SPECIAL NEWSLETTER FROM HEALING DIMENSIONS, ACC
By Brent M. Baum, STB, SSL, CADC, LISAC, CCH	(September, 2001)
The following “newsletter,” composed in two parts, holds reflections arising out of urgent need and in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11th and was intended to offer hope and facilitate coping with the various triggers emergent in the aftermath of these events. This unparalleled tragedy impacted us personally and collectively in ways that mandate an updated understanding of trauma and its influence on the psyche. The invitation to embrace the new healing paradigm is imminent with the expanding repercussions of these events and the degree of societal and psycho-spiritual dissociation they reveal. New strategies arise under such duress and afford us opportunities for personal and societal transformation.

PART 1: "COPING WITH PERSONAL AND NATIONAL TRAUMA"

Dear Friends, Colleagues, and Visitors:

I extend to you a warm welcome at this time of transition in our lives. Our website was created some years ago to facilitate the healing of personal, societal, national, and global trauma. Though I felt some seven years ago a growing urgency for the dissemination of this information and wrote The Healing Dimensions to address this more directly, the timeliness of our message has now become self-evident. (See www.healingdimensions.com) We are grateful to all who have trained with us in Holographic Memory Resolution® (HMR) and are using these skills to help those in need at this time.

I mentioned in my first work my involvement with the treatment of trauma with the TWA Flight 800 senior staff out of New York and the officers and survivors of the Oklahoma City Bombing. But, in spite of my extensive work with trauma, some very significant issues have now arisen with the recent events in New York, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania, which impact the foundation of our daily lives and our society as a whole.

Even with Pearl Harbor and the Kennedy Assassination we did not “see” the spontaneous, global impact of such violence, nor did we experience them on such a scale or with “live coverage” that permitted spontaneous traumatization and encoding in the “viewers” and “observers.” We are also aware now that the observation of violence impacts us far more profoundly than we ever realized. In the advent of quantum physics, we have come to understand that “the act of observation collapses the quantum probability wave into reality.” Put simply: that which we observe we experience as a profound creative act within ourselves, whether this originates consciously or subconsciously. This means that the events that we observe are of far greater power than we ever imagined. It also means that we are inextricably intertwined in the events that manifest around us. We are slowly coming to understand the power of such quantum perception.

This past weekend, following the events of last Tuesday, I was on retreat with a group of twenty others. I provided the opportunity for them to experience HMR (a trauma resolution process) and discovered a number of important factors that you may find helpful to consider. I share these reflections and follow them with suggestions for improving emotional and spiritual self-management of your reactions to and internal processing of these recent events:

1. The Likelihood of Personal Trauma (PTSD) Encoding:

Many of us had never seen a spontaneous act of murder/terrorism occur “live” much less the intentional deaths of a group of innocent people in such a calculated manner; as a result, many people “encoded” the events witnessed as traumas to themselves and their nervous systems. It should be noted that at such moments, you will, naturally hold your breath for a fraction of a second, attempting to contain the pain at the point of overwhelm in the nervous system -- freezing all perception and encoding the feeling of overwhelm. The location and metaphor for this encoding – a heavy tightness in the chest, a knot in the throat, an overwhelming sadness or pressure in the eyes, a queasy nausea in the stomach can actually manifest quite physically and generate what appears to be anxiety reactions. These are the “triggered” responses of the limbic-hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal system and will often be compounded by experiences of overwhelm which felt similar from your past. Any prehistory of “terrorism” from your own family or past can exacerbate an already overwhelming trauma reaction. In working with people since 9-11-01, I have noticed many triggers surfacing from their earlier experiences of childhood. The events of September 11th were so violent and intense that many lesser childhood and young adulthood emotional traumas were brought to the surface by these acts of terrorism. In one case, for instance, over the stomach and abdomen of my client appeared the holographic metaphor of an early childhood “shield” protecting the individual from violent abuse in childhood; during my work with this body-memory fragment, the shield actually took on the features of a jagged piece of an airplane wing and led to the scene of Tuesday. Traumatic encodings are personalized to each person’s nervous system. This was similar to my findings with both TWA Flight 800 and the Oklahoma City Bombing: we encode memory using the metaphors of our personal experience.

