-lateral symmetry of the human form, i.e., 2 eyes, ears, arms, lungs, legs etc. Front to back is challenging, especially in the upright posture, so we really have to slow down and allow the sensations and perceptions to come.

Frank Netter’s drawing of the a cross section at T-12 , similar to the one above, is viewed from below so you have to reverse left and right, but the cavities are the same. Notice the space behind the stomach, where Bonnie allows her ‘embryonic breathing’ to originate. Also, the liver, kidneys and spleen. These will be key areas in our explorations, as we track the flow of breath/qi, through the micro-thin spaces between two layers of fascia surrounding the volumes and the organs.

In Chinese Medicine, these Yin inter-fascial spaces or channels also have an upper (above the diaphragm) component, as seen above, and are linked to the lower through the three openings in the diaphragm. The Qi flows through these three ‘channels’. These channel also branch out into the limbs to complete the meridians associated with each organ system.

Jue Yin follows the opening for the Vena Cava and links Liver Acupuncture Channel with the Pericardium Acupuncture Channel. Tai Yin follows the esophageal opening, linking Lungs and Spleen/Pancreas; (embryologically speaking, the lungs emerge from a bud on the oesophagus near the vocal cords.), and Shao Yin follows the opening for the aorta linking Heart and Kidney channels.

Exploring the Jue Yin

As an example, we see how the Jue Yin channel combines the Pericardium channel in the arm/upper body with the Liver Channel/leg in the lower body. ‘Absolute’ is one translation of the character ‘Jue’. Others are reversing or returning. Jue Yin runs from Liver-1 on the inside of the big toe all the way to Pericardium 9 at the tip of the middle finger. The pericardium channel also has an inner branch extending down the vena cava linking the three burners.

Dynamic Practice

Setu Bandha Sarvangasana and its variations are great poses to explore Jue Yin. Activate the inner big toes and middle fingers to open whole meridian. For the ‘Leg Jue Yin’ Liver meridian, track flow from the inner big toes along the inner legs and knees and through the groins. (Right and Left) Upper and lower channels meet at the upper front diaphragm.

Feel the liver and pericardium rotating in opposite directions to open space for the vena cava. The Jue Yin channel is where yin has reached its maximum and begins to reverse or return to yang, like at the winter solstice. It is where the de-oxygenated venous blood is returned to the heart and lungs to be re-vitalized. Setu bandha is a more yin backbend allowing the yang to build gradually. As the Jue Yin channel opens, more challenging backbends can be added. This supported (yin) ‘sort of’ kapotasana is still more yang. Without support, backbends become even more yang. Open slowly.

Another way to explore Jue Yin is through the forward bend back bend flow mentioned in a previous post. In fact, you can explore the three yin “Great Channels’, by adding Tai Yin, (Lung and Spleen/Pancreas, the middle layer; and Shao Yin, Heart and Kidney, the inner most layer, anatomically speaking. Iyengar begins all his forward bends in ‘Light on Yoga’ by opening Jue Yin. The completed pose opens Shao Yin with the Tai Yin, the middle layer balancing the two.

Most beginning yoga students collapse in at the Pericardium/Liver junction, and the compensate by over constricting the very outer layer, Tai Yang along the back body to stay upright. By aligning and opening the three inner or yin channels, both back bends and forward bends become organically beneficial.

Inner Practice

In meditative or restorative poses, allow your imagination/attention rest in the opening in the diaphragm for the vena cava as it passes from behind the liver up and into the heart. Bring compassion/Loving Kindness to your heart area so the Pericardium, the connective tissue surrounding the heart, also know as the ‘Heart Protector’, can relax a bit.

Allow you imagination attention follow the Jue Yin as it passes from the feet through the groins. Imagine where the common iliac veins converge to form the inferior vena cava. This is the area of the ‘Hara’. Rest and soften here, bringing Loving Kindness and Compassion. Allow the whole space from the bifurcation up to the heart soften and relax. This is the Middle Burner. Notice the inner link as the inferior vena cava links heart in the upper burner, IVC and aorta in the middle burner and below the navel lower burner. Add inner arms and legs.Have fun with wherever this qi takes you. Be Yin/receptive, allowing, not trying to control, as best you can. Be grateful for having a human body.

