Tami Simon: This program is brought to you by SoundsTrue.com. At SoundsTrue.com, you can find hundreds of downloadable audio learning programs, plus books, music, videos, and online courses and events. At SoundsTrue.com, we think of ourselves as a trusted partner on the spiritual journey offering diverse, in-depth, and life-changing wisdom. SoundsTrue.com.
You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Judith Blackstone. Judith Blackstone is an innovative teacher and contemporary spirituality. She developed The Realization Process, which is a direct path for realizing what Judith calls fundamental or non-dual consciousness, as well as the application of non-dual realization for physiological, relational, and physical healing. Here’s my conversation with Judith Blackstone.
Judith, you’ve written a beautiful new book with Sounds True, a very helpful book called Trauma and the Unbound Body. And in this book, you really help readers understand trauma from the perspective of the work you’ve been doing for the past several decades in developing The Realization Process. So to begin our conversation, can you help our listeners understand what The Realization Process is, and from the perspective of The Realization Process, how do you understand the healing of trauma?
Judith Blackstone: OK, sure. The Realization Process is a series of practices for helping us inhabit the body: not just be aware of our body, but actually to live within it, to feel present within our body. And when we do that, we uncover a very, very subtle dimension, we can say, of consciousness, a very subtle ground of consciousness that we can experience pervading our whole bodies as if we were made of this consciousness, and at the same time, pervading our body and environment. And what that means is that as we do this initial practice of The Realization Process, we come to not only our internal sense of wholeness, the deepest contact that we can experience with our own individual being, but at the same time and in the same way, we transcend the limit of our individuality and we feel oneness, actual experience of oneness as if we were made of the same conscious ground, the same ground of consciousness as everything in our environment.
And of course with other people, that’s a deep contact, a deep reciprocal contact. But we could experience this oneness pervading everywhere. So as we inhabit the body, we not only feel this sense of oneness, of being able to experience our whole being at the same time, but we also uncover or reveal qualities of our being that seem to be innate in us, that seem to just be waiting there for us to open to them: the quality of love in our chest, the quality of power, personal strength in our midsection, the quality of our sexuality in our pelvis, the quality of our voice in our throat, and the quality of our intelligence or understanding in our head and our brain. So these seem to be qualities that are inherent in us, that are really our being that we can actually live our whole lives and not tap into if we don’t get to this very subtle attunement to ourselves and this way of living within ourselves.
TS: OK. So we learn through The Realization Process to inhabit our body and to tune into these fundamental qualities. Now, for many of us who have gone through some kind of trauma—whether it’s just the trauma of being born and being a human being and being in relationship, to imperfect parents, or some more severe kinds of trauma that many people have experienced. How does that affect our ability to inhabit our bodies fully and connect with these qualities in the ways you’re describing?
JB: Yes. So in this work, in The Realization Process, I’m defining trauma as anything that’s too overwhelming, either our own experience of being that’s in some way dangerous for us to experience—in other words it won’t receive approval or love from our parents—or the external world being too abrasive for us to fully receive, like the abrasion of an angry voice, or even the abrasion of ambient sounds, sounds of the environment that are irritating, that the child can’t fully receive, that the child’s too sensitive to fully experience.
When we are in an environment or when we are in a situation that we cannot fully accommodate, that we can’t fully take in, we actually constrict our body. We constrict the instrument of our experience in order to dampen the impact of that experience. So we can dampen our own anger or our own grief. We can hold back tears. In other words, we can hold in experience by gripping deeply within the body, or we can hold out experience. We can dampen the impact of a usually loving face suddenly looking angry or upset by actually just slightly dampening, constricting the anatomy of our seeing.
So it’s a very interesting thing that we can’t limit our experience of life without constricting our body, without constricting the instrument of our experience. For example, if you, even just listening to this, go and decide to conjure a little bit of sadness, and then try to suppress that sadness, I think you’ll find that you cannot suppress that sadness except by clamping down within your chest, within your lungs, within your gut. Somewhere you’re going to have to constrict the instrument of your experience in order not to feel that sadness, in order not to let it flow.