2. Difficulty Focusing and Concentration in Present Time Due To The Intensity Of The Trance

Trauma, by definition, is “a spontaneous state of self-hypnosis, facilitated by the limbic-hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal system to protect us from an overwhelming physical or emotional experience.” An overwhelming experience such as this induces a trance state. This is subconscious and automatic, not consciously intended. It results in the storage and repression of pain in the subconscious to allow us to continue functioning at a time of crisis. Once induced, however, since such memories are stored “holonomically” (meaning that they act just like holograms), they can be triggered by a single feeling or sensation similar to the original moment/event.

We generally experience both positive and negative holonomic memory at a rate of 15-50 trances an hour. The pleasant ones we hardly notice as daydream/fantasy/visualization, but the negative ones we experience as fear, pain, and overwhelm. Upon witnessing the events of Tuesday, Sept. 11th, many of us found ourselves overwhelmed by a wholly unanticipated experience. Throughout the immediate hours and days following the events, I repeatedly heard statements like: “I feel like I’m trapped in a dream/nightmare and just want to wake up,” “everything feels surrealistic and unreal … like I’m observing impossible events that surely cannot be.” In the midst of all this, we found ourselves hypnotized into watching the events replayed over and over on television, further reinforcing or imprinting the horror of the events and their consequences. When called upon to perform some essential tasks, I found myself having difficulty keeping my thoughts focused and had difficulty processing certain types of information. It became apparent that it was essential to me to return my own life to its essential focus and to recall the primary spiritual tenet: true safety comes from abiding in the “white light” found within oneself. Utilizing my own visualization of white and indigo-violet light in meditation, I was able to return my focus to “center,” and release a number of stress points within my body while doing so. Some symptoms that you may notice when such trances are active include: 1) insomnia or very restless sleep patterns, 2) nightmares, 3) overwhelming fear and/or anger, 4) irritability or agitation, 5) recurrent or intrusive re-visualization of the event(s), 6) hypersensitivity to sensory triggers related to the trauma image (sudden fearfulness at the sound of a plane, loud noises, etc.), 7) physiological reactivity upon exposure to internal or external cues that symbolize or resemble some aspect of the traumatic event, 7) a numbing or detached feeling in the mind/head, 8) “frozen feelings” that cannot be relieved or displaced, 9) difficulty concentrating or maintaining focus on current tasks, conversation, or normal daily schedule, 10) significant impairment in social, occupational, or other significant areas of functioning. If these symptoms were not present before the events of Tuesday, but are now in evidence, you are more likely to have encoded some degree of trauma.

In response to these events, I found, for myself, a certain comfort in recalling some of my healing experiences from dealing with earlier national traumas: While I cannot speak for those nearly three thousand souls who departed this world amid the recent terrorist acts, I recalled the fact that, following the TWA Flight 800 disaster, those who utilized HMR and were able to visualize their friends and loved ones killed in the crash were surprised to note that they always appeared peacefully and joyfully with the other group members; never did they appear alone – as though to say that they journey together in spirit and in mutual strength. I have no doubt that something as powerful is occurring spiritually with those who departed in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. It is my belief that those who “departed together” are engaged in a great task for humanity and for their own spiritual evolution. Even the lessons learned from Flight 800 in New York serve us in having generated some degree of preparedness to deal with these events. Those who died in Flight 800 have given us some awareness of how to address such unanticipated tragedy. Meaning, healing, and service can be found in the greatest of tragedies “for those who have eyes to see.”

