Trauma Healing Is Spiritual Work.

First, a caveat: spiritual healing and growth is in the eye of the beholder. If you resist or reject the premise of having a spiritual landscape, that’s awesome! If you are in process with your own relationship with spirit and healing, read on!

When we are living with the impacts of unresolved traumatic stress in our lives, this affects our ability to navigate daily life with grace. The manifestations of traumatic stress are very individualized - maybe manifesting as chronic activation and anxiety. Or as despair and lethargy. Often as some blend of the both.

Traumatic stress usually comes about from a rupture in the relational matrix - perhaps because of a shocking experience. Perhaps because of a lack of social and systemic supports. Perhaps because of bias and bigotry. Perhaps because of childhood neglect and mistreatment. Perhaps from the literal rupturing of the boundaries of bodies and skin.

Trauma recovery is a winding path of repairing these ruptures. It’s not a one-size-fits-all journey. Often there are trends and overlap, yes, however, *your* trauma recovery journey and *my* trauma recovery journey are two very different journeys.

Certainly a key quality of trauma recovery is the welcoming home of our fractured parts and experiences. And, as we integrate, opportunity arises to notice and attend to deeper feelings of fracturing and isolation that might exist that sever ourselves as individuals from the larger relational matrix of humanity and the beyond-human-world. 

This experience of noticing and choosing to weave ourselves into the larger web of relationship is a slow and spiritual process. For myself, I’ve discovered that the landscape of the erotic is a powerful landscape within which to practice this weaving.

We can practice cultivating erotic feeling and energy (an abundant internal resource) to manifest states of excitement, bliss, connection, and creativity. Through practice we expand our capacity to feel ourselves and our aliveness more deeply. Perhaps as individuals, and, as we practice, perhaps as part of a larger web of abundant and vibrant life.

Spiritual journeying is a quality I never expected to find myself exploring in professional practice, however, having an erotic spiritual practice has become a constant companion that has made all the difference for me.