*This is an early version of a chapter in my upcoming book, Saturn’s Maw: Essays and Aphorisms for the Living and the Dead
Suggested Listening: Worlds Theory Playlist
“Speaking quite generally, this is the point at which psychotherapy falls short of being a way of liberation, even when it is recognized that therapy is far more than adjustment. The weakness lies not so much in the theoretical differences and confusions of the various schools as in certain tacit agreements – in particular the continued acceptance of the dualistic view of man: ego and unconscious, psyche and soma, subject and object, reality principle and pleasure principle, reason and instinct. Therapy is healing, making whole, and any system which leaves the individual upon one horn of the dualistic dilemma is at best the achievement of courageous despair.”
– Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East and West
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
– Albert Einstein
“This mind is not ours, not another’s, not coming from elsewhere; yet after we bring forth this mind, when we take up the whole earth, it turns entirely into gold, when we stir up the great oceans, they turn immediately into ambrosia”
– Dōgen, Bringing Forth the Mind of Bodhi
Lifeworlds and Collective Healing
WT’s emphasis on the social and cultural basis of the mind and body’s social basis has great precedent. Prior to our modern era of therapy, many great psychotherapists were also philosophers or social psychologists. They blurred the lines between spirituality, psychology, philosophy, and other disciplines in ways that are rarer and stranger in our contemporary material conditions. As WT draws its inspiration from these earlier practitioners and thinkers as part of its heartbeat, it aligns with the tradition of seeing the individual’s experience at the most bodily level as inextricably structured by the larger social and cultural world it arises within. More than this, WT sees the body as a social and cultural experience as in a feedback loop with larger codependently-arising conditions of the mezzo and macro systems. In other words, our bodies are shaped by the systems we are in but our body can also engage and shape those systems based on what kinds of schemas we operate with. This idea has its antecedents in the lineage of people like Karl Marx or Max Weber. It is a great tragedy of our modern therapy culture under scientific materialism that some of the most helpful ideas how to understand and heal trauma are not in the domain of psychotherapy. For example, the Unwelt, or lifeworld, of the philosophers Husserl and Heidegger can provide rich and necessary perspective on the world but we rarely encounter (if ever) these types of ideas in the therapy or spiritual practice world.
Here is a short description:
Husserl’s phenomenology brackets the lifeworld, which he treats as the ‘natural’ or unreflective attitude involved in everyday conceptions of reality. The lifeworld is, however, not a pure, interpretation-free world. It is a social, historical, and cultural world loaded with various interpretations and value perspectives. The lifeworld includes individual, social, perceptual, and practical experiences. Lifeworld denotes the way the members of one or more social groups, for example, cultures, linguistic communities, use to structure the world into objects. In analyzing and describing the lifeworld, phenomenology attempts to show how the world of theory and science originates from the lifeworld, strives to discover the mundane phenomena of the life-world itself, and attempts to show how the experience of the lifeworld is possible by analyzing time, space, body, and the very givenness or presentation of experience.
WT seeks to integrate these philosophical and sociological insights into the very structures of time, space, body at the level of our felt-sense of ourselves and the world. Philosophers have historically focused on the way that whole groups and cultures share a specific lifeworld amongst each other and the trauma healing world stands to gain immensely from resurrecting this awareness. In the ideological backdrop of scientific materialism, we can easily miss that a scientific focus on neurobiology and the brain as the core of healing trauma is part of the lifeworld we live in. WT sees this focus on the social and cultural backdrop of healing and the therapy world as necessary addition to approaches to healing and liberation which privilege the individual or even small-scale community as its site of intervention. At the base of our experience of reality itself and our specific sufferings, we cannot separate our wounds from the lifeworld they exist in which is profoundly social, cultural, and even political and economic.
Our shared assumptions and values themselves based in these larger systems and contexts shape how we even divide things into objects at all. For example, if you have experienced trauma in your family, school, or religious community, these systems co-dependently arise within the larger systems which structure them. If you have ever experienced the knife’s edge of your wounds being misunderstood or invalidated when you have been wounded in any of these systems, rest assured it makes no sense why this happens without seeing the whole world arising in that moment. When we cannot or refuse to see this, we are doomed to constantly feed the very same information and energy we were given back into the world in every given moment. The limbic language and experiential base we need to understand and help heal our depression or anxiety must arise from the whole world that gave birth to them, not just our family or community.
WT takes the larger abstract and theoretical approaches of philosophy or sociology and ground them in our body and structures of our mind. In other words, WT sees philosophy and sociology as just as essential for healing and liberation as psychology and spiritual practice. As Alan Watts has said in Psychotherapy East and West, both psychology and paths of spiritual liberation put great emphasis on the individual but deemphasize the cultural and social institutions of which these paths seek to heal and liberate us from. Along with Watts, WT takes this contextualizing of our healing and liberation in the social, cultural, and political institutions as the essential. Contextualizing Watts’s insight, we also pay close attention to how the individual’s embodied, emotional, and spiritual life gets easily lost in conceptions and analysis of large-scale systems. In all our looking to analyze the systems, we must never forget that it is our nervous systems and emotional schemas that shape the mind that analyzes the systems. WT deepens healing and liberation practices through integrating the philosophical and sociological views of lifeworlds (i.e. shared assumptions of cultures, groups, and institutions) with the depth of somatic and emotional insights of trauma healing, existentialism, spiritual practice. To be clear: WT sees that there is no understanding systems without understanding the nervous systems and emotional lives of the beings that make up those institutions.
Without understanding how our lifeworlds are shaped and structured by our feeling and perceptions, we can easily miss how the very paths of liberation or healing are profoundly caught in the very systems of the lifeworlds. If our paths of healing and liberation can only reinforce the schemas of self of those systems, healing and liberation will continually hang us by the hooks of our own making. Our attempts to heal leave us with the tragedy of the very tools of our liberation only deepen our suffering and reinforce the very logic and assumptions of the systems that we suffer within. Audre Lorde, icon of the Black feminist movement, once said, “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” WT sees the self and its schemas we are all inherit as the most pervasive and enduring tool of the master.
By taking this social, cultural, and political integration as essential to any healing or liberatory practice, WT points to a way of seeing through the very assumptions of self-operating behind the curtain when someone seeks liberation from their suffering. These schemas are often the real culprit, behind our pain, incapacity, and powerlessness. Going further than just Dante’s experience, it also provides a framework for the therapist, meditation practitioner, existential philosopher, etc. to question their own self and schemas as arising from these very same systems. To see through the self of the person you are helping with healing or liberation fundamentally confronts you with how much we have seen through our own self. The degree to which we are intimate with our suffering, and its causes goes a long way on the road to helping others understand their own. At some point, Virgil was just as lost as Dante in that dark wood and traversed the inferno in the same steps. In the end, there were just two co-dependently arising pilgrims.
In WT, to be a healer or to be healed asks us to strive to become a philosopher, sociologist, political theorist, or any other type of thinker who could illuminate the worlds of the self. Scientific materialism and specialized disciplines in our current world contribute to the breakdown of broad and holistic approach of inquiry and curiosity of the world for healing and liberation of beings. Alternatively, WT is an interdisciplinary framework and not based in scientific materialism (though it does see scientific inquiry as essential for understanding our world and nervous systems, in particular). It gives no quarter to any need to keep specific learnings and wisdom about the world separated into neat and tidy buckets. This need often arises from the schemas of self and world of suffering. Rigidity is one of the great markers of nervous system dysregulation. As WT grants that being philosophical, existential, and spiritual is organic and an emergent property to having a nervous system and a mind, it views the capacity we and others must access this level of metathinking as at least somewhat universal. WT is primarily an optimistic and hopeful model of the relationship between human beings and their worlds. However, its optimism and hope can only be won through a direct journey into our individual and collective suffering. For WT, the only legitimate hope lies on the other side of the gateway out of the inferno.
Lifeworlds and Collective Healing
I have often heard the call that we must heal in community or awaken together for the sake of collective liberation. WT attempts to provide a practical and theoretical (i.e. praxis-based) framework for this very process for assessing the various systems and schemas of the self which are precisely what we are trying to heal from and liberate ourselves from together. While the worlds and schemas of the self will be different based on our nervous system and mind’s specific context, a soteriological metatheory approach allows us to peer into the self which is suffering to see what is both unique and universal in that suffering. For example, while there are universal aspects of the suffering self in a Buddhist framework (namely greed, hatred, and delusion), how we experience greed, hatred, and delusion are profoundly social and systemic. At this point in human evolution, our nervous system still utilizes the same limited number of survival responses and schemas specific material conditions to respond and adapt to the environment as the time of the Buddha.
A Buddhist practitioner in 4th century India seeking to liberate themselves from greed, hatred, and delusion will be both different and the same as someone seeking to liberate oneself in the United States in the 21st century. The systems will be different, the culture will be different, the material and karmic conditions will be different, but the nervous system remains the same. In our current era, the globalized nature of media, politics, and economics gives us enormously powerful means to act out of our greed, hatred, and delusion (or being very influenced based on our propensities for these qualities of the separate self). However, whether you have an iPhone in your hand, a newspaper, or are reading sutras off of palm leaves, you are still experiencing a self-constructed through language, culture, and biology as you take in the world. If this were not the case, spiritual practices or means of healing from thousands of years ago would be less then helpful – they would be unintelligible to us. As they are not, we have the good fortune to know that the karma and neurobiology we carry connect us to all those before and that will come after who seek the very same alchemical gold we do.
From this point, our question now becomes how exactly does WT approach healing and liberation? While WT can utilize many tools from what is already available popularized as approaches to healing trauma, it combines them into its soteriological framework in unique ways. Moreover, it brings in the elements of philosophy, sociology, and spiritual psychology to guide the use of those tools beyond just healing. Our main task is to find where healing becomes liberation and what differentiates the two to guide our use of which tools are most appropriate for which task. By clearly delineating the two and how they overlap in the model trauma healing landscape, WT addresses can address the blind spots in both. Any soteriological metatheory worth its salt must be able to account for the various layers of wounding and healing which (as much as this complicates the picture) constantly interact and reinforce each other. As we say with the bodhisattva vow in the Buddhist tradition, it is precisely because the task is impossible that we make the conscious effort to take it up for ourselves and all beings. Our Alan Watts quote at the beginning speaks precisely to why WT incorporates spiritual practice and philosophy for seeing the limitations of psychotherapy. WT unabashedly states the need to be radical in the political, existential, spiritual sense to question the very self and social conditioning which causes our suffering. We must take psychotherapy and healing further than the limits of the medical model and trauma healing can provide to find the paradoxical point in space between the dualistic horns of either liberation or healing.
Creating Worlds Upon Worlds
WT’s views the common ground of healing and liberation, the bridge between the two, in the necessity of seeing through the self which suffers and is experienced as a separate, isolated being in the universe. For this separate self to even be experienced at all, it requires an entire array of codependently-arising conditions of the entire world and its systems for us to have a separate, isolated self-constructed in this way. Philosophers like Charles Taylor and Michel Foucault have written a great deal on the historical and cultural roots of what we call the self in our era and how it is not some immutable thing that exists in the same way in all times and places. WT agrees and sees the self as a process and emergent property based on our world conditions and schemas which is greatly impacted by the amount of trauma we have experienced. When we carry an overwhelming amount of unmetabolized information and energy in our node of the circuit, we tend to organize our sense of self and identity around the symptoms and challenges that unmetabolized information and energy creates.
On the existential and spiritual layers of experience, the self is constantly being made and remade through a process of meaning-making and integration of information and energy in the nervous system. Various schemas, core beliefs, and adaptive and coherent strategies to certain kinds of information and energy make up this self. In the medical model where diagnostic categories provide the most ready-at-hand description for suffering, we miss something fundamentally important about human experience. Just as Donna Henderson points at with how autism spectrum disorder is currently diagnosed in Is This Autism? A Guide for Clinicians and Everyone Else, we diagnose something based on the social adaptations of the core experience, not the core experience itself. WT views anxiety, depression, and even PTSD and Complex PTSD in a similar way. We diagnose ourselves and others based on a collection a coherent strategies and core schemas of self, not on the core experience those things are protective reactions to. In WT’s model, we utilize mapping the world and spacetime location of the self instead of diagnosing. Diagnoses can only lead to managing and reducing symptoms. Mapping a world and the spacetime location of the self leads to compassion, wisdom, and the possibly of rescue.
Where diagnosis and most therapeutic approaches tend to fall short in conceptualizing and understanding how mezzo and macro systems influence the very conceptions, practices, and goals of what therapy and healing focus on. Even more so, these approaches often shy away from the radical challenge spiritual practices and philosophies pose to any perspective built on the scientific materialist framework. Usually, one must go to Western philosophy, cognitive science, or perhaps psychedelic experiences to find direct challenges to our conceptions of the self in our world. When the codependently-arising conditions of our shared world lead to epidemics of loneliness, increasing traumatic stress, and great plagues of anxiety and depression, posing direct challenges to the self is increasingly difficult. Many experiential therapies like Internal Family Systems or Coherence Therapy take a huge step in letting go of the medical model by eschewing diagnosis as a starting point. However, they stumble on the bridge between healing and liberation when their other foot gets snagged by the assumptions of scientific materialism. As it is so challenging to clip the strings of our ideological ties to scientific materialism, making Watts’s leap into the paradox between the two horns remains just as essential for our time. The world of therapy and healing trauma are themselves social institutions grounded in the world of scientific materialism. Healing and finding our wholeness again so we can return to the larger world circuit and Indra’s Net requires us to go through, not around, the very self we inherit from the world. This includes all the very institutions of therapy and healing which could be just another gate keeping us trapped in the Inferno.
Lest we neglect the other horn of the paradox, we must also hold that spiritual practices and philosophies tend to shy away from a self-reflective view of the very social systems and institutions of which they arise from and within. These philosophies limit the radical potential of the very spiritual disciplines they prescribe to challenge these core schemas of self which are the source of our suffering. Of course, you can find in almost all spiritual and religious traditions the strains which utilize critical perspectives from politics, history, philosophy, and economics to deconstruct their own foundation. They clearly see how the institutions and theology itself become obstacles to liberation and healing. By and large, however, most of us do not encounter these perspectives without some kind of academic or philosophical exposure to the nooks and crannies of the traditions. We turn away from whole traditions and spiritual disciplines which can provide much needed guidance and tools for how to challenge the schemas of the self which dominate our lives. It is even more challenging to find spiritual practices which integrate the recent approaches of IPNB, experiential trauma therapies, and a general conception of how the body and nervous system shape our experience. Without these views, they miss crucial insights into the ways our nervous systems limit or expand our ability to use spiritual practices to their fullest for liberation and seeing through the self. This is not even to mention the tendency of spiritual healers and leaders to fall prey to their own unconscious impulses, emotions, tendencies to abuse power, or traumatic histories being projected onto others. This has led to untold amounts of traumatic experiences and religious trauma for eons. Yet again, we come back to the absolute requirement for a soteriological metatheory that is usable both for healer and healed simultaneously.
