27 "Is My Bruised Psyche Blocking My Awakening?" PTSD Part 2

This is part 2 of 5 on Awakening and PTSD.

You are a relaxed beautiful radiant loving being flowing effortlessly with love...but often we don't feel that way. Why? We absorbed a "bruise" of inadequacy, fear, discontent, or some other equally untrue feeling. This became our underlying felt sense of ourselves and because it did not feel right we started trying to incessantly think our way out of our predicament in order to solve our suffering. But this bruise is neurobiological and can't be solved with thought. Different tools are needed.

These podcasts are what I have found to be the most helpful over the last 50 years on my path of awakening. They are most powerful when listened to in sequence from one forward because each is built on the last. They also stand on their own. If anything does not resonate, please disregard it.

Though I am a psychotherapist these podcasts are offered to be spiritually helpful and are not psychotherapy. Reach out to a PTSD trained therapist if needed.

Transcript

Hello, This is William Cooper. Welcome to Awakening Together. How's your day going? I hope well. Isn't what you want and what we all want is to be our natural, Happy self? Relaxed and radiating beautiful, Loving light. Everything around us is light. It is consciousness. We see what we are and in this body we channel light. We've talked about that before. Well, Why isn't that happening? This imprint somehow has covered us up and that's what I'd like to explore today as we further discuss PTSD and how to solve and release this covering that's blocking us so deeply. Normally we come to awakening from the outside in. We feel pain so we look at why are we feeling pain. That brings us to our thoughts and our emotions and we look to release those. Perhaps we go through psychotherapy. Perhaps we change our life. Perhaps we do a lot of things and all of these things are good things to do. But today I'd like to look at it from the other way, From what our true self is and what happens to bring us to the state of affairs that we and the world are in now. To see is to be free. So as we see this clearly, We'll know exactly what to do and then we'll talk about how to do it. All of this should end up making a lot of sense and being very doable for you. If it doesn't, Just disregard it. So, But I think it will make some sense. Okay, So what's underneath this covering that's blocking us? Without that covering we would be radiant and we are radiant light. Beyond that reaches outside of creation and you can only know that part of yourself through intuition. Very quiet, Very perfect and within it is the potential for every possible thing to occur. Very powerful yet very silent. What we do feel and can see is that which is created and that's the light that would that flows through us. That infinite beyond creation turns into light as it flows into this creation and into the world. Everything is made of this consciousness, This light in our natural awakened self. We're relaxed and we flow light. Everything that we see around us glows with light. We are light. We see light. Everything is light and that light feels like bliss and joy and everything is connected because it's the same thing and that feels like love. So that's our natural state. We don't have to do anything to achieve that. That's what we are all the time under the surface if we're covered up. If we're not covered up we just experience that all the time. So that's nothing to aspire for. That is what you already are. The thing to aspire for is if you're not experiencing that is to let the covering go. Let it dissolve because it creates pain and it obscures your view. You can't enjoy life. You don't feel your natural joy and beauty and love and so you make up a facsimile, An emotional love, An emotional joy. You put on a happy face. You read positive thinking books. You know you go to spiritual events which are good things to go to by the way. But that's what we do because we're desperate. We're desperate to feel ourselves again, Right? So how is all this happening? How did we get covered up? Okay let's again look from the inside out. Let's go to our core. We're light and then what happens? We take in an imprint. There's a bruise on the surface. It's an imprint. We take in some kind of felt message. It's a feeling maybe more than a thought but it's a feeling of insecurity or doubt or that we're no good or we're unlovable or some kind of just felt experience. Perhaps it comes from a past life. Perhaps it comes from childhood. I'm not saying where it comes from. I'm just saying it's there pretty much for all of us. You know like I said in the last podcast cult-ture culture. Maybe it comes from our cult-ture. Who knows? But we are bruised and we have this imprint. Let's just say if it's doubt. We start with that. It's a felt sense of doubt and then we form thoughts to solve that doubt. We form a personality to solve that doubt. Everything looks suspicious to us as we put our thoughts together. Everything creates insecurity as we look through these thoughts because underneath it all we are doubtful. And so everything that we see looks doubtful and we form a personality to cope with what we believe is a doubtful world. If we're anxious perhaps we form an anxious personality. Maybe we believe everything is a conspiracy. Maybe we that's the lens that we look through. As we create these thoughts, Remember thoughts are simply hallucinations. We hallucinate some kind of reality. It's generated from this felt bruise. So as we look through these thoughts, They're like film strips or images. We talked about that in our last podcast. It's like putting on a 3D, On 3D glasses, Virtual reality. And as we look through it everything seems so real. It's not. It's just thoughts. But just like you can't see the color pink if you have on pink sunglasses, You can't see through this virtual reality that you yourself have created in order to solve the bruise which is underneath it. So you're looking outward for a solution that can never be found. Now fortunately thoughts are not very strong. Although they can be devastating and this virtual reality can cause depression, Suicide, It can ruin your life, Destroy relationships, Change the way that you look at the world, The thoughts themselves are not that strong. So spiritual practices cut through those thoughts and that virtual reality and you get a burst for a moment of clarity perhaps once you've been doing your spiritual practices. You get a burst and you feel good and you feel your blissful self for a moment. Maybe during your yoga or your meditation or whatever you're doing, Your mantras, Your chanting, Your praying, Your going to church, Whatever it is, You feel a release. Unfortunately because you don't touch the underlying, The very first bruise, Though you cut through that personality that's built on top of that bruise, You cut through it for a moment, It reforms quickly and the stress that you perhaps released forms again. And so every day you need to do your spiritual practices over and over and over and over because the underlying problem has never been solved. You'll notice every day perhaps