3. Fluctuations between Feelings of Fear and Powerlessness, and Feelings of Outrage and Anger

Trauma is always a moment that forces a disassociation from self, due to the overwhelming nature of the pain. As we then “split off” the overwhelming states of consciousness, we end up with two separate polarities: on the one hand, we feel trapped in powerlessness and fear (victim mentality), and on the other, stuck and overwhelmed by our intense outrage and anger (often without a specific object of focus, capable of “excessive” reprisal). The anger response is amplified by the adrenal response to crisis. These energies are split from each other at a traumatic moment. One way to think of it is this: if we had been able to access and utilize our power at a moment of overwhelm or vulnerability, the trauma would not have occurred, but since we could not, the fear gets trapped on the one side and the anger on the other. Healing a memory simply involves the integration of these energies at your “unique” moment of encoding. The healing of a trauma need not occur in actual present (historical time), but, rather, must address the weakening of power (splitting of emotional power) that occurred at the millisecond of the memory encoding. This may be done through a variety of techniques and processes that address such trance states. HMR has proven highly effective in this regard. The capacity to reframe our memories allows us to achieve such resolution whether the offending party is alive, accessible or not. Please note: even the execution of a perpetrator does not insure the resolution of “my feelings” induced at a particular moment when I froze in front of the TV or on the phone. We must address the trance moment of encoding; subsequent reactions may satisfy principles of justice, but the subconscious mind (ninety-five percent of the mind) must also be addressed internally. We address this with somatic reframing processes such as HMR and other trance-resolving strategies.

This suggests that the initial adrenal fight response triggered by an event will, naturally, seek expression, but will remain frustrated and unresolved unless the “T-1” (trauma millisecond of encoding is addressed). This is usually accomplished by identifying the “missing emotional content” of the original moment of trauma, and sending this to the subconscious to break the static protection cycle that the subconscious is maintaining in order to prevent overwhelm. Re-visualize the event the way you would like to see it; frame the event in your mind (with color, feeling, or sound), and move the color(s) through your body where you are now holding onto the original moment’s tension overlong. This will help to notify your subconscious that you have survived and are ready to move forward in time. Unless this reframing is done, it will hold onto you! And all in an effort to protect you from the moment of overwhelm!

It is critical to separate and resolve our traumas that could be contributing to the intensity of the triggers that we are feeling about recent events. The intensity of our reactions can be greatly amplified by earlier experiences of “loss of control,” “threats of violence,” domestic violence, invasion of personal or professional boundaries, etc. By healing ourselves, we will not contribute to the growing archetypal energy that cannot be fully resolved with external or post-T-1 action anyway. We will examine this issue in the next consideration.

4. The Impact of Collective Trance Induction

As the events of Tuesday, September 11th unfolded, I found myself struggling to continue my preparations for a retreat which we had already scheduled for Sept. 14-17. The timing was certainly well-placed, as it had been the weekend that Princess Diana was killed (we were on retreat that weekend also). My work with individuals on the retreat revealed a number of interesting features: Already in my workshops I had detailed a phenomenon which I called “Level 2” trauma – a pattern of repeated abuse events which became “linked” collectively in the subconscious, leaving the individual with a sense of exceptional powerlessness and overwhelm – a level far greater than the impact of just a single event. I identified this pattern some years ago when one of my clients found her subconscious mind had “linked” a series of traumatic events into an “archetypal” form that seemed far more powerful than her own ego-strength or resolve. Jung’s discussion of the “collective unconscious” caused me to examine the impact on a global level of simultaneous broadcast and presentation of a traumatic event such as that of 9-11-01. What happens when millions of people go into “trance” simultaneously? Gary Zukav in Seat of the Soul mentioned how "humankind has evolved mainly unconsciously (subconsciously in my terminology) from an unconscious intentionality." It is as though we are operating from another place within our minds when disassociation occurs. But what happens when a vast group of people go “subconscious” simultaneously?