WT sees healing and liberation as two dynamic elements of one process. This process involves a specific set of ideas, practices, and general philosophy of how to see through the self. The unmetabolized information and energy being carried within one’s neurobiological circuitry results from a combination of one’s personal history, the larger intergenerational history of your respective family lineages, and the larger social systems and cultural assumptions of your specific world(s). The fastest way to access, understand, and metabolize this material lies in the layers of spiritual and existential experience. At these layers in WT, our relationship to questions of freedom, death, impermanence, change, compassion, and wisdom become the focus of both thinking and practice. The emotional learnings and schemas of your self hold the exact information you need to see through the self into the world and all the systems it has arisen from. Healing and liberation come not from counteracting and “fixing” one’s schemas and self that is the locus of suffering. This is no different than a common schema I hear my work with clients: it is easier to shame and criticize myself in hopes of changing my experience than changing the entire world and reality I live in. Healing and liberation come from metabolizing the information and energy that has brought you to believe your “self” or the world needs fixing at all. When we believe we can and must be different to heal and find freedom, we are worshipping the Inferno instead of walking out of the gates. We are trapped in the deepest, most profound protection against the unmetabolized information and energy of trauma that beings can create. We have become our suffering and forgotten there even is a world outside of the Inferno. Despite our ingenious solutions to survive, healing and liberation can never be found by identifying or becoming our suffering. This is just another way of avoiding our pain. Healing and liberation begins when accept the wisdom that there is no escape from it.
Time to wake up.
Schemas of Healing and Liberation
Let’s take another turn up the spiral to get another view of our starting point. When we grant interconnectedness or interbeing as our foundation, WT sees our experience of ourselves alone, isolated, disconnected, and shut off from life and the world as the primary mystery. WT states that the alone, isolated self which suffers can only be an emergent property of the entire world (or worlds) where this experience was and is a protective schema. For this experience and aloneness and separateness flies in the face of the most basic experience of reality itself. Any path to healing and especially liberation must contain means for the separate self to be seen through at its very origins and in its impermanent nature. This will necessarily involve heartbreak. The self that seeks greater control and power over reality, our environment, others, or ourselves unfortunately cannot be the solution to our suffering we hoped it would be. In fact, it is the very heart of the problem itself. Now, this is not to say that one should have no sense of self or ego.
A self is a necessary and useful structure for navigating reality and keeping us alive. More so, the play of separateness would not even be possible for us without the inheritance and emergent property of a separate self. As cognitive science and Yogācāra would agree, the self emerges out of unconscious processes that we do not have direct access to. WT goes even further than this recognition of the cognitive and karmic realities of the self. WT sees the true function of the self as the very means to fully actualize and make real your specific jewel in Indra’s Net. The only real question is whether one operates with an inherited self-originating in survival or a consciously constructed self-originating in safety and joyous expression of your place in the Net.
WT’s model sees a self as essential to experience fully the safety, joyful expression, healing, and (to at least some degree) liberation. WT involves metabolizing unprocessed information and energy from past trauma and karma so we can see through the self as it is constructed across all systems + spacetime. Healing allows us to reintegrate the fragmented circuit of the past worlds of trauma back into their rightful place in the spacetime continuum. The past finally becomes the past and the present finally becomes the present. Seeing through the self is primarily seeing the world that the self codependently arose from. In the Buddhist tradition, we often speak of wisdom and compassion as two aspects of the same thing. WT sees that existential and spiritual freedom also co-dependently arise with wisdom and compassion.
The bridge from healing to liberation lies exactly at this inflection point. There is no freedom without compassion or wisdom as freedom requires one to accept and be intimate with the conditions from which one is acting freely. Wisdom arises when we see through the self to the very heart of the codependently-arisen material and karmic conditions of the self. Compassion arises when we see that it is only our alone, isolated self that creates the illusion of separation between the various things in these conditions and ourselves. With wisdom and compassion, we finally feel safe and at home enough to experience and act freely as ourselves. For in acting as ourselves, the whole universe acts and we are acted by the whole universe. This is Dante’s ascent to the Heavens with the guide of both his compassionate and wise guides of Virgil and Beatrice.
WT holds that seeing through the self and the world behind it are the existential and spiritual layers of change required to replace hatred and judgment with compassion and wisdom as our primary orientations to the world, others, and ourselves. Any mode of healing or liberation which does not emphasize this will likely only result in constant counteracting our shame, hatred of ourselves, or hatred of others without ever finding the road to transforming those tendencies at their root. A common world condition we inherit from not just our families but the general cultural and political and economic systems centers guilt, shame, and self-hatred as a primary orientation to ourselves. Over the years in my own healing and in my work with clients, I have found no greater block to healing our wounds and liberating us from suffering than the universal schema of shaming and punishing ourselves for what has happened to us. As opposed to our general culture of shame and hyper-individualism in our Western capitalist and Judeo-Christian frameworks, there is nothing noble or helpful in the way we think about shaming and guilting ourselves for our feelings and what has happened to us. In fact, shaming and guilting ourselves for our normal human emotions or events out of control lie at the heart of our schemas of self which relate to reality through power and control. However, the self-built on power and control through shame and self-hatred to feel safe in the world can only find the illusion of power and control. For no amount of control inside or of the self can ever truly control events outside of the self. No amount of self-hatred can truly change the conditions of one’s own environment. Shame and self-hatred are a not disease, they are an adaptation of an organism in a hostile and threatening environment beyond its control.
Now, this is not to say that the self has no agency, control, or ability to impact the world and change one’s conditions. An approach to healing and liberation based on a self that has no real agency would essentially abdicate all responsibility for yourself and your world. It would be an escape from one’s freedom and a sacrifice of our capacities for wisdom and compassion, as well. it would be a dead end for how to occupy a totally different orientation to that world and our lives. In the end, it would be a total acquiescence to the world of depression where freedom, compassion, and wisdom are forfeited for the hope of just not feeling so damn terrified all the time. In WT’s view, this depressive world shares the same underlying assumptions with approaches to healing that focus on simply helping the individual self feel just a bit better and less troubled by the world. The hope of healing being a slightly less bothersome adaption to the conditions as they exist is pessimism at its finest. These approaches seek to make the self more adaptive and “resilient” to the world without any insight into how the self and world are not separate. In other words, they hang us on one horn of the dualism Watts described. Both the sickness and the cure assume there is a separate self that is solid, permanent, and the source of our agency and identity.
In WT’s view of healing and liberation, when the self and the world(s) it arises with are seen through and fully grasped, the rigid and limited self of survival and separateness is freed. Compassion and wisdom arise in us as we finally see and feel in our bodies the true nature of the information and energy that have been structuring our experience. Then, with the safety of the present world and with our capacity for wisdom and compassion online, we can unfreeze the body that had to freeze to survive, flee that which could not be escaped, and fight that could not be fought in the past world. WT sees all types of experiential therapies for trauma and practices of spiritual liberation as aiming to enhance and expand our sense of agency and control over our inner experiences and responses to the world. When we see through the separate self and into the causes and conditions of its arising, we can now identify with (and not against) the entire codependently-arising conditions of the world of the here and now. We now identify as the self and the entire environmental conditions the self is operating within. Now that we are not limited to just being a separate self against the environment/world/universe, the existential suffering of our separateness and aloneness can be resolved. We see that the aloneness itself was always just a call to return home.
This new way of experience leads to a self that is primarily an expression of the world conditions with agency and freedom to enact upon those very same conditions. This becomes possible to the degree we can experience in the body and our emotional reality that there is no separation between the two. There is no way not to constantly be affecting the world conditions one is in. A World is the combined experience of the self, the internal conditions of the body and mind, and the environmental conditions as one total process. Much of our panic, depression, and rage are protections and defenses against being fully in the world of the here and now. They are, in the end, ways of not letting go of the past world. They are ways those marooned and exiled parts of ourselves desperately attempt to call us to their rescue. We can live and die without ever hearing their call.
Let’s look at the schemas of a self fully identified with its environment. Notice how the very schemas of the self increasingly reflect the qualities of wisdom, compassion, and freedom to act in the world (i.e. the hallmarks of healing and liberation):
- Subjectivity (the felt sense of being alive) – one’s individual life is experienced as codependently-arising and shared with all beings and inanimate objects in the environment, life is felt as precious and a gift, your life is shared with all others, your life is both very minimally important while also being essential to the entire universe, you are both separate and unified with the whole world simultaneously, you are living the entire history of your life and all life in every moment
- Perspective (the point of view from the center of experience and being alive) – your separate ego is no longer the separate experiencer and perceiver of the world, the whole world is seeing itself through your separate self of which you are a unified part, your entire body is now perceiving the world through movement and feeling in space and not just your thinking mind or head, codependently-arising conditions are now the center of experience instead of your thinking mind
- Agency (the center of action from being in living experience) – action arises spontaneously through the body and self, action is based on appropriate responses to current world conditions and not past world conditions, action is done by the self unified with the codependently-arising conditions and not the self acting on the world, action and agency come from internal regulated states and not survival threat responses to the external world (unless necessary)
WT’s vision of a self that is healed and liberate fits into practically every view of the combined experiential trauma therapies, affective neuroscience’s view of a regulated nervous system, and many spiritual disciplines of what some ideal state of human experience. WT’s healed and regulated human being would have enormous capacity for emotional regulation and presence, have a wide window of tolerance for emotional experience, and would have flexible access to all of our survival responses (the 4Fs in Pete Walker’s language). As this self can maintain a flow of information and energy with the current world it resides in, this self has minimal amounts of anxiety, depression, or dissociation unless they are appropriate responses to current world conditions. It primarily operates from the social engagement nervous system state that uses connection with self and others for meeting our needs, regulating our emotions, and operating in reality. Agency and control over one’s inner and outer worlds is returned (or maybe found for the first time) to a realistic standard. This self no longer spends most of its energy repressing emotions or trying to control its environments beyond what is feasible for the sake of blocking unmetabolized energy and information from past traumas of the old worlds.
Healing is not the end of the road with this kind of regulated, connected self in WT. Healing allows for greater capacity to reshape what meaning, purpose, and identity mean to us at the level of existential and spiritual experience. In WT, we cross the bridge to liberation when the self becomes a conscious and active participant in the causes and conditions of the world, here and now. WT’s self becomes active and alive with agency in the world but is simultaneously just a part of the larger causes and conditions of a codependently-arising world. It is only by becoming part of the world that we can ever truly act within it. The experience of no separation between us and the world becomes the center point of existence. Meaning and purpose now transcend one’s limited, separate self as meaning is now inherent to the very environment and causes and conditions themselves. We now can find great relief and peace within the self, not outside of it, as we no longer have our isolated, separate self as the center of our universe. We can finally experience and appreciate our life as being part of these codependently-arising conditions through experiencing life primarily through our bodies, not our heads. As we no longer need to dissociate and attack the body as the very source of our threat, we can finally feel at home with our sensations, emotions, and memories. An old saying in psychoanalysis says that the body is our unconscious. In WT, we say that traveling into and through the unconscious mind leads us into the body leads us to a new liberated world and universe.
Returning to IPNB, we can see this kind of healed and liberation self leading to us being integrated within ourselves but also fully integrated within our environments and social worlds, as well. In WT, this is when the node has returned to the circuit but no longer seeing itself as a separate node. The self and mind become our filtration system and organizing structure for the energy and information flowing through our individual nervous systems. Many forms of healing stop at regulating our nervous systems and integrating the individual self due to a wealth of unstated assumptions from the social, cultural, and political systems level. These assumptions usually lie in scientific materialism’s view of there is nothing beyond the brain or in the political assumptions of individualistic culture which sees psychotherapy as primarily a way to adapt us more smoothly to the environmental conditions as they are. On the unacknowledged or denied existential and spiritual layers of meaning, these assumptions straitjacket our visions of what a healed and free self could be like. The legacy of scientific materialism (which most healing approaches assume as a basis) has left us all with blocks to integrating various disciplines into a coherent way of seeing the worlds we exist in. It is one thing to talk about the social or political world as a psychologist or therapist but quite another to see the world through sociology or political theory while also doing healing work. As an antidote to this block, WT sees the necessity of combining these different perspectives on their own terms as necessary for a soteriological metatheory worth its salt. WT approaches our worlds through an interdisciplinary lens not out of conceit but because understanding our worlds and ourselves requires it. It is an interdisciplinary praxis through and through.
WT offers a way for those of us on the path of healing and liberation (whether as Dante or Virgil or both) to combine these different perspectives from philosophy, psychology, sociology, spiritual practice, etc. as essential for both processes. While no one can ever be an expert in all the various disciplines and perspectives that are a part of WT, we can prioritize the attempt to do as as essential for any engagement in healing and liberation. We have only greater understanding of our worlds to gain by doing so. WT seeks to undercut both the assumptions of scientific materialism which keeps healing in a separate container and the nervous system dysregulation from shame that keeps us trapped in the container of our own accord. WT both names the assumptions and gives us a framework to address our blind spots from the unspoken systems in our own world constructions as both the healer and the healing. Make no mistake: whether you are on your meditation cushion or sitting across from your therapist, the entire material conditions of the world are in the room with you. In the old Marxist or critical theory terms, analyzing and thinking about ideology becomes a central part of the path to healing and liberation in WT. Ideology makes the systems of the world our self arises within appear as reality itself. In the most radical way possible, our self as we usually encounter it is the embodied ideology of the world. Ideology and the version of the self we inherit ingeniously mask the impermanent social constructions of time, place, history, institutions, and politics/economy. It becomes difficult to question our most basic assumptions of reality when we would have to question the very self that is asking the question.
Is this not exactly what traumatic experiences and our unmetabolized information and energy in our nervous systems do, as well? Our nervous system provides its greatest protection (and perhaps greatest trick) in convincing us that the world of trauma as it presents itself to us is reality itself in the here and now. In WT’s view, we are not experiencing reality when we are in the throes of our traumatic pasts – we are experiencing the ideology of the entire world where that trauma occurred. The past world has usurped the present because the parts of us stuck there believes we never left. Surviving has gone from an objective reality to an ideology which believes itself to be objective reality. As many of my clients have reported, they wrote a manual for survival as a child, and no one helped that child realize they could write a new manual now with their adult body and mind.