TS: Now, is it fair to say that you think all of us are constricted in one way or another to varying degrees? Is that fair? It certainly feels that way.
JB: I do. Yes, this is just the human experience. So it’s not pathology. It’s not even tragic. It’s just the ordinary human experience. In fact, we not only constrict ourselves in reaction to sometimes quite ordinary traumatic experiences. None of us have perfect parents. Sometimes they yell. Sometimes they yell at each other. Sometimes they don’t have time for us. Sometimes they snap and tell us to be quiet. So none of us grow up in a perfect environment which we can fully take in and blossom.
But we also constrict ourselves to mirror our parents’ design of constriction. So if our parents are somewhat constricted emotionally, but live very nicely within their heads, within their intellect, then we will mirror that sort of pattern. We just do that unconsciously and spontaneously, but we do it to be part of the family, to be able to be in communication with the people who are important to us. So in this way, these designs of constriction and openness, or the ability to live in parts of our body and not in other parts of our body are passed down through the generations.
TS: Now, I’m having… I’m thinking this. I’m thinking of my parents. I’m thinking of the many ways I experienced them as constricted in their openness and fluidity, and now I’m seeing myself mirroring them. I’m not feeling so great right now, Judith.
JB: I’m sorry.
TS: It’s OK.
JB: So we approach this in these two ways: By doing the practices of inhabiting the body, and the lesser constrictions will sometimes dissipate just by the practice, repeated practice, of inhabiting our feet, inhabiting, living within our legs, and in our pelvis, and in our midsection, so forth, inhabiting our whole body. Sometimes we have to work directly within the constrictions doing what we call in The Realization Process “the release technique” in order to release those constrictions. But they do release.
One interesting thing is that people who are particularly sensitive, and a lot of the people who come The Realization Process—because it does require some degree of sensitivity to get to this fine attunement to one’s self—most of them are sensitive. People have been particularly sensitive. Children. Sensitive children can constrict themselves very deeply. The mind/body connection is very acute. The body is very malleable to the mind. And we can actually constrict ourselves quite deeply. But the good news is that we can use that same sensitivity to focus very precisely within those tensions and release them.
TS: Now, tell me a little bit more about The Realization Process release technique. How does that work?
JB: So the release technique—of course, there are now many release techniques, especially in the body psychotherapy world. The Realization Process differs a little bit from those in that we focus within the tension in such a way that the pathway of constriction increases, and that happens by itself. So in other words, we’re not exaggerating or intensifying the constriction volitionally, the way many techniques do. But we’re taking this fine focus that we have refined through The Realization Process practices, and we’re focusing within the tension. And by doing that, we find that the tension moves automatically further into constriction. And when that happens, when it reaches its zenith, as far as it goes, we can let go a little bit, and the constriction will unwind right along the exact pathway of the constriction.
So you see here, we’ve been working with releasing emotions now for generations in the psychotherapy world, and I was trained to take a Bataka soft bat and hit pillows and scream and so forth, and that was quite effective. But this is like the great-great-great-granddaughter of that technique, where we’re now focusing so specifically and precisely within the tensions so that we don’t manufacture emotion, but we release exactly what was held within that constriction.
TS: Help me understand why there’s a natural, spontaneous intensification just by bringing our awareness to a part of our body where there’s some bound energy. How does it just naturally intensify like that?
JB: Well, for one thing, we’re not just bringing our awareness to the area, we’re actually focusing within the area, which is a little bit different. All of these constrictions are arrested movements into constriction. They’re movement into limiting experience that we then hold, that have become frozen in the body. So they contain within themselves, those constrictions contain within themselves, the pathway of the movement into constriction.
