I have just completed a Trauma Informed Certificate for Coaches through the Centre for Healing which I loved and can’t recommend highly enough. One of the people Ryan Hassan and Matt Nettleton refer to quite a bit is Peter Levine, who wrote the book Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, a brilliant book, which interestingly, I’d just finished re-reading. So healing and trauma is very much in the forefront of my mind at the moment.
As someone who is a Tiger in terms of Eastern astrology I love the symbolism of the tiger as willpower, courage and personal strength. All good solar plexus chakra qualities. It reminds me of the time a tiger appearing during a meditation session that led to a fit of laughter. Laughter being a useful resources, so long as it comes from an instinctual place and isn’t just a mask to hide behind (one I know only too well).
Tantra, as we know, is a great path for coming out of the mind and into the body, for dis-identifying and cleansing, what could be called an erosion process. Indeed, this is the process of awakening. Awakening from and to our patterns. Where we make the unconscious conscious. This is the path to freedom and the healing journey. It is also, to a great extent, the coaching journey.
The tiger is a great symbol here as it requires courage and strength to face our own demons, or past traumas. This stands in contrast to what we normally perceive as being strong – the stiff upper lip, or pulling up our socks and getting on with it. Levine says “Real heroism comes from having the courage to openly acknowledge one’s experiences, not from suppressing or denying them.” And the starting point for that is by calling the spirit back into the body.
This is very different to bringing will-power to bear, which is a mind orientated approach, that does not take into account the nervous system. The course I’ve just completed does a great job in showing what takes place in the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, especially in relation to the gap people experiencing trauma often have in relation to the Ventral Vagus (where we develop connections and engagement). It is the activation of this area that is important for safety and so for healing to take place.
Trauma is a survival adaptation. A large part of the work then is the cultivation and nurturing of our safety container, the felt-sense of being safe, building our resource of safety for re-adaptation to take place one step at a time so we are better able to meet the triggers in our life (almost as a form of edging for the nervous system). This is where the coaching setting becomes so important, a place where we feel we can experiment without judgement or expectations.
But this is where our will-power can lead to self-sabotage as it fights to maintain our survival adaptation. And this might especially be so when we realise that connecting to our felt-sense is not all bliss and spiritual transcendence, but actually can be very uncomfortable. Indeed, the very notion of transcendence can be a form of spiritual bypassing as we look to find safety through disconnecting from our body.
Bringing it all together
The job then is to build our capacity to sit with the uncomfortable, to build our container (which was my very own realisation at the last Diploma on Healing and Surrender I attended through Tantr4GayMen, and connects well to the Teacher Training / Coaching Diploma I am currently completing). Which brings us back to a safe haven in which to experiment with the more unpredictable, although possibly better referred to as the more innately spontaneously and natural, to support the need for the erosion or cleansing process.
Tantra at its best.
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Email me direct if you are interested in mindful, trauma-informed, intimacy or spiritual coaching, or if you would like to join my new Pink Tantra Towards Awakening group for chat rooms, video channels and in-person workshops around tantra and intimacy practices robert.pinktantra@gmail.com
See my personal development / personality profiling book DISCover the Power of You published through John Hunt Publishing Ltd, 2017. ISBN: 978-1-78535-591-2
And for a bit of light reading, see my first historical fictional novel Fermented Spirits published through Austin Macauley Publishers, 2022. ISBN-13: 978-1398437159