We hear it all the time, find your center, take your awareness inside, be with yourself. It is the basic principle of many healing modalities. But what does it mean ? Where is it ? and what is it supposed to feel like ? And what do we do when we get there ?
I myself heard some expression of this for many years and obediently attempted to comply to an instruction I intellectually understood but had no practical comprehension of.
We live in a traumaitsed world in an age of complete distraction. Everything , everything is encouraging our attention to be somewhere other than within. Not only that but once we do arrive to ourselves, once we can bring our awareness inside it is not uncommon to discover that it is not just peace and harmony that we discover there.
Any modality that can help needs to be able to not only guide us back to ourselves but give directives and support to navigate what we do when we arrive there. Anything that doesn’t address these two key points has the ability to re traumatise and destabilise us.
So as helpful as mindfulness and meditation are , and they surely are, for those of us that need to process trauma (and I would argue that this number includes most of us at some stage of life) we need to practice something with more traction, with a practical application to the trauma, fear, sadness , anger we encounter within.
It is for this reason that I believe focusing is the healing process for our time. It provides the practical skills we need when we encounter trauma within. It is a technique we can learn and practice , like a language, and therefore become more comfortable with. So that the experience of uncovering and working through blocks, fears and traumas has the potential to not only become less scary but also potentially the source of excitement and adventure.
We can continue to avert our eyes, to look away, to look for another screen , toward another distraction. What is within is not going anywhere. No matter how much we avoid it.
There has never been a better time to embark on this inner adventure and find ways to process and understand what exists there. It is my understanding that in this way we play our part in bringing more peace and healing to the world. By ending the war within.