Tending Our Hearts & the World
Exploring the Confluence of Trauma and Soul
This past year, I have shared my writing and voice with the world more than ever. My first book, Wild Yoga: A Practice of Initiation, Veneration, & Advocacy for the Earth, was published one year ago, last February. Following publication, I was invited to do podcast interviews and encouraged to share my work on social media.
Welcome, I’m Rebecca Wildbear, author of Wild Yoga: A Practice of Initiation, Veneration, & Advocacy for the Earth and Soul guide at Animas Valley Institute. My newsletter, Radical Dreaming, invites readers to listen to their body, nature, and dreams while unveiling power imbalances & other root causes of ecocide. Almost everything I publish is free, but I occasionally offer some deep imagination journeys for paid subscribers.
Writing and sharing myself in the world aligns with my soul and excites my muse. Yet, I was surprised when I noticed shame arise within myself. I wondered why my desire to hide increased. Meanwhile, I felt the pull of my muse wanting me to share more, like the outrage I feel when encountering ecocide, power-over dynamics, and injustice in relationships, organizations, and the world. But sharing these perspectives feels dangerous. And sometimes my feelings are so strong I imagine self-combusting, turning into a raging fire. In these moments, words often elude me.
My feelings relate to my unique way of seeing and sensing, which can serve the world if I share it. Yet some of my fear and outrage seem related to trauma: personal, cultural, and ancestral. To fully express myself and offer my gifts, I need to explore the trauma. I contacted a Master Neuro-Affective Relational Model (NARM) therapist and have engaged in weekly sessions since May. Lately, I’m feeling more curious and gentle with my heart and in closer contact with my grief.
I have worked as a psychotherapist since 1997 and trained in many models offering strategies to heal trauma, including Hakomi, Brain Spotting, and Somatic Archeology. I have mastered techniques to relax my nervous system and establish wholeness, like yoga, meditation, and nature-based soul work. Doing yoga and being in nature has allowed me to find a home within myself and connect with the land and my dreams. Yet these models and practices don’t address relational trauma like NARM, and relational trauma is pervasive in our society.
Having worked as a nature-based soul guide since 2006, I have explored the confluence of trauma and soul. I have noticed in myself and others that we can access the vision of our soul and still unconsciously respond to life and others from our traumatized selves. Sometimes shame or anger arises when we see these parts in ourselves or others, and unhealthy relational dynamics can become the norm. Yet, with more awareness, our compassion can increase. We can develop strategies to hold ourselves while listening to our soul and offering our muse-inspired work.
Complex trauma is created in childhood when our environment fails to meet our needs and when it is unable to offer us a structure of connection and trust. This failure causes us to develop unconscious survival strategies, often through shame and disconnection. These strategies can continue in adulthood and cause us to unconsciously perceive through the perspective of our child self, objectifying ourselves, others, and the Earth. We may see ourselves as bad and strive to be good in relation to an external person, idea, expectation, or belief. We may fail to cherish ourselves as humans with feelings, emotions, and dreams.
Everyone carries culturally imposed and ancestral pain. Being in touch with our tenderness is the ground from which intimacy with ourselves and everything grows. Trauma is not only what happens in this lifetime. Our bodies hold the unhealed dissonance of those who came before us in our family histories and the land where we live. Cultural change won’t happen through appeals to the cognitive brain. We need to understand our body’s relationship to trauma.
White supremacy, ecocide, and patriarchy live in our bodies. Stopping these horrors begins with tending to the trauma within. “Social and political actions are essential, but they need to be part of a larger strategy of healing, justice, and creating room for growth in traumatized flesh-and-blood bodies,” writes author Resmaa Menaken in My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies.
Trauma is stored in the body and can be experienced as a felt sense of constriction or expansion, pain or ease, energy or numbness. Trauma is not a weakness. It’s a highly effective protective mechanism for safety and survival, helping us thwart further damage. What we perceive as dangerous can be accurate or inaccurate. Healing and growth aren’t binary. They operate on a spectrum, with many places between broken and healthy.
In my sessions with my therapist, he often asks me to slow down, so we can explore the underlying feelings related to what I’m saying. I’ve realized when I move quickly, I miss so much. When I slow down, I can see what’s happening and understand more about why I feel the way I do. This helps me stop feeling ashamed and start feeling curious. There isn’t a wrong way to feel. My heart is a wild creature whom I’ll never be done getting to know.
Attuning to our vulnerabilities is part of the soul’s journey. We can’t connect to anything greater if we’re disconnected from our hearts, bodies, and emotions. Once conscious of our patterns of shame and disconnection, we can relate to ourselves with greater understanding and begin to explore how our trauma is intertwined with our gifts. Certain wounds penetrate us so profoundly that through them, we may come to know our core sensitivities. As well as making us feel vulnerable, our core sensitivities carry powers that impact our unique way of seeing the world. These sensitivities can inspire the contributions we make.
Brave Heart, the name I was given on my first solo fast, calls me to live vulnerably. Our souls often ask us to do what is the most difficult. Growing up, it was not safe to feel, let alone speak, about what I felt. I was raised to believe our culture’s toxic myth, “Tough guys don’t have sensitive feelings,” and brought into the idea that it is best to act like nothing bothers me. Our culture tells us vulnerability is weak, but in reality, showing tenderness takes courage. Being Brave Heart is a gift and a challenge. Brave Heart guides me down inner and outer rivers and calls me to speak, write, and stand up for nature.
Our trauma and the trauma humans cause to others and the Earth are linked. Part of the work of our times is to shift from strategies of disconnection into a heartful state of being that is organized, regulated, and subjective. This reconnects us to our humanity and enables us to develop a greater capacity to live within the depth of relationships with all of life on the planet.
Starting March 25th, Joseph McCaffrey, a NARM-trained therapist, and I will offer a six-week online intensive called Tending Our Hearts & the World: Exploring the Confluence of Trauma & Soul. Join us and immerse yourself in practices to enhance your awareness and compassion; watch our 45-minute video discussion, Joseph and I, where we talk about what excites us about working with trauma.
Here’s the full program description:
This online immersion will take a mindfulness-based, nature-centered, resource-oriented, and non-regressive approach to trauma. We’ll highlight organized, coherent, and functional aspects of ourselves while bringing awareness to disorganized and dysfunctional parts. We will focus on strengthening each person’s capacities for self-regulation, trust, attunement, and building healthy relationships.
Attachment, relational, developmental, and shock trauma cause life-long psychobiological symptoms and interpersonal difficulties. Deepening our relationship with nature provides needed support in realigning with our bodies, hearts, and emotions. Sensing how personal trauma and the trauma we cause to others and the Earth are related reconnects us to our humanity. It helps us develop deeper relationships with all living beings.
During this six-week immersion, we will dive into practices for healing our relationship with our heart, including mindfulness-based meditation, prayer, Wild Yoga, and sacred council ceremonies. We will court the image of our soul through deep imagination, dreamwork, and mirroring stories. We’ll discover how our core sensitivities can carry unique powers that impact our way of seeing and giving to the world. In between sessions, there will be opportunities to explore through journal prompts and wandering in nature with guided suggestions.
Join us to deepen your relationship with Heart and Soul. Understand your strategies and patterns of disconnection and objectification while engaging in an enlivened and mystical conversation with the wild world. Return to your human nature and build your capacity for intimacy and a heart-centered relationship with yourself, others, and the Earth.
To learn more or register, click here. ~ https://www.rebeccawildbear.com/register