Trauma and Healing: An Interpretation by Jeff Foster
A Poem by Jeff Foster...
"You do not heal 'from' trauma.
You simply come to know yourself
as Life Itself.
And you turn towards the wounded place.
And you flush it with attention,
which is love.
And maybe the wound will always be with you.
Maybe you will always walk with the hurt.
But now, you hold it. It doesn't hold you.
You are the container, not the contained.
It doesn't control you any longer, the wound.
Because it is drenched in awareness now.
Drenched in You.
Loved by You.
Even celebrated by You.
You do not heal 'from' trauma.
You find healing 'in' the trauma.
You find yourself at trauma's sacred core.
The One who is always present.
The One who can bear
even the most intense feeling states.
And survive.
The Indestructible One.
The Infinite One.
The Powerful One.
You.
The trauma itself becomes a portal to You.
To the Safety of Yourself.
And you will cry out in joy,
and you will cry out in sadness,
and you will cry out in relief,
and you will cry out in revelation,
"'Yes I am broken,
but I am whole.'"
-Jeff Foster
"The Secret To Healing Shame" by Jeff Foster
"The secret to healing shame is found deep inside shame itself, the last place we'd ever think to look. Shame is a misunderstood vessel of self-love, weaved of non-ordinary materials and only longing to be infused with your warm awareness, curiosity, and heart.
The secret to healing shame lies in finally meeting it from the inside. Not meeting some clinical, abstract, experience-distant definition of shame, for something conceptual cannot truly be touched, but this very alive, embodied, unique experience of shame as it appears imaginally, poetically, aesthetically inside you.
Not yesterday’s or last year’s shame or the shame I had when I was seven, for this shame is too far away. But this day’s shame, this moment’s shame, which is raw, wild, achy, and untamed, emerging as thought, feeling, and sensation; as pressure in the head and fluttering in the gut; as emptiness and longing; as voices in the mind, yearning in the heart; as pregnant light, water, fire.
Shame has arrived, not to harm, but to mercifully offer her sacred and misunderstood portal. Take the risk of knowing its unique fragrance, felt sense, moods and images; touch this sacred place that has been longing for your love for so long. Come close to shame, but not so close that you fall in. Interpenetration, without enmeshment. Intimacy, without fusion.
Forget about ‘healing’ your shame today! Instead, find the ashamed one, go to the one who feels unworthy and broken, invite in the one who feels sick and unlovable and bring him out of hiding, lead her out of the darkness and into the light of compassionate awareness. Find her in the belly, the chest, the throat; flood him with light, curiosity, and care, with this tender awareness that seeks not to ‘fix’ but understand; not to ‘mend’ but embrace; not to ‘annihilate’ but soothe and re-parent.
Hold your shame close like a mother holding her precious child and ask:
'My love, do you need to be healed today?'
And listen, listen carefully, listen from the depths of your soul now; listen to his or her timeless response as it emerges out of the thundering silence of meditation:
'Not healed, today, mother; only held.”'
~Matt Licata & Jeff Foster
Grief Work: An Interpretation by Jeff Foster
"The sorrow we sit with may have no solution. The loss that we have lived through may have no bow, no wrap, no box to be placed in. The most unimaginable events of our lives come without answers. They ask to be witnessed but offer no promise of spectacular resolve, just a quiet deepening of our relationship with ourselves over time. Sometimes with the most painful of processes there is only a steady learning of how to be with it, refusing to leave yourself because of it.
Those things untenable that have happened to us, happened. This we must accept. Their meanings have to be detangled from our sense of self and worth, but the imprint they have made upon us is unchangeable. Their impact undeniable. The act of acknowledging them is a gateway to a new relationship with what pains us, a gateway that hopefully leads to blessings greater than the harm done to us.
Without acknowledgement, the burdens we bear pull from our every resource. Taxing our systems. Distorting our drive. Veering us in directions that have less to do with our natural inclination and more to do with our desire to make a wrong right. A noble pursuit, but until we have done the work of acknowledging, unpacking, and interrupting our wounds from festering, there is little right to be wrought. The journey that healing requires demands we develop a determined desire to reflect on the events of our life and to understand the ways in which they have shaped us. Not to change what happened, but in order to make sure we don’t perpetuate more of the same
We have every right to want it all to make sense, to contextualize our suffering, but if that is our only end game we miss a million moments of meaning along the way.
It will be, at times, unmanageable, unruly, and uncooperative, but that is what life should be like when it’s lived honestly. One admission of harm sparks the memories of a million more. It’s not supposed to be an experience one can fold up like socks and neatly organize in a basket."
~Jeff Foster
Contact
Phone: (310) 383-3040
Email: drmelissamuller@gmail.com