For more detailed work and multiple postures and sequences for Jue Yin, see Ruth Knill’s YouTube page. Ruth is a long time yoga practitioner and teacher as well as a licensed acupuncturist working in Arlington, MA. She is teaching a regular ‘Zoom’ yoga class on line every week.

Taosim/Chinese Medicine Background

Foundational to all of Chinese Medicine is the Taoist non-dual principle of yin and yang, representing the three primary realities of creation: dynamism, inter-connectedness and change. The dynamic energy comes from the opposite polar charges of yin and yang. Although ‘opposite’ there is no ‘pure’ yin or yang; each is embedded in the other, no matter how deep you go. There is continuous flow between the two, one waxing, one waning, and then the reverse. What flows is known as qi, (or prana in Sanskrit).

Chinese Medicine describes 12 Primary acupuncture channels, six yin and six yang, that regulate the flow of qi in the body. Each channel is associated with an ‘organ’ (more of a set of energetic processes than the physical organ of Western anatomy), and has points located along the surface of the body. However the channels also have branches that dive into the interior of the body.

In general, yang organs are hollow and move substances throughout the body. They are: (capitalized to differentiate them from the western anatomical organ) the Large Intestine, Small Intestine, Stomach, Bladder, Gall Bladder and a quirky one known as San Jiao, or Triple Warmer. There is no western equivalent, but the San Jiao balances the flow qi through the three burners, which we might see as a regulation of the whole digestive process An ancient Chinese medical text states: ‘The Upper Burner controls intake, the Middle Burner controls transformation, the Lower Burner controls elimination.’ It can also be seen as the mediator of tensegrity in the fluid/fascia living matrix. The San Jiao is a key for our heart/hara balance.

The yin organs include: the Heart (the most yang of the yin organs), Pericardium or Heart Protector, Lungs, Spleen/Pancreas, Liver and Kidneys (the most yin of the yin organs.

One way to group the 12 Primary Channels is in yin/yang pairs of 2, giving us the 6 Great Channels. The six pairs link yang upper body/arms with yin lower body legs. There are three arm yang channels linking with three leg yang channels, and three arm yin channels linking with three leg yin ones. The Great Channels actually arise from 6 embryological, fascially distinct cavities that are arranged spatially from the yang, Governing Vessel back body to yin Conception Vessel front body, in this order:

Tai Yang – Yang Ming – Shao Yang – Shao Yin – Tai Yin – Jue Yin

These also determine a flow with Tai Yang being the Beginning of a cycle and Jue Yin the end of the cycle, which is why Jue Yin is called returning or reversing Yin where

Thank you and credits to Frank Netter for his anatomical drawings
and Marc Ignacio on Upsplash for his candle photo.

As always, questions on practice and editorial and copy editing corrections greatly appreciated.

The Spaciousness of Being, the Activation of Purpose

Posted on August 22, 2020 by admin

(I’m working on my next post but Kate passed this onto me and it is so good I want to pass it along to you as well. I have not heard of Philip before, but it is always a delight to meet a fellow somanaut and voice of Collective Awakening with a unique and universal perspective. Thank you Philip!!)

By Philip Shepherd (from his blog)

We are in the midst of an extraordinary moment in history – witnesses to and participants in a global unravelling. It is a potent storm fuelled by three converging vectors: the untold damage human activity is inflicting on nature; the disruptive virus that nature is inflicting on human activity; and the ideas of power, inequality and entitlement, ossified within human institutions, that are inflicting pain on fellow humans.

There is no telling when this storm will pass, or how it will alter our world. One thing seems certain to me, though: it’s never been more important to ground yourself in being and feel yourself aligned with and carried forward by your deepest purpose. This short essay reflects on the nature of those challenges.

