Trauma and Basic Goodness: Sometimes Being Shattered isn't the Worst Thing Ever
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My brain isn’t working so well these days. How about yours? I think this is pretty normal considering the circumstances. I hope you all are being extremely kind and patient with your overwhelmed minds and bodies. Just in case anyone who wants to read something that isn’t coronavirus stats, this is an excerpt from a talk I gave to some young people at Karme Choling Shambhala Meditation Center, right before everything started going pandemically haywire. It’s a chunk of my story but it’s also relevant to the fact that so many people are being traumatized right now by the threat this pandemic poses to everyone’s health and wellbeing. For some, this is a first experience of trauma. For many others, old traumas are being re-triggered. For everyone, no matter what their experience, basic goodness and/or resilience can help us get through this...and possibly even find a greater sense of self.
I’m here to talk about my experiences with trauma and basic goodness, particularly in light of everything that’s going on in Shambhala and, of course, in the world. I have no credentials. I’m not a therapist or a meditation instructor or anything like that. I’m a writer, which qualifies me for nothing. I write fantasy books for kids, which qualifies me for even less. But my books always have some kind of focus on trauma and resilience. I also do creativity workshops with kids, because creativity is an awesome healing tool. And I go around talking to anyone who will listen about the effects of trauma, because it’s something we’re learning more and more about every day and it’s something that more and more people are experiencing every day, especially right now as the threat of coronavirus grows. So the more we understand about trauma, the more we can help.
My expertise in trauma is %100 experiential. I am a sexual assault survivor. I was kidnapped at gunpoint by a serial rapist when I was 18. This happened well over 20 years ago and if I’ve accomplished anything since then it’s been to become an expert on my own healing. Because while others might know a lot of helpful stuff, it only works if I figure out how to use their knowledge to my best advantage. With that in mind, here’s one of the surprising directions my healing path has taken me in:
I became a part of Shambhala about 7 years ago and lived and worked here at Karme Choling for two years. During that time I took the Refuge Vow and became a Buddhist. I later took a vow claiming the head of the Shambhala lineage, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, as my main teacher. After leaving Karme Choling I bought a house nearby in order to remain close to the center, to the local sangha, and to my teacher.
In other words, I made a huge investment in and commitment to the Shambhala community. And with good reason. Shambhala, and Karme Choling in particular, were huge sources of comfort, healing, and belonging. As a part of the community I was able to process and make sense of what had happened to me on a whole new level, to feel safe in a way I never had before. I was able to start turning my experience into a strength rather than a massive wounding.
Unfortunately, when everything started going pear-shaped in Shambhala a couple years ago--namely teachers being accused of everything from sexual misconduct to sexual assault and the subsequent community and media fallout--I found myself massively re-triggered. Old old stuff started resurfacing, stuff I thought I had beaten. In ways I felt worse off than I’d ever been before because I was giving Shambhala all the credit for “fixing” me, for making all the bad better. To have that source fall apart triggered panic, terror, and overwhelming grief. There were times when I didn’t know who to trust, even amongst some of my closest friends.
This is the nature of trauma. When it gets retriggered, the way it did for me, your body and mind don’t know the difference between the present moment and the moment when the initial trauma happened. So when people I had put unprecedented amounts of spiritual and emotional trust in were suddenly accused of doing the kinds of things that had profoundly hurt me in the past, I began to feel extremely unsafe and betrayed. The rapist from 20 years ago had been a total stranger, but I CHOSE these people. And I trusted them with everything, including my deepest hurts and vulnerabilities. It was shattering.
But! And bear with me on this. Sometimes being shattered isn’t the worst thing.
In order to deal with the panic attacks and out of control badness I was experiencing after Shambhala hit the fan, I had to look into new ways of healing, stuff I had never tried before. I discovered Sensorimotor Psychotherapy for working with trauma, a modality that goes beyond your thoughts and your rational mind and finds ways to gently access and release trauma held in the body. I didn’t know this before, but traumatic experiences are literally stored in the body. The definition of trauma is an event or experience that overwhelms your capacity to cope or make sense of it. In other words, it overwhelms your rational mind and the system you’ve set up for understanding the world and your place in it. It also short circuits your body’s natural responses to threat and unless you’re able to release that initial impulse, it stays in your body as a kind of confused form of self protection, to sound the alarm in case something similarly threatening ever happens again. Which is how I got re-triggered when Shambhala blew up. Even though I wasn’t in physical danger this time, my system jumped back to a time when I was, and the result was a lot of confusion, panic, and an inability to assess what was actually happening in the present moment.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy helped me process the stored past trauma, which in turn enabled me to accurately assess the current level of threat and danger. It helped me reconnect to the present moment. Which is something teachings about basic goodness also do. For anyone who hasn’t heard about basic goodness before, I’ll try to paraphrase Shambhala teachings on the subject: it’s a kind of inborn okayness, a fundamental perfection of existing. Just by being, you are enough. I have trouble putting it into words because the best way to understand it is to experience it for yourself. And that’s what happened when I started doing Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. I’d gotten hints of it during meditation--an infallible sense of resilience, of being bigger than anything that can happen to one person or ego. But doing Sensorimotor Psychotherapy turned it from a hint or a theory into an actual experience of being big enough to handle whatever comes my way. I need to be crystal clear about something: bodies and egos and all the other discret, vulnerable, easily-bruised components of human being should never be dismissed as bad or unimportant, nor will I let anyone off the hook for doing harm to them. But our bodies and our egos (and our bruiseable bits) function a lot more cohesively if they are integrated into a greater context. At that point, in terms of healing, we no longer have to focus only on or be defined by feelings of pain or loss. Those feelings deserve attention and care, but we can know that they aren’t all we are.
So back to my claim that sometimes being shattered isn’t the worst thing: Shambhala didn’t invent basic goodness. Shambhala chose those words to describe it, but it is a universal truth. It just is. And much of Shambhala’s teachings are simply about becoming aware of this truth. Not trying to convince you of some magical thing that may or may not exist, but rather making you aware of or reconnecting you to this thing you already are. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (and other forms of somatic therapies) can do the same thing, though it might be referred to as resilience rather than basic goodness. But what compels you to seek out a greater understanding of basic goodness or resilience? If I hadn’t been shattered (and more than once), I wouldn’t have even known that there was something greater to become aware of.
In the context of dharma, which is what teachings about basic goodness are, the teachings are good even when teachers let you down. And you are good, even when really shitty things happen to you (or you do really shitty things). Basic goodness remains basic goodness and resilience is always possible. Again, I am in no way dismissing feelings of hurt, loss, grief, fear, anger, or shattered-ness with a panacea of “goodness.” There is a place for all of those feelings to be messy and expressed and honored and whatever else the moment calls for. But there is also an opportunity to use them as a catalyst for greater awareness. Of self and everything else. Whether you get there by meditation, somatic therapy, or some other path, having a direct experience of your own basic goodness, resilience, or godliness is worth doing in this lifetime.
My healing journey isn’t over yet, and the current pandemic is creating new avenues of experience for me and for all of us. No matter what happens, I hope to continue having this greater space of basic goodness/resilience within which to hold all experiences of pain, fear, and loss. It’s a space where I can hold the shattered-ness without being defined by it. I wish this for all of us. Even if it’s just glimpses of our own basic goodness, of what we truly are and are capable of, it will be enough to get us through even our most shattered moments.