Trauma Can Lead to Spiritual Experiences
How emotional pain can lead to spiritual growth
Perhaps like me, you realize you’ve lived with lifelong insecurity and anxiety. You feel, perhaps, like a stranger on the planet, as though others were given some kind of gift of confidence and the ability to fit in and navigate life that you never got. That was always me — the stranger.
I learned to meditate in my late teens, and it brought me an important but temporary peace. For a few minutes of meditation, I was in a place of harmony and well-being. I also learned to love nature and the earth from walks through the countryside that I started taking around age 10. Those two things — nature and meditation — brought comfort where not much else did.
As the years went by, I coped as best I could with life, had a family and a career, but I never felt emotionally whole. I repressed a lot of uncomfortable emotions to get through my daily routine of working and having a family.
Eventually, I retired, and with retirement came a flood of emotions. It was as though the lid had been taken off all the feelings I’d repressed for a lifetime. Also, I found myself attaching insecurely and painfully to a friend with whom I felt close. I seemed to constantly crave my friend’s loving kindness and company. My friend had struggled with CPTSD, attachment, and other issues, and as we talked about those issues, it became apparent that I struggled with them also. This explained to me for the first time why I had always felt like an unloved alien on planet earth — trauma.
As I explored the past and investigated its connection to the present, emotions flooded out of me. I had suffered two major traumas in early childhood that stayed with me emotionally throughout adulthood — life-threatening asthma and my parents’ divorce when I was five years old. Additionally, my mother was an insecure and emotionally unstable parent, and my father mostly abandoned us after the divorce. It all added up to a meaningful explanation that I began to explore in therapy, in a therapeutic group, and in walking the path of healing with my friend.
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
As I felt my emotions and let them be there, and also as I felt supported and loved in therapy and friendship, my heart fully opened and healing began to happen. In meditation, I’d had a number of small awakening experiences over the years that showed me we live in a loving universe, but those tastes of awareness had not been integrated, had not stayed with me.
Continuing in meditation and therapy, I began slowly to become more deeply aware of my connection to nature, the earth, trees, plants, water, sky, and eventually the whole universe. I was also aware of love in the spiritual world, among souls and the Source of Loving Consciousness. There were many spiritual experiences and flashes of insight but no feeling of wholeness yet.
Finally, the combination of everything I’d been doing — friendship, therapy, meditation, extended nature hikes, spiritual seeking — came together when I read physicist Federico Faggin’s description of his awakening and subsequent understanding of the universe (“I experienced myself as love… I saw that everything is ‘made’ of that same love.”). His experience almost exactly matched my previous experiences, and all of a sudden, it was as though all the puzzle pieces assembled themselves in front of me.
I understood that I am perfectly loved by the Loving Consciousness that created everything, by all the souls I know in the soul realm, by the universe and nature, and of course by all the people in my life — and I love them back, powerfully and unconditionally from my soul. I felt my own expansive existence as a soul connected to a universe full of pure perfect souls and Loving Consciousness.
The experience made me feel somewhat euphoric, as though I suddenly understood something much bigger than myself. I don’t claim any special wisdom or knowledge. I don’t plan to hang out my guru shingle. But that feeling of being connected to everything and being totally and perfectly loved and loving remains with me and is transforming my life. I’m also learning how to cultivate this new awareness by revisiting it daily in thought and meditation, contemplating reality as I see it now.
I’m still discovering who I am after this experience. It appears I am mostly the same but gentler with a new joyful and loving understanding of life. I also don’t seem to have as much fear, anxiety, sadness, or anger. I see emotions come and go in flashes and brief moments, but they don’t grab me as they used to. It’s as though I mostly see them from a distance. Even when I occasionally feel them a bit more strongly, listening to the emotions and letting them be heard and seen, followed by meditating on the loving nature of the universe brings me back to joy. The one emotion that remains strong much of the time is love!
In summary, it was the pain of trauma and attachment that drove me to try to find healing. As I pursued the healing process, the combination of unconditional love from others together with my own heart opening and spiritual seeking brought healing and new awareness. My hope for you is that you will read this article, and it will propel you a little farther along your own healing and awakening path. L’chaim (to life)! Here’s to discovering your own loving, connected life, my friend! It’s a beautiful thing!
