Trauma Healing And Joy
Supporting the States that Serve us
States and Stations
According to the Sufis, qualities of being – such as peace, joy, trust, inner strength and courage – can either be experienced as states or stations.
A state is a quality of being that emerges for a short time in response to an external stimulus and then recedes again as conditions change. When a state has passed, it may be difficult to get it back.
A station is a quality of being that has been fully integrated into our interior, allowing us to access it from within, regardless of our external stimuli or situations. Once a state of being has become a station, we can access it whenever we need it.
To bring a quality of being into station within us, we need to understand what blocks its full integration into our being and how to melt those blocks away.
For example, what are my blocks to peace and how can I melt them?
Stations and Somatic Healing
Let’s bring this spiritual idea into the soma, into our embodied reality.
In order to create a station from the qualities of being we desire, we must do two things, which are actually at the core of all somatic trauma healing.
One, we must bring ourselves the resources, practices and reparative experiences our painful experiences didn’t afford us. In other words, we must practice peace, joy, trust, inner strength, and courage. And we must notice them in our living unfoldment.
And two, we must unwind the blocks, the old adaptive patterns and survival reactions (which live in our bodies, BTW). As one of my teachers says: “We can’t just lay practice over a system that is deeply protecting itself. We need to open the system to let new practices in.” For this reason, an integral part of developing the qualities of being stations we desire is to do trauma healing work. This is melting what is in the way.
The paradox of healing, and in this case of creating stations, is that we need others and we need ourselves. We are biologically designed to connect as a way to build stations. AND, we also must find a way to build stations within us that aren’t dependent on those outer connections and conditions. It’s a both/and.
Trauma and Resilience
We are good at internalizing and integrating (stationing) those qualities of being that enable our survival. (These are not always the states we might choose for ourselves.) Our adaptations to trauma or rupture remain with us as stations until we update our system with new information and new experiences.
We are not as good at creating stations from the qualities of being we actually wish to cultivate. Call it the negativity bias, call it survival triage, call it conditioning. So to develop the stationed beingness we long for requires our intentionality and our conscious focus.
Cultivating Stations
There are many ways we may begin to intentionally cultivate as stations those qualities of being we long for.
SIFTing
We can steep ourselves in our prior experiences of such states with intention. I call this co-regulation with memories, and I have a teacher who calls it SIFTing (soaking in the Sensation, Image, Feeling, and Thought aspects of an experience).
We take a memory of a felt sense of peace, for example, and we amplify it with our attention. We call into our experience what it felt like sensationally in our bodies, the feeling of it in our emotional body, the thoughts that accompanied that state, and we ask our deep being to offer us an image that represents this quality of being.
These don’t have to be big experiences, our nervous system is re-shaped in micro-moments of ordinary magic.
Evidence Journals
We can also keep an evidence journal, tracking our experiences of such moments of being, so that we can orient to them. What we place our attention on grows. Moments grow into qualities that grow into states that grow into stations.
Internal Co-regulation
We can learn to become more skilled at internal co-regulation and we can seek out connections that are supportive (ones in which the nervous system feels safe and open enough to allow in qualities such as peace, joy, and courage). These two topics are big ones, for another time.
We are going for full range flexibility not stasis
I do want to mention one last thing about stations from a nervous system perspective. It would be unfair to ourselves, and disrespectful to our soma, to expect that we could always maintain a state such as peace or joy. We are mammals, we are designed to come into and out of such states. What we are going for here isn’t to always remain there, but to come back to those states and stations with greater choicefullness and ability. This is about nervous system flexibility and capacity.
Reflection
Over to you: take a moment to think about what qualities of being you’d like to cultivate.
Where in your life have you felt these before?
What practices might you weave into your world to enact these qualities and build your internal maps to these stations?
What is in the way of your building stations to these places?
What may need tending with the accompaniment of an appropriate other?
In my personal experience, my own spiritual practices (meditation, sound healing, energy medicine), my somatic healing work, and my relational recovery work have been the most instrumental in my development of stations.
If you’re interested in working with someone on cultivating the practices and exploring the healing work that allows station creation, please reach out here.