The Forbidden Truth About Trauma

There was something I recognized from my first OM. It sounded farfetched, subversive, even naïve, but it was unmistakable: Arousal, matched with attention, has the power to transform trauma. It pierces the membrane most healing practices never touch. 

I had seen the experience first with psychedelics: people practicing with the mystical state and either breaking through the membrane or not. 

There is a valence. Most people live behind it. The worst case is that you are locked behind it in reactivity. The best case scenario is that through some kind of healing or meditation you decrease the reactivity. 

You may learn equanimity with things that are “good” and “bad” but you do not learn to break through the sound barrier altogether and write your own interpretations of your experience while not going into denial. Full ownership of all experience. That is liberation and that is resilience. 

I watched the methods for healing trauma develop. It was absolute torture to see people unnecessarily suffering. To see people instructed in precisely the wrong direction—the modalities were all based on turning down arousal. One can never break through the valence that way. It is like trapping someone in a membrane with sewage and then giving them methods to not ruminate on the stench.

It was simply horrific to watch a harmful industry, albeit I do believe well intentioned, put in charge of people who had already had very extreme experiences.

But I was a “kook,” a “charlatan,” “do not trust that woman.” I dared suggest that not just a way, but the only way to entirely transform trauma is to turn up the rheostat of arousal along with fastening it to the faculty of attention. With increased arousal and attention, you suddenly have both the gas and the steering wheel to move through any experience. You break out of the inherited judgment of “good” or “bad” that fuels the reactivity cycle. The mind becomes free to rewrite the code of experience.

Because sexual energy carries such strong evolutionary reinforcement, its positive sensation opens access to a mystical state threaded with bliss. In that state, the mind can enter “dark” experience and code it positively.

The lessons hidden inside it can finally be mined. Not only does this process transform what was negative, but once the mind is no longer absorbed by the trauma response, it becomes available for higher states of functioning—flow, creativity, even genius.

What looks like magic is simply the alchemy of arousal meeting stasis, where the very material of suffering becomes activated and repurposed. It is the literal transformation of poison into medicine.