So when we focus within it, I don’t really know why it goes further, but it does. And it creates a kind of a boomerang… When you stretch a rubber band and then let go of it, it creates that sort of momentum for the release.
TS: Now, Judith, you corrected me and said that there was a subtle but significant difference between bringing our awareness to a part of our body where there’s constriction, and inhabiting fully. Help me understand the distinction here that you’re making.
JB: So, not even inhabiting fully but focusing within it. We do this core breath, maybe we’ll get to do that in our talk today, we do this core breath where are breath and our focus becomes quite refined. So it’s like taking this refined, precise focus and penetrating within the tension so that then we can get beyond that frozen movement and allow it to become fluid again. So we can’t even usually yet inhabit the tension, but we can bring that very fine focus within it.
TS: Well, I do like the idea of doing the core breath practice together. So let’s do that in a few minutes. But before we do, I just want to understand, does The Realization Process work effectively with trauma that comes from something like a car accident or some other type of physical pain, twisting your ankle, something like that, that kind of physical trauma?
JB: Certainly. Any sort of tension can be released in this way. And the interesting thing about a car accident is that impact. When we’re impacted in that way, we actually grip around that impact. So, in fact, we hold the shape of that trauma. We can actually say that about all these constrictions, that they’re the shape of our trauma. We hold the shape of that trauma. The same when someone is hit, when someone is punished. I worked with a woman who was continuously boxed on the side of her head—boxed on the ear, we used to call that. The mother would hit her on the side of her head, and she had constricted, she had pulled in away from the impact, but also around that impact, so that when she focused within it, she was able to release the impact of her mother’s hitting of her.
Now, many of these physical traumas are surrounded, as that one is, with emotional trauma. To be hit by a parent, of course, is physically impacting, but it’s also shaming and brings up grief and terror and fury. So all of those layers are often held within the impact. The same with a car accident, there’s often going to be fear in there and maybe other emotions as well, depending on how badly we’re impacted by the car accident. So held within this gripping will be all of those emotions.
TS: Now, Judith, your own work with The Realization Process and your discoveries around the healing of trauma came from a personal laboratory, not just working with clients, but your own experience. Can you share with our listeners a bit about that?
JB: Yes. This work came out of my quite desperate need for my own healing. Many, many years ago, I’d been a professional dancer. And then when I was in my 20s, I was put in a posture that intensified a structural problem that I have in my body so that my body was, my spine was really sent out of whack. And then to make matters worse, I underwent surgery supposedly to correct it or to keep it from getting worse, and they fused me in that off-center position. So I was really in trouble. Having been, in fact, particularly agile, I was now fused in an off-center, imbalanced position.
So I pretty much had to heal that in order to go on living. And first, I made the rounds of, of course, doctors, and then body workers, and then healers and of course it was a great education, but nothing really helped until finally I just lay on the floor in my dance studio where I was living and began to discover ways to focus within myself that would begin to release those tensions.
TS: And The Realization Process came from that inner inquiry in terms the particular application to trauma and the healing of trauma. How did this work, this body of work that you now describe in your new book, Trauma and the Unbound Body, how did that come into focus for you?
JB: Well, in this healing… And let me also say that as I was lying on the floor and healing myself, I had people coming for dance classes. And that is an important part of it because it meant that the work developed not just in relation to my own issues, but also then teaching these other people and helping them to where they felt imbalances in their body. But I did notice as I went along that I was focusing through levels of difficulty in myself, not just physical, but also psychological. So I, or course, got as much help as I could about that, and I trained as a psychotherapist. And then I was still working with that, working, working, working with that, and I began to notice that if I focused within these tensions, I would release the emotions and the memories of all of the painful experiences of my childhood and my lessons.
And for a long time, I didn’t teach that work because it seemed so subtle and so hard to describe to anybody. But one day, I had a very, very sensitive woman come to work with me, and I thought, “Oh, I’ll just try teaching to her.” Well, she did it no problem at all. It was no difficulty at all. And now, I work with many, many people with this technique, and they have no trouble with it at all. But for a long time, it was just my own private way of working with myself.