This manual of inherited and learned responses of the survival from generations past shapes many of our experiences of trauma in the worlds of our families, communities, systems, etc. These systems operate on the same logic of survival and ideology of trauma that we inherit and carry in our own minds and bodies. These systems take their own ideology to be reality with little to no awareness of the nervous system states of survival they arise from. Despite how real that ideology feels in our bodies and minds, they function more like a collective dream than anything approaching reality. What cracks the guise of an ideology so complete as survival lies in the hope (real hope, not hope as avoidance of fear) from facing the despair and the devastation of our pasts. That hope lies in the wreckage of the past where we finally see these worlds could never truly tell us who we are. By seeing right through the center of the self into the worlds that created it, WT points the way out of the dark wood. Once we reach the clearing, we can see that who and what we are is and always has been far beyond what we can imagine from our states of survival and isolation. We see that our traumatic worlds of depression, anxiety, and complex trauma we carry in our mind and bodies are just ideologies of worlds and other beings that we had to believe to survive. We have gone from adapting to a world to having a chance to participate in and help create one.
Closing Wormholes and Repairing Spacetime
In WT, most forms of our mental and emotional suffering arise from traumatic experiences where unmetabolized information and energy has fragmented our worlds across spacetime. With this as our starting point, repairing those fragmented worlds and spacetime through metabolizing of undigested information and energy becomes the logical focus of healing. Healing trauma in WT moves beyond just about processing “unexperienced experience” as described in many trauma therapies. Processing “unexperienced experience” repairs the very fabric of reality at the existential and spiritual layer of experience which trauma has shattered and ripped apart for the subjective experience of the person experiencing it. All effective experiential therapies for trauma accomplish this on one level or another. Some like Coherence Therapy or Internal Family Systems go “top-down” and utilize the mind and cognition to do this. Others, like Somatic Experiencing or Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, go “bottom-up” and utilize the body and nervous system to locate undigested information and energy (i.e. unexperienced experience). Just as memory reconsolidation research in Coherence Therapy aims to find the universal mechanism of healing and transformation, WT extends this process across the bridge to liberation and spiritual and existential experience. We aim make these aspects of existential and spiritual healing explicit in identifying how our relationship to freedom, choice, power, death, connection, and meaning. Our relationship to these existential givens is shaped by our nervous systems, our schemas of self, and our overall functioning as a node in the larger circuitry of the world.
In essence, WT’s sees Pete Walker’s approach to resolving emotional flashback experiences as the starting point to reintegrate the past worlds into the present world. Resolving a flashback and its corresponding trigger functionally repairs the fracture in spacetime which keep the individual existing in multiple worlds at once. In WT, our primary source of suffering lies in the distortions of our schemas of the self which protectively arise as part of this spacetime fragmentation. Simply put, rescuing whatever part of us has been stuck in the past world and closing the wormhole resolve trauma at the existential and spiritual levels of wounding.
In WT’s integrated model of healing and liberation, the wormhole is central conceptual metaphor. Based on the wormhole, we accomplish healing and liberation through five primary steps:
- Finding the Wormhole
- Completing unfinished survival responses for specific situations or large-scale patterns of trauma such as abuse, neglect, abandonment, annihilation, etc. (somatic approaches and body-based focus)
- Entering the Wormhole
- Rescuing any abandoned and isolated fragmented parts of self stuck in those past worlds (Inner Child, Inner Teen, etc.) (parts work and Inner Child healing)
- Seeing the Codependently-Arising Conditions of the World in the Wormhole
- Updating emotional learnings about self and the world through completing those survival responses and reintegration of fragmented parts that have been stuck in these worlds (memory reconsolidation process)
- Closing the Wormhole
- Grieving our losses of being trapped in this old world such as original pain and suffering of the experiences, loss of attunement, loss of safety and trust, loss of authentic development and expression of our self, lost time, lost futures of what could have been, and loss of ideas and images of who we thought we were and who we thought other people were (metabolizing of undigested information and energy of past world)
- Homecoming
- Integration of the rescued part back into the circuitry of the world now, reparenting and Inner Healer/current self teach lost parts how to adapt to world now, development of spiritual and existential practices to expand the self and enhance capacity to face impermanence and death, cultivation of practices of joy and safety in the world, creating new connections with others, communities, and world as a whole to find historical agency and belonging (full integration of fragmented node/jewel back into The Net)
WT uses the wormhole and the world as the central conceptual metaphors in the process of healing and liberation. In WT, living in the past world or falling through the wormhole operate in place of the common therapy terms such as regression, amygdala hijacking, living in memory, unintegrated neural pathways, and emotional flashbacks, etc. By using world and wormhole as our central metaphors, we extend the focus on neurobiology and the scientific materialist framing of trauma in other ways to treat trauma into the realms of the existential, spiritual, and the philosophical. Without this shift, we inevitably will be stuck and limited by the assumptions of scientific materialism in how to become whole and reintegrate back into The Net. Hence, most other frameworks stray far from the existential and spiritual realms of healing despite the necessity and hunger for them by those of us on the path of healing. For WT, focusing on spacetime being in need of a repair and our experience of being in multiple worlds simultaneously can be done with any number of experiential therapies which we will provide examples of below. WT offers a bridge for any of those therapies to be joined with the existential and spiritual layers of healing by functioning as a soteriological metatheory. It provides a larger context from which to understand why experiential therapies for trauma what do they do and how and when to use them. As praxis is at its heart, it also allows a high degree of creativity and freedom for both the healer and the healed to define what specific tools are needed for repairing the spacetime continuum and exploring the past worlds we carry.
The specific steps of repairing the subjective experience of spacetime in WT directly arise with our conception of what trauma is. Step one focuses on incomplete survival responses and their associated emotions (fear, anger, sadness, disgust, etc.) as the primary unmetabolized information and energy held in the body from traumatic experiences. Completing incomplete survival responses from a past world gives us access to finally having an appropriate response to present-day information and energy coming into my node of the circuit. For example, completing dissociated anger and fight responses bring back online our ability to establish separateness and boundaries physically and emotionally in our present world. This increases a felt-sense of safety and trust of the self to protect and survive an encounter. We no longer need to protect ourselves with only anxiety and avoidance. Alternatively, perhaps we need to metabolize the overwhelming fear and panic of being trapped in a situation of no escape where our safety and autonomy were threatened. This allows us to feel safe to engage in connection and intimacy in the present world which was not possible in the past world. In cases like these, the information and energy from experiences of annihilation or abandonment (abuse and neglect respectively) will have very specific responses and associated emotions we must be able to access to complete. The primary reason that we did not complete these responses in the past world original world only becomes apparent after we encounter them directly and complete them. We see our nervous system made a wise choice not to complete them. Then, we can finally replace the shame and self-blame with wisdom and compassion for the very reason why spacetime was ripped apart in the first place.
Our bodies had the wisdom to know that completing the survival responses in the moment would increase the likelihood of us being destroyed or more neglected. In Coherence Therapy language, not completing the survival responses was the lesser suffering compared to the greater suffering (or even death) in the original experience. When we access the original suffering underneath the incomplete survival response, we can then complete that response through moving our bodies, imagining the scenario with that response present, or speaking and naming truthfully what was occurring. Our survival responses return to their rightful place in the world of the present. We can now fight when we need to fight, flee when we need to escape, and even freeze or fawn to someone when it is most appropriate to do so. This frees up nervous system space and capacity to no longer constantly interpret our world as if we were still trapped, powerless, or helpless.
Without access to this core information and energy, we simply cannot organize our responses in any other way. It is common that we can feel anger, confusion, or despair when encountering this fact. Usually in our adult mind in the present world, we know that anxiety, rage, or crushing depression are not the preferred responses for any given situation. As WT seeks to move us from a model of metabolism to a model of reflection, we see that any rigid survival response provides a gateway into past worlds as a reflection of the past world, not of the present one. Undigested information and energy essentially provide the very means of accessing and seeing the past world for what it truly was – an environment where survival was required. In the world now, we may not need to respond with survival responses at all. One our node returns to the larger circuit, reflection becomes possible. Then we have myriad options of responding to the world at our disposal such as establishing boundaries, communication, seeking connection with safe others elsewhere, or our survival responses if needed.
The second step of repairing our experience of spacetime clearly follows from the completion of old survival responses. When we access to incomplete survival responses, it becomes very clear that the unmetabolized information and energy does not belong to our adult self in the present world. The information and energy belong to young, fragmented parts abandoned in the past who are desperately in need of help, trust, connection, protection, and safety from safe adults and others. As they did not have this resource and safety in the old world, the need does not go away but remains at the center of the wormhole. The unmet needs are the tears in the fabric of spacetime. While there is oceans of grief to come from the truth of these unmet needs, we can take up their needs as loving and protective adults whose job is to find them and provide for them now. In WT terms, this job requires literal subjective space and time travel within our own bodies and minds. We must choose to jump into the wormhole or the void to find those children and rescue them. At this point in my work with clients and in my own leaps into the wormhole, our terror, lack of confidence, and fear of failing tell us that we are not equipped or capable to do such a thing. If no one did this for us, how on earth and heaven are we to do this now for ourselves? WT contends that every being’s nervous system and mind has the potential to do this impossible task. Our most adaptive, regulated state arises from repairing the tears in the fabric of spacetime which can and has been accomplished by countless others (myself and many of my clients included). If it can be done at all, then it can be done by all.
To close a wormhole and repair spacetime, the third phase requires moving the unmetabolized information and energy through the memory reconsolidation process. As our prior definition of fleshed out, information allows a system to organize at more stable and complex levels of functioning. Unmetabolized information profoundly limits the functioning of our nervous system in the environment because it is profoundly simple and lacking complexity in how to interpret reality and ourselves in the environment. The great psychoanalyst, Adam Philips, once said that we can characterize our Inner Critic most accurately by its stupidity. It only offers us one way to see and interpret reality which is based on fear and control of the uncontrollable. Upon close examination, we see that our endless tirades and hatred against ourselves cloak how little our Inner Critic has to say. In WT, we approach this Inner Critic (perhaps the prime cause of all ongoing traumatic responses past the original events) with more compassion and wisdom than Philips but recognize the need for healthy, loving boundaries and self-protection from it, as well. In my own healing, any feelings of peace and safety have only come after recognizing that my Inner Critic is so virulent, so destructive because it holds all the pain of the world where hatred, neglect, and violence were the only terms of attachment on offer. Until I could see he deserves as much healing as any other part of myself rather than disdain, I was doomed to live in hyper-vigilance. My Inner Critic held out some the last remnants of the unmetabolized information and energy from the past world, and I would never help him and free us both as long as I hated him equally in return.
We can view our Inner Critic as the guardian at the entrance to the bridge from healing to liberation. They are our very own Cerberus guarding the gates of the Inferno. While most experiential therapies base their models of healing trauma on the model of learning (i.e. healing comes from updating past learnings from traumatic experiences), WT takes this further into the realms of the existential and even ontological realms of perception of reality itself. When we are living in memory (i.e. in an emotional flashback), emotional learnings from that world will be necessary if we perceive and feel reality is the past world. WT sees this as a much deeper and fundamental problem of just remembering and memory. When unmetabolized information and energy of that past world actively shapes our cognition and perception of ourselves, others and the world. That information inevitably collapses how much meaning we can make of our experience of the world into simple, survival-based interpretations. Grief and loss are necessary parts of healing and memory reconsolidation because grief results from the integration of unmetabolized information about traumatic experiences of the past world. When I cry for my younger self, I am now organizing information of what those experiences meant into the updated circuit in the present world. Grieving leads to new ways of making meaning of the past. Grieving changes the past.
WT states there can be no complete updating of past emotional learning without some element of grieving the losses our circuit has not been able to tolerate. We contend that every emotional learning that remains attached to the old world exists to paper over and conceal the unfelt grief and loss of that original experience. Returning to Janina Fisher’s model of Structural Dissociation, these learnings manifest as trauma-based belief which paper over the gaps and breakdowns in our circuit’s capacity to hold information and energy. They reduce and translate the complexity of the experience with its overwhelming emotions and bodily sensations into a conceptual model of the world. The thinking mind becomes the center of our existence primarily to reduce and diminish the intensity of emotion and sensation through beliefs and ideas. The self operating primarily through thinking reduces the intensity of the information and energy into something controllable and coherent to us. Here is the most common example from my own healing and with countless clients I have worked with: it is easier to feel shame and that I am the cause of my suffering than to accept the chaos and intolerable terror that I exist in a world where I am dependent on beings that I both love and am terrified of.
Let’s return to our bodily experience to make further sense of this. When we have slipped into a flashback and fallen through a wormhole to a past world, my body and nervous system have become the world I primarily have access to. In this state, I take my perception, sensations, and emotions from the past world as representative and objective truths about the present world. Unmetabolized information and energy in my system becomes the world itself. More than just heightened emotional reactions to what is happening around me, I have entered an altered state of consciousness and perception. In this altered state, the boundary between my inner physiological and emotional experience and what is usually occurring in the larger circuitry of the world has vanished. My subjective experience of isolation and being cut off from life in a past world has now become synonymous with the whole universe.
Feeling like a small, insignificant mote of dust cut off from the Net and alone in meaningless, cruel universe defines many emotional flashbacks in Complex PTSD. WT expands the view of these flashbacks into the realm of existential and spiritual experience by seeing them as non-ordinary states of consciousness closer to psychedelic and spiritual journeys than our normal, waking consciousness. Just as with psychedelic journeys, we benefit and grow exponentially in flashback experiences not by resisting them but by seeing them as portals, dharma gates. An emotional flashback becomes where our terror, pain, and confusion are transmuted into the material of existential and spiritual integration instead of a being a eternal life sentence to a realm of the Inferno. When seen this way, I travel through the wormhole to discover the grief of my experiences. When I grieve my reality and see the flashback as evidence of my past world, my overwhelmed and overloaded circuit returns to connection with the present world. I move from my body being the whole world to the whole world becomes my body. I have crossed the bridge to liberation where there is no true separation between the body, mind, and environment.