I saw this impact in working on individuals who recalled the Kennedy assassination. One client “acted out” her grief by going into the backyard and burying her baby doll after seeing her parents crying together for the first time; she never played with her doll again after that. It was as though a kind of naïve innocence had been lost in her mind. Similarly, days after the event, all recalled how they felt as though a “collective perception” had been altered or changed irreversibly, and that America had somehow “lost its sense of innocence.” This is often the side effect when one’s boundaries are violated by rape, aggression, and acts of hatred. The collective amplification created by entering into trance collectively, within seconds, of millions of minds is staggeringly powerful. While we cannot resolve the collective trance easily, we certainly can work to clear our own and assist others in doing so. We can also respond archetypally by creating a “counter-archetypal” response to such events, and praying or meditating collectively or in synchronization with others. This is already occurring from the e-mails I am receiving. I noticed that many people went into intense meditation and prayer to address the collective trance induced from these powerful events. Always remember that there are “positive archetypes” available to address such moments. “Arch-angels” are not called such for no reason; a culture will always have its positive archetypes to address its negative ones. We will respond by discovering the internal “archetypal” powers needed to ground and free ourselves from being hypnotized into powerlessness by these events. It is our nature as humans to “reveal our best” when things are at their worst.

5. Do Not Underestimate the Impact of the Archetypal Features of the Recent Trauma Events

What I am pointing out here is the importance of recognizing the precision and intention of the terrorists in attacking the sites and symbols they chose. Repeated throughout our history are certain positive symbols and archetypes that mirror to us security, safety, and stability. Attacked were: The Pentagon – symbol of national defense (security) and power; the World Trade Center – reflecting our financial security and stability; and, without knowing any details, the two logical remaining targets would have been the White House itself and the Capitol: the seats of America’s “first family” and the center of government/democratic rule. These sites were chosen, undoubtedly, for their long-standing history and symbolic or archetypal value. For this reason, an assault on these structures impacts us subconsciously and creates an underlying sense of fear and insecurity. The stock market responses have reflected this. Understand that this was very much the intention of the terrorists in choosing these symbols of meaning as targets. It is no accident that they are called “terrorists,” for they deliberately employ strategies that amplify fear. Our invitation is to respond by reaffirming our individual and national security within ourselves. Our symbols gain their power from our perceptions. Buildings may, indeed, be destroyed, but the realities that they represent remain undeterred in their commitment to spiritual and emotional freedom. We have seen and will continue to see our resilience emerge from these attacks.

When asked what their most spiritual experiences have been, most people will identify the birth of a child as the first and a death of someone close to them as the second. I found that this was true in my own experience, particularly with respect to the latter. There is such an outpouring of love, a reassertion of faith and higher convictions when such events occur. Things trivial move into second place and our deeper values assert themselves at such moments. This is our spiritual nature. Our personal invitation is to reaffirm our commitments to our nation, its security, financial stability, government, and family values.

Understand that the effectiveness of terrorism resides in its amplification of our personal and collective fears. This means that an individual’s personal history involving any trace of trauma from financial insecurity, lack of protection or safety at home, unreliability in our primary caregivers or family members, will be greatly exacerbated when the collective archetypes representing these realities are assaulted. This is the INTENT of terrorism, to prey on the unresolved fears of the masses and undermine these structures and their underlying functions. If our subconscious is, indeed, ninety-five percent of our mind, then the unresolved fears of our past are fertile ground for the intended impact of terrorists. Our response, therefore, must also be an internal one involving a commitment to personal healing and prompt address of our fears, rather than an irrational “acting out” of them, bringing no authentic relief and amplifying the senseless chaos that the attackers intended. It may not seem so important, but the most powerful tool for healing will be found, not so much in the reassertion of our country’s military defense, but in the strengthening of our internal, personal, spiritual ‘defenses’ by addressing our unresolved fears that are triggered by these events. When I address the source of my own personal fears from my history, I abide in the assurance that I remain in contact with the true Source of security that resides within the self; the self is the place where all spirituality occurs. Attend to the security of the self that has been triggered by these recent events. Know that you possess all that you need within yourself to reach and maintain your full potential in the midst of external pressures from the world or opposing ideologies. In fact, we find that we discover the power and depth of our internal goodness and resolve at such critical moments.

