Disciplines:
Stuck in Time
Responding to: “What tools exist to manage the potential for emerging traumas?”
(Based on a teaching from María Monjejo [Jakaltec/Popti’] interpreted by me and infused with revelations gifted to me by my ancestors.)
The Mayan ancestors were masters of time and mathematics. They had at least three intersecting calendar wheels that depicted cycles of cosmological energies that Earth experiences over vast eras of space time. Like background music, these energies are the theme songs to our collective life force. In the same way that we can choose to dance to rhythms offered by the music of our playlist, dance out of sync, or sit and watch others dance, the energies of this current era offer us the song of expanded awareness that we can fear, ignore, or align with.
Whether the Maya had a word for trauma is unknown to me, but they certainly understood the impact of unhealed wounds, whether experienced yesterday, years ago, or centuries past. Instead of dancing to the rhythm of the moment, those of us carrying collective and ancestral trauma dance to the memory of a discordant song, an earworm stuck in our brains, repeating over and over, like a scratched record. When activated, we go backward around the circle, referencing the original wound, even when it is not a helpful response to the present moment.
Traveling in a circle doesn’t feel like progress or evolution. You go round and round, returning over and over to familiar places you’ve visited before, unable to offer a different response to life, one that breaks you out of the cycle. Luckily, the Earth and other planets in our solar system don’t circle the galaxy. The sun circles but because we revolve (re-evolve) around the sun we actually spiral through space. And with this spiraling Earth, and those of us upon her, never travel through the same point in space-time twice. Thus, in every moment of our existence, the energy we are offered is always new information. Every activation of the ancestral wounds we carry arrives with the promise of opportunity to explore the story from a different vantage point, deepen our understandings, and formulate new questions.
With every completed cycle around the Healing Spiral, our flower of awareness blossoms wider. The process is the same: feeling, sensing, making meaning, releasing, transforming, and creating safety so that the soul fragment that fled at the time of wounding (decades, centuries, or millennia ago) can return.
Foundational to many global Indigenous worldviews that I have intersected with, is the idea that we have chosen to limit ourselves for this short lifetime to the material realm because that’s the experience we wanted. Similar to why we require lights and phones to be turned off in the cinema, so we are not distracted and can immerse ourselves into the emotional journey of a film, we narrow the range of our vision, hearing, and other senses. With such limitations, we can focus on our short lives in the world of matter.
Hence, we have chosen to forget for now that the material universe represents only a small fraction of reality. Beyond the range of our senses, in the Spirit Realm, there are all manner of worlds, entities, and activities happening. This is where the ancestors, spirit helpers, extra-dimensionals, and our higher-dimensional selves reside. Unless we expand our consciousness, we are unaware of the vast majority of what goes on in the Universe. One of the ways consciousness expands is through the ceremony of healing.
Every time a trip around the Healing Spiral is completed, the flower opens wider, consciousness expands, and we evolve. With every emotional release, the rest of the journey is inevitable and effortless. We approach wholeness and become more aware of reality. Initially, it may be only our awareness of the material realm that expands but as we continue our journey, around and around, soul fragments return and broaden our intuitive capacities, allowing us to comprehend more and more of nonmaterial reality.
The best news is that the game is a cooperative, collective one. We cannot help but be in spiritual conversation, laterally with each other, and horizontally with our ancestors and descendants because, ultimately, we are each other’s lost soul fragments seeking wholeness through forming community. And community is the most advanced healing tool available to us in this reality. The more we heal as individuals, the more sustainable our communities become because separation is an illusion.
Questions
What if the game we are here to play was exquisitely designed by our ancestors, who played various roles as victims, perpetrators, and saviors on the trauma wheel, so that we would inherit the results of their harms, suffered and committed, without the physical experience itself? In this way we have the honour of healing their traumas, becoming more whole, and catalyzing the evolution of humanity to the next level.
Could their traumas and harmful acts be our gifts? Our dance partners in the process of creation?
What if we are doing the same for the generations that follow?