In the end, grief teaches us about intimacy with our own pain and the pain of others. It rejuvenates and brings us back to life and the world because we finally become intimate with which was previously only experienced as traumatizing. Intimacy with ourselves leads to intimacy with others and the world. While the healing world increasingly acknowledges grief is the antidote to our trauma, WT uses its model of metabolism to clearly map the bridge from trauma to grief. Our circuitry will not let us grieve until we have some grounding and safety in knowing that we are in the world of the now. That can only come when the wormholes to the past worlds are closed. Only then does grief become accessible to us. The tears of our grief then clean the cloudy mirror of our circuit into a vehicle of reflection.
As we increase our capacity for reflection from grieving, we increasingly can relate to the world with creativity, freedom, agency, and a self that is built of safety and not survival. In a word, reflection gives rise to our capacity for use of our imagination. In WT, imagination becomes more than just a source of fantasy and artistic creation. Imagination takes its place as the source of our very language and schemas of the self which shape our relationship to perception and reality. In the imagination, we find perhaps the most powerful tool in the arsenal of all healers. More so, we find in the imagination a fundamental component of all spiritual practices where logic and emotion can become integrated and lead to more regulated, mindful bodily states. If we want construct language, images, and even a self that can increase our ability to relate to the world with freedom, agency, and creativity, we must turn to the imagination. In WT, it is the vehicle for seeing through the self and into the codependently arising conditions of the world here and now. The imagination provides the means to relate to ourselves, each other, and the world of the now with compassion and wisdom. The imagination gives us the means to find our way back home to The Net where we have always belonged.
Worlds of Imagination
When we are lost in the depths of our past worlds, we lose our imagination and creativity as the first sacrificial victims to our survival. These qualities become either not accessible, or they are coopted by our anxious and depressive parts for survival. Our creativity and imagination transform from vehicles for self-expression and exploration into vehicles for catastrophizing and predicting all the worst possible fates which will inevitably befall us. Returning to Yogācāra teachings, when our self and mind operate from afflictive emotional states, our perception shapes the world we see and feel based on these afflictive emotional states. In WT terms, our capacity for imagination and creativity function protectively from states of anxiety and depression by shaping our worlds to reflect their basic assumptions about our powerlessness and fragility. As opposed to Internal Family Systems which sees creativity as only accessible when we are regulated, WT sees imagination and creativity are definitional of perception and consciousness. We question what nervous system state and unmetabolized information and energy have control of these capacities in how our worlds are shaped and felt. The worlds of anxiety and depression are just as creative and imaginative as the world of the artist and poet. Their limitations lie in our ability to only imagine one or two constricted realities to exist in.
Yogācāra emphasizes that everything in our experience is inseparable from our mind. The seeds we carry in our minds from past experience and our larger worlds shape how we perceive and then act in our lives. The seeds that sprout in our lives largely arise from both the unconscious schemas we carry and from the layers of existential and spiritual states of consciousness we have access to. When we operate primarily from states of survival (which are largely determined by past world conditions), our reactions restrict and limit our ability to respond appropriately to our situations even when they do contain elements of real danger and threat. For many clients and me, we see this when we explore how despite how often we would not choose to react to a situation with anxiety or depression. Some rational and adult-mind capacity exists to say, “I would like to respond to this with calmness, asking for help, and seeing how often I have overcome other difficulties in my past so I will survive this one.” When we have quietly slipped through the wormhole to the past, we lose the capacity to stay this regulated in response to real or perceived threats. Our past strategies have cut off access to the internal freedom, safety, and connection to be creative and use our imaginations as our most effectively ally. Creativity has become the horseman of our terror.
A Philosophy of Creativity
In many experiential therapies for trauma, imaginative uses of metaphor, and even poetic expressions for the healing process tend to reside with each person doing the healing work’s creative capacities. Creativity and imagination become tools of healing in the hands of a capable healer, or they are the main method of work in art therapies. While modalities like Internal Family Systems recognize creativity as being an essential quality of Self energy, most experiential healing approaches do not center creativity and imagination as essential to the process of healing itself. Historically, the tradition of psychoanalysis prioritized free association as a way that creativity and freedom of expression provide some of our most direct access to unconscious impulses, desires, and meanings. Free association even becomes the marker of healing to the degree that we can free associate without repression and shame. For Carl Jung, active imagination allows the collective unconscious to speak to and through us via symbols, images, mandalas, forms, or memories. Like Jung and Freud’s versions of psychoanalysis, WT places imagination and creativity as the center of letting our unconscious speak. As opposed to active imagination’s emphasis on the collective unconscious or free association’s road to the individual unconscious, WT sees imagination as the vehicle to access our entire nervous system functioning and the worlds of the schemas of the self we carry. If, as the psychoanalytic saying goes, our body is our unconscious, then WT extends this insight into seeing the body as the world. The body becomes the access point to the entire world and its conditions that it arose within. In WT, the muscles and bones of our very perception of reality itself and how we make sense of our worlds lies in the heart of our imagination and creative capacities.
To illustrate this point from a philosophical lens, here again is Johnson’s view of the relationship of imagination to the way we perceive and make sense of our realities on a collective level, (172):
Imagination is central to human meaning and rationality for the simple reason that what we can experience and cognize as meaningful, and how we can reason about it, are both dependent upon structures of imagination that make our experience what it is. On this view, meaning is not situated solely in propositions; instead, it permeates our embodied, spatial, temporal, culturally-formed, and value-laden understanding. The structures of imagination are part of what is shared when we understand one another and are able to communicate within a community.
Johnson’s work focuses on how many Western philosophies exploring how we make meaning and what exactly is meaning at all assume a separation between the body and the mind and between the organism and the environment. Most of our philosophical assumptions throughout all our models of treating trauma also assume we are separate organisms using our mind and rationality to relate to a separate environment out there. We make meaning and sense of things through our nervous systems in these models but there is only now a growing recognition that our very perception of reality is shaped by this embodied meaning-making process.
WT shares Buddhist philosophy and Johnson’s primary assumption that the organism and the environment are not separate but one dynamic unity. This assumption makes up a key part of the philosophical architecture of the bridge between healing and liberation in WT. This dynamic unity cannot be known and explored at the level of psychology alone but requires us venturing into the realms of existential and spiritual experience. We also take imagination and our use of metaphor and images as the essential vehicle for modeling this dynamic unity and our relationships within it as the basis for how we make meaning of things. My own foray into the need to question our basic assumptions in healing and therapy about this separation of organism from environment arose out of direct practice in meditation and psychedelic journeying. At a key juncture in my own healing, I saw that my own schemas of self which separated me from my environment were inherited from both my own individual traumatic learnings. I also was actively inheriting them from the larger emotional and spiritual wounding of my particular society and cultural history. With WT, I have sought to provide a metatheory for myself of how our schemas of self and collective and individual traumas reinforce the notion of a separate self and our suffering as a whole. These schemas of self lie at the base of almost all philosophy and psychology that originates out of Western European and Greek modes of thinking which we inherit. In other words, they lie at the philosophical, linguistic, political, and cultural systems-level basis of our shared worlds
Refractions of Isolation
WT conceptualizes the core of trauma as experience which leads to the jewel no longer believing it is part of The Net for coherent, survival-based reasons. The origin of our aloneness and not being at home in the world lie in the psychological, existential, and spiritual effects of this process. In WT, imagination and creativity serve as core pillars of our perception, meaning making, and our fundamental relationship between ourselves and our environments. WT places imagination and creativity at the center of our world-modeling/making ability which is an essential component of our consciousness and subjective experience. In Yogācāra terms, mapping and making our shared worlds functions as a core experience of the mind. This world-making capacity integrates our experience into a coherent whole. When trauma occurs, it wounds our world-mapping/making capacity directly. Our neurobiology, cognitive capacities, relationship to existential givens, and spiritual experience warp around the black hole of the traumatic experience. To address this wounded world-mapping/making capacity, WT states we must recover the use of our imagination at these existential and spiritual layers of experience. This goal serves as both a means and an end in WT’s model of healing and liberation. The close relationship between imagination and freedom point to this directly. Imagination serves as more than a secondary quality of someone who is safe and regulated in their bodies. Imagination serves as the engine of our world-mapping/making capacity which shapes our schemas of self and relationship to our environment in every moment.
Experiential therapies for healing trauma invite us to utilize our imagination and visualization skills to activate neural pathways and reconsolidate our memories as core parts of the process. A few examples include Inner Child rescue operations, parts work using visualization and characters, and using imagery and imagination to access survival responses and emotions. Recent neuroscience findings show that the brain and mind struggle to differentiate between a real sensory input and a strongly imagined one. This fascinating quality of our mind hints at the power it has to literally shape our reality and perception on the most fundamental level. This capacity also provides the very means to heal in experiential therapies. When we imagine scenarios vividly and with an emphasis on our emotion and sensation, the past is always accessible and never truly the past. As the past world lives in our bodies and emotions, it can haunt us indefinitely, but we can also access it and heal our wounds without any time limit.
Our ability to use our bodies and emotions to simulate and imagine scenarios of the past, present, and future for healing show how imagination lies at the center of our return to wholeness. This imaginative capacity which shapes our perception and experience of reality itself contains the heart of WT’s approach to both healing and liberation. In my own healing process, imagination has been the vehicle for conversations with intimate partners or parents, dialogues with my Inner Child parts, and even exploring where particular patterns in my life and schemas of the self arose from. For an example, the first protective part I ever encountered became accessible through imaginative exercises following my first solo MDMA experience. One morning a few days after the journey, I was sitting quietly in reflection when my mind presented me with a vivid experience of my own freeze response carried for decades from the nightmare of my childhood. In the vision of my mind’s eye, I saw myself as a soldier hidden away in a jungle cave, exhausted, terrified, and alone. In the corner of my cave, a radio squawked half-garbled updates about the war and orders, but I had no idea how to interpret the messages. I had no idea how long the war had gone on or who I was even fighting against. I just knew that if I left the cave, I would be killed and I no longer had any arms or weapons to fight the battles anymore. Something in my belly told me that I had been conscripted into this mysterious war as a child and without any say in the matter. Just like Hiroo Onda fighting against the United States invasion of Japan for decades after it ended, I was alone fighting a war that ended decades earlier. My imagination (with the help of MDMA) gave me the first connections to the fragmented parts of myself and the source of my suffering. This experience marked the true beginning of my healing of Complex PTSD and years-long journey back home to myself.
Our imagination and our capacity for creativity actively blends the past and present into our visions of the future and how our bodies and minds occupy the worlds of the present. However, the openness and flexibility of the imagination are largely determined by the way our nervous system and circuitry can process information and energy from the surrounding environment. When we carry unmetabolized information and energy in our circuits, our ability to imagine and creatively respond to the world of the present is hijacked by this unmetabolized material in our system. Our imagination now orients to healing ourselves and resolving the past through projecting the past world onto the present or only giving us visions of a disastrous future. Our amazing and precious ability to simulate and visualize the world becomes primarily based on unprocessed emotions and responses to that past world and its pain. Our imagination no longer operates in the present world where are bodies are in spacetime. When we catastrophize and live in paranoia about how under threat, we are, we often are encountering our pain and terror of the past world using our imagination solely for the sake of survival. In the worlds of anxiety and depression reveal the power of our minds to creatively shape reality and bend it to the whims of unmetabolized pain. Even in the presence of real threats in the present world, we still need our full imagination and visualization capacities if we hope to respond appropriately to them.
Building an Inner Refuge
WT places Imagination as the primary vehicle through which we create new worlds of internal safety and connection. On the bridge from healing to liberation, we require an inner refuge for ourselves, a place where our basic goodness and inner sense of safety are unquestionable. With such a refuge, we find that it is possible to start building a new world within the very hell realms of the past worlds we currently operate within. The unmetabolized content which keeps us stuck, afraid, and shut off from the rest of reality starts to become workable and digestible with an inner refuge. When trauma-based information and energy dominate our inner world, we cannot escape the confrontation with the past world if we hope to heal and find freedom in this life. We cannot heal what haunts us without directly going into the hell realms and building a refuge right in their open, bloody maw. In memory reconsolidation terms, having an inner refuge creates the ultimate disconfirmation of our emotional learning which says this information and energy is not survivable. If I can encounter it directly and not be destroyed, then I no longer need to avoid it at any cost. To do so, our inner refuge must be filled with inner resources such grounding and resourcing techniques (like from Somatic Experiencing) along with my unshakable belief in my own basic goodness (such as from Inner Child and reparenting techniques). This inner refuge can be catalyzed and nurtured in the present through a trusted, safe relationship with a therapist, friend, partner, or community, This inner refuge practice mirrors a similar idea from radical politics. We no longer need some catastrophe to start over and build new systems and a world for ourselves. We build the future right in the heart of the past. We build heaven right amid hell for they are, in truth, not two separate places.
Returning to Winnicott’s insight that our most basic use of creativity and imagination is how we interpret our reality, WT conceptualizes healing and liberation as processes which fundamentally reshape how we interpret the world and perceive reality. If you have experienced being violently dragged into a wormhole during a flashback trigger, you know firsthand the degree to which our fundamental interpretation of reality and our perception can be altered. We can assess how thoroughly we have resolved flashbacks (i.e. closing the wormholes to past worlds and repairing the continuity of spacetime) through the degree of our ability to creativity interpret the world and our sensory experiences or thoughts with greater flexibility and playfulness. Once a flashback is resolved, our interpretations of reality are no longer a separate self imposing and interpreting reality out there outside of us. We gain even greater freedom and insight into how perception and imagination function after flashback resolutions. We embody Winnicott’s insight and gain greater access to how our interpretations of reality become creative, imaginative expressions of the self/environment world system. Post-traumatic growth at the existential and philosophical layers of experience can be defined by this greater increase in creativity and play in our perceptions and interpretations of reality.
Before turning to specific examples of how experiential therapies and spiritual practices can use this focus on creativity and imagination for world creation, we want to make clear that this use of creativity and imagination have long precedents in Yogācāra and other schools of Buddhist philosophy. As an example, a cherished Zen teaching states that “mind precedes everything”. WT seeks to extend these philosophical teachings into the process of healing and liberation centering creativity and imagination as the integrative tissue between wisdom, compassion, and freedom. These three qualities structure and define the core schemas of the healed and liberated self. The self that is wise, compassionate, and free from the emotional learnings, information and energy, and karma can be the most creative and imaginative self for existing in and responding appropriately to the world. This self sees that anxiety or depression may at times be an appropriate response to our world conditions but we would greatly benefit from a whole host of different responses to our conditions. We can feel anxious without it becoming the world we exist in. This self can set boundaries to protect ourselves or our loved ones as the superior option to being anxious and trying to predict and control our uncontrollable environmental conditions. This self can access the compassion and self-worth necessary to express our anger and grief toward our life and the world as a vastly superior option than being hypo-aroused and depressed. If our approaches to healing and liberation cannot provide an embodied map of how to access these appropriate responses to life and the world, we can only hope for pessimistic adjustment and courageous despair as the goal of healing. WT’s path of healing and liberation aims to liberate the very mind itself and free us from the prison of the self of our past worlds of trauma through reclaiming the radical nature of our imagination and creativity. We can build heavens instead of hells. This defines what it is to be human.
