Source Text
INTRODUCTION THE UNDIVIDED LIGHT
To know all things, including the painful and difficult, are lit from within by undivided light. AURA GLASER
Wholeness is not a vague ideal, but a lived experience. It is a potential, inherent in our human nature. To be whole is to be conscious and in contact with ourselves everywhere in our body, to live within our body. When we inhabit our body, we experience ourselves as an undivided consciousness, a subtle, unified ground of consciousness, pervading our whole body and our environment, at the same time. This book offers a method, called the Realization Process, of understanding and healing trauma. To heal means to become whole.
When we embody our wholeness, our thoughts, emotions, sensations, and perceptions occur as a unity. Our senses function as a unity. Our actions spring from a single source of understanding, emotion, and physical sensation. Even the smallest movement of our body, as we turn our head or gesture with our hands, carries the full breadth of our human capacities. So, for example, we can experience love and intelligence in our arms or our legs; we can hear with our whole body, heart, and mind.
To be in contact internally with our body is, at the same time, to be open to our environment. Everywhere that we are in contact with ourselves within our body, we are alive and responsive to the world around us. This produces a lived experience of continuity and connection with everything and everyone that we encounter.
Both types of trauma have a shattering effect on us. In reaction to traumatic events, both big and small, we constrict and fragment our body and withdraw our consciousness from those parts of our body. We organize ourselves in ways that dampen the impact of intolerable experience or that restrain those aspects of our own behavior and personality that have brought us harm.
AI Summary
Trauma and the Unbound Body by Judith Blackstone presents key insights from the contemplative tradition. The 6 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
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Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 6 are particularly representative.
This entry was generated from Readwise highlights. Expand with additional context as appropriate.