trauma unhinged dr. neal's presentation on karma and the intersection of neuroscience and karma our memory doesn't function properly at times of trauma as survival mechanism; trauma isn't stored in our mind, it's stored in our body. like karma fruition, trauma will be released from the body when it is ready. (lately i have been crying in child's pose when i do yoga) maybe i have been in denial for a long time about exactly how much trauma i have had in my life sexually. maybe a lot of it is finally being released. maybe the denial made some of it worse i.e. saying no doesn't even seem like an option anymore. (i need to do some contemplations on this) 151107 ... unhinged shambhala_training 151107 ... epitome of incomprehensibility I was thinking recently about how humans are fairly resilient to illness but not to injury. We're very breakable. I find emotional trauma less like an injury and more like a recurring illness. It doesn't damage my everyday life on a regular basis but sometimes it oppresses or depresses me, pushing me down. Squishable humans. 151111 ... epitome of incomprehensibility ...Maybe that's more personal than universal. Me associating sickness and emotional trauma, I mean. I had my first panic attack at age 12 when I was sick with some cough/cold thing. Or maybe it was the sinus infection a year later - I don't remember. In any case I got alarmed when I woke up with a blocked throat, became convinced I couldn't get enough oxygen, started hyperventilating and nearly fainted. I remember knocking on my parent's door and screaming that my heart had stopped beating (I couldn't feel it beating because I was dizzy and my ears were ringing, but it was going at about 180). My vision went white-light-cloudy, as if I'd been rubbing my eyes, and I collapsed into my mother's arms. Then I felt my heart beating three times a second by the clock, and thought, "Oh, OK, there it is." I had my worst early-adulthood one when I was living in a new place for the first time - Ontario, Master's degree, renting a room with a family of family acquaintances - and I woke up with a temperature of nearly 40. I didn't know what was wrong with me because I hadn't had a fever in years. I rushed into the living room and collapsed on the couch, exclaiming that there was something wrong with me - that I felt faint and I was sweating and shivering at the same time, which didn't make any sense, so I was probably dying. (I am smiling as I write this. It was pretty funny in retrospect.) Of course my mother wasn't there to pamper me, only a cross other-person's-mother to inquire why I was rushing into the room and leaping onto her couch like that. She exclaimed that I could've sat on the baby. ("No, no, I couldn't have. I wasn't trying to sit on your baby," - me, sobbing.) ("Yes, you could have! You weren't looking!") To be fair to myself, the fever also made me frighteningly light-headed. The first day of that flu, I couldn't walk from my room to the bathroom without feeling dizzy and having to stop and sit on the floor halfway. ...Of course, the rest of the panic attacks the year after and the next, mostly when I was 24, were due to the trauma of injuring someone else (not badly, but I cut her on the nose when I hit her). I was genuinely frightened of blood for a while. When a person in the school improv club that I joined on a whim (a healing whim, as it turned out) talked about seeing a cup of what looked like blood on a tattoo artist's windowsill, I was disturbed for the rest of the day. When I had my period I was scared of looking at the toilet ("Why did it have to be blood?" like Indiana Jones with snakes): that was like being 13-14 again, but reaction of anxiety instead of merely "ew, yuck." This will sound weird, but it's encouraging that people can be traumatized if they hurt others - it's a sign that they can change. And this is probably a terrible thing to say on Remembrance Day, but I feel that way about PTSD in soldiers too. I mean I feel sorry for them, but I think they are traumatized not only for the horrors they saw but because they participated in violence. But for people being traumatized only by bad things that happened to them - it's not fair, and yet it's natural. It's like being sick or injured. It isn't fair, but it happens. (Anyway the time is late enough and I need food - if I get dizzy from not eating, I'm liable to panic. What a fragile psychosomatic wreck.) 151111 ... e_o_i (Interesting. If I'm emotionally worked up I repeat verbs: "collapsed" and "exclaimed." See, this is why I shouldn't be distraught, because I turn into Stephanie Meyer. Must be the new moon!) 151111 ... e_o_i (Fahrenheit conversion: the fever was maybe 103 F.) 151111 ... nr makes one crave the attention of those who only offer it intermittently but when it's there, it's there like nothing else 230228 what's it to you? who go blather from