Be Here Now.
A simple, yet powerful refrain which rose into the public lexicon care of Ram Dass’ 1971 book of the same title.
Why not just be here now?
It seems to me like it would be a more peaceful, embodied, heartful, real and even more effective way to live.
Be here now simply means to live in presence all the time.
Sounds wonderful!
So, what’s stopping us from just doing that then?
Why haven’t the most profound spiritual teachings of our modern age had the expected revolutionary effect on human consciousness and resulted in everyone becoming enlightened?
The most obvious reason is trauma.
It is our trauma that gets in the way of being present. Yours and mine.
If you’ve ever tried to meditate at all seriously, you will have noticed that the mind, when given an extended period of time and quiet space, will begin to yammer on at you like an untrained monkey. About absolutely anything. What you ate for breakfast that morning. A conversation with a friend from yesterday. That meeting you have later this afternoon. Anything except silence really. It doesn’t have to have any rhyme or reason to it, the mind just needs to fill the space. But what creates that? What is the source of all this unconscious nattering?
The answer, again, is trauma. It’s our unfinished business. The resistance we carry in our bodies throughout our daily lives. The repression and suppression we engage in to cope with our stressful existence. When we finally stop, it starts to come back to us. It pokes its head up and says, “Hi! Remember me?”
Ok, cool, so we’ve established that, what’s the solution?
Well, many would have you believe that the answer is simply more meditation.
Just sit silently and don’t touch the mind and eventually it will shut the fuck up and you’ll be beyond it.
Right, ok, and that’s worked for a lot of people has it?
No, it hasn’t.
Because it is not dealing with the obstacles that have been put in place that prevent spiritual growth. It’s attempting to bypass them. Skip over them. Get beyond them and never look back.
We all grow up and develop an ego. An ego is not an aberration. It’s not a mistake. It’s part of a health developed human being. It’s a survival mechanism that is supremely intelligent and is designed to keep you alive. What’s the best way to do that? Well, it seems pretty genius to me to get you to identify with this body and attempt to protect it at all costs. If you take this body to be you, you’ll want to do everything you can to ensure it is still around tomorrow, right?
Great, so we have an ego and it keeps us alive. A good start.
But, we don’t just have a clean ego that sees itself as a separate self which we must dissolve and get beyond. That would too clean, too easy. We also carry a bunch of trauma from our childhoods and, for many of us, the rest of our lives too. No one gets out of childhood unscathed, no matter how angelic your parents were. You’re going to have some shit to deal with when you reach adulthood. At the very least, moments of misattunement, feeling dismissed, ignored, unloved, unheard, whatever. There’s stuff there for everyone. As the parent of a toddler right now, I know firsthand there’s no such thing as perfect parenting.
What exactly do I mean when I say trauma?
Essentially, I’m pointing to any experience in which our nervous system couldn’t handle the charge at the time. As kids, our nervous systems are very easily overwhelmed. It doesn’t take much to have a 2 year old start to experience some very big feelings indeed. That’s ok, we have Mum and Dad there to help us regulate and navigate those feelings. Fantastic. In theory, as we get older, our nervous systems expand their capacity to hold a bigger and bigger charge until, by the age of around 26 our brains are fully developed and we have, hopefully, learned to regulate our emotions to a large degree. Development doesn’t stop there, we can continue to develop further and not only hold space for ourselves, but also for others. I’m getting off topic and rambling here. What I mean to say is, there are certain experiences that are too much for us to handle, so our nervous system shuts down doesn’t fully process these experiences. Often we go into fight, flight or freeze mode. The fight and flight parts of this tend to be healthier cause they express energy rather than holding it in. Trauma tends to be stored in the body when we freeze, unable to take meaningful action at the time and hope for the best. Whenever we’re in this mode, we are creating wounding that gets stored in the body, waiting for another moment in time, in the future, when we can create enough safety, space and attunement to revisit this trapped energy and feel it in order to heal it.
As we do repeat this process over and over again, we create patterns. Ways of dealing with our experience that allow us to cope with life. We form character armour (Wilhem Reich) which is basically muscular tensions in certain parts of the body that get reinforced enough over time to the point where they eventually are always held unconsciously, we aren’t even aware of them after long enough.
These ways of dealing with our wounding, trauma, unpleasant and difficult experiences form our personality. It’s who we meet the world as most of the time. These well worn grooves in the neuroplasticity of our brains.
These patterns are the obstacles to freedom.
These patterns are why we cannot just “Be Here Now.”
This where the work comes in.
The work is becoming aware of and undoing these obstacles as we find them. One by one.
It’s scary, painful, difficult work.
But it’s the only way to embodiment, presence and real aliveness.
It’s the only way to wholeness.
It’s the only way to truth.
What we really need in this world, is more understanding of the trauma that we all experience as individuals and how this informs our self-images and our worldviews and how to navigate this with courage, skill and perseverance.
This is what a truly trauma-informed model of spiritual growth looks like.
It doesn’t compromise safety.
It doesn’t see the ego as the enemy.
But it honours the human experience and works with it to help us walk each other home.
Step by step.