The Praxis of Imagination
To illustrate the primacy of imagination and creativity in WT’s approach to healing and liberation, we will survey how imagination can be the primary vehicle for reshaping the self and seeing into past worlds. WT’s sees the intimate connection between the body and the imagination as the shared feature of all experiential therapies for trauma or embodied spiritual practices. The imagination bridges the body to the mind and allows us to use our freedom, agency, and creativity through to actively intervene in the conditions of codependent arising in the present world. In each example below, WT’s use of imagination and creativity arises as an expression of our consciousness at the level of existential and spiritual experience. Looking back to our WT model of a world, these layers of consciousness exist outside of the micro, mezzo, and macro systems. However, they are intimately connected to these systems as part of the codependently arising conditions of our world. They actively shape those systems through our schemas of self and in our learnings and karmic inheritance of the people and worlds before us. Those systems constantly influence how we can act or feel within those systems through the schemas of self which shape our existential and spiritual layers of consciousness. We require a soteriological metatheory like WT if we hope to grasp the true nature of our worlds and schemas of self which are the sources of our suffering.
Sitting with the Past
In my own healing and clinical practice with clients, I have found one of the most powerful examples of the use of imagination and creativity for metabolizing past information and energy in Emotion-Focused Therapy’s (EFT) use of “empty chair work”. EFT sees one of the primary reasons (if not the primary reason) for our suffering has to do with our “unfinished business” with past people and situations in our lives. In WT terms, unfinished business describes unmetabolized energy and information of past worlds held in our circuitry. This unfinished business from the past causes us to repeat patterns (i.e. the repetition compulsion) with people and environments in hopes of finally resolving the incomplete survival responses and digesting the emotions of that primary experience. In WT terms, this unfinished business keeps the tear in the fabric of spacetime open and leads to emotional flashback experiences. For example, let’s say I have undigested information and energy from experiencing physical and verbal abuse at the hands of my father. Empty chair work involves using my imagination to sit in the room with my father by viscerally and creatively visualizing him sitting in a chair across from me. As our minds do not distinguish a real experience from a vividly imagined one, I will quickly notice all the feelings and body sensations arising as if he is right there in front of me. The past is never the past with this kind of imaginational work. It is right there with us in the moment.
With the help of a therapeutic guide, I start to describe what is arising in my body and emotional experience then clearly express and feel what those sensations and emotions are telling me about my relationship with my father. Usually, I will notice anxiety, anger, numbness, or any other survival response start to activate with him in the room just as it did during my childhood experiences. This information and energy connected to him has not been available for me to utilize if my survival responses dominate the experience. With the help of my Virgil in the journey back to hell with my father, I have a chance to transform my nervous system’s responses to the abuse and to integrate the information of my experience with him for understanding and organizing my nervous system at a high degree of complexity. Through expressing via words and bodily actions in the experience with my imagined abusive father, I can regain access my fight responses to protect myself and set appropriate boundaries. I may scream, express my fear and pain, or imagine he could be restrained physically from causing me harm. In any of these cases, I am utilizing the undigested information and energy of the past world to finally express what could not be expressed at the original point in spacetime.
Once the inexpressible is expressed and felt through to completion, we can finally access the grief and loss and close the wormhole. Our circuitry can come back into full intimacy with the world of the here and now because we no longer need to orbit the blackhole of the unexperienced experience. Completion comes when we have encountered and experienced the truth fully. At times, we can feel it is pointless to work through these past experiences with a dead parent, former partner, or anyone from our past. Declaring something useless in the realm of imagination and creativity for WT proves to be one of our most ingenious protective schemas. In truth, WT finds it useful to engage in these practices with any figure you have unfinished business whether they are alive or dead. If you carry the unmetabolized information and energy in your system, that person is not actually dead and not actually gone from your life. By using our imagination with these people in our lives, we can experience how undigested information and energy keeps open various points in spacetime. These empty chair exercises show us that relationships and not just events create these tears in spacetime. When something is not digested and experienced fully, it does not go away. It lives and is sustained in our circuitry as energy which persists until it is digested fully. With empty chair work, we experience that the right techniques and use of imagination make past worlds always accessible to us.
Imagining our Inner Worlds
Internal Family Systems and “parts work” provides an expansive place where imagination is a vital component of healing trauma. With parts work, we can utilize imagination and creativity to map survival responses, unintegrated neural pathways, and behavioral patterns. We can give voice, an image, or even an entire personality to our tendency to feel anxious, get defensive when feeling criticized, or dissociate when feeling overwhelmed. By making our pattern into a character (real or imagined) or voice, our imagination gives us access to the part so we can interact with and get to know it. Through dialoguing with them and getting to know the job and pain these parts carry, we can help them release their burdens from their jobs they took on in past worlds to help us survive. As they have usually taken on these roles out of choice but necessity, it becomes possible to see them with compassion and wisdom as opposed to fear and anger. Without these qualities of compassion and wisdom in how we related to them, we remain stuck in a hostile internal environment and our psyches remain dangerous and mysterious to us. As parts carry the unmetabolized information and energy of the past world, they are key to seeing through the self and into the codependent arising conditions of our worlds of the past. Connecting to each part provides a gateway through the wormhole and into the past world. Leaning from a parts what its origins are directs us to the fragmented and lost “exile” (or unintegrated neural pathway/young child part of ourselves) whose unmet needs and incomplete survival responses keep the wormhole open.
In my own imaginative process with parts work, no better example exists than my evolving relationship with my depressive part. Truth be told, I had been terrified of my depressive part something for much of my life. When it reared its head, I saw it emerging out of the depths of the ocean like a great serpentine monster of my nightmares. Its arrival signaled the loss of all hope, meaning, and vitality in my life. The universe became empty and lifeless when it engulfed me. For decades going back to my early childhood, I could only describe my depressive part as an incomprehensible force of nature or law of the universe. Through my own use of parts work years into Complex PTSD healing, I developed sufficient capacity to dialogue with my depressive part and approach it with courage and curiosity despite my terror.
While my depressive part first emerged from the abyss of my nervous system as a terrifying sea serpent, I began to visualize it as a black hole embodied in human form where no light could escape its gravity. After long hours of standing and quaking in fear in its presence, it started to tell me that it lived in the dark ocean of my embodied unconscious and nervous system. It waited to rescue me when it was most needed, and I was most in danger of not surviving. When my anxiety or panic from feeling abandoned or on the verge of annihilation would become unbearable, it would arise out of the dark waters to wrap me up and protect me from that terror by blocking out all light and life which it saw as the cause of my terror. The schema which gave it life had connected being alive as the greatest source of threat and the only way to protect me was to shut off the energy and information of life completely.
My sheer misunderstanding of my depressive part, driven by my terror, fueled my hatred of it for most of my life. I eventually learned it also felt misunderstood by me. In my hatred and fearful ignorance, I could never see it was acting from a place of mercy and protection for my younger self. I could never learn how my young self had associated being alive and life itself as the threat in a past world full of isolation and terror. It was only through imagination and dialoguing that I could understand it and it could understand me. Creativity provided the vehicle where it could learn I was an adult now and no longer that scared and lonely child in desperately in need of its help because no one else came to help. I could thank it for helping me survive the terrifying and isolating conditions of my childhood.
Through developing this intimacy with the present world and the adult that I had now become, my depressive part and I could work together to identify the unmetabolized information and energy of the past world. We both could finally see where and how it stepped in to save my life. Only then could we finally and truly provide for that young boy who needed so much understanding, love, connection, protection, and care which never came. Imagination built the road to him and the means for my depressive part to finally be loved, thanked, and honored for the unimaginably painful job it had learned to do. Through this process, I learned that imagination and creativity were not just useful for intimacy and connection but were two essential threads of intimacy and connection themselves. Through connection and intimacy, I began to find heightened integration of my parts into the present world. The wormhole to the past began to close. The decades-old information and energy of my depressive part gave me far greater love of life and self-compassion in my darkest moments than my younger self ever thought possible.
Visions of Lost Children
On the bridge from healing to liberation, we can find one of the most powerful uses of imagination and creativity in Inner Child work. One of the champions of this approach, John Bradshaw, used imagination and creativity as a primary means of locating and helping these young Inner Child parts. Through techniques like visualization, guided meditation, letter writing, and non-dominant handwriting, he helped pioneer ways to use our imagination to find our lost, younger selves in their specific spacetime locations. Once we have access to the traumatized Inner Child that we carry around inside of our systems, we can then conduct “rescue operations” to finally get them out of the hell realms they reside in. Rescue operations involve highly imaginative interventions where your child self is vividly pictured in their world conditions where trauma, loneliness, or a lack of safe and trustworthy adults to help them are present. Not only do those children need to be seen, heard, and understood, they need to be taken out of the environments where their trauma occurred. Through our imaginational capacities, we can create or find the places where they can finally cry, share their stories, and their nervous systems can know peace and joy.
As with all other praxis of imagination, WT emphasizes the use of our creativity in Inner Child work for accessing the unmetabolized information and energy of our child selves. In WT’s circuitry and metabolic model, encountering overwhelming and destructive information and energy without sufficient development in our bodies and minds will lead to fragmentation of our sense of self. In Inner Child work, these lost, afraid, and suffering children are the primary reason for the great majority of our suffering and lack of capacity to respond to the world with flexibility and inner security. Inner Child work gives us a way back to the world(s) where these children are still lost and in need of rescue. Through using our imagination and ability to vividly picture, sense, feel, and dialogue with them, we can establish inner connection and emotional attunement to them. WT extends Inner Child work through exploring how imagination helps us gain access to not just their experience by the entire world in which they lived, breathed, and suffered. These larger world conditions of community, culture, society, politics, and ecological systems were likely the very things our families and caregivers were unaware of themselves as they parented us. As this unmetabolized energy and information exists outside of linear time in WT’s model, our ability to access it never expires as long as we live and breathe. It lives on and shapes our life through those children inside of us and the children we past in onto until we make the decision to act upon it.
In my own healing and spiritual journey and guiding clients through theirs over the years, I have seen few places where the healing power of creativity and imagination can be as shockingly powerful as Inner Child rescue operations. My own work has centered on my Inner Child taking me to traumatic scenes of isolation or violence where he was frozen, terrified, and unable to respond in any other way but to just survive the encounter. While there are usually fragments of original experiences (like images or body sensations) present In those scenes, creative reimagining defines them. Usually, my Inner Child is accompanied by the adult me or some version of an Inner Healer who possesses the most necessary qualities for healing and liberation. In WT’s version of Inner Child work, the Inner Healer shows up to protect, care for, love, remove from danger, or assertively establish boundaries for that Inner Child. They can do this because they possess the requisite compassion, wisdom, and freedom to act for my Inner Child’s experience and unmet needs. In WT, the Inner Healer is the embodied action and relational quality of our basic goodness or Buddha nature in Zen terms. The Inner Healer resides under our separate self but actualizes love and connection through our specific experiences and personalities.
My own Inner Healer began to take shape roughly 3 years into my own journey. I had successfully built an inner refuge for my Inner Child and many of my protective parts. They could talk and feel safe enough to relax and explore in this space, but they still had so many unmet needs for protection, guidance, love, and adventure. My Inner Healer came to my inner refuge after little more than a quiet intention being set in my heart which announced my readiness for him. He was adorned in monk’s robes with golden armor across his chest and arms symbolizing self-protection and inner security. Across his entire body, he was covered with scars of past violence and pain, but they had long since healed. Once he arrived, my Inner Healer became the leader of all my rescue operations and the inner secure attachment figure for all my Inner Children and protector parts. He would go on to save them from brushes with death, burning houses, abysmal isolation, and countless experiences of freezing and hiding to protect myself from pain. As he is the loving and spiritual caretaker I always needed, he had the rights to give the killing stroke to the psychological umbilical cord which kept my Inner Critic and Inner Children still yearning and hoping for the love and connection he needed which never came.
In my work with clients, I have witnessed people’s Inner Healers showing up in kindergarten classrooms to stop bullying from peers or an abusive teacher from shaming them for their natural self-expression. They have rescued Inner Children from their childhood homes where they were alone and unprotected from sexually abusive parents or cousins. They provided a safe and loving adult to finally show up for their Inner Child when they locked themselves in the bathroom to escape their raging parents outside the door. They cared for and loved their Inner Teens through depressive episodes when their parents shamed and abandoned them in their pain when they needed them most. In all these cases and many others, the Inner Healer or adult self can provide for the underlying unmet needs of the emotional pain and suffering of those child parts of ourselves. Visualization, artistic representation, and creative imagining become the royal road to return to the past worlds and finally provide what those Inner Children needed most. We need the supplies and preparation to conduct rescue operations, and the Inner Healer process gives us exactly that. Once we begin to rescue these Inner Children, we can experience rapid reductions in anxiety, depression, suicidality, or any other number of symptoms we carry. Once we have rescued the child from what has been causing them pain, what need is there for the symptoms and protective parts that shield them from it? Those children need help to metabolize information and energy that could not digested by their small, underdeveloped nervous systems in a world without adequate safety, care, and attunement. While the past is never the past as long as those children remain lost in the hell realms of their worlds, our imagination and our Inner Healer give us the means to finally bring them home.
A Place for Our Selves
Janina Fisher’s model of structural dissociation for understanding traumatic experiences utilizes imagination and creativity as core tools for finding and integrating the fragmented parts of ourselves in its own unique way. In structural dissociation, our fragmented parts of self from specific traumatic experiences coexist with our “apparently normal self”. Similar to Internal Family Systems but without a conception of a “Capital S Self” and its qualities of the 8 C’s, Fisher’s model uses imagination to construct specific locations where we can connect and help our fragmented parts. Some examples include a meditation circle, a council meeting, a sharing circle around a fire, a treehouse, or any other place where the entire family of fragmented parts can coexist and interact with safety and peace. In Fisher’s model, imagination and creativity give us the means for constructing internal spaces of safety where unmetabolized energy and information can be accessed and metabolized individually or collectively with our fragmented parts. In WT terms, the model of structural dissociation most poignantly describes how our “apparently normal self” severely constricts our behavior, feeling, and thinking. The apparently normal self holds the responsibility for much of our suffering and separateness in WT’s model. We lose access to our imagination and creativity due to the need to mask and function in society after our trauma has taken up residence in our nervous systems. We must find some way to exist after traumatic experiences and appear as if we are not as fragmented and in as much suffering as we are. The apparently normal self’s primary function is to help us survive and not creatively engage with the world. The systems and worlds we exist in largely determine the terms of attachment and schemas of self for this “apparently normal self”.