6. Attend to the Impact of the Increased Stress on Your Bodymind

Traumatic events cause the subconscious and automatic activation of the Limbic-Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal system. This system moves into steroid hormone production to empower us to deal with crisis. As this happens, however, the T-Cell production of the body drops to accommodate the needs of the other systems crucial to crisis management. Watching traumatic events depicted over and over produces an adrenaline response as well as the initial release of endorphins and enkephalins that can leave one feeling numbed out or mobilized and tensed for response. Repeated exposure to these stimulating images, however, results in hyper-corticosteroid production and overstresses the system. What is alarming about this is the fact that most Americans were in hyper-corticosteroid production prior to the recent events. Our media style of spontaneous, “live” reporting of traumatic events has already stressed our systems beyond what is healthy. Individuals whose subconscious trauma patterns were already triggered by the depictions of their pain in TV and cinema, are moving into critical stress levels. I was informed that many people in this condition began to experience anxiety attacks and various dissociative responses when the recent events occurred. A “prehistory” of trauma from your past will leave you hypnotized to the screen as your subconscious finds resonance for itself in the events occurring. Some of my clients who were trauma survivors found themselves “riveted” to the screen and subsequently experienced nightmares appropriated from the terrorists’ acts, but adapted to fit their own histories and to express their unresolved pain. Acts of terrorism can produce a “double or triple whammy” so to speak by their activation of your fear/trauma history and the unresolved triggers in the subconscious. Your emotional reactions will feel excessive, disproportionate, and overwhelming when such triggers are activated. This becomes even easier when the events occurring are truly of an unprecedented and catastrophic nature. (See item 8 below for strategies for facilitating self-healing).

7. But How Could This Happen? Identifying the Collective Subconscious Blind-spot:

Many people have found themselves asking how such a series of events could occur. At the opening of my website some years ago, I began with an article entitled: “Respecting our Quantum Perception” (See website for full article). In this reflection I described my findings about the power of the mind and the act of perception. I shared the findings of quantum physics and the results of our understanding of trauma induction, citing the power of the mind to store traumatic states of consciousness. I simply pointed out that the acts of violence that we were admitting as entertainment were not merely external, impassive experiences, but were evidencing a detrimental effect on our internal psyche and quantum consciousness. What we watch on television is actually experienced and structured within our mind through its sophisticated holographic properties. All of the images we admit to our psyche through the media are admitted into the inner sanctum of our mind and its sensitive and vulnerable perceptions. This perception was honored decades ago, but a slow process of desensitization and growing exposure to violence through the media has resulted in a “normalization” of violence within the subconscious. Gary Zukav in The Seat of the Soul stated that humankind’s path of evolution has, up to this point, been "mainly unconscious from unconscious intentionality." This means that we have, up to this time in our evolution, evolved primarily from the imprinting and stored messages of our subconscious (my preferred terminology) minds.

The day that we began to view the slaughter of others as entertainment, we became susceptible to the Columbine High School type tragedies, the acts of terrorism on our own fronts. From the time we began using the aggression/violence employed in law enforcement as entertainment, I believe we destined ourselves for a day of subconscious-conscious reckoning: a day of self-confrontation. As the New York skyline collapsed, we decided to postpone the Arnold Schwartzenegger movie depicting, quite graphically I’m sure, terrorist acts in downtown Los Angeles. Did we not get the message when our children began shooting each other in a terrorist-like manner? Our Columbine High School experiences, however, were contained and localized. We did “beef up” security in the high schools first, did we not? Still, we appeared to process these events rather dissociatively: how outraged we were that such things could happen in our own back yards. Still, the violence did not become “personal” … at least not until last week.

A few weeks ago I noticed at the mall some new life-sized video games with life-sized targets and weapons. They were “sniper” games. I saw a mother encouraging her six year old in his efforts to wipe out the police officers and agents in the game. On both conscious and subconscious levels I was horrified. But now we don’t want fingernail files on airplanes! Hmm. I am afraid we have been “ticking away” toward a global uprising from the wounded subconscious for some time now. I truly expected an archetypal statement from the collective subconscious mind of our world about the state of our subconsciously accumulating violence. But I did the same as most of us: I suppose I simply disassociated from the growing discomfort with exposure to violence, never expecting the violence to get past my desensitization, never expecting events to impact me in my own living room.