when you wake up you have a certain attitude underneath everything that just sort of starts to fuel your day. Again maybe it's anxiety or could be anger or it could be you have a chip on your shoulder or maybe you're anxious or scared or maybe you don't feel good enough or whatever it is. It's not a true thing but you believe it's true. It's beyond thought because it's your very first felt sense of yourself. We've talked in previous podcasts about the personality system called the Enneagram and it looks at nine different possibilities that absolutely everybody forms a personality around. There are nine different ways to form our thoughts to make personalities so we fall into one of nine categories. As we look through our thoughts that we formed it's like looking through a kaleidoscope or again those virtual reality glasses. That's how we see the world. And we're stuck. You can't heal the mind with the mind because the mind is sick. It's formed around a bruise and it's sick. A sick mind cannot heal a sick mind. It just doesn't work. So you'll notice that spiritual practices are generally around you stopping. Just stop. That's what meditation is right? Stop and sit down. You can't be distracted if you sit down. You can't get in the refrigerator and eat a pie. You just sit and let things unwind. You don't get involved with your thoughts but you let them unwind and dissipate. You let that energy dissipate until all there's left is you that's watching. And what is that? That's you. It's just you. It's not you that's watching. It's just you. Awareness aware of itself. We've talked about that plenty in earlier podcasts so I won't go back over that. I will say this though and you've heard it before. It's about neuroplasticity and it's about the way psychology often treats things like obsessive compulsive disorder. Things that are motivated by deep a deep felt sense. Where you repeat over and over and you can't stop. Well that's what we do but since so many people do it on a manageable level we think it's normal. And the phrase is neurons that fire together wire together. So the way that you treat something like obsessive compulsive disorder or one of the ways that you would treat that is to have the person as much as they can not follow through on what they what that bruise is telling them to do. For instance if they feel very insecure and that they're gonna get in trouble and maybe they feel guilty maybe that's what that first felt sense is for them. They feel like oh I better check the stove and make sure it's off or I better do this or I better do that and I better do it over and over so I bet I make doubly sure that everything is okay. I've got to make very much sure that everything's okay. Well the more you do that the more that becomes a habit and next thing you know you have obsessive compulsive disorder. Well that's what we have in our lives. I hate to break it to everybody but that's what we've got that's what our personality is made of. We obsessively act like ourselves. Our personality selves not our real self. So we have to stop this. Okay that's called meditation. It's hard. Nobody wants to sit down just like and do meditation just like somebody with obsessive compulsive disorder. They don't want to not turn off the stove. They want to check it every second. They have to work at it. It's hard. They have to have courage and they do. We have to have courage and we do. So backing up now we are light and as we look we see there is a bruise when we wake up in the morning there is the sense of who we are. It feels so real. It feels right. It feels right because it was something that we were told or some imprint just by osmosis maybe in our culture or our family or we observe something but we took something in deeply and beyond a thought just a feeling. I feel insecure. Some kind of feeling. I feel angry and it's stuck. That's what I'll call PTSD because as you move backwards through your spiritual practice you do your yoga, You meditate, You relax, Things open up, You see that you're not your thoughts, You're not your emotions and you let them go, Let them go, Let them go and you keep going back back back and you finally get to this felt sense, Guess what it doesn't release. You have awakening but you're in pain at the same time because it doesn't release and it keeps generating thoughts because in PTSD what happens is a term called reenactment. You keep trying to reenact the original bruise and so you keep thinking and thinking and thinking you keep trying to solve it. That's what thoughts are. Their job is just to solve a problem. That's why we take the effort to hallucinate or think. I'll call it thinking but it's the same thing, That same process. It's a hallucination but we take the effort to do it in order to picture, To form a hallucination of solving it. How can we solve it? We are looking through our virtual reality glasses and we're trying to picture it and work it out, Work it out, Work it out so we have incessant thoughts and they just don't stop. So we can be very awake and feeling bliss. We could get that far in our spiritual practice but unless that first bruise releases, There's not a clear flow in our life. We keep generating thoughts and emotions and troubles and worries and that's how you can have an awake person that is at the same time very depressed or anxious or obsessive-compulsive. You can have that because that bruise hasn't released. Why hasn't it released? Okay now we see the bruise, We're looking at the bruise, Let's say. We're experiencing it and it's releasing energy, Releasing energy and that goes on for decades. Why? It just doesn't release. Have you ever noticed in your life you see something, You work on it but it keeps coming back and coming back and coming back. Why? Because we've got post-traumatic stress disorder. It may not be like the kind that we recognize, Like some horrible big event we've been through a war or some horrible thing but it's enough. We went through enough and that's imprinted and until it releases, It's generating everything every day that we then use spiritual practices to try to dispel but then it forms again the next day and then we guess what, We end up going to yoga the next day and we keep doing our chanting and we keep doing our praying because the problem is still there. You also see in spiritual practice these practices are not designed to do forever. We're supposed to, The idea is to be awake and once awake you don't need the spiritual practices. They're not to do forever. So what to do? As we discussed in our last podcast, This is like working with a muscle cramp. It's a biological issue and no amount of thinking or reading is going to release it. We have to go deeper and we have to use different tools. I think I said in my last podcast that this podcast we would look at how to release these things. Well I thought it would be best for us to talk a little bit more and get a little bit clearer because to see is to be free and I want to have a clear playing field when we actually start working to release this bruise which is what we will start to do in our next podcast. So I've enjoyed talking with you and I look forward to talking with you soon. Take care.