For an example of how useful imagination can be in the structural dissociation model, let’s look at how a person’s creativity can help them build an internal space and working platform right in the middle of the hell realms. Virgil and Dante both need a way to keep their bearings in the Inferno. By creating a space in a natural landscape that is meaningful to us, we can anchor a felt sense of safety inside the body and mind which can be the first and biggest step in our healing. We can learn and find a way to feel connected and safe even amid great pain and fear within our environmental conditions. Over the years, my own inner refuge has evolved into a dense forest at the base of a mountain surrounded by a force field, impenetrable to anything or anyone unless I grant it permission to enter.
In this space, I dialogue and help Inner Child parts or any other part (like an anxious part or my Inner Critical Parent part) with a background of enough safety and inner connection for them to relax their survival responses. From that connected and regulated space, we can collaborate and find new and more helpful solutions to our fears and problems in our present world. Over time, always doing parts work in this internal space has allowed me to find more internal safety in external conditions, even when they cause fear and pain. In the words of Shantideva in The Way of the Bodhisattva, instead of covering the whole world in leather to protect our feet from its pokes and scrapes, we can just cover our feet with leather. The world becomes much easier to walk free and protected when we have an inner refuge from its many harms. This experience of ourselves as being “covered with leather” (strong boundaries, internally connected, have a secure base inside of ourselves for action in the world, loving and compassionate toward ourselves, etc.) allows us the greatest flexibility and adaptability of self in the world of our current conditions. This imaginative creation of a home inside of ourselves brings us from fragmentation back to wholeness.
Embodied Imagining
Somatic Experiencing holds great promise for metabolizing old information and energy but also expanding our ability to respond to the current world we exist. In Somatic Experiencing, our imagination and creativity help us to create resources and grounding in our bodies to metabolize traumatic experiences along with helping us to complete interrupted survival responses from past worlds. Using images of animals, safe and trusted others, or specific places like a favorite natural location or a room in your home where you are safe and connected, we learn to access the felt sense of safety and being anchored in our bodies in any given moment. For many Complex PTSD survivors like us, our bodies hold the source of our sense of danger and unease. Our sensations and emotions hold both the terror of past worlds and the very unmetabolized information and energy we need to heal. In Somatic Experiencing, we learn that we can experience our bodies and the physical spaces we occupy as sources of safety and comfort and not just dangers to be avoided at any cost.
With our imaginations in Somatic Experiencing, we can revisit the past worlds where we felt alone and unprotected and bring in what is called a “competent protector” to help metabolize old information and energy. This competent protector can help the young versions of ourselves who needed connection, protection, or compassion in traumatizing experiences where aloneness and powerlessness dominated our subjective experience. Competent protectors could include your adult self, an animal or other kind of non-human being, characters from film or television, or real people in your life which embody the qualities and characteristics that we needed in that original experience. In WT terms, using our imagination to craft our own competent protector via images and what it means to us to have those figures for us closes wormholes in a way few other techniques can. We can close the wormholes to past worlds and heal the tears in the fabric of spacetime (trauma vortexes in Somatic Experiencing terms) through a competent protector providing for our unmet needs in those past worlds. As Somatic Experiencing focuses on the relationship between trapped energy in our bodies and traumatizing experiences, it provides a key approach to healing trauma at the bodily level. In WT terms, wormholes will stay open as long as there is incomplete energy (we would also include information or meaning equally important) in our circuitry. Somatic Experiencing sees the reason we constantly return to patterns or relationships which do not serve us as a call from our bodies to heal and process past survival responses which were blocked or unsafe to complete. We find healing and completion through letting the body express and feel the survival responses needed in the moment.
In my own journey through the Inferno, Somatic Experiencing’s competent protector exercise provided my Inner Children one of the greatest resources for healing and finding protection for the first time. During a particular Somatic Experiencing session in my early days of training, I found that exploring a specific experience of tension and tightness in my hips directly led to experiences of utter horror that had been trapped in my body since I was 7 years old. The tension held the interrupted and frozen flight response of my child self witnessing sexual trauma and violence in my family but with no escape from the nightmare. By focusing on those sensations with the help of my Somatic Experiencing therapist, my nervous system immediately presented me with vivid images of being frozen and unable to move or escape the room where I witnessed the trauma as a small boy. My breathing stopped and I could not even move my eyes around the room. I had landed right smack in the middle of the unmetabolized information and energy of one of the most horrific experiences of my childhood.
In Somatic Experiencing, we bring in a competent protector when our nervous system gets overwhelmed and stuck on how to access the sufficient safety and trust to complete survival responses in the past world. With guidance from my Somatic Experiencing practitioner, I brought in the image of a massive grizzly bear to help my child self unfreeze his body. As I felt the safety and strength to fight back in the original memory, I finally started moving my body and finding ways to protect myself and finally escape the experience. This grizzly bear image became the great source of protection, strength, and ferocious self-compassion that was needed to stop the traumatic event from occurring in real time. It helped rescue me from the room where my body stayed stuck in that past world for almost 30 years. That grizzly bear became my vehicle of escape and liberation which my child self rode out of the room, the home, and the entire world that was so unsafe and traumatizing. It took me to a place of safety and connection with myself and my other parts where he could cry, shake, and scream out all the fear and pain of his experience. After this experience, I have carried this grizzly bear protector as a primary resource and competent protector in every other rescue operation for my Inner Children. Without fail, it provides safety, protection, a fight response, and an opening to escape when they needed it most.
Creative Coherence
Coherence Therapy, while more cognitive than Somatic Experience, comes with its own unique ways of using imagination and creativity as a direct means of creating doorways into past worlds. Coherence Therapy uses imagination to give us access to and make explicit the deep emotional learnings and schemas which drive our present day sufferings. Our schemas contain two primary components: the original suffering we experienced and the primary strategy we developed to avoid feeling or repeating that original suffering. Coherence Therapy utilizes our creativity and imagination in techniques like symptom deprivations (creative visualizations of scenarios without our core symptoms of anxiety or depression) or creative sentence completion exercises (“If I stay in this situation, I must feel anxious so that…”). These techniques help to draw out the underlying strategy of why our sufferings continue to show up in our lives despite our best efforts to remove them. In Coherence Therapy, our imagination opens direct access to our unconscious where we can see almost every symptom keeps us shielded or distracted from a deeper, more terrifying suffering that likely would feel intolerable if we were did not have the symptom.
In WT terms, these schemas are both the guardians of the wormholes (symptoms) and the lost parts in the past worlds (original suffering). directly through creative means with the guidance of a skilled therapist. In my own healing experience and as a clinician, Coherence Therapy is almost unparalleled in its power and efficiency to get to the heart of our suffering, especially the ways we perpetuate our suffering unconsciously. Our unconscious patterns or karmic legacies become directly accessible with the right questions guided by our imagination and limited only by our creativity. By not interpreting the unconscious but curiously exploring it and using our creativity to guide us, we invite the unconscious roots of our suffering to present themselves directly to us.
In my own healing work with Coherence Therapy, creativity and imagination were irreplaceable for accessing unmetabolized content which felt completely inaccessible or would have take years of talk therapy to access. In working with my Inner Critic part around body shame and fear of being hated for my physical appearance, my Coherence therapist helped guide me through a visualization where I imagined physically removing the Inner Critic part out of my body to understand its coherence in my life. It was perhaps the first time I truly tried to not just fight it but understand what its real role in protecting me. In my mind’s eye, I saw it as a bloody, underdeveloped little creature whose primary role was to attack, abuse, criticize, and shame me before anyone else could do it to me. When I asked what was so important about this job, it said it was helping me adapt and “get with the program” of a world that was full of only cruelty, violence, torture, and pain. In this world, being sensitive, emotional, and in need of care was a recipe for constant suffering and even death. As it always expected this harsh and cruel treatment from all people, it was the most logical strategy to just do this to me all the time and beat them to the punch. My essential threat detection system had been warped into using self-attack as the only means of feeling protected in a world that felt full of constant fear of being hated, attacked, or destroyed by anyone at any moment.
After seeing and hearing his belief and how he helped me adapt to a world where torture was unavoidable, I held him like a child in need of compassion and care for the deprivation and brutality he had come to expect from the world. I began to learn from him that he held a belief about the world based in the intergenerational pain and suffering of multiple generations of my father’s family. For them, the world was that cruel and brutal and they treated themselves and each other accordingly. Torture and deprivation were the norm inside the walls of their home. Their violent world became my inheritance as my father passed it down to me as his mother had passed it down to him.
Through externalizing my Inner Critic outside of my body for the first time, I was able to see through creativity and imagination that his beliefs about family, people, and the world reflected the violence and pain of an unspeakable world of my ancestors and my own family. For him, he must help me survive this at any cost. Once the coherence of his brutal job was clear, I could start to access the unmetabolized information and energy of my early life. At first, this elegantly deceptive information reiterated at every turn that I was worthy of the intensive cruelty and torture by my Inner Critic. Seeing through the illusionary protective self that was worthy of torture came from externalizing and creating a new relationship to my own Inner Torturer. Only then did his real work become clear: to shield me from ever feeling the intolerable pain and associated meanings for my child self of what it meant to be dependent on adults who I could terrorize and even torture their own child. Through insight into the coherence of my own tendency to self-torture, I finally saw my own truth and started to heal the unexperienced experience of the world I existed in as a child. My Inner Critic and younger self would believe I existed in this world to this day until someone finally stopped the torture. Through this healing process with Coherence Therapy, I saw that my schemas of the self required self-torture to protect me from a cruel and brutal world. They led to most of the anxiety and terror throughout my life. Slowly after this session, those schemas became more malleable, and I could reshape them to match the codependent arising conditions of the world of my adult self. Even now, anytime my Inner Critic gets scared, I gently pull him out of my body and remember that he is worthy of compassion and care just as I am. Together, we are finding out the world is more than what we thought it was.
The Mind That is Bright and Free
Let’s turn to some examples of how imagination and creativity from spiritual practices are foundational for healing and liberation in WT. On the bridge from healing to spiritual freedom, we must inevitably start to question our relationship to language, our perceptions, and the origins of our experiences of the self. As we saw with Yogācāra philosophy, language and our concepts create and shape our perceptions and experiences of self at their root. In WT’s view, spiritual practices address the layers of existential and spiritual wounding in traumatic experiences which reinforce our sense of being an isolated, separate self. We can most directly access unmetabolized information and energy at the existential and spiritual level through the ways we utilize our language and how our schemas of self are shaped by that language. Imagination and creativity provide the most flexible and adaptable way to do this task.
While a comprehensive survey of the use of creativity and imagination in spiritual practices is beyond this writing, let’s look at some illustrative examples from my own practices in Zen Buddhism, Vajrayana Buddhism, and Ashtanga Yoga Philosophy. An old Zen adage says the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. It could also be said that we need a finger pointing at the moon to let us know it is there when our attention is buried in the dirt. WT holds that our imagination and creativity with language and symbols give us the best means we have of seeing through the self and the moon beyond it. In Buddhist practice and philosophy, the teachings and enticing others into realization of our non-separation comes from upaya, or skillful means. Upaya involves finding appropriate techniques and uses of language for pointing to direct experience or creating a logical conundrum which forces us to unravel the rigid schemas of having a separate self which are the primary cause of our suffering. And these are appropriate to each person’s current practice and state of their schemas of the self.
In all the trauma therapies previously discussed, each one utilizes specific skill memes to engage the memory reconsolidation process which can change our core schemas underlying many of our symptoms. But in spiritual practices like in Buddhism, upaya go further into unraveling the feeling of a solid separate self which keeps us isolated and disconnected from the rest of Indra’s Net. This can be done through the practice of koans which can be the rock that our separate egoic self crashes upon while trying to answer its teaching riddles. Or it can be in sitting for hours in a meditation retreat or sesshin (which can be translated as “to gather the mind”) which allow the mind and body to quiet down and our boundaries of separateness and disconnection from ourselves, others, and the world of the present show how truly arbitrary they can be. It can involve studying texts and chanting sutras of the Buddha’s and ancestors’ teachings which point directly to the moon or reveal the myriad ways we can practice experiencing our inherent Buddha nature. Through philosophical argument or description of states of consciousness achieved through diligent practice and living an upright life in the world that is on fire constantly.
In any of these uses of upaya, WT would see them all as directly intervening at the level of the spiritual and existential aspects of our existence which hold the schemas of self which healing therapeutically alone cannot reach. Healing practices with therapy can reduce symptoms and it can even truly resolve our traumatic experiences through the metabolizing of energy and information from past worlds with experiential therapies in the hands of skilled practitioners. In many cases, this may be required for any practices of spiritual and existential liberation to be truly effective and to reach the depths of the seeds of our suffering. But these experiential therapies are not inherently upaya for liberation of the self and from the self in most cases. Western psychology and therapy are inherently based on a notion that there is a separate self which exists and needs adjustment or healing. Buddhist and yogic philosophies see this as the primary source of our problems, and it is why therapy can never go far enough unless it becomes something totally radical and different than it typically exists (just as Watts described around 60 years ago). But what we can do is to allow the practices of healing and the practices of liberation to mingle and become interdependent in our bodies, minds, and in the intersubjective fields we exist in.
In Buddhist cosmology and psychology, the Wheel of Life (or Bhavacakra) is a prime example of how vibrant and powerful imagery is used to both aid in teaching and provide an object of meditation. These kinds of images provide the way for the mind to open itself up to realms of existence and psychological states through metaphor and creative imaginings of the very nature of reality and the mind. In WT terms, it is this image and object of meditation which allows one to see through the limited, distorted views of the separate self to not just the worlds that our minds and bodies can occupy. The image and object of meditation allow us to see through the world of suffering and the schemas of self we carry to the very nature of the mind and open awareness which they arise from. In the end, Buddhist practice and other forms of spiritual disciplines, especially the contemplative and mystical ones, aim our experience right at the heart of nondual experiences. It is these nondual experiences where the schema of a separate self is seen through completely. We no longer identify with some individual sense of self. We identify with the total conditions of the entire universe itself giving rise to whatever is happening right now, at this moment. But how can we find our way to nondual experiences without some kind of tool, practice, or other upaya to guide our way?
