My Sunday with Dragonflies
A New Way of Healing Trauma
Musing from a lazy day by the lake watching dragonflies...
There is a shift happening in the way we look at trauma and nervous system dysregulation. It is a shift away from the idea that the problem rests with an individual who needs fixing and toward an understanding that the patterns of fight/flight/freeze/fawn are reasonable coping mechanisms designed to keep us safe. The old way of dissecting and excavating the object (you) from the environment emerged within old paradigms of Western psychology. We're now recognizing their origin in a mentally-biased, white, patriarchal, ableist culture of control that centers heteronormative compliance as 'healthy'.
Remember that Einstein quote? “You can't solve a problem with the same thinking that created it.” The new thinking arises from a recognition of our profound loneliness brought on by the polycrisis of our age and our increasing alienation. This loneliness is the product of our disconnection from our bodies, feelings, one another, our communities, our roots, and the animist language of our living, sacred nature. We are nested within the embrace of a dynamic natural world that we barely notice.
I am not saying that our trauma-healing models should be trashed. They have gotten us this far. They have helped us to recognize patterns. They have spawned other models and given us a lot to work with. Plus, you can pick and choose your maps to understanding and healing. You can connect the dots between attachment patterns, IFS, psycho-physiological defenses, body armoring, ancestral trauma and sexual trauma. We have many maps and many layers to explore.
Constellize the Information
To harvest the hidden riches of your soul-wisdom, go beyond the known information and see the constellation of the system. How does it all work together? The main thing is not just recognizing the pattern and going down that road. The more patterns you see, the more your perception opens. You receive a larger field of information and you recognize how alive each moment is.
You can’t just do this in your head, you want to enter into this kind of knowing like you slip into water. Your body, in all her fascial aliveness, can know and reveal things through direct experience. This is how we enter the spaces between the stars, the dark, fecund potential as well as the submerged imprints holding us back.
This requires movement and gentle sounding- intentional, aware, varied, often slow, movement. It requires pausing, resting and listening to the voices of Nature, soul and Cosmos whispering through us.
Too often, what we think we perceive is just a conditioned response. It really doesn't matter how extraordinary your senses are or could be if you won't pause, feel and listen. Otherwise, you will be in your past, not the arising moment. The body is speaking to us in the language of sensation and beneath every sensation is the voice of the soul. We must listen with our hearts to hear that still, quiet voice within. Hearts listen differently. They hear the faint whispers that cannot be silenced and they record them.
They see with dragonfly eyes. (A dragonfly has 56,000 eyes! Can you imagine? - See below for fun dragonfly facts.) A dragonfly hovers and flies like a helicopter – up, down, forward, back- scouting the field for prey. Their thousands of eyes focus on thousands of different scenes simultaneously, differentiating, assessing, and focusing on finding one goal: dinner. Then, they constellize the information and zoom in like lightning for the feast.
In an age of information overload, compounding crises and collapse-fatigue, dragonflies are remarkable examples of being able to take in multidimensional perception with self-mastery.
What does this have to do with you, besides making dragonflies your spirit animal?
Something else is arising like the dragonfly nymph from the waters. A new structure of consciousness is coming online. It has been coming for a while, but now things are speeding up.
The mental/either-or/one perspective/conceptual understanding of the world is slowly shifting to an embodied, integrated, multi-perspective stance where diversity is a sign of a healthy system, where Nature and the unmanifest sacred origin are present, and where time and space converge, diverge and flow as probabilities we can almost taste.
Getting our bearings in this new landscape requires centering the felt experience of presence. Then our extraordinary sensory capacities to feel, hear, see, smell, taste and intuit through time and space awaken.
So that's the exciting view from above but, it's important to remember we all start where we are, with our own bodies, nervous systems and personal challenges. You might want to start by noticing how often your body goes into a freeze response.
It's normal to freeze, flee, fight and fawn, but what else is available (and safe) in those moments? Can you root through your feet, open your crown, and breathe a few slow, full breaths? Can you exhale a silent ahhh sound and 'see' the wall behind you? Can you really fill up the space with your energy? What happens when you begin tracing imperceptible infinity loops inside your pelvis? Do you relax and take in more information? Do you see an alternative you did not see before?
The point is, we can consciously participate in what we perceive, how we shape our bodies, ourselves, and how we show up. Try it and let me know what opens for you.
Learn about awakening your perception. Become articulate in the intuitive language of your sensory body and connect with the messages you may be numb to. Reach out if you'd like to know more.
Dragonfly nymphs - Photographer unknown
p.s. The animal with the most eyes in the world: the dragonfly has 56,000 eyes. The compound eyes of dragonflies are the largest and most numerous in the insect world, accounting for 2/3 of the entire head, and science has detected that both of the dragonfly’s large compound eyes are made up of 1,000-28,000 small eyes, so dragonflies can have up to 56,000 eyes, which is 10 times more than the average insect!
https://www.dragonflyfacts.com/how-many-eyes-does-a-dragonfly-have/