Tag Archives: coping

Memory Where Art Thou? Reclaiming Our Shielded Recollections

Have you ever experienced slowly obliterating from your memory something most important in your history, something crucial, that changed your life? Without necessarily being aware of it? And then one day it surges back in all its feelings, raw and unmissable, self-evident, and you wonder how on earth you could have “forgotten”, while at the same time you deeply know you never did? One can remember without remembering, because of a feeling of disconnect. It’s nothing like “forgetting”: it’s how most victims of violence cope, how they “move on” despite the intolerable, the unacceptable. It’s how we cope with violent emotions too: break-ups, losses, extreme rejections, distressing revelations… Most shocks create a numbing shield, an opaque fog that disables communication between various parts of ourselves, because being a coherent whole at that moment would be feeling the unbearable pain in all its acuity, and having to face what hurts too much to face. So we disassociate; we part into fragments, and in the process we lose our connection to our inner Truth. (This has devastating consequences for our immune system, by the way.)

photo credit: http://www.winzibeon.com

photo credit: http://www.winzibeon.com

This explains how people can “keep secrets” from their closest ones for years, decades even. It’s not a deliberate decision. They remember something clouded in numbness, that is thus not worth even mentioning. When the “secret” comes out after so long, it is a shock to everyone… The worst thing one can do is “solidify” this fragmentation by the use of drugs or alcohol – and yes, alas, even wine other than very sparingly – anything that has an additional numbing effect: think of it as a little like burning a bridge behind you; how do you then find the way that leads back to yourself?

The Little Prince - Le Petit Prince. Saint-Exupéry.

The Little Prince – Le Petit Prince. Saint-Exupéry.

Kundalini Yoga addresses this numb memory phenomenon and provides “kriyas” (exercise and/or meditation sets) that help dispel the thick mental fog produced by the shield that occurs after a shock. It also gives you the tools to process the initial shock that led to the protective reaction in the first place, so you don’t have to live once again carrying the pain of the experience that your system tried so hard to suppress. Sat Nam Rasayan® is the perfect healing modality to support and help speed up the process.