Reviews

Thank you so much! Such an important message. Awareness and reinforcement is very helpful. Peace and love, Jennifer Lea

Thank you so much. I have listened to this one three times! I am truly grateful 🙂🙏

The bruise analogy works for me! Excited to learn more from Peter and inner family systems...I have done some systemic constellations and they are fascinating. I had pleasure of listening to Elmar Dornberger speak on trauma and there were so many connections within your talks, felt like God was like listen up buttercup. There are times I wish there was someone I could talk with everyday as stuff comes up and traditional therapy isn't a fit.

Schwartz has a great book only available on audible that walks you thru his model as an experience. Thank you :)

Thank you William & Hello on this lovely October day. I listened to this podcast today, after listening to the preceding one last night. Now to take it slowly and stay with this one for a while. Listen to again.
This is extremely helpfull to me. There is so much here…. to let the thoughts soak up the goodness of my awareness… thoughts & feelings of despair, Thich Nhat Hanh when asked what is the most important thing in life- he said not to be overwhelmed by despair- and here I can also connect that to how you describe that a person can be awake, aware and very anxious. Pendulate, maybe, just take in a drop… I’m remembering the wind and light rain, on one of my cheeks as I recently walked from the train on a stormy evening.
Peter Levine and Richard Schwartz, I’ve come across both. I’ve spent a long time on a lot of stuff- here you are helping me connect into this in a real and paced way.
So for anyone else who sees this, if they’re like me with the fast mind, looking and looking for solutions I suggest maybe go to your website first and look at the resources section you recommend. They may find enough material that connects with these talks and not need buy loads of books and watch hours of youtube, which can become like an ocd of our mind trying to help solve a lot of stuff. I’ve done that and more.
Your pacing here is lovely. I feel gratitude to have found your talks. Also, thank you for your 2nd follow up message to me on the previous talk- I left a short reply there.
Blessings to all here 🌱