WT’s aim as a soteriological metatheory is to provide a framework for integration of healing practices (or upayas) and techniques to support spiritual practices with identifying and resolving the unmetabolized information and energy which keeps our nervous systems and minds in states of survival. Being in survival states makes seeing through the self not only extremely challenging but for our nervous systems feel deadly and to be avoided at all costs. For unmetabolized information and energy are most influential in our inner worlds through how they shape perception and language. As we saw previously, the self and schemas are primarily accessed through how our perception and language use become markers where our wormholes lie in waiting until we repair the fabric of spacetime.
In Buddhist philosophy, especially Zen thought, this layer of experience is called the mānas-vijñāna and it is where we experience our individual and seemingly-separate experience of a self which is taken to be who we are (i.e. our egoic self). This self is primarily an afflicted self where our emotional vicissitudes and attachment to our schemas of self reign supreme. And the self that is preoccupied with these aspects of our experience profoundly block an awareness of how we are just experiencing our own unique position in spacetime but which is a manifestation of all the entire codependent arising conditions of all being and time in every moment. WT’s focus is how the afflictive emotions and our incessant self-focus are made exponentially more powerful by our unmetabolized information and energy in our circuitry. And how to help soften and digest that material for the sake of giving us more capacity, awareness, and courage to see through the self as this entire codependent arising state of conditions manifesting in every moment. In other words, we are always, already just total dynamic being of every single thing in every single moment.
In both Buddhist and yogic practice and philosophy, we engage in practices to quiet and bring stillness to the mind and body as a prerequisite to gain insight and wisdom. That wisdom becomes the basis for seeing into our karmic conditioning which creates our suffering and our limited, egoic sense of self. These karmic patterns and learnings block us from knowing the self as a manifestation of all being and time experienced through our own unique bodily experience. In Yogic philosophy, we can use various disciplines to tie us back (or “yoke”, the original meaning of yoga) to our fundamental nature and ultimate reality. Yogic disciplines can be as diverse as compassionate service to others, chanting, meditation, or holding the body in various specific positions or mudras. In my own tradition, Ashtanga Yogic Philosophy, we must engage in these disciplines to break down our habits and conditioned patterns (known as samskaras) to find our fundamental nature. In the words of Baba Ram Dass, this fundamental nature is open, loving awareness that maintains its presence with whatever is arising in our experience, whether that be heaven or hell.
In Zen terms, we could say that this nature is clear, open awareness or our inherent Buddha nature. In any yogic approach and in the teachings of Buddha-nature, our greed, anger, delusion, and our afflicted emotional states obscure this bright and open awareness which is our deepest nature and shared by all beings. Through practice, we develop the compassion, wisdom, and imaginative capacity to see the shared fundamental nature of all beings which resides in ourselves, as well. Is it any wonder why the Avatamsaka Sutra (or Flower Ornament Sutra) contains both the early seeds of Buddha-nature teachings and the origin of Indra’s Net in Buddhist imagery and cosmology. In the sutra, a vision of the universe is offered where countless Buddhas sit upon jewels that are as numerous as specks of dust. The whole universe down to the tiniest particle is full of countless buddhas, gods, demons, and myriad beings all representing and containing this Buddha-nature. WT places the origin of its soteriological metatheory in this vision of Indra’s Net.
In Zen philosophy, being at home in Indra’s Net brings with it the clear, open awareness of a mind that is bright and free. We could even say more accurately being at home in Indra’s Net is clear, open awareness and a mind that is bright and free. Home becomes this experience as opposed to being in any specific geospatial location. It also brings us the ability to manifest our fullest humanness with all its unique elements of experience, karma, and history. Our Buddha-nature holds and is our impermanent, specific humanness, the crest of the wave of our entire world conditions, and the entire universe manifesting in this very moment at the same time. In Dōgen Zenji’s terms, we find in our Buddha-nature both the ability to be the unique, phenomenal expression of our truest selves manifesting our entire world conditions in any given moment while also being non-separated from the clear, open awareness of Indra’s Net. It is only in this way that we can be totally immersed in our life as it is, no fixing or changing required. Yet, it is only from this specific state that change becomes possible.
Dōgen Zenji called this a dharma position and in our lives and selves, we embody in our dharma position both the absolute truth of the entire universe and the complete conventional truth of our specific conditions with responsibility for our actions as one whole thing. Operating from a dharma position requires the flexibility and insight to move between both perspectives and experiences with ease and freedom. This freedom and ease come from seeing through their separation from each other which requires a great feat of imagination and creativity. It is this full awareness and occupation of our dharma position which allows us to see both that form is emptiness (nothing has a separate, solid self apart from everything else) but emptiness is also form (the entire codependent arising conditions are giving rise to phenomena which are always just manifestations of Buddha-nature). From this viewpoint, everything we experience in its complete and full nature is luminous, bright, and free. Each separate thing always contains both the whole and the particular all the time.
Each dharma position, as a totally unique experience that is unrepeatable, totally manifests the entire universe in that moment. Dōgen once said that firewood does not become ash but each manifests the entire universe completely in that given moment. Each has its own unique dharma position. From this view, our direct experience of codependent-arising becomes an alternative basis for our life and perception that sees us (or the firewood) as having some stable sense of a separate self that exists outside of our conditions and the total arising of the universe. Dōgen envisions both the vertical aspect of our experience (what is arising out of and as a part of the total world conditions) while also holding the horizontal view (all things are empty of any separate self outside of them). The truly magical implication of Dōgen’s dharma position for our healing practices from Dōgen’s philosophy holds that change is possible precisely because it is the nature of reality itself. If the separate self were truly real, how would it ever interact with anything else or change at all? It is in our deepest conviction that things do not and will not change that we are at our most deluded and separate from reality. We have found ourselves down at the center of of the black hole of a past world where it was safer or less painful to assume change is not possible or real than to risk hope and be smashed upon the rocks of reality.
The concept of a dharma position brings us back to the IPNB model of the circuitry of our mind and self. The IPNB mind and self do not exist separately from the environment and without being in constant communication and interaction with the dynamic flow of information and energy from the environment. While Dōgen did not relate dharma positions to our own paths of healing, they remind us that even when we are at our most anxious, depressed, or disconnected from the world, we are still manifesting the entire codependently-arising conditions of the universe in that moment. The greatest delusion of trauma, anxiety, or depression comes as the illusion of separation. Despite what our deepest cultural conditions, thinking, or shame may tell us, there is nothing to fix or solve about these afflictive states. We can only experience them as dharma gates and paths to awareness and wisdom of our sense of self as manifesting the entire karmic and world conditions in the moment.
WT connects the bridge between Dōgen’s philosophy and healing by seeing the primary reason why disconnection or anxiety arise comes from our past incapacity or lack of connection to fully experience our dharma positions. Each past world is in existential and spiritual terms a past dharma position of the entire conditions of the universe in that moment in spacetime. Liberation and healing come together when we finally can utilize our creativity, imagination, and safe connection with self and others to fully experience and manifest those prior dharma positions in the present here and now world. Each wormhole (i.e. trigger for some kind of flashback experience) keeps open the possibility of these unexperienced dharma positions being fully realized and experienced by the self of the now. When we do, we recover and unify the conditions of the universe and our selves with the rest of our world. We can see that the past never truly was the past. The absolute and the relative finally come home to each other. WT views the gap between healing and liberatory practices (or upayas) as a question of how to gain access to this level of existential and spiritual experience in and through our embodied experiences.
Practices like meditation or yoga along with creative uses of imagination help us explore and reshape how the mind itself is the ground of our experience (and not just our biology as in a scientific materialist view) through the ways it shapes perception and language use. How we can engage and transform our perception and language use becomes the location of our greatest creative potential for healing and liberation through how we experience and express our world conditions in any given moment. As the connection internally between healing and liberation becomes stronger, we then can see that there is no grappling with the unmetabolized information and energy in our circuitry without also including the various mezzo and macro systems as part of that information and energy. An approach to healing and liberation that neglects the role these systems play in our separateness and schemas of self would be incomplete at best and replicating the conditions of hell at worst. While the separate self may be a karmic inheritance arising human consciousness itself, it would be cloaked in delusion without a recognition of how it is constantly being shaped and is shaping the systems of the world the self is arising from. WT holds there is no bridging the gap between healing and liberation without going through the systems that comprise our entire worlds. Standing on the bridge between healing and liberation illuminates the whole world we arise from and within. In the creative expansion of our minds in meditation or yogic practices, we can see the codependently-arising conditions and systems of our worlds that give rise to our greed, hate, and delusion. We see the self and the world as one shared reality. Once the self is freed from the prison of illusory separateness with all our schemas of survival and afflictive emotional states from our karmic inheritances, we see we are not and have never been the clouds. We are and have always been the sky.
In WT terms, healing and spiritual practices point us to the truth of our dharma position and help us gain greater awareness and ability to have embodied experience of it. It is from and within our dharma position that we gain the freedom to move between our universal and particular experience as much as we can in any given moment. This freedom of movement and perspective captures the actual embodied experience of IPNB’s goal of integration and the existential and spiritual experience of being in the center hub of the Wheel of Awareness. This experience of the mind that is bright and free lies underneath all of our unmetabolized information and energy. This experience is not a thought or a feeling specifically, but thoughts and feelings arise from this experience. Being in our dharma position at the center of the wheel truly heals our separation from the universe. When we arrive at our home, perhaps for the first time, the jewel recognizes its true nature and place in The Net. From that vantage point, the jewel sees its place was there all along and it was never truly separate. The objective world “out there” finally finds its place in our subjective world “in here”. We have arrived in that moment, but our homecoming extends into all moments.
Into the Voids
In doing the work of bridging the gap between healing and liberation, WT holds there is no more powerful tool than the combination of psychedelic molecules and plant medicines with experiential therapies and spiritual practices. In fact, WT as a praxis which combines these approaches arose out of years of my own experiential therapy work, Zen Buddhism and yogic practices, and psychedelic journeying. What do psychedelics bring to healing and liberation that is so powerful and catalytic? As Stanislav Grof once said, “psychedelics are nonspecific amplifiers of unconscious experience”. When utilizing psychedelic molecules (especially for healing purposes), we can gain access to the unmetabolized information and energy which our schemas of self keep repressed. Grof was trained as a psychoanalyst and his initial clinical work with LSD focused on the unconscious layers of emotional and family wounding which were not accessible without years upon years of psychoanalytic investigation. Over time, he saw that the unconscious roots of our neuroses and suffering went beyond just our early childhood experiences and extended into the realms of our birth experiences. Grof saw the origins of our neuroses (and the templates for the vast majority of our experiences) through the lens of his Perinatal Matrices, our species-level experiences, and even the transpersonal realms. These transpersonal realms lie beyond any limited, separate sense of self we operate with and can be fully transcended through full-blown mystical experience with the aid of a psychedelic molecule or plant medicine.
WT concurs with Grof’s understanding of psychedelic molecules as amplifying unconscious experience while extending this unconscious experience to include:
- the body
- the systems of our past and current worlds
- our schemas of self
- our terms of attachment to other beings
- our relationships to inanimate objects
- our dualistic sense of self and other
- the entire codependent arising conditions of our worlds and dharma positions as a whole
In psychedelic journeys, we can gain intense and deep access to the entire codependently-arising conditions of current and past worlds of experience (i.e. our dharma positions). They wait for our attention in the unconscious realms of our experience. Psychedelic medicines and molecules, when used with intention and with support and guidance, help us access unmetabolized information and energy contained in our circuitry where the roots of our feelings of aloneness, separation, and suffering lay. Perhaps you (like myself and countless others) leapt into some non-ordinary state of consciousness hoping for transcendence and bliss only to find that experiences of intense terror, isolation, aloneness, abandonment, or fears of death await you. In my own psychedelic voyages and accompanying many of clients on their own, non-ordinary states of consciousness can confront us directly and active the triggers for overwhelmingly intense emotional flashbacks from past developmental and relational traumas. And just as we felt in the original experience, we take our nervous system and mind’s experience of utter despair and isolation as being inherent to reality itself. We take this terror of the flashback experience of abandonment, isolation, and even annihilation as reality itself. When we speak and tremble with fear about “losing our mind” or “going crazy” in a non-ordinary state, we often are naming this exact fear of traumatic re-experiencing. We directly encounter our fear of what has already happened to us, but our minds could not hold when it originally occurred.
In taking the leap into non-ordinary states via psychedelic molecules, the Buddhist maxim of “mind precedes everything” becomes our lifeline and practice for these terrifying encounters. Mind precedes everything will never be more crucial than when the psychedelic medicine and teacher take us to face all the unexperienced experience of our past. These opportunities (or dharma gates, if you will) arise precisely when the schemas of self and our need to be control of our experience become disrupted or even totally shattered and taken offline. During these experiences, the powering down of our DMN’s emerges as most effective and helpful for us. Our rigid sense of self or need for control, while protective, ultimately limit how much access we have to the unmetabolized information and energy in our circuitry. If we hope to gain access to the unmetabolized information and energy keeping us in states of suffering and hypervigilance to our own internal worlds, we must find a way for our schemas of self that prioritize control as the primary means of safety to be gently encountered but courageously confronted. This can come from long-term work in experiential trauma therapy, meditation and yogic practices, or with great intensity and rapidity through accessing non-ordinary state of consciousness via psychedelic molecules.
In WT terms, psychedelic molecules allow some of the most radical means of finding the entrances to wormholes and the tears in the fabric of spacetime that have arisen from the trauma of our lives. They can directly, even brutally, bring to our awareness the living legacy of our traumatic histories, emotional learnings, and karmic inheritances in heightened states of feeling and experiencing. The potential for people with complex and developmental trauma histories to experience intensive and overwhelming emotional flashbacks before, during, and after psychedelic usage and non-ordinary states of consciousness is so common for this very reason. For many of us, we find ourselves on a journey to the center of a labyrinth to confront a minotaur when you had no awareness, we carried a labyrinth or a minotaur inside of yourself! When we assess the potential risk of psychedelic molecules from this context, the potential to be destabilized and even re-traumatized by such an experience becomes obvious. However, where is there is great risk there also comes hope for healing and liberation in these states.
