The Art of Allowing

Surrendering to uncertainty – Healing is an Unconscious Process – The Jungian Lens

I want to talk today about the art of allowing, surrendering to uncertainty. Specifically, allowing impressions, feelings, and memories to be let go of because they're causing you bodily symptoms in the present. Allowing is not about surrendering to the way things are now as being fixed but of surrendering to the idea that we can't possibly know. It's surrendering to uncertainty but knowing or trusting that things can always shift and that this is not a conscious process.

If you try to approach healing in a conscious way as ‘I just need to fix something’,  I just need to study  the right courses, have enough understanding and then somehow my brain will figure out how to heal me, this is actually a diversion from what you actually need to be doing which is going into unconscious process. What Jung called the ‘shadow side’ and I think it's a really important understanding that healing is NOT a conscious process in the main. It has conscious elements of course - like making the decision to do the healing in the first place is a conscious process but accessing the unconscious thoughts, feelings and beliefs that are really not accessible to willpower cannot be done that way.

So, we need to find a new a new way in. And it doesn't need to be just another thing to do or another thing to tick off. It's about being willing to let go and go into the places that feel painful. Now, I've written about this extensively, particularly in my book, The Scar That Won't Heal, that this is this is a heart-based process, not a head-based process. And although the unconscious mind is accessed by the brain, a lot is stored in the body and in particular in your heart resonance.

This has been very well documented by scientists and it's not something that you should dismiss as being ‘New Age nonsense’. It's actually very obvious that when we're going through very emotional processes in our lives, that it's our heart that feels it. For example, when we fall in love, when we when we fall out of love or someone abandons or rejects us, or we lose someone. These are heartfelt emotions and emotions are resonances within the body. They're not just thought processes. So that's the first thing to understand. Therefore, any kind of letting go has to be done in the body as well as in the brain.

Now I want to return a little to trauma as an instigator of many of the symptoms that I see in my practice because trauma is an imprint in the body from the unconscious of anything that happened to you that overwhelmed you. That is the definition of trauma as a wound. And it can be very simple things. It doesn't have to be major events of your life. Although often they are they can also be traumatic if you weren't supported. But the major traumas I see are relational. The ones that happen through your experience growing up in your family of origin or with peers at school, particularly if you were sent away, which can be very traumatizing,  the way you came into the world – the nature of your birth is very significant and will set the tone for your nervous system.

How you attached to parents, whether that was secure, whether you felt safe, loved, understood,   whether you met psychologically and emotionally is a really key factor. And if not, the psyche registers this through bodily impressions, states of being, and emotions. Emotions are really key in healing, and they're often missed out in a lot of the programs we see - in the cognitive approaches particularly in the modern-day arena of nervous system rebalancing programs and so on. That's why actually I I launched my nervous system reset program recently because I wanted to show people that this is both trauma-based but it's also body-based. It's not just about changing your mindset and that's a limitation of many of the programs out there.

So, it's not about willpower. It's not about grasping certain facts and then you'll get well. It's more about allowing the unknown and allowing your body to speak to you in ways in which perhaps you've not known how to do.

That's why we get ill in the first place is because something in our psyche is mismatching with how we're expressing our life.

For me this was being you know a very competent university researcher; it was a job I could do easily and you know for many years I enjoyed it but there was something in me that wasn't resonating with that and I needed to make the shift and the only way my body could give me that shift was in fact to collapse me, give me symptoms that were so bad that I couldn't ignore them anymore and that's really what chronic illness is.

The mismatch between your true Self and how it is being expressed bodily as control strategies.

Fatigue states, severe anxiety are this mismatch between what is occurring in your life and what you are underneath - the Self that you're really meant to be.  Trauma is one of the blocks in the way to expressing yourself fully and it can live on as a resonance in your body which will undermine you. Make no mistake, it will sabotage your best efforts of relationships at  earning money, the kinds of jobs you do, undermine your best efforts. Because it will evoke certain responses in you which remind your brain of past experience and so it will just pattern match to what it believes you should be doing in that moment and that can often be wildly inaccurate or just plain bad strategy for living in the present.  You will want to control these experiences with old reflex responses of people pleasing or over-working or thinking. These are driven by feelings of unsafety within that are completely unconscous.