TS: I think it would be helpful and make this very real for the people who are listening to our conversation if you would describe: somebody comes to you now, and they know they’ve had some type of traumatic experience, and they’re coming to you for help, what the sequence is that you take them through?
JB: That depends a lot on the severity of the trauma. We always start with talking. This is not meant to be done without processing. We always start with talking to the extent that they’re able to describe the trauma without becoming too terrified, whether they can tell me. And as we develop trust in that dialogue, that’s of course just as with any kind of therapy, really the basis of it. We do the embodiment work before we do any kind of release work, and that can take quite a while for someone who’s been traumatized. Again, depending on the severity of the trauma.
So I worked with one woman who’d been held down and gang-raped at a party when she was a young adolescent. And it was a long time before she could even get into her feet and really experience herself there. We worked first for her to find places in her body that she could inhabit, and she found that she actually could inhabit her hands. She’d been held down on the shoulders, but her hands were free. And she was able to experience herself as living within her hands. And once she was able to do that, then she was able to get into her feet and very gradually into the rest of her body. And we did that before we even worked with the actual trauma-based constrictions in her body.
Now, some people don’t have to take that amount of time at all with it. Their trauma has been more along the line of what we call developmental trauma or childhood trauma, a parent withdrew their love from them when they were five. Even though that’s extremely painful, it doesn’t necessarily keep them from entering into their body, really, within the first few sessions. And once they can do that, once they can live within their body, and if they can really feel the internal cohesion, we get a natural sense of unity as we inhabit the body. Once they can feel that, then they can even do the attuning to the space that pervades inside and outside the body, the unity. And then we do the core breath, which we’ll do today. Then they’re ready to take that refined focus and that ability to be in the body and release the constrictions.
Now, an important part of this work is that when the constrictions are released, they don’t release into nothingness. They release into this ground of being that they have already learned how to attune to, so they become more of themselves. So it’s actually as if there’s something there to hold them, to catch them, as they become more and more open.
TS: Now, in this very first step, inhabiting this cohesion in the body, if somebody is having trouble with that, they’re listening to this and they’re like, “God, I’ve never been in this part of my body or that part of my body. I work in an inner way, and I skip over this part, or I skip over that part.” What would you suggest? Or, “This part is always numb. I can’t feel it.”
JB: Yes. Well, there will be parts that are more numb than others according to how we’ve constricted ourselves. Everybody’s pattern of constriction is different than everybody else’s. But little by little, the first thing to do is to really understand and experience the difference between being aware of the body and being inside the body. For example, we can be aware of our hands, and we can feel how tense they are, how warm or cold, but that’s really different than entering into the hands and experiencing ourselves as present there.
It can be helpful to, for example, to put a hand on either side of an ankle, if you’re limber enough to do that. Put a hand on either side of your ankle, and then see if you can experience yourself being present within between your two hands. We do that to each other when we teach The Realization Process. I’ll often do that, put a hand on either side of a wrist or on either side of an ankle, and I’ll say, “Feel that you are between my hands.” And people do find that, even though it might be a new experience that never occurred to them to do that, that they can come down and feel that they’re inside their ankles, inside their feet, and so forth.
TS: And then in this process, if intense emotions come up for somebody, how within The Realization Process do you instruct people to work with the emotional content that might come up?
JB: To feel it just the way we do in most forms of therapy. This is why it’s important to do this work with another person, with a therapist, with someone who’s trained in the work, so that you have a support when those emotions come up. We will sometimes start by finding a safe place in the body, a place that feels very comfortable to inhabit, so that there is a place to go back to if emotions get too intense. But in general, we’re looking forward to that release of emotion. And it’s just good to have someone else sitting with you, accepting that, encompassing that, and accepting it as part of the human experience to be that sad or that angry or that frightened.