Psychedelic experiences and journeys into non-ordinary states of consciousness can bring healing and liberation through two primary means:
- they help us learn how to be radically present with, ground ourselves in, and find resources to tolerate our core somatic and emotional experiences (especially when we are stepping into a past world where our unmetabolized information and energy lives)
- they reveal how to connect with some ground of our being which is not based on the separate self or ego
These two combined aspects of psychedelic experiences bring what is most needed to our circuitry for metabolizing information and energy:
- safety
- compassion
- courage
- wisdom
- identification with the codependent arising conditions of all reality as the ground of our experiences and not just the egoic, separate self
- freedom from suffering without denying its existence and causes and conditions
Psychedelics can bring a radical breakthrough to these inherent qualities of our own nervous systems and minds which frequently are made inaccessible by our schemas of the self hellbent on controlling reality. These schemas of self which we developed in worlds where survival was the priority and not guaranteed provide the primary gateways to qualities like compassion, wisdom, and freedom. In Buddhist terms, a psychedelic experience (with enough preparation, support, and integration) can bring us directly into awareness of our inherent Buddha-nature. From this place, we realize that we have been good enough all along and at home in The Net without any need to fix or change our basic nature to be in this awareness. When this view is obscured, we must look to what unmetabolized energy and information from past worlds obscures it. When we did not receive the safety, connection, and love to find and experience this Buddha-nature sooner, rest assured that it was too dangerous to know it and survive your world conditions.
In my own journeys through the wormholes of non-ordinary states of consciousness, confronting my own unmetabolized pain, suffering, terror, and isolation with the aid of psychedelic molecules as teachers in themselves has been essential. Psychedelic experiences have shown me that the greatest undoing of aloneness from my own traumatic past worlds can come from directly experiencing that the separate sense of self that experiences the aloneness was real but not true in the way I thought it was. In almost every journey, undoing aloneness in those past experiences or general beliefs about reality and myself catalyzed some of my greatest leaps across the bridge from healing to liberation. During my first journey with MDMA for trauma healing and spiritual growth, I sat outside watching trees sway in the wind, reflecting on the startling experience of feeling totally safe and at home in my body and reality for perhaps the first time in my life. Then I heard a voice both authoritative and gentle whisper into my mind, “you could not be alone in the way you think you are, even if you wanted to be.” Earlier during the onset of the experience, my body seized up as I felt the first effects of MDMA and anxiety stepped in to protect me from all the unmetabolized information and energy of developmental trauma from arising in my awareness. Again, the authoritative but gentle voice of MDMA reassured me that “fear is just energy moving through your body.” At every moment when I was scared and alone, some insight or connection would arise from MDMA which helped undo the locks of all the armor I had been wearing for years totally unbeknownst to me.
During a journey into deep inner space with psilocybin, I found myself sitting on a dark path on the side of a mountain feeling alone and arms wrapped around my knees in fear. As I sat there trembling and lost, a dark figure appeared behind me and stood over me with compassion but also challenge. I knew on some visceral level this was the spirit of psilocybin and began to repeatedly say that I want to know who I really am. Its answer to every desperate inquiry about my true nature was to repeat, “STAND UP” over and over again. After a seemingly endless call and response that built in intensity, I finally did. As soon as I stood and answered the call, I shouted at the top of my lungs, “I know who I am!” with an unprecedented certainty. I learned that no one can ever tell us who we truly are and that we can only know through answering a call and engaging our bodies themselves in action. After this point in the journey, I walked through my physical environment with a confidence and inner stability the likes of which I had never known before. I walked as if I had finally covered my feet in leather and I envisioned walking through my space as if I was walking through the spheres of hell themselves with both safety and compassion.
During a journey into the hyper-dimensions of DMT, I heard a voice that sounded like the call of all existence itself quote William Blake at me when I was baffled and unsure of how to make sense of the hyperdimensional reality I had found myself within. The call reminded me that “heaven and hell are just states of mind.” It took almost 15 years of integration work, Buddhist practice, and studying Yogācāra philosophy to come to terms with what the call had sought to teach me: mind precedes everything. With this lesson, I began to see that if I could stay present with whatever was arising in my mind and body, there would inevitably be a calming of the waters, and I would survive it intact. I can point to no greater disconfirming experience of my emotional learnings than this one: that I would not be destroyed if I allowed myself to fully experience the sensations and emotions from my past world. In these and many, many other experiences, I was repeatedly shown that if I wanted to fully experience what my mind and the molecules were showing me, the most important thing I could do was to focus on my breathing and ride the waves of visceral emotion that were cresting and falling in my nervous system.
After many journeys and consistent practice with these essential skills, I began to access deeper and more elemental layers of my traumatic experiences of being a sensitive, neurodivergent child dependent on highly traumatized, emotionally immature, and narcissistic parents. After some years of work, I was finally shown that the greatest source of my suffering was feeling trapped in a world that was not my own but was forced upon me from birth to serve the needs of others. One of the origins of WT as my own soteriological metatheory for healing and liberation arose from this exact experience during a particularly intense MDMA experience. In that journey, I spent the first 3 hours experiencing intensive nausea and dry heaving as the intensive protective responses of my nervous system arose to interrupt my experiencing the unprocessed trauma and narcissistic needs of my parent that had been shoved down my throat as a child. As the disgust intensified and finally broke, I fell to the ground and began to experience the feeling of vomiting up the entire world of my parent which I had been forced to swallow to stay alive. I wailed and doubled over in pain and disgust as an entire world emerged from the depths of my body. Despite the pain of the experience, I have experienced few moments that were more illuminating for my own healing and liberation in my own path. That experience and the wisdom and great compassion it brought to my life was only possible to experience after years of experiential therapy work combined with the aid of a psychedelic molecule. In the depths of my own terms of attachment, I finally saw the true nature of my experience where to stay alive, I had to swallow an entire world that was being shoved down my throat as a child.
Over the next 5 years, I utilized those lessons and many others from MDMA and psilocybin repeatedly every time I fell through wormhole to a past world into fear and aloneness or sat with a client during their own journeys into non-ordinary states. In my work with my clients doing experiential therapy and psychedelic journeys, this visceral and foundational experience of swallowing a world that was not our own to survive has become the central lesson of WT. In the paths to healing and liberation for myself and my clients, our deep need to keep the past worlds of our parents, community, society alive (despite the anxiety, depression, or rage we feel) can be seen as both the greatest obstacle and greatest gateway for our freedom. In this past world we learned the schemas of self and beliefs that we do not deserve to exist, that we do not get to be our true selves, and that abandonment and annihilation are waiting for us around every corner if we violate the terms of attachment in that world. For healing and liberation, we must go to the end and beyond just updating our learnings from the past world. We must seek to resolve and heal those experiences of toxic shame, anxiety, depression, and all the rest of our sufferings as the foundation of any practice. We can and must go further into the greater existential and spiritual implications of that healing.
In WT’s soteriological metatheory view, the greatest hope of healing and liberation is not just that we can heal the past worlds and close the tears in the fabric of spacetime. Yes, this is necessary journey into the hell realms so we can live fully now. However, WT understands that the true implication of both healing and liberation together leads to transformations and changes in our very perception of reality itself. In this reality, the world itself and we right along with it become a living, breathing expression of a creative, imaginative mind that is bright and free. This mind can move beyond just existing, surviving, or even healing. This mind of liberation that can turn outward from just the separate self and our unmetabolized information and energy of past worlds to the possibilities of co-creating the world of the here and now. This mind with all other beings as part of the codependently arising conditions. It is the mind and self that has finally become the jewel returning home to The Net with full awareness of it being both the jewel and The Net. It is that which is both the ordinary and transcendent. It is the self which finally knows that it has arrived and there is nowhere else to go and nothing else to be. It is the self which can finally affirm all of existence and feel the joy of being alive, right here, right now.
Worlds of Our Own
We often hear that healing and liberation is like an experience of waking up from a dream. At the layers of spiritual experience, awakening and liberation come from seeing through the illusion of the separate self. We wake up from the dream of separation, of being different and inevitably alien in the universe. When we wake up from this illusory separateness, the story goes that our suffering and its causes arising from our feeling of separation from the universe will cease. As Dainin Katagiri once said, “there can be no peace in duality” which implies that peace can only come from nonduality or non-separation. In the state of non-separation, we still move through the world orient with a self but they are no longer what they seemed. The world and the self are now more than what they seem.
In WT’s vision of healing work, we also experience a kind of awakening process. We wake up from the delusion and dreams of being stuck in past worlds, of being the same terrified and suffering children we once were. We wake up to the experience that we are more than just our physiology or survival responses. In WT, we always ask, “how on Earth did this particular mind and body override our organic, somatic ability to process trauma?” WT’s view as a soteriological metatheory states that trauma wounds us at the level of consciousness and perception themselves. We are wounded at the core of our existential experience and its first casualty in that war is our imagination. True, some types of therapy point toward this healing of consciousness and imagination but they are almost always implicit and decentered. As a response to this, WT explicitly focuses on healing at the level of consciousness and imagination as this is the inherent implication in all forms of healing and spiritual practices focused on healing and liberation. As a soteriological metatheory that has arisen from direct praxis with me and others, WT aims to address both the models of inheritance and models of learning that provide the primary obstacles and gateways on the roads to healing and liberation. WT answers the call for freedom and peace with its unified models of metabolism and reflection which embodies both the experience of being a jewel in The Net and The Net itself. It is a compass to find our way back home.
WT primarily arose as my own answer (based in experience and praxis) to David James Duncan’s question at the heart of his novel, Sun House: if we need a shift in consciousness to change the world, then how do we shift consciousness? Of course, we can answer with myriad possibilities and different times and places call for different approaches. However, in our specific world conditions and general point in spacetime, the prevalence of trauma and recognizing its impacts at all systemic levels has become more central to understanding why world conditions are the way they are.
Alongside the rise of recognition of trauma’s role in our limited, particular experiences of the world, our yearning for something universal, transcendent, and beyond our separate selves to ground our ability to be fully engaged in the world is just as relevant now as it was during the Buddha’s time. As WT’s view sees healing and liberation as interrelated and dynamic ways of changing consciousness, it seeks to orient us to how to cultivate states of consciousness that can fully embody our unique world conditions with the universal yearnings for freedom and transcendence of the mind and body. Healing and liberation practices primarily shift and transform our perceptions, interpretations, and ability to act and respond to the world conditions we find ourselves in. They allow us to fully embody and manifest our dharma position and Buddha-nature of clear, open awareness as two aspects of one reality. The nexus where healing and liberation meet lies in a self that is integrated to that particular time and place while always orienting from The Net as being an expression of the entire universe itself. As with maybe all experiences of capital-T Truth, the jewel returning home to its place in The Net can only be experienced as a paradox. The homecoming we long for may likely not be possible to experience unless one first was lost, alone, and adrift in the world. We must first fully acclimate to existing as a single, solitary mote of dust drifting through the universe and then come to know that dharma position in its entirety. In truth, we will likely find it was even more precious because we know the depths of our isolation and followed them to their end and beyond.
WT developed from my experiences as both the healer and the one in need of healing. It arose from how often it seemed that for all our understanding of what it meant to be a wounded and isolated separate self, I always found something lacking in the technique of healing trauma and in the practices of spiritual discipline. I kept searching for a voice and experience of the existential and felt sense of this reality I felt in my own mind and body as if it were my closest friend. Throughout the years, I caught glimpses of a perspective which captured the truth of my own life in D.W. Winnicott’s descriptions of the primitive agonies of early childhood trauma, in poetry, or in descriptions of unspeakable terror, pain, and rage in Pete Walker’s work on Complex PTSD. In all the technical descriptions from trauma therapy and neuroscience for how to heal our trauma, yearned for something that went beyond just the scientific description of how trauma wounds us. I wanted more than just a description of how to set and heal a broken bone. I yearned for something that could join the description of how to set a broken bone with the felt sense and reality of what it felt like to have a broken bone from the inside of our conscious experience of it.
No doubt, my deep yearning was a search to undo my own aloneness and lifelong isolation within my own feelings of pain and terror and a deep longing to feel understood. I knew in my bones that I was a jewel that had closed down to being part of The Net long before language and memory could develop any description of it to share with others. Through the years of healing work, Inner Child rescue operations, sitting with clients as we journey into the void week after week, holding a hand of someone confronting their unmetabolized information and energy for the first time, psychedelic journeys to the underworlds, sitting in rooms of my fellow travelers as we share our unspeakable pain and secret terror of childhood, and sitting on my meditation cushion for days on end with others in search of peace and freedom, one thing became clear to me. How else is one to find the universal but through the particular conditions of your life? Maybe our greatest hope can be found in our capacity is create a world and find something universal. We can create the homecoming we long for with each other and for each other. If the conceptual metaphors for this do not exist in the world conditions, we find ourselves in, then we must create them.
Most days, I try to continually remember how necessary it is to not just know how to heal a broken bone but to have cultivate the wisdom that arises from the inner experience during the process of healing it. This wisdom provides the security, safety, comfort, connection, and real, meaningful hope in all the darkest places of hell that Dante and Virgil dared to tread. This wisdom may in fact be the key ingredient to help us heal and be healed as fast as we can. In the dark, our Inner Critics whisper that it is too late, that all is lost, and you have run out of time. With this wisdom, we can see that in truth, there is much life left to live. Even another breath is an eternity if it is breathed with freedom, peace, and wholeness. This remains true for the Buddha, for all beings, for me writing this, and for you reading it. The world of the here and now waits for us to fully embody our dharma position. Each jewel is essential to The Net but the jewel must believe and know this to be so.
In Duncan’s Sun House, his unintentional menagerie of characters show how to to undo our aloneness through seeking healing and liberation their particular causes and conditions but as part of one unified vision. It is through coming to fully embody how they were “beautifully broken” that they found themselves and each other. At its core seeks, WT’s soteriological metatheory to map out a framework for we beautifully broken to find ourselves and each other more fully and with greater rapidity. It builds a bridge between the healer and the healing/healed because we all must walk each other home if we are to get there someday. In the end, the entire project of healing and liberation requires us to confront the reality of being human beings that are born into and inherit a world full of karma, suffering, and emotional learnings which are not our own. Every wormhole and tear in the fabric spacetime presents us with our unique gateways into the ways we learned to internalize and swallow that inherited world to survive. However, maybe there can be another fate for those of us that learned living death is the price to stay alive and survive. Maybe we can we let the dead bury the dead and build a world of our own, together, for the first time.
“The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labor lies,”
Virgil, The Aeneid, Book VI
