To be human is to traverse a lifetime of micro and macro initiations. Each one of us is a hero or heroine on a mysterious journey of pleasure, love, and connection, as well as states of fear, anxiety, separation, darkness, loss and heartbreak. Initiations are the path of evolution. They crack us open, break us down, leave us breathless and eventually, through their alchemy and transmutation, present us with our personal light and power.

The matrix of social and cultural conditioning is the most pervasive form of trauma on the planet. It’s a system of mind control that manipulates us to think, feel, and behave in specific ways. Without realizing what’s happening, we become drugged by a fabricated and conditioned reality. One that recklessly distorts our feelings of wholeness and creates a sense of painful separation and aloneness.

What exactly is trauma? How does it impact our sense of self, well-being, and relationship to life? How does trauma influence our levels of stress, hyper-vigilance, patterns of control, and fear-based behaviors on a daily basis? And how do we heal from it? In this article, I’ll explore these questions and provide a conceptual framework of trauma.

Trauma changes our relationship to ourselves. It changes our relationship to the world, and our experience self-trust and feeling safety within our own being. Let’s look at a few common impacts of trauma.

To investigate the heart of personal trauma is to gaze through three influencing factors: physical and psychological trauma; attachment and developmental trauma; and expanded cosmologies of trauma. In this article, we explore them one-by-one

In this article, we investigate three main categories within ancestral and inherited trauma: DNA and epigenetics, family and social conditioning, and eco-psychology.

Trauma that affects a community or a whole society is called a collective trauma. In this article, we will make a distinction between two aspects of collective trauma: cultural traumatic events and the disempowering and persistent psychological trauma that is a result of the matrix of social and cultural conditioning.

Your brain is the mapmaker of your belief system. While our subconscious beliefs serve us to an extent, they also leave us with blind spots, such as outdated protection mechanisms. Becoming an integrated human being isn’t about erasing our adaptive strategies, but about expanding and updating responses that reflect who we are now.

Embracing your adult relationship patterns is a journey of power reclamation. You have the power to interrupt what no longer serves you and to make conscious relationship choices that fulfill, heal, and uplift you into greater levels of growth and intimacy.

Going down the rabbit hole of personal and collective trauma can invoke what some refer to as a dark night of the soul. The phrase “dark night of the soul” is used to describe what happens when the conceptual frameworks of our life, and the associated meaning we have attributed to it, fall apart. This collapse of “normal” can occur suddenly, or slowly over time, creating a dark and disorienting space inside.

Our greatest challenges are the medicine we are here to transmute from bitter into sweet healing for ourselves and others. The way to heal abusive cycles born from our past is to find safe, loving, and attuned support to help unravel the trauma of misunderstanding ourselves as bad or wrong because of other people’s projections, fears, and defended hearts. We need new and more accurate mirrors.

To dig into the conditioned mind is to unwind the ways in which we try to control and plan every aspect of our lives, and instead learn to surrender and sink into befriending the unknown. The practice takes discipline, self-acceptance, trusted allies, and humility.

What does it mean to be an integrated human? The process is a deep inquiry into how our multi-faceted systems are both organized towards expressing our authentic self and away from this towards ideas of who we think we should, could, or ought to be.

Anger is something that everyone experiences, at one level or another, and it needs to be expressed to maintain emotional health and intimacy. Most people have a murky relationship with anger and how to express it in a way that isn’t hurtful to oneself or others.

Much of what we’ve been taught to value points us outside of ourselves and increases a sense of feeling separate and alone. If we can’t force a system to change then what can we find inside of ourselves that carries us through the storm of collective change? How can leaders challenge the old paradigm and support a collaborative and wisdom-oriented approach towards effective change?

When we embrace the view that our shadows are as significant as our joy and passion we are on a different journey than the traditional one of ‘avoid feeling and exploring your fear, create illusions of control, and pretend to be what you think is acceptable’. Opening into and witnessing what is present in our experience is the entry point to a path of deepening into an authentic relationship with ourselves and all of life.

Have you noticed that loss, change, and transitions invite the opportunity to drop the veils and get down and dirty with what’s really important? Simultaneously, what do you notice about all the ways you try not to be where you are, embrace what you’re feeling, or face what is in front of you?

The roots of the restorative justice process come from the lineage of tribal cultures and the practice of ‘council meetings’. On the surface, the intent is to provide an alternative to the criminal justice system, however, it’s laced with the profound impact of personal transformation, community building, and healing.

Have you ever found yourself sensing that something or someone simply didn’t resonate with you but you bypass this information and listen to what you ‘should do or feel’ instead? This happens every day. Our mind can be as fast as a hummingbird.

When we cultivate enough awareness to investigate and witness the default patterns of the mind, we can begin to make new choices and rewire the neural pathways in the brain that impact our emotions and physical vitality.

Anxiety and fear are common emotions many of us experience in response to our life circumstances and the uncertainty of transitions and decision points. These emotional states can feel disorienting and we may find ourselves acting out in behaviors or activities that are not healthy or supportive.