Your body takes up space in the world. Everyone’s does. But think about it for a moment: the space your body occupies is not an encroachment on the world’s space, or an intrusion into it. Nor does it represent some kind of annexation, wherein your body claims ownership over that space and holds it separate from the world. The space your body takes up belongs to the world as much as it belongs to you. The world courses unstoppably through it. That happens in the form of light, sound, gravity, electromagnetic waves and particle streams, of course. But also with every breath you take, with every morsel you eat, with every tear you shed, parts of you are turning into the world and parts of the world are turning into you. So the space occupied by your body is not where you hoard the self, but where your self and the world converge in a living partnership. There is no ‘me’ apart from that partnership. That partnership is the process of your being. It is the fundamental nature of your reality.

Your life is carried forward by that partnership for all the days you spend on this earth. Your existence depends on it: you cannot dissolve the partnership without dissolving your life. What you can do, though – and what we all tend to do – is to grow forgetful of it. Even as the partnership continues to sustain us, our awareness of the body tends to dim as we learn to contract our thinking more and more into our heads. We leave the spaciousness of being and hem ourselves into the consolidations of doing. We come to observe the living convergence of self and world through the static prism of idea, and eventually we stop feeling it. Which means we stop feeling our reality.

The values and hierarchies of our culture encourage that retreat from our natural spaciousness. We are told to uphold a fiction of the body as a mechanical thing that operates in a mechanical universe, and to fabricate a sense of self that stands aloof from all partnership. But there’s more to our culture’s message than mere encouragement. I think our culture is so attached to its fantasies of independence, domination and control that it looks upon the spaciousness of being as though it were a death threat – because once you feel the spaciousness within your body in its continuity with the spaciousness of the wide world and beyond, the self-important ego suffers an existential shock, and can tailspin into confusion and disorientation. Your cherished little concretized certainties are suddenly awash in a tidal wave of mystery.

The spaciousness of being hums with every possibility. Every consequence of past events ripples untraceably through it as though through a fathomless ocean, as does the potential for every event that is to come. Like the quantum vacuum, the spaciousness of being is the empty nothing out of which everything is birthed. And even as the spaciousness of being contains your body, your body contains it. All that lives through it lives also through you.

The body can recover its natural spaciousness when it empties of expectation and comes fully to rest in the present. But that process of emptying directly contradicts our cultural directive to secure the self within a fortified boundary. So let’s look at that emptying. To allow your body to truly come to rest on the earth and in the present, you need to find ways of opening it to the present and the earth. And that undertaking will necessarily draw you into a process of deep undoing. It requires a dismantling of the body’s inner barricades and divisions: bringing voice back to the silenced shadows within its flesh; dissolving its congested anxieties; softening any resistance you might have to belonging to something larger than yourself; and disarming the insensate patterns held in the body that fortify you against uncertainty. As all those frozen energies yield and thaw and harmonize, they open within the body a cavern that is spacious enough to receive the world – a cavern that welcomes the empty nothing out of which everything is birthed. The currents of the transforming present course through that cavern within, even as they flow through the spaciousness of the world around you.

The spaciousness of your being is like the space within a bell – it is what enables you to attune to the world. Such attunement is very different from sitting in your head and noticing the world ‘out there’. Attunement enables the world to be also felt ‘in here’ – in the empty resonance of your being. It allows you to come home to the fundamental reality of your life: feeling ‘your’ space as a continuity of the world’s; feeling your life as a continuity of the world’s. Moreover, as you attune to the living world that holds you, you cannot but awaken to the intimacy of your partnership with it. That partnership summons you to come and play and give the whole of your being to help ease and deepen the harmony in which you live. And you’ll find that the service or task to which you are summoned is one that directly activates the gifts of your deepest nature. By surrendering to what the world is calling from you, then – by allowing your being to be so profoundly activated – you also surrender to the flowering of your fullest humanity.