God does not abandon us. But we are in the “free-will” zone and allowed to experience the consequences of our actions. I truly believe that we could not manifest such events as a species were we not predisposed for subconscious allowance or manifestation of these events. It is not God that we must hold accountable, it is our own capacity to respect the quantum creativity he gave us to manifest our acts of consciousness. We may continue to create consciously or subconsciously, but create we will. These events of recent days are an announcement that we are making to ourselves on a higher spiritual plane. We do not have the luxury of spiritual or ethical disassociation any longer. And I am not sure that we can use a strategy of forcing our subconscious minds into healing or compliance. We cannot say one thing with our rational minds and act from the endorsement of violence as casual and normative in the subconscious. We have been witnessing terrorism within our midst, acted out by the collective unconscious – acted out through our children … and we continued to miss the warning signs. Did you not wonder what was happening when the pattern recurred and was proven to be, not an isolated incident, but a statement about the new “acting out” capability of violence in our children. Children, by their natures, are designed to learn more quickly by imitating what they see and hear. They have been broadcasting their crisis with the internalization of violence for some time. Desensitized, we no longer act until it impacts us personally, in our own living rooms. It appears that we have arrived!

These events offer a wake-up call for us to not merely respond “codependently” to some external political threat alone, but to trace the collective statement that is being made about humanity’s capacity to traumatize itself. We have been traumatizing ourselves, though unwittingly for the most part, for some time now. We have an opportunity to examine the power of our quantum acts of perception and what we create as a society, a nation, and a species. The media has an opportunity to re-examine its approaches and its impact. Our country has an opportunity to examine its own vulnerability to violence by examining its own spiritual integrity, not just its borders or defense systems. We have been admitting terrorists and their acts into our subconscious for some time now. We, as individuals must lead the initiative to respect our creative power and learn mastery of our states of consciousness. The casual admission of violence to our subconscious will only fuel repressed anger and violence from 950,00 years of subconscious encodings. We have been repressing trauma and pain since our preverbal days as a species. This is not a new phenomenon. It has allowed survival through the repression of our pain and violence, until we were strong enough and ready enough to deal with it. Perhaps that time has arrived. This will prove pivotal in our spiritual and social evolution. Perhaps it is finally time we learned to process our anger and our pain differently. We, more so than at any other time in our evolution, have an opportunity to utilize our quantum awareness to resolve our underlying pain and species-memory of violence. We must look to larger solutions than cosmetic, military, or political remedies. We are invited to appeal to the higher resources we hold within ourselves to generate an authentic safety with self, family, nation, and planet. Many of us have come to assist in this endeavor.

While driving down the road yesterday, it finally occurred to me why my particular history positioned me for the teaching and delivery of strategies for learning to master and heal our states of consciousness. I never expected the archaeologist and his knowledge of history … the priest and his ministry to the frightened, dying, and wounded … the trauma therapist and his work with bombed buildings and downed airliners … to coalesce into an understanding and preparedness for the recent events of these past days. While that most human side of me felt the personal impact of trauma in these past days, another, higher self emerged and stated: do you now understand the urgency and the scope of the undertaking we face. Do you understand the resources that have been building to assist in this time of spiritual awakening? Underlying all, and beneath all is a wisdom that guides and supports us at all stages of our spiritual evolution. It is my hope that we are not SO disassociated that we miss this call and invitation to awakening. We no longer have the luxury of treating violence as entertainment.