TS: One of the things in your book, Trauma and the Unbound Body, that I found so interesting is that you were very clear that it’s helpful for people to both understand what has happened to them as well as release the physical constrictions. That both components, both insight and the somatic release of the tension or constriction together, are the winning combination, if you will. And that’s very interesting to me. Sometimes I’ve heard people say, “Oh, you don’t really need to have understanding. Just let go of the tension, and you’re good. Check. You don’t need to bother knowing what happened.” Tell me more about your view of this.
JB: Yes. Yes, that’s important. There is, to me, a myth, especially in the spiritual field these days, that all these things that happen to us are just story and they don’t need to be understood or remembered. And I don’t think that’s really the case. I think it’s very helpful to know what happened to us, not in a blaming way. People are often concerned that people are going to get stuck, they’re blaming their parents or something, and I think it doesn’t take too much maturity to see that your parents were also injured, and this is not their fault. But it is important to know what you dealt with, how you managed to survive, and that even these constrictions were part of that way that you dealt with what happened to you that you were able to overcome.
I think, on one level it helps us cultivate true compassion for ourselves as we go through the pain of this unwinding. It can be quite painful to remember the losses or the grief and the fury and all that did happen to us. But to have that compassion and acceptance for ourselves is a very important part of the healing. One of the most difficult challenges, I think, for people to actually let go of their constrictions is to get to that self-love that’s underneath, what we used to call in the psychology field “primary narcissism,” that feeling about one’s self that we deserve to be whole, that this is not our fault. It’s nobody’s fault. But these things really did happen to us, and that’s why we limited ourselves.
Now, in addition to this, knowing the exact circumstances are usually quite important for getting to the exact pathway of the constrictions. And in fact, that narrative reveals itself more and more clearly as we do get to the exact pathway of the constrictions. So we do get to know what happened to us and what the circumstances were.
TS: So do you think if somebody is just, “I just surrender. I surrender tension in my body. I don’t really know what happened. I don’t bother with that. I just release, surrender, breathe out. I’m good. Check.” Do you think that there’s some way that they’re skimming on the surface if those storylines haven’t naturally emerged and become clarified?
JB: Well, probably. I can’t speak for everyone, but that’s probably the case. Letting go, just relaxing, just letting go of ourselves is much better than going around holding tight on ourselves. But we probably won’t be able to just simply let go of the chronic, deeply-held constrictions. Those don’t even surrender, don’t even let go to years and years of meditation practice, which is clear to see if you go to a monastery. I lived in a Zen monastery for a year, and one of the most astonishing lessons of that year was to see people who had meditated for decades and decades and still were so tight and collapsed in their heart, so tight emotionally, because the meditation just hadn’t gotten to that. So, yes, I think that this very precise work usually is necessary.
TS: OK. Let’s do the core breath practice together. And if you can introduce it, Judith, by giving us some context of how and when you introduce this in The Realization Process and specifically how it can help us in the healing of trauma.
JB: OK. So the core breath is one of the two main practices of The Realization Process. The other main practice is the being in the body and the attuning to the space inside and out, which I call fundamental consciousness. That’s usually the practice I do first, and that’s a much longer practice. But this is a shorter practice, the core breath, and I do it for several reasons. The subtle core of the body, which by the way is mentioned in Buddhism where it’s called the central channel, and it’s mentioned in Hindu yoga where it’s called sushumna and the chakras are along it. So this very subtle vertical channel that runs through our torso, neck, and head is actually our entranceway into fundamental consciousness, into that very fine subtle consciousness that pervades our whole body and pervades our body and environment.
So the more contact we have with that core of ourselves, the more fully we have realized the ground of fundamental consciousness. Not only that, but the core of our being is our entranceway into our most subtle energy level. I do make a distinction in this work between fundamental consciousness, which is actually experienced as a quality-rich stillness, and energy, which is everything that moves, which moves. But the energy system, itself, is made on a dense to subtle level. So we get to our most subtle energy in the core of ourselves.