Feeling your life carried forward by that partnership relies on your ability to sensitize the body’s spaciousness to the spaciousness of being to which it belongs. But there is a compelling reason we tend to consolidate within ourselves and barricade the door against our fundamental nature. The spaciousness of being is something you can join, you can be carried by, you can dance with – but it is not something you can control. And in a culture that obsessively asserts agendas of control over the natural harmony of the world, that partnership looks scary. Control is what we trust. Harmony, a property of the whole, is way beyond control. You can find guidance in the world’s harmony, but you will never dominate it. Furthermore, if you accept that guidance and undertake the work it is calling you to, it will not offer you a map, a clear destination, or any assurance of success. All it can guarantee is that by giving your life to what the world is summoning you to, the whole of your being will come alive, and your purpose will be illuminated by being lived.

A body trapped in its own consolidations is like a singing bowl filled with sand: it cannot ring to the world around it. When you cannot yield to the spaciousness of being and attune to the world, there can be no felt partnership. There can be no palpable guidance. You are immunized against the juicy exhilaration and wonder of feeling yourself being organized by the mindful whole. What you are left with instead is your aloneness, and the endless, stale task of organizing yourself.

It seems our culture has made a choice: we would rather feel ourselves alone in the world than to feel ourselves not in control of it. By siding with the fantasy of control, we turn our backs on the experience of feeling the whole moving and speaking through us. We miss the grace and wonder of life itself. On the other hand, once you identify a choice that your culture has made on your behalf, you are free to begin forging a new one.

Healing Personal and Collective Trauma

Posted on August 1, 2020 by admin

NASCAR drivers Kyle Busch, left, and Corey LaJoie, right, join other drivers and crews as they push the car of Bubba Wallace to the front of the field prior to the start of the NASCAR Cup Series auto race at the Talladega Superspeedway.John Bazemore/Associated Press

Not sure how many of my readers follow NASCAR. It’s usually not on my radar either, but this photo taken in early June at the beginning of a race at the Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama captures an extraordinary moment in American history that brings tears to my eyes every time I fully take in its significance. The car belongs to Bubba Wallace, the only full time Black driver on the stock car circuit. It is being guided to its position at the start of the race by every single driver in the race, and every single member of their support teams, all choosing to make a unified stand about love and inclusion.

A few weeks previous to the race, Bubba, with the support of all the other White drivers, asked NASCAR to ban the display of the Confederate flag at all races and, amazingly enough, NASCAR officials did just that. This is not going over well with many of the predominantly southern White male fans, and Sunday evening, it appeared that someone had left a noose in the garage of Bubbas racing team. The response, as shown above, was immediate, clear and unified. We (NASCAR) stand for love and inclusion and against hatred and division. (It was later clarified by the F.B.I. that it was a garage door pull fashioned as a noose and had been there for several months.)

The healing of collective trauma cannot truly begin without a deep acknowledgement of its reality. And it is the nature of trauma, at its root, to remain hidden, repressed and unseen. The symptoms and after effects may be recognized cognitively, but until we can begin to feel the visceral reality of the violence. Collectively, trauma healing requires a group acknowlegement, or witnessing the trauma and the a group ritual or action directed specifically toward healing the wound. The Nascar act of love, support and acknowledgement was so powerful for me because it was a real, embodied action of collective healing.

It is now early August. We have a long long way to go in healing. The deeply embedded trauma that White supremacy has inflicted upon the African American people, as well as the Native American people, has been accumulating for over five centuries. It continues in the present as the collective fears of a certain percentage of White people have added Hispanic and Muslim people to the crosshairs of the fear and anger. The fact that we have a president who amplifies these fears, and in an election year is doubling down on his ignorance, is both terrifying and heartbreaking. But is is the nature of unconsciousness to perpetuate patterns of behavior until they are brought to the conscious level for reflection, recognition and the awakening oof sufficient motivation to change.

George Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020. For whatever reason, his death was the one that finally broke through the ignorance and denial of collective White America to the depth and intensity of the traumas Black Americans live with on a day to day basis. Certainly not all of White America is awakening, but a large enough percentage of people in power to begin a shift. Corporations follow the money, so I am suspicious of the underlying motives of some of their statements, but, none the less, we are seeing the beginning of a major, major shift in American society, and one that is ripploing around the planet.

