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If the Buddha was was walking around now, he would have said; ‘Life is Traumatic’ instead of “Life is Dukkha”. For context please see this previous post.
Everyone grows up through some sort of trauma, it is the human condition. Some trauma is more difficult to deal with than others, but any trauma can be turned into a mountain. I witnessed this many times during my days living in the Zen center.
During a single retreat, I heard the stories of two women, currently stuck in the same difficult state. The first had been raped in a child’s swimming pool at the age of four and the other had gotten socks for Christmas, while her sister got a bike. They were both in their 50s now and had been letting these traumas be a leading life story and influence the way they re-acted to everything in the world.
The Second Noble Truth is helpful in understanding the dilemma. The second is; we suffer because we want things other than the way they are. Primarily we want things we do not have or we have things we do not want. We want a perfect relationship, a better job, bigger house, etc… or we have a disease, partner, boss or trauma that we wish to be rid of.
The Covid years got us all to slow down, rearrange our lives and forced us to see what we literally had around us. We couldn’t escape to the coffee shop daily or some beach every other weekend as a diversion and actually had to take inventory of our lives.
Somewhere out of this came the current focus on Trauma and Trauma Reactions (or as we would say, deeply rooted patterns). As pop-psych fads go this one seems to be very useful to a broad cross-section of America.
Simply shifting the focus from the event and a victim stance, to how I have been molded by it, shifts the power.
While I have taken a Buddhist path to my own human awareness, I fully understand why it is impractical for most people. I find this shift to be very promising for the lives of many and encourage you to do some work if need be.
Getting free of our own story is a necessary step in living the free-functioning life we all strive for.
May your lives go well -