So we have to understand trauma is a real thing and it can express itself bodily. I think that's really important. So, if if trauma is in the body in the beliefs and survival strategies of the past, what can we do then to reverse that? Well, first of all we need to come into a felt sense of safety. And that is really something I developed in my book, The Scar That Won't Heal. I was really talking about the psychological and the physiological together because they they're not separate. The mind and the body are not separate. They talk to each other in many ways. And to get into a sense of safety is a heart-based connection with another person. Generally, you may have had that in the past. You may have had somebody in your family that was able to support you. um and to felt known and sensed as who you truly are unconditionally. But many people grow up without that. And it distorts their psychological understanding of themselves and how they express themselves in the world because they'll always be overcompensating whether that be as overwork, not taking care of themselves, trying to please or impress other people. We only have to look at politics for that!

It's sad because it's not living truly authentically. And I think that's really why symptoms come along is to bring you back to authenticity. I describe in the book many ways to do that, but most of the tools stress coming back into authenticity via the body - a felt sense of knowing therefore are body based and many of them are interpersonal.

Now, I know there's been a lot of criticism. I've been watching a lot of online stuff recently and there's a lot of criticism of the therapy industry in general and psychology as a bandwagon of getting people to sit weekly with a with a psychologist or psychotherapist. But being a somatic (bodybased) therapist I’ve managed to avoid that and the good news is it’s a lot quicker and longer lasting. If you’ve been in therapy for years, then it's clearly not working! More body-based techniques um such as those proposed by Gabor Mate – called ‘Compassionate Inquiry’ is a much more somatic technique in combination with a safe connection with a person who's fully trained to be present with you while you allow the feelings of being young or vulnerable.

And it doesn't have to be childhood, it can be at early adulthood - any experience in your past in which you felt overwhelmed. Once the psyche feels heard and felt then it can realign almost spontaneously.

The unconscious as a dynamic system that needs to be heard/ allowed

Carl Jung talked about this, but he had different language for it. He described that healing and letting go was not just a psychological technique or as we describe it now a ‘self-help hack’. It's an invitation to embrace a transformation that begins in the unconscious. Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst - he and Sigman Freud actually studied together for a while, but then they diversified and began to disagree with each other.  Jung believed that the unconscious isn't just a storehouse, a random kind of attic of all your forgotten memories. It's a living dynamic force that that propels you into awareness. And if you don't listen, it will create symptoms to wake you up, to force you into open awareness.

So letting go is not just about giving up and saying ‘oh well, whatever’ i.e. learned helplessness.  It's more about being curious and open to what may be presented to you in dreams, thoughts, memories, even sometimes physical sensations which are all teaching you something - the body is speaking to you in the only language it has. And it's about integrating those messages and finding a sense of meaning in them that doesn't mean ‘I'm falling apart’ or ‘I'm broken’ or ‘I need someone to fix me’. We really have to get beyond that.

Healing Yourself

Really nobody else heals anyone. What a good therapist or psychologist does is encourage you to heal yourself. But it has to be done through the body; through EMDR, EFT, yoga, chi gung or cranio sacral therapy. There are many ways in to healing and it's not simply about sitting in a chair and being analyzed. It's about making space in our life for everything that we've ignored, repressed or disavowed. All the feelings about ourselves that perhaps we knew when we were little. I often ask people, "What did you love to do when you were little?" because it's usually a clue to who they really are. Many of us become conditioned to let go and remove those things from your life as you go through standard education which teaches you how to conform and do all the things that everyone else does and compare yourself and compete and little by little you lose your essential self in that process.

So it's about reigniting and coming home to our true sense of self, about letting go of control because control is one of the strategies that our conscious mind puts in place when we feel, you know, at a loss, when we feel things are sliding or slipping and certainly if our identity is questioned e.g. things that we did for a living that become no longer possible or the relationship that we had that we've lost a sense of being recognized or praised or credited with something and that disappears. Losses of those kinds are really massive for people particularly sensitive people and the ego which is what Jung called that part of us that likes to control, will resist.

The Ego resists change or meeting the Shadow side – it needs trust to let go of clinging to the Conditioned self

It's the thing that tells us ‘if you just read enough’ or you learn enough or you do enough courses, you'll get through this and you need to defend the you that you've become, the Conditioned self. But in opposition to that is a deeper sense of knowing what Jung called the Shadow. And the Shadow is this denied truth if you like,  the inner truth. All our all our myriad emotions, even the unacceptable ones: the anger, the fear, the desire, and sometimes even the hidden talents, just knowing what it is you love and being able to express that and letting go. Therefore, in that context healing means meeting the shadow side and not avoiding it - it's a receptivity,  a surrender but not in a helpless way AND a trust in the unconscious process and that allows life to unfold without opposition, without barriers, without defending yourself against change, which is very common in people who've had trauma. And so you stop clinging to who you think you should be, the conditioned self, the one that you were told you were or should be. Like being n a career that maybe has no meaning for you. And begin to listen to who you are in the process of becoming in this moment.

