You can also check out a highlight here on my Instagram page. (P.S. if you haven’t followed me yet make sure you do 🙂) I’ll be posting more highlights soon.

I’ve already agreed to do another workshop at Praksis later this year, which I’m looking forward to.

I’ll also have more workshops around Australia coming up in the near future that I’ll be announcing soon.

Stay tuned for those.

❤️‍🩹 The Wisdom of Trauma

The past few years have had a dramatic effect on the collective psyche of mankind.

The circumstances that promote suffering have become more entrenched in our cultures through each passing year: more isolation and loneliness, less community connection, more stress, more economic and political instability, and ultimately more fear.

The rising disharmony within our societies is being mirrored in sharply increasing rates of addiction, homelessness, crime, and mental illness.

Regardless of recent world events, we’ve all experienced some form of traumatic experience in our lives: loss of a loved one, abandonment by people we love, or even physical and mental abuse.

The need to heal and learn from our traumas is an ever-present and growing need across humanity.

I’ve recently been studying the work of Gabor Maté, and watched a fascinating documentary about his work called The Wisdom of Trauma.

Gabor Maté is a specialist in trauma and addiction, and his work is shedding new light on what trauma is, and how to heal from it.

In The Wisdom of Trauma, Maté explains that traumatic events like war, sexual abuse, and childhood neglect are not traumatic in themselves.

Rather, trauma is the physiological and mental affects that happen within a person as a result of events they experience.

It’s our perception of events and the way we respond to them that pose the deepest challenge to us, not the events themselves.

This is a deep spiritual truth, as well as a profound insight for healing.

As Gabor Maté notes in this interview with Tim Ferris, our mind’s almost always fixate on the worst possible perception of events. This is a conditioned response based off past experiences, and behaviors.

It’s our inability to process an experience that causes us to ignore, repress, or reject the pain it causes. This creates a painful disintegration within, and leads us to project the unresolved emotional experience into future situations.

Essentially, trauma is a wound that causes disconnection from our authentic Self. By rejecting the pain, we reject a part of ourselves calling out for help.

Healing, then, is bridging and integrating the disconnect, and reconnecting to our authentic Self.

The paths of yoga and inner practices like meditation give us the tools we need to transcend life’s suffering; to heal from the traumatic responses our bodies and minds inevitably endure, and to reconnect with our authentic Self.

When connection to our inner state of being is strong and grounded, we have the foundation we need to process, regulate and adapt to the experiences we have–no matter how difficult.

Eventually, the suffering caused by life’s stings lessen as we establish an unbreakable bond with the source of light, peace, and happiness within us: our true, authentic, and transcendent Self.