So in terms of a spiritual practice, and also in terms of being able to let go of our gripping on ourselves, of our constrictions, this subtle core of the body that enters into fundamental consciousness is very important. It’s also our deepest contact, our deepest inward contact, with ourselves, and our entranceway into oneness with our environment, but also our greatest distance from our environment. When we live in the core of ourselves, we actually find that the environment looks a little bit further away, and that’s our true distance from things. We tend to contract the space between inside and out, but actually we get a sense of a little bit more distance. That means that we can live right in the center of all of the swirl of circumstances. We can go home for Thanksgiving dinner, for example, and sit in the midst of all the old triggers and be relatively free of our reactivity because we’re right in the center. We’re in the deepest perspective, in a way, on all of our environment and everything that’s happening around us.
So we go into the subtle core of the body in The Realization Process in three main points. We actually can go into it anywhere. And as I said in the Hindu yoga system, there are seven chakras, and they enter into this subtle core through each of the seven, sometimes nine, of the points along it. But we go into three main points. The first one, and in many ways the most important one for getting this very refined focus, is the center of the head. And the center of the head is between the ears, deep in the internal depth of your head. See if you can find it, if you feel like following along with this exercise now. See if you can find the center of your head between your ears.
So what I don’t mean, I don’t mean the top of the head, the seventh chakra, and I don’t mean the third eye, the center of the forehead. I mean a point in the internal depth of the head. Just by being in the center of your head, it enters you into your internal wholeness. And be patient with this. Unless you’ve done a bunch of meditation, this might take you a little while to experience. But just by being in the center of the head, it gives us access to our whole internal space at once—or as much as we’re able to access today.
And now bring your breath into the center of your head and back out again. See if you can. So the breath comes into both nostrils. It makes a single stream of air that can go right through your head to this center point. And then you can let the exhale just release, let it go wherever it goes.
And if you practice this on your own, do it a couple of times like that. And now, we’re going to initiate the breath, initiate the breath within the center of the head. It’s a very interesting feeling, as if you have air there within the center of your head that you could breathe. The air will still come in through your nostrils, but it feels like it starts right in the center of your head, and you get to this very, very fine breath. And you may be able to feel a very gentle vibration throughout your whole vertical core, that means all the way down to the base of your torso, just by breathing in the center of your head.
And these are called practices. It means that they need to be practiced in order for you really to experience this. With practice, it becomes much easier. Now, you may feel that you’re not getting enough air there through that little tiny point in the center of the head, but you can. Even though the air is coming in and out through that tiny little point, it can still be a long breath. In fact, it can be a breath that fills your whole body with this kind of breath energy. And then back out again through that tiny point.
OK, now we’re going to find the heart chakra, the heart center. And this point is in the center of your chest, deep in the core of your body. So as deeply inward as you can focus, as deeply back towards your spine as you can focus without strain. And once again, just by being in this point, in the heart center, it enters you into your internal wholeness. So with practice, if not today, just by being in the heart center, you may be able to feel the internal space of your feet, your hands, your head, without moving from within the heart center.
And now, initiate the breath within the heart center as if that space, that tiny, tiny little space within the heart center could inhale and exhale. And as you do that, you may be able to feel a very subtle vibration upward and downward throughout your whole vertical core, throughout the whole subtle core of the body. And do this without strain, as easily as you can, and it will get easier and easier. So it doesn’t need to be perfect today.
And now, we’re going to find the pelvic center, and this point is in the center of your pelvis, but deep in the core of your body. So again, focusing inwardly back towards the spine in the center of the pelvis. So it’s below the belly button and above the sacrum. And just by being in that point, it enters you into your wholeness. And you’ll find some of these points are easier than others to access. We’re all like that. Now, initiate the breath within the pelvic center in the same way, feeling that gentle vibration throughout the whole core just by breathing in the pelvic center.
