July 27, 2025
When Compliance Is Not Consent: How Freeze-Based Trauma Undermines Our Agency And Will
Tags: Freeze, Trauma therapy, Psychadelic therapy, Andean Mysticism, Consciosness, Choice, Neuroplasticity, energy medicine
Emerging from the architecture of freeze—into the light of will, choice, and consent.
A Thief in Sheep’s Clothing
It has been said that trauma is a thief. The events themselves may have been horrific, but with freeze-based trauma, the worst of it often still lies ahead.
As children, we are usually outmatched by our aggressors. While the default stress responses are to flee or fight, neither is usually an option when we are small and dependent upon our abusers for survival. Children facing violence, abuse, or violations of their boundaries—and their bodies—have but one option: to survive it. A third stress response takes over: freeze.
When the nervous system chooses freeze, it does so by overriding our will. No one wants to freeze. It’s a form of paralysis. Without will, our agency, or ability to act according to our will, collapses. Now we are at the whims of our aggressors. To make matters worse, if this happens more than once our brain rewires itself to use freeze as the default stress response in the future. We are not making choices anymore in freeze. We are surviving them. What happens in the aftermath often causes far more harm than the event itself...
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July 19, 2025
Initiated by Lightning: Trauma as a Sacred Rewiring
Tags: trauma healing, neuroplasticity, intitations, Energy medicine, Andean Mysticism, plant medicine, DMN, psychadelic therapy
How trauma cracks perception open and reveals a portal into the soul’s higher gifts.
There is a kind of spiritual initiation in Peru that comes straight out of the sky.
Across the world’s spiritual traditions, initiations take many forms. Most are ceremonial and symbolic. Christian priests baptize parishioners with water to mark a rebirth in Christ, or offer communion through the ritual of bread and wine. In Judaism, the bar or bat mitzvah celebrates a coming of age. These are gentle rites of passage.
But in the high Andes of Peru, there is an initiation that comes not through ritual, but through lightning.
Many indigenous cultures have rites far more intense than the ceremonial softness of Western religion. Vision quests, burials, and Sun Dances are all deeply transformational…and often traumatic. In the Andes, some paqos, or Andean priest-healers, are said to be initiated by being struck by lightning. These are the altomesayokes, those who speak directly with the Apus, the mountain spirits. They are not chosen by human teachers, but by the cosmos itself.
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February 08, 2024
Podcast with Jason Grechanik of The Universe Within
Tags: Shamanism, Intitations, the call to shamanism, Shamanism and Physics, inititations and neuroscience, The Q'ero tradidion, Dark Energies, choice, Andean mysticism, Psychadelics, Psychadelic Therapy, podcast, Juan Nuñez Del Prado, Joan Parisi Wilcox, Trauma
Podcast: Jason Grechanik of the Universe Within interviews Christina Allen
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December 02, 2023
Interview of Christina Allen at Shaman’s Summit: Healing Trauma, Body, Mind, and Soul
Tags: Shamanic Training, Shaman's Directory, Global Summit, Trauma, Energy Medicine, Freeze, Shamanic Teachers, Podcast, psychadelics, psychadelic therapy, Healing
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Listen to an interview with Christina Allen by the Shaman's Directory at their 2023 gathering
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