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Join Christina Allen and many other remarkable shamanic teachers and practioners in a summit this November 27-December 1.
Live interview and conversation between Christina Allen and Olivia Young on healing from trauma using shamanic tools.
It is said that patience is a virtue. By this we mean that impatience and impulsivity are things we must overcome in our journey toward emotional maturity. As children we want it all now. Yesterday even! We wind ourselves up and become anxious, we push the river, we demand! We want and we create angst in that wanting. Maturity comes in recognizing that there is a divine timing to all things. For us to get what we want, the universe has to do a lot of shuffling and reshuffling of the deck. And then, when and if the moment is right, everything lines up and it is time!
There is order to all of Creation. Think of a human body. It starts from two cells, an egg and a sperm. They come together in a single moment and then begin to organize and multiply into an array of highly differentiated cells signaling back and forth to each other, creating a complex being pulsing with life. These cells multiply and replace themselves many times through a lifetime, renewing themselves to keep the organism healthy and vibrant. This intricate ordering can be disrupted, however, and a new one can unfold. A missing, damaged, or extra chromosome, for example, can cause a mutation that results in a different form or structure. Creation is an endless process of ordering and reordering. But not all form is viable or healthy. Creation just creates. Take cancer, for example. We know that metastatic cell proliferation usually occurs in response to a stressor. The resulting mutations drive cells into reproducing themselves without check. A new order ensues but not a healthy one.
As separate, individual, human beings in an ever unfolding Creative Universe we are all in relationship with absolutely everything outside of ourselves. In the Andean spiritual traditions everything in the created universe is made of a conscious living energy called sami. To be, is to be in relationship with all that is. How we engage in general determines how we are engaged with. With this in mind it might be worth taking a moment to stop and reflect upon how we approach being “in relationship.”
We trip over, and loop through, an internal feedback system of thought, perception, and emotion and call it our reality…. It’s quite compelling and we are often unable to see outside this thing we have created to be “me.”
Podcast:
Olivia Young interviews Christina Allen on her work.
It has been said that trauma is a thief. Whatever it was that happened, the worst of it often lies downstream. The events may have been horrific, in and of themselves, but trauma also steals from us our future and our self respect. Like interest on a maxed out credit card the effects of trauma are compounded daily. Especially when it happened early in life. As children we are usually considerably outmatched by our aggressors. The default stress response is to flee or to fight back. But when we are small this is usually not an option. Children facing violence, abuse, or violations of their boundaries and bodies have but one option: to survive it. A third stress response called Freeze takes over. Freeze is a shut down of all physical and emotional responses. It is akin to the opossum playing dead. The goal is to live. We go into shock, into paralysis, and then we dissociate, leaving our bodies to the circumstances at hand.
It all actually started for me when I fell into the fire on Summer Solstice of 2019. It’s been a long 3 years. I don’t know about you but I was taken down to zero. I fought it. I was not going to go down. I’m tenacious, I’m stubborn. But over and over again I got the message to let go. To die the shamn's death. And finally I did. I’m sure this happened to many of you over the COVID time-out.
I literally fell into a ceremonial fire, landed with my left hand on a log of burning embers and was apparently engulfed in flames, briefly. I heard this voice say "This is an intitation." Then came the unraveling. And the reformatting. And the alchemy. You see, at the core of this was the call for me to heal from a lifetime of what I call freeze. It’s one of the three states we can go into when events are too big to face. We run. We fight. Or we freeze. My go-to was to freeze.
See a live 2 hour interview with the Shaman's Directory and Christina Allen on on walking the Andean paq'o path and using the Andean Healing arts to heal trauma, especially Freeze.