Tiny breaths. If you’re not feeling that resonance of your whole core, see if you can take even a tinier little breath. It could be a long breath, but coming through that tiny little opening of the pelvic center. You might feel that it’s more like a thought than a breath. It’s like a breath thought, very subtle.
OK, now we’re going to do all three points. Find the center of your head again. Find the center of your head and your heart chakra at the same time if you can. And if you can, bring in the pelvic center as well, so you’re in all three points. Now, for a while, you may need to practice with just two points at a time. And then as it gets easier, you can add in the third. So there you are, in all three points if you can. Now, do you still feel that just by being in those three points, it enters you into your internal wholeness. And initiating that very fine breath within all three points, or within two, and then adding in the third later on. And you may be able to feel a very, very gentle vibration throughout the whole internal space of your body just by breathing within these three points.
Now, if your eyes are closed, open them. See if you can still feel this, because eventually you want to be able to live like this, in the core of ourselves. So we always do the practice with the eyes open at the end. With your eyes open, find the center of your head, your heart chakra, your pelvic center, and initiating the breath from within all three points with the eyes open. Now, if you’ve done lots of meditation or you’re very, very sensitive to your core, you may be able to feel that this core breath is a disentangling breath. You can let go of your grip on yourself and the room just by doing this core breath on both the inhale and the exhale. The breath lets go of yourself and the room. You will still be there, everything will still be there, maybe even more vividly, but you’re letting go of your grip from this core.
Now, one last thing. See if you can experience the room from this core of yourself. Usually we experience our environment from the surface of ourselves, so this may be a shift for you to experience the room or wherever you are from this core of yourself. And relax.
TS: What a beautiful phrase, a disentangling breath. I like that, Judith.
JB: Oh, good.
TS: Now, just to ask a couple clarifying questions. What is the size of these centers that we’re breathing from in this subtle way? So like the size of a quarter? Bigger? Smaller?
JB: If you want to image them, I would imagine them the size of a pea, like a green pea.
TS: And when you say imagine the breath initiating from this pea and feel that connection to your wholeness, how do you know you’ve hit it, that sense of being connected to wholeness?
JB: That’s quite palpable, and will become more and more distinctive and experienced with practice. So we’re actually initiating the breath… The image of the pea is an imagination, but the breath is not an imagination. You can begin by imagining it, but eventually you’ll feel it quite distinctly, and you’ll also feel quite distinctly that just by being in any of these points, it enters you in and gives you a sense of contact everywhere in your body.
TS: Tell me more what you mean by that sense of contact.
JB: Well, like being present everywhere in the body, so living within it. So in other words, just by being in the center of the head, you can actually experience the inside of your feet. But this might take some practice of the inhabiting the body practice before you can feel this completely. But you might be able to get a sense of that.
TS: And if I understand correctly what you described in this conversation about The Realization Process work applied to trauma, we begin here. And then from this place, this place where you just led us in this guided practice, that sense of being wholly connected— inside, outside, in a unified field of fundamental consciousness—then we look at our constriction from that place. Is that correct?
JB: That’s right. And we can actually focus within the constriction. We’ll sometimes start by finding the center of the head and focusing from the center of the head into the tension. And that helps us to have that very refined focus, that very precise, refined, focus.
TS: So that’s very different than starting with the constriction itself. Like for example, you mentioned body workers who know that trauma is held in the body, and they might start working on a particular part of the body that has suffered some type of trauma. They’re starting right in with the constriction. This is a pretty different approach.
JB: It is. And I think it’s good because it gives you a ground within which to open. So if we open into nothingness, we don’t know how to inhabit our body. We don’t understand that by releasing these constrictions, we’re adding to that amount of presence that we have in our own body, that amount of contact that we have within our own body. Then it can be quite intimidating, overwhelming, to just let go of a constriction. But here, we, right away, after we’ve released, the next step is then to inhabit the part of the body that we have released so that we can really feel that it’s added to that ground of our being.