It is my hope that this shift will be driven from the spiritual foundation of “Wholeness”, Inter-being, Love, and fierce Compassion. It is the only hope for long lasting and meaningful change, because there is also a much larger collective trauma that also needs to be acknowledged; the trauma inflicted onto Mother Earth by all humans. We need to expand time, envision 10 generations into the future, and ask ourselves; What are we offering those generations to come? We have been given one of the most prolific, fecund planets in the galaxy and are systematically destroying the very conditions that allow life to flourish. As my mentor Thomas Berry once stated, ‘modern humans have macrophase power and microphase intelligence.”

It is easy to fall into hopelessness and despair when confronting the magnitude of our challenges, unless we have a spiritual practice that can orient and balance us. Each of us has a ‘soul role’ to play. We have incarnated into this moment with a set of skills, a certain level of vitality, lessons to learn, and a place in the center of the living breathing energy field of Mother Earth, the Solar System and the Milky Way. A practice helps us refine our skills, maintain our vitality, study and learn from our lessons, and participate in the dance. We need to cultivate multiple resources to facilitate any type of healing and the beginning of collective healing is our own personal journey of healing.

Unconscious trauma presents a fragmented perspective on reality. Thomas Huebl describes this as though looking through broken glass. Thomas, in his own unique way, goes on to note that our brains then ‘photoshop’ the fragments away. It fills in the blank regions so we may ‘appear’ to have a coherent view and function in society. But the information coming in to us from the world is actually quite fragmented and thus our ability to respond to the world is limited. As Thomas says, our ‘response-ability’, our ability to respond to the moment, is compromised and this is true both individually and collectively.

Our memory and cognitive constellations tend to determine our perceptions and actions. If we are not in true resonance with the world moment to moment, our fall back will be to refer to our beliefs, concepts and memories and call these ‘reality’. These beliefs and concepts, more often that not, have been passed down by our parents, grandparents and teachers, and society as a whole. Because they, and we, were born into a world with pre-existing personal, ancestral and collective traumas, we usually do not see the trauma. It is ‘just the way things are, and always have been. White supremacy is the root of the collective trauma of our time.

It is the nature of modern culture that athletes and entertainers have the largest and loudest platform to speak to the general public. That also gives them a lot of power. ( Professional and college athletics currently generate upwards of eighty billion dollars of revenue every year!) The murder of George Floyd was the tipping point that woke up a sufficient number of White athletes and coaches so that they can begin to hear the stories their Black teammates are telling. On the collegiate side, money more than morals drives the bus, but none-the-less, the voices the Black Americans are finally being heard and acknowledged by White American and a social momentum of deep seated change has begun.

The burden of systemic racism and White supremacy, inflicted by the European cultures onto the Black and Native populations going back to the time of Columbus, is being recognized as an acute personal and cultural trauma that White people must acknowledge, feel and address through action. Hispanic and Muslim communities also have been recipients of White ignorance and rage. Jews have been recipients of ignorance and rage for centuries. How to navigate the fullness of the damage done to multiple ethnic groups, across multiple generations, remains to be seen. That NASCAR, the most White and most ‘southern’ of our national sports, chose to make a statement, is a sign of hope. However, symbolic gestures can only be the beginning if true healing and transformation of society is to take place. The energy of protests have to become transformed into policy and symbolism has to be transformed into tackling extremely challenging unconsciously entrenched habits of White supremacy. Bandages are of no use when radical cultural surgery is needed. This will not be easy, simple or quick.

The voices of those who have been victimized by the inherent White supremacy embedded in the fabric of American society are being finally heard. As part of my own personal healing I have been reading and re-reading Kevin Powell: (The Education of Kevin Powell) and (My Mother, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and the last stand of The Angry White Man): and Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me), heart opening descriptions of how de-humanizing and traumatizing growing up an African American Male can be; how that burden often is then inflicted onto women and each other; and how painful the path of healing can be.

