The Great Backlog of Trauma: How The Loss of Ancestral Lifeways Keeps Us Frozen In Time
There is so much trauma in the world because we no longer live like The Ancestors.
The great beast of trauma spreads it’s wings, swoops down, and takes another soul. Onlookers cry out at the horror, and yet secretly they worship this creature, for it lets them feel the deeper wound of what they have lost...
A common theme in much of today's discourse around why people do the things they do, where they sit in the social hierarchy and how entitled they are to just be “okay”, is trauma rhetoric. In fact, it seems like being “okay”, is in a lot of ways not okay. As a culture, we have become highly identified with our wounds, and also consistently call in the type of mindset that enchants wounds into being just by staring its gaze upon a life story. In other words, creating pain where none exist.
This is probably for good reason. The wounds, blood and guts...and dismembered pieces of modern citizens are littered about now and have been for thousands of years. Traumatic pain has accumulated, created momentum, and now like a child, is throwing a tantrum in the collective human sphere. We are aching and we need everyone to know. We see others aching, and they have to know that we care. In fact we will make them know.
The Great Homotraumatica?
Yet, why is there so much trauma? Are we the great homotraumatica? In this particular instance, I believe we are dealing with a case of this being a bug, and not a feature of the human experience. A bug that has crawled it’s way into modern human life, because that which would normally guard us is missing. I suspect we have so much trauma, because the actions, modes of perceptions and experiential cues that once existed in our ancestral past are missing. The human species used to exist in a context that had built into ways of regularly releasing or even preventing, the build of the “energetic charges” that allow trauma to exist.
What is Trauma?
In order flesh that out, let’s try and first find the bones of trauma itself.
Although many could say that trauma occurs because of what happens to us, I would say that misses a part of the story that is critical. At-least in equal measure to the occurrence of life events, trauma is how we respond to what happens to us. For many people may experience the same event, and not be traumatized in equal measure.
What is trauma? Trauma is an event that causes “frozen time”; a part of your story that keeps repeating itself. Some event occurs, we experience it, and our response is getting “stuck” at the time of the event. Many people understand this. PTSD for example is characterized by memories of the event, repeating themselves over and over again. Other ways this shows up is “hyper-vigilance” for the organism believes that a threat (or type of threat) is present, because one was in the past. Trauma often continues to color our perception to make us expect more of the same. The expectation is that something will “repeat” itself.
Some aspect of who we are gets fixated with the past, and refuses to release it’s hold, keeping us perpetually stuck in a rhythm out of sync with the present moment. This is by no means just mental, but fundamentally energetic in scope. The body shifts and changes in response to the event by warping energetic flows, on multiple levels. A great water wheel of fear based expectations begins to turn. The nervous and endocrine system adapts to the event as if the event were perpetual, ever present and ongoing. The cycle of experience, digest, reconcile, and move on gets interrupted and the event becomes like a heavy stone in our guts, our heart, or our throat. We are pressurized and locked into a state we feel we cannot escape, and yet must escape.
This is certainly suffering. If we experience a trauma (or many traumas) with enough gravity, then we are caught in the event horizon of a black hole of the past. For if our story gets locked into a perpetuating loop we feel we cannot be present with our lives. We cannot attune to the sun rising and setting. We cannot breath the air freely, for a weight bears down up us. We cannot show up for our lovers, or envision a generative future, or pursue our destiny. The drag and resistance of the past is too great.
If this paints an accurate picture of trauma, and I would be willing to bet the house, it is pretty close to the mark, then it stands to reason that what we need is to find ways to release the past and enter into the present moment.
Why Are We Responding Into So Much Trauma?
The question then is why do we we respond the way we do?
One might color this as purely the result of individual constitution, and that probably does play a role. However, I suspect it has a lot more to do with the collective constitution. It is the current organization of modern civilization that keeps us perpetually traumatized for it prevents the ongoing release of trauma, as a byproduct of life itself. Like a tiger or wolf stuck in a pen, pacing back and forth, humans find themselves doing the same. Our innate state of being is cast off, and we exist in a zoo like environment. The massive accumulation of trauma is the result of a losing our sense of who we are as a species.
Inside of indigenous and tribal cultures we often see a very different way of life compared to ours because their lifestyle by it’s very nature clears out the cob webs regularly. If we as modern citizens lived more akin to the way the ancients lived, we may find our experience of much wounding similarly cleared.
Tribal and Indigenous Lifeways That Reconcile or Prevent Trauma
Our tribal and indigenous ancestors, as well as the traditional cultures that emerged out of them all had access to:
1. Communal ritual and dance, which are “shared” energetic patterns and cathartic events that would regularly allow them to discharge built up trauma in the context of a safe communal container. These were often regular scheduled events in harmonic resonance with natural cycles in time. They facilitated deep trance states, which would reset us, and allow profound release through peak states.
