When I meditate on healing, and what helps us to stay alive in the face of all that we are faced with, I keep seeing circles. I don’t think this is for just any reason. I have a lesson that deals with circles and with healing, it’s called the lesson of recreation. (Not recreation, as in, sitting on the beach, but re-creation: to create anew.)
This lesson is tied to the number eight, which, as you know, is made up of two circles, one on top of the other. This lesson teaches how one heals through a trauma. The top circle represents the thought/emotional process; the bottom circle represents the physical process.
According to this lesson, when we are traumatized, our minds and body stop in time. They clutch and cling to that moment, frozen in the trauma. This is why people have so many dreams about horrible incidents that have occurred: the time in which the trauma occurred does not pass us by, it stays with us. We are trapped in that exact time.
To heal from the trauma, we must pass through it again (and again and again) without the “catching” time. We must pass through it, literally, because we did not do so the first time around.
So, applying the lesson of eight, or recreation, first we must go through the occurrence in our thoughts and in our emotions. And as we see it in our minds and feel it in our hearts, we have to let go of the aspect of the trauma that holds us fast in its memory. We must rage at the injustice and pain, and cry the tears that we think is good to have held in. Over and over, circle after circle, we must move through the incident until we can look at it from a distance, saying goodbye to it, and feel only indifference that this should have happened to us.
Then, going through the bottom circle, we will find that we are walking through the experience again. We may find ourselves turning a corner and remembering the attack that we suffered. Or we may be out on the road and come close to an accident, triggering the tightening breath, the clenched fists, the pounding heart. And, through these experiences, we must learn to keep breathing, learn to still our hearts until we can acknowledge our safety, our wholeness.
Trauma, it seems, can trigger great spiritual awakenings. Once we have reacted fully to the tragedy, we can find ourselves literally spiritually transformed. There are counselors who focus on leading people through just such transformations. I wonder, personally, how beneficial such transformations are without a religious context — what is to explain the mystery of it all? How is the person to continue his spiritual growth without a circle of faith holding on to him, holding him up? On whom can he lean as he discovers his own vulnerability and weakness?
Which brings me to think about the greater circles that we create in our lives, with loved ones and with people we come in regular contact. Do not these circles, healing and otherwise, provide us with our motivations to keep living? When we let go of these circles, do we also let go of our sources of the life force itself? Is the life force strengthened by feeling connected, feeling the hand as it supports us?
We find ourselves in so many circles, do we even acknowledge their importance to us and our lives?
It’s something to keep meditating on, don’t you?