holding what’s haunted
“Trauma is where the unintegrated past meets the unresourced present.” -@ryankuja
Whether it’s an abandonment wound from the past, a younger part that wants security but only knows instability, addiction, or another form of coping with what was too much at one time, a person you loved who has died, or your own neurotic tendency to not know what step to take next…
being haunted however humbling, can give us great access to an embodied sense of intuition. Let’s call it our felt sense of knowing.
My father who I buried on my 25th birthday, was a Scorpio and over the past 16 years, (maybe it’s my Venus in Pisces,) he has connected to me mostly through art- paintings, performance, dance, music, and films. There’s a way that art can give us a doorway into the subconscious while also keeping us tethered to this world.
Just like death and grief, art puts our noses right up to the paradox that this world is full of meaning, however fleeting, as well as a gut-wrenching possibility that nothing matters at all. Just materials mended and messed with to make something so beautiful it forces you to feel everything and nothing at all.
This is why as artists and people exploring multiple realities, it is essential we develop health in our physical world. It can help us stay tethered so we can be freer to do our work in a healing way as opposed to following the daunting footsteps of our artist ancestors who couldn’t handle the intensity of living with what the mainstream deems as inappropriate or even crazy.
If you grew up in a dysfunctional family system or around addiction or abuse. you most likely had to reject your inner knowing for the sake of survival. What once saved you now has become both a wound that keeps you spiraling in deep wells of shame and aloneness and a gift of sensitivity to perceive the unseen. To give voice to what doesn’t have language.
My Chiron (wounded healer archetype in esoteric astrology,) and my Mercury are in the same degree in Taurus in the third house (communication and swirling insights.) My whole life is all about being a wounded healer, a wild-woman writer who has too much to say with too little a desire for refinement, although I am learning as ai do value the finer things in life. Mostly my medicine supports others in awakening their intuitive and embodied gifts with full permission to be a messy human who cares and came to serve.
Our felt sense runs through many worlds, including our dreams. When you wake up in anxiety and fear and then you carry that energy or state down the stairs and into your kitchen, the people around you on some level can feel that. Even if you don’t eventually turn it towards them in projection.
When we share love with another human, this love connects us beyond the physical. So that means even after they die, you can still find them through the courageous work of feeling and trusting what brings you closer to Love.
Those who have died, especially in inauspicious or auspicious ways I have found, tend to come back to those who loved, adored, and worried about them.
Being “haunted” can be a metaphor for the ways in which these fundamental aspects of life can linger in our consciousness, shaping our thoughts and actions. By exploring these areas somatically, we can become more aware of the ways in which we are haunted by our past experiences, and begin to release the patterns that no longer serve us.
My goal in this essay is to provide a sense of connection, perhaps a little relief and an energetic adjustment to the current form of haunted you are holding.
Your beliefs don’t matter so much here, it’s more of a movement. A desire to know more, to allow what is presenting itself to you in the form of a trigger or psychic attack take you to the next layer of freedom within.
We know now the stories we tell ourselves, the beautifully expansive or torture chamber of lies that can be our minds at times, comes from our state. Our state comes from what is happening in our autonomic nervous system.
It can be imperative to bring our experience to someone or a community who gets it. Where the fear of “making sense,” is no longer a question and can get healed as you own what you know about communicating with the unseen.
To work with being haunted in a dream or in reality by abusers or cyber bullies hijacking your system, an old lover who’s died, or simply by the unprocessed trauma of your past,–creating is always going to help you heal and reveal more.
We trust that more will be revealed and that when our nervous system is in a certain state, we experience helplessness, hopelessness, and despair. We find out devotion to art and healing through falling asleep to our gifts again and again.
Mother, please help me hold this grief.
At the root of experiences that induce fear and terror is grief. To be able to access our grief in a sustainable way, we need the love of the Goddess and Mother Earth. We need a mountain to press our backs against. We need the ocean to capture our drifting and light-headed attention. We need a clear way to touch our own bodies sexually that can bring about safety to feel.
We don’t have to grieve it all at once. We titrate towards the weight of what we are holding that hurts, and learn how to give it a language through image, movement, and sensation.
Sometimes, we just need to remember we have a choice. And if we don’t that is where our work lies, in creating choice where there currently is none. Trauma robs us of choice but it is not a negative thing. It is the way we are wired, naturally so how could it be? If it’s something we all experience, even if it’s something we want to heal and move past, how could it ultimately be bad at its root?
We just haven’t been taught how to relate to our root. Sex, death, belonging, even the shape of shame that when worked with takes us to integration with what we “know,” to actually change the ways we relate.
The red zone labeled shame on all the yoga studio posters where the purple vibration of enlightenment lives far away. But if we are a part of nature, which we are duh, then we are cyclical and spheric. The highest vibration needs the density of the “lowest,” and judgment, in fact, is not allowed into the exploration, or else it doesn’t work.
For example when you are triggered into anxiousness or shut down, the more you practice noticing your behavior and sharing it in places where it can be held, the more you experience a sustainable shift towards allowing yourself to be where you are, and not be stuck there for too long.
You begin to see real change and not just seeking those “profound experiences.”
What if we stopped seeking and only sharing profound experiences? What is it like when you wake up as you every morning? Is that not profound enough?
When you are haunted you have a unique opportunity to become the huntress and hold a new way to work with energy in form. In the ways, we care for ourselves and one another.
We practice being the one who not only runs but turns around with your broom, starts chasing, and shouts…”No! Get out of my house this instant! You don’t belong here!”
Or perhaps on a different day, you get curious and invite what’s haunting you to sit down for tea, and a practice where you enter the subconscious for new material to work with.
You can do this by reading a poem and doing a somatic stream of conscious writing practice where you ask and receive answers or free write for 15 minutes on an experience that is arising for you to explore. You can time travel back to a younger age and see, hear, and speak as who you were then.
You can ask the person or entity that is haunting you for a song and put it on and see what you feel and you roll around in your bed or throw a tantrum.
We fear the Mystery mostly because we are conditioned to reject the natural cycles of life and death.
We also fear it because our ego is wired to stay safe, and there is nothing safe about creating new worlds. Even when the old ones are no longer serving but instead sucking away our life force.
As humans, we get to feel our feet on the ground as we walk ourselves away from what is harming us, metaphorically every day. Putting our hands in the dirt will take us to the Mother we need to help us hold all this grief.
The next time you feel haunted try turning towards what it is only %3 and then remember the last time you felt good and safe in your body. If you can’t remember on your own ask someone you trust to reflect back something positive they see in you. We indeed need each other.
Toxic patriarchal wiring will say we are alone and we will die if we ask for help. But that my friends is a bold-faced lie. We need to remember our zip code as Ram Dass used to say, if we want to be able to do deep mystical and soul retrieval work in a sustainable way.
You have more to give, more to make. Cultivating greater choice and being with all that haunts you will inform the next things you are meant to be a channel for if you make space for it
Growl externally or internally at that which threatens you and see what happens…or try this gentle breath and somatic practice for grief and angel’s blessings.
Let me know how it goes, always here for it.