2. Healthy ancestral relations, which would prevent the build of trauma from one generation to the next, and offer a deeper sense of belonging and resilience.
3. They would regularly experience intense physical activity and/or flow states in nature. Physical activity helps complete the neuroendocrine cycles that are characteristic of stored survival stress. Flow states create states timelessness, and thus the frozen time phenomena can release. Flow also by its very nature creates “flow” inside our system, thus facilitating that which much flow and not remain stuck. When we do all this in nature...physical activity and flow, we get regulated by the great spirit of the earth itself, to let go of that which we have been holding onto.
4. Deep communal ties that connect them to ssense of true support. Survival is not in question nearly as often as it for us today. They love and care for one another and display cohesive family dynamics. Their role in the community is also fostered and acknowledged from a young age, and thus a deep sense of meaning and purpose develop in the context of their community.
This is the way humans were designed to live, and constitute the mountains for the wolf, or the jungle for the tiger, as opposed to the zoo and the perpetual pacing.
Aligning My Own Life with The Ancestral
Doing my best to align my own life with these patterns, and reverse engineer some of the aspects of the this “ancestral way of being”, has been deeply healing for me, bringing me back from severe illness and shamanic sickness/Kundalini syndrome. Thus, this has been true for me.
I have experienced some difficult events in my life. Not the worst possible inside the human experience, but also some that are “worth writing home about”. Some that have crushed other people in fact. At this stage in my life, I am the least impacted by trauma, I have ever been. I say this not with hubris, but immense gratitude for the healing I have been able to experience, and that it has allowed me to share this perspective.
I can say that in the whole time I have surfed these currents I have not once gone to therapy, have paid minimal attention to “safe nervous system regulation” work, concerned myself with not being triggered, or obsessed over trauma as a whole. Some people have and will benefit from those interventions. I invite you to embrace whatever you need and/or facilitate. What I have done, is do my best to re-awaken the innate layers of ancestral experience in my life and consistently invoke greater and greater aliveness. As the aliveness comes, the discharges do as well. The fire of being alive must cook through that which is incoherent with it.
In the spirit of this pursuit of the innate aspects of my humanity, which have also been deeply healing of my trauma, the big currents of practice that have helped the most:
1. De-armoring the body through Bioenergetics. Bioenergetics is a form of somatic work that emphasizes vitalistic embodiment, vibration, and catharsis. It is also fundamentally primal in scope. Our ancestors were likely way less physically tense and neurotic than we are. This is my go for releasing neurotic holding patterns for trauma is carried in the body itself.
2. Living in an environment I love and communing with it daily. This means going out in nature, giving offerings and speaking with the land. Engaging with land spirits proper. We exist and experience in the context of space-time. Loving and being loved by the land is exceedingly healing.
3. Shifting the way I understand events in my life within the context of an auspicious cosmology. That means aligning with a more medicinal story. A story that aligns the events in my life with a deeper and more nourishing north star. This is cosmology work. We need more auspicious cosmologies like our ancestors had.
4. Energy work and internal alchemy. Learning to once again commune with natural forces and speak the language of energy is profoundly helpful. Much of what we call energy work these days comes directly from the ancestors. Old traditions. Beyond that, our ancestors could feel the pulse of life and currents of energy moving through it. Trauma is energetic pattern.
5. Animist ritual and ancestral veneration. Once we understand that we live in an animate universe, the flood gates of possibility and relationality open. What is your relationship to the intelligent animating force that enlivens your body? Do you sing and dance with the spirits of your lineage that gave you this body? Does your trauma itself have a “spirit”? How does lineage support your healing.
6. The heart is at the core of a soul filled life. It expands our sense of self to include the broader sphere of life, and allows us greater compassion, love and forgiveness. We cannot heal that which we do not love.
7. Ecstatic sexual experiences are purifying forces and no trauma can withstand the fire like brilliance of orgasmic tremors. They shake, and shimmer through that which is not present here and now. Eviscerating anything not living in this moment. Deep sex ask us to surrender to the eternal moment. Trauma cannot exist there.
8. Intelligent diet and supplementation are critical for supporting the body, and as a form of self love in the context of broader healing. Food is the nectar of a life itself.
9. Flow state practices. Deep flow creates states of timeless experience, while creating profound physiological states of release, recycling and reconciliation.
In one way or another, all of these practices or states of being are reclamation's or regrowth's of our innate humanity, that have all been but suppressed in the modern world, and that is the greatest trauma of all.