The transformation requires an alchemical dissolution via processes using new sensory input and a willingness to allow/surrender to a wider knowing

Many images around this transformation process use the idea of a butterfly emerging from a cocoon  because it's in that transformation the butterfly doesn't just rearrange itself, it dissolves itself first and then rearranges itself to become the butterfly. So the dissolution is actually part of the process. It's an alchemical process as well and this is something that Jung firmly believed. Hence, I called myself alchemy therapies but not because I understood Jungian psychology. I had no understanding of it whatsoever at that time. I believe I was actually given the name in a process that was completely unconscious. I can't explain why I called my business Alchemy therapies. I can only tell you that the name arrived and then I had to look up what alchemy was - my understanding of alchemy was it was a a process by which some scientists were trying to create gold out of base metals. And I thought,  that's interesting because that's transformative. And after all, if you're working as a therapist, you're hoping to encourage people to transform, but it's far more than that. It's an inner transformation a burning away all that we don't need, you know, anything that no longer serves us. And every time you release a belief or a role or a wound, remember you're not broken, these wounds, which is the true definition of trauma, are there to be healed. When you do that, you create space for something deeper and your true Self, and Jung called that self with a capital S, to emerge, just like the butterfly.

And I think just understanding that is so key to allowing this process without shame and without needing to fix it, just being present is a lot easier when you have someone to guide you through. I have described in my various books the many different ways in which you can do this. Some of these tools and techniques are relatively recent. you know, EMDR, which is using eye movements to stimulate memory rewiring. We now know it also stimulates your vagus nerve and the cranial nerves which feed directly into your unconscious. It seems to have this alchemical transformation which we can't really explain but just by doing certain eye movements and making certain statements seems to feed back into the unconscious a new belief system about yourself. But it really starts with allowing first allowing the fact that you don't know what's coming, you don't know how you're going to heal this, but you trust that you will and you can.

Paying attention to the unconscious messages, the dreams you have are very, very informative. Actually, the detail isn't so important. It's the emotions within the dreams that tell you what it is you're facing. Write down stuff that you dream. See what the patterns are. Notice what beliefs come up whenever you're challenged because these will be part of your patterning from the past and learning to kind of let them be there initially and then asking to be able to let them go because it's not an act act of conscious willpower. Remember that. It's about surrendering to a bigger, stronger, more powerful sense of knowing that your body has about you. Uh we are not just physical beings. We're energetic. That's certainly my awareness now. And I think if we allow that the energetic vibration of healing is what transforms the physical then it has to come from these unconscious processes first. So, I think that's the power that's the power of the Jungian lens from my point of view. We have to be flexible in our approach too because in the act of recovery.

Flexibility is key - returning again and again to process - the iterative process of healing is a fine tuning of the system that is not easy because the old patterns are so much stronger.

process we're going to go up and down a lot you know it's not a linear progression you may think oh well if okay so letting go okay I'll just let go and see what comes in and then everything will be hunky dory it doesn't work like that it's an iterative process because the old beliefs and the old shame feelings will want to reassert themselves. The ego is very powerful and it will say no, letting go is tantamount to being vulnerable and it doesn't want that. So it will absolutely shove things in your way whether they are events in your life that seem to reoccur. Um whether people in fact that repeat you know um if you had experiences of being dominated or controlled or bullied or shamed that would just often keep happening until you really get it. And and so how you respond to those experiences allows you to fine-tune this system of of allowing without judging yourself without uh reflexively reacting to everything that goes on. And this is this is really hard to do. It's not easy because the the old road, the reflex reactions to certain challenging emotional situations are very very um much quicker than the more contemplative one where maybe our our conscious mind does have some involvement. So we we need to kind of be aware that the old patterns are so much easier and therefore changing those patterns does take a certain amount of repetition in order to achieve the end result which is feeling good. You know not being perfect, not never having challenges but knowing that you have everything all the resources you need to deal with them at any given time. Okay. So, um, do if if any of this interests you, please subscribe. Please look at my other videos. They're all here. And in the meantime, I wish you peace and lots of healing.