Also needing to be heard are the voices of those who have on the front lines of racism for decades and who can speak from well earned wisdom. Civil Rights icon John Lewis wrote this a few days before he died. Another wonderful example is Ruth King’s Mindful of Race: Transforming Racism from the Inside Out. Also, Buddhist teacher Larry Ward, as expressed in this blog post on The Lotus Institute web site. Or this Op-ed from Kareem Abdul Jabbar. Boston Globe writers Renee Graham and Jenee Osterheldt are two more voices of Black women who keep me paying attention. Social change is challenging at any level and our current situation has layers and levels of trauma that will require years of diligent and relentless effort. Keep reading, keep listening. The more voices in the choir, the more powerful the music.

The collective cultural healing we desperately need can only happen when all ethnic groups can express and be respected for their unique perspectives, traditions and talents, while at the same time discovering in each other the essential common ground of wholeness and unity. Even in individuals, trauma cannot be healed individually. The healing of trauma requires an ‘other’, to listen to the stories, feel, embody and validate the experience and then link energetically with the speaker in wholeness. I hear your pain, I feel your pain, I take it into the depths of my cells, and join you in the communal healing of the heart.

Working with my pre-natal PTSD is very different from working with the challenges of my new hip joint. Working with the quirkiness of the hip doesn’t trigger any deep and hidden emotional trauma. No shortage of frustration, but that is quite different, very obvious and relatively easy to manage. The trauma of PTSD awakens terror and this needs to be handled with care and love.

The complex emotional charge of stored trauma and its effect on the body’s nervous system requires a much more nuanced approach. This is equally valid in the collective field as well as the individual’s energy field. With trauma, there is embedded in the field a powerful, non-verbal sense of chaos; of having no control of the situation, of being totally disconnected from the present moment. This is the nature of unresolved trauma. Because it has been repressed, and it takes a lot of energy to do so, it is like a pressure cooker slowly moving toward explosion.

The analogy to the looting and rioting is very relevant. As Kareem Abdul Jabbar mentioned above, when an intense collective trauma has been accumulating for generations, eruptions of violence cannot possibly be surprising. What is amazing is that there is not more outbreaks of violence. Much of the inner city and gang related violence stems from this collective generational trauma.

In an embodied approach to trauma therapy such as Somatic Experiencing, the mature adult/therapist helps the client discover their own pressure valve and guides them in learning how to safely and slowly discharge the pent up fear/anger/energy. This may take months or years to do safely. Doing this collectively is part of the new level of healing of our time. Spiritual teacher Thomas Huebl is one of the planet’s leading guides in this realm and I highly recommend listening to him or working with him.

Hearing the stories and opening our hearts to the intense suffering of others may help us dive into our own darker dimensions. There is a not so subtle hint in the ‘Apostles Creed’ the prayer I learned as a child growing up in the Catholic Church. Upon his death and before ‘ascending into heaven’, Jesus ‘descendit ad inferna‘, he descended into hell. To become ‘One with God’, aka Enlightened, aka realize ‘True Nature’, we must descend into the inferno, like Dante in the Divine Comedy, to truly see the depths of our trauma and begin the healing. Dante had guides, the Roman poet Virgil and Beatrice. We need guides. We need our angels. And we need to be very diligent in our practice of coming back to the Stillness where True Nature reveals Itself as our ultimate refuge and ultimate source of healing.

(PS: a personal note)

Apologies for the delay. It has been almost 4 months since my last post. The cancer treatments, Covid-19, Black Lives Matter and my ‘new hip’ have sucked the energy out of me and slowed me way down. Very little energy for anything but listening and healing. I’ve been trying to finish this post for two months now, so it is a bit choppy.But I did not want to wait any longer

But I am slowly re-emerging! I will be done with the cancer meds by mid September. (By all indications the cancer should be gone, but there are no guarantees.) I’m back to swimming every day, rebuilding strength, trying to write, considering some Zoom classes, and my son Sean and I are collaborating on a series of podcasts to discuss the evolutionary dimensions of our present moment. I’ll keep you posted on that.

Also much thanks to all who reached out to me for my surgery and birthday. George Floyd was murdered on May 25 and my surgery was May 26. I spent much of my 70th birthday June 1 oscillating between deep grief and deep joy. Great for my heart opening, but exhausting.

Stay safe, stay awake, keep loving, keep practicing…