8. Strategies and Recommendations:

Renewed Commitment to Personal Self-Care: The first key is the attentiveness to yourself, your stress levels and your anxiety. The key response of each individual must be a heightened attentiveness to personal issues and “triggers.” The issue is less whether you were triggered and more about “how” the events triggered you. Are you polarized more to feelings of fear and powerlessness, or to outrage and aggressive response? These are the polarities of unresolved trauma. Look within yourself and track their source. We have all had individuals who frightened or terrorized us at one time or another; a portion of our stress will be from this prehistory and not from recent events per se. Address the prehistory issues and life will become immediately more manageable. The traumas stored in the subconscious mind subsume upwards of 93% of our minds. Of course we will have trouble coping when the subconscious is “triggered” and our resources are split between crises in present time and unresolved crises from our past. The crises of the past occurred when we were younger and had fewer resources for coping; when these are resolved, our adult coping resources emerge and we find ourselves “more in control” than we would have thought possible.

As an exercise: Visualize yourself in a real or imaginary safe place in nature. Move the calming colors of the scenes through your whole body. Feel the calm and peace of your powerful mind reassuring you that as a quantum creator, you choose safety and stability for yourself. You may wish to invite the archetypal symbols of your spirituality to reinforce your safety: God/Angels/pets/loved ones/Spiritual Guides/Saints/Animal totems … use your spiritual resources. Picture and see the “colors” they send you for strength and reassurance, and move these through your body. Now invite into your “safe place,” all the younger selves from the moments of your past (including those “freaked out” by last week’s events) when you felt “terrorized by others.” Do not be surprised at the numbers that may spontaneously appear as you extend the invitation. Move the colors/sounds/feelings of safety and reassurance through them. Remind these selves that, from the perspective of the "physics of the soul," we are magnetic to only that which we carry within ourselves. Abiding in white light, we can only attract that which we carry. True safety resides within the self. We encounter the security of the God/Higher Power of our beliefs through the self, not primarily in military action, heightened airport security, or withdrawal from the outside world. Our country, its citizens, and our world need our spiritual contribution to these dynamics, not our disassociation from them. Disassociation from the self, the typical by-product of trauma results in disempowerment, a primary goal of terrorism. Our invitation is to greater participation by contributing our integrated spiritual awareness to the traumatized whole, particularly its more wounded parts.

Renewed Commitment to Service of Others and the Values of Freedom: We have an opportunity to “manifest our true worth and value” in our response to this crisis. This may be expressed socially, materially, or spiritually. The appropriate and proportionate responses of our authorities are vital, however. As I have often found with trauma survivors, of equal or greater import to the victim is the compassionate and healing response of the responsible caregivers to the crisis event. An inappropriate or inadequate reaffirmation of protection and safety will leave the “victim” vulnerable to re-traumatization or even re-traumatized. Much trauma occurs not from the event itself, but how the “responsible” authorities respond to bring protection and healing. While it is true that a balanced response from spiritual center is essential, the “failure to protect” carries with it grave consequences to the psyche of the victim as well. Even Jesus became angry and quite physical in his response when the temple was violated; he later identified our bodies and lives as such a temple. Our archetypal symbols have, likewise, been violated. We must honor, however, the fine line between assertive use of anger to prevent further abuse, and the disproportionate and abusive use of anger that simply passes on the abusive pattern of the original perpetrator. We do not wish to become those we abhor; the fine line of balanced response is not easy with an underlying history of 950,000 years of traumatic and violent encoding. We face a spiritual challenge on personal, national, and global levels.

I invite you to utilize your internal resources to remain centered and connected to the Source during these times of change. Gather with like-minded souls and process the events of late. Renew your communication with your children and help them to process and make sense of the events and lessons of late. Utilize meditation and visualize sending to our friends, our leaders, our security forces support, light, and wisdom. Most importantly, care for the frightened or traumatized “selves” who have been triggered by the recent events. You will know them by their resonance within your body. Anchor them in the resources that you possess to create safety, nurturing, and calm, and know that you are joined by countless others in this endeavor. “That which does not defeat us, empowers us.”

Sending you love, light, and support in this global invitation for healing,

Brent Baum, STB,SSL,CADC,LISAC,CCH
www.healingdimensions.com