TS: Now, Judith, I want to be confessional for a moment. I read your book, your new book with Sounds True, Trauma and the Unbound Body, and found it to be incredibly helpful and useful in many, many, ways. And I started working with an area of constriction that had to do with an old injury that I’ve suffered, and I know this part of my body has some constriction in it. It’s very palpable. And what I felt was more and more light getting released, as I was reading the book and working with the practices. And I wonder if you can talk some about this, this experience of light in the body?
JB: Yes. Well, the fundamental consciousness pervading the body, as we inhabit the whole body, we actually get to that very fine level of consciousness that I’m calling fundamental. And it is experienced sometimes as light. It feels like light. It looks like light. And the light in the body has been referred to in various spiritual traditions, and it’s an actual experience.
TS: How do you experience your body, having done these practices for a long time, in terms of light? What’s your experience of living now, having done this Realization Process, as an unbinding body?
JB: Well, it does feel freer and freer, and it does feel to me like contact, like I’m picking up internal space, and that I have contact with myself. I can attune to it as completely empty, so that I feel completely clear-through, made of empty space, or light, or radiance, or love. There are so many different ways we can attune to the same ground. But I like to feel it as contact with myself, as a sense of really being in touch everywhere, in myself and also in the environment.
TS: OK. I want to pull out one final section of the book, Trauma and the Unbound Body, a quote that I’ll have you comment on that got my attention. So here it is. “In The Realization Process, the illusion of separateness is understood to be a constructed protective barrier between ourselves and our environment that has become bound in the tissues of our body.”
JB: Yes.
TS: The illusion of separateness is a constructed protective barrier. How did we all construct such a protective barrier?
JB: Well, because life is very impressive, very impactful. Even a loud sound, for a child. I remember being at my grandmother’s house and the light that they would sleep me under would be buzzing all night long. And even that, I found extremely alarming and irritating. Children are very sensitive. So yes, so we begin to construct a barrier between ourselves and our environment, and then to the extent that that barrier becomes extreme, we can feel extremely isolated. And as that barrier dissolves, we feel more and more contact with other human beings, more and more kinship and more actual contact.
TS: It’s interesting that you are using this word, contact. So I want to know more what you mean by that, whether it’s contact within or contact with others, and how that is experienced without this constructed protective barrier?
JB: Yes. How to describe that. Well, it feels for one thing like this very, very fine consciousness, like we’re made of that. And that we look at another human being and that being is also made of that very fine consciousness. But not only that, the expanse that pervades me and this other person is unified. It’s a unified expanse. So we’re actually one. Now, having experienced that, there’s then an energetic back and forth, an energetic vibration between us that becomes more and more fluid, more and more free. And so we experience both this sense of oneness. Contact, it’s a hard thing to describe in words. But if you put your hand on your desk, you’re going to really touch it.
Now, if you put your hand on someone you love, you’re going to really touch them all the way through to the being that they are. And hopefully, many of us have experienced that touching another person all the way through to not just what they feel on the surface, but who they are and knowing ourselves in that way. And we can actually experience that kind of contact, that kind of oneness, and that kind of reciprocal energetic flow between ourselves and others with anyone, just with a stranger passing in the street, anyone.
TS: Judith Blackstone, you have such an exquisite sensitivity. Thank you so much for all of your great work and writing and teaching. Thank you.
JB: Thank you very much, Tami.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Judith Blackstone. She’s the author of the new book, Trauma and the Unbound Body: The Healing Power of Fundamental Consciousness. She’s also the author of the beautiful book, Belonging Here, as well as The Enlightenment Process, The Intimate Life, and an audio series with Sounds True on The Realization Process.
SoundsTrue.com, waking up the world. Thanks for listening.
