The body will reorganize when it feels safe

We’ve all been given experience that we’ve been unable to process consciously. This is one of the basic characteristics of trauma, unendurable emotional pain that hasn’t been able to find a relational home in which it can be held.

There are times in my clinical work when I’ll meet with someone who is really suffering, but they can’t actually feel that pain. They’re not able to make contact with the felt quality of the open wound.

Instead, there’s a protective numbing, a dissociative shut down and collapse into the somatic unconscious. From here, the lost orphans of psyche and soma burn, ache, and long for holding.

This response is coherent and makes sense based on what happened earlier in their lives, and was an adaptive response in the face of survival-level anxiety and annihilatory panic, to the very real threat of psychic disintegration.

Trauma is the experience of de-linking – left and right, top and bottom, limbic and cortical, body and mind – and linkage occurs through the felt sense of safety.

Where we find a way, guided by mercy and grace, to touch that experience, hold it in love, make sense of it, and integrate it into a new cohesive narrative.

Slow and safe. I’m with you, and you’re safe. I’m with you and you’re safe. You’re no longer alone. And you’re safe.

While insight and clarity can be supportive, it is right-brain immersion in fields of safety which fosters cellular restructuring.

The psyche will reassemble when it feels safe.

The body will reorganize when it feels safe.

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Living in the Mandala

This blog has grown out of a current flowing in my life for many years — one of psyche, awareness, and love. Not as abstract ideas, but as living rivers, each with its own fragrance, each carrying me into mystery by way of its unique portal.

At the river of psyche, I encountered Jung and the alchemists, who whispered that descent into shadow and loss is not a detour but the beginning of transformation. These waters were dark, mineral-rich, shimmering with images that asked to be tended rather than transcended.

At the river of contemplation, I met teachers of Dzogchen, Mahāmudrā, Zen, and Advaita, pointing toward the sky-like nature of mind — vast, open, already free. This river reflected the infinite sky, so that gazing into its surface one could not tell whether one was looking up or down, inward or outward.

At the river of devotion, I was met by the poets and mystics — Rumi, Mirabai, Hafiz, John of the Cross — who sang of longing not as weakness but as fire, an ember of the Beloved hidden in the heart. This river glowed as much as it flowed, a stream of flame carrying the fragrance of rose and smoke.

For a long time, I kept these rivers apart: analysis in the consulting room, meditation in the retreat hall, devotion in poetry and prayer. Slowly the boundaries dissolved. I began to see that what Jung called shadow, what neuroscientists describe as implicit memory, and what the mystics call the unwanted guest are not separate. They are movements within a single mandala, facets of one mystery awaiting our presence.

Over time, I came to see that descent, vastness, and love are not only rivers but gateways — three great doors into the same living pattern. The mandala shows us that descent roots us in the soil of shadow, vastness opens us to the luminous sky of awareness, and love ignites the flame of intimacy with the Mystery. Alone, none is complete. Together they form the vessel of transformation, both personal and archetypal.

This blog (and all of my writing) is an invitation to step consciously into that mandala — not as an abstract diagram or intricate artwork hanging on the wall, but as a temple already surrounding you. You are already inside it, already carrying its fragrance in your breath and longing. The mandala lives in your nervous system, your relationships, your imagination, and your soul. The work is not to construct it, but to recognize and participate in its unfolding beauty.