Q: Some months ago I made a really brave decision and ever since then I've felt happy and really powerful. My heart is open most of the time. I feel love and can help a lot of people, but then there is a huge flashback into my childhood and a wave of pain – a lot of pain. I know it’s not the real me and I open to be with it, but I forget everything. Why does it still come? Will it ever go away?
John: When you have a flashback, the pain is the holding that’s there from your past. The holding is put in place by a judgment that you consciously made in your past. You don’t need to remember what that judgment was. What matters is that the judgment is a closing you support with your emotion and your thinking. You set it in your will, which puts it into your body.
When you go through a fundamental opening, the levels of your body open. That can move a wave of your past right into the present, and there you’re able to be in your past differently.
Q: Can you explain more?
John: When you have a flashback your nervous system flares, which puts you right into the experience of your past. The experience of your past is in your nervous system and it’s in your body.
As your nervous system flares, instead of being with the pain – which is a distraction – it’s all about you opening: not opening to the pain, but you opening because that’s what’s real and true for you. That openness is what you really are.
Without addressing your past as it comes up, without dealing with it, just completely open in it. Open without any view of control, without any view of survival, in the way that you were able to open in the past but didn’t. Wherever you have opened in the past, you have no issue. Your issue with the past is where you closed, so as it comes up again, deeply, quietly open.
When your past comes up and you open in it, all that you are is openness: openness in a way that you’ve never been before. You begin to see differently. You’ll see in your past what you couldn’t see before. As you see differently, love moves into your past and it changes your past.
Your past is fixed only where you closed. As you open in your past, what you’re opening into, without realizing it, is your future self. You’ll enter a level of development in your self that you’ve never been in before. It’s that difference that addresses your nervous system, opens it and heals it.
Q: And when that happens it doesn’t come back again?
John: Your past will keep coming back, but when it comes back, it comes back as love. Then, regardless of what your experience has been in your past, as it comes back you love your past because you see differently in it. You can see, whereas before you couldn’t. You couldn’t see because you closed.
When your self suffers a trauma and you open in it, love is released into your self despite what’s happening to your self. When you open, everything is helping you. When you open, trauma deeply helps you. It’s difficult to understand until you’ve lived it.
Q: Do you mean it’s helping me to be the person that I want to be? How can it help?
John: When you’re opening in the midst of trauma, the trauma to your self draws up the deep in you. As soon as you’re opening, what you are being is the same as your being.
When a trauma hits your self and you are being the same as your being in the midst of that, much more of your being opens, moves and fills into your traumatized self, and you understand in a way that is contrary to your experience. What you understand is love. What you experience is hurt.
As you open, it’s love that addresses the hurt. As soon as you close, it’s a judgment that addresses the hurt. It’s the judgment that seals in the trauma. It locks it into your body.
