Every living creature on this planet is subjected to experiencing traumatic incidents (of varying degrees of intensity and frequency) for the duration of their life down here. Humans seem to have two distinguishing features of their trauma experience that complicate things even further when compared to animals/plants:
We generally unconsciously "hold on" to the trauma as opposed to "shaking it off" soon after it occurs and going on with our lives. If you were a gazelle being chased by a lion, that could definitely be classified as very traumatic, but consider that the gazelle unconsciously knows how to complete the trauma process by shaking off the excess energy that has been built-up and then goes back to doing things that a gazelle does when it's not running for "deer" life (sorry, I had to).
We seem to have extremely complex variations of trauma which is akin to adding "salt, lemon juice, and/or rubbing alcohol" to new "wounds" as opposed to just being wounded and "walking it off". Let's look at a person that just got fired from his job. He gets into a minor fender bender on the way home, his electricity bill is overdue and will probably be shut off within the week, and his girlfriend just told him earlier that morning that she was pregnant. What a fantastic collection of traumas to deal with all at once, wouldn't you agree? And to make things worse, innately, this human doesn't know how to "shake off" all of this accumulated energy because his nervous system is stuck in "freeze" mode. All of this traumatic energy has to go somewhere, but without an exit, it will just settle and solidify into energetic blockages throughout his energetic body (this includes the physical) with some of the end results manifesting as: physical ailments, being stunted/close off emotionally, cognitive issues, mental disorders, losing connection to the other side, etc.
Honestly, if I had the option to choose between experiencing and dealing with the "gazelle-chased-by-a-lion" scenario or the "let's-see-how-many-traumas-we-can-pile-on-this-poor-guy-today" scenario, I'd happily tighten up my shoelaces every fucking time.
As I recall mentioning in another post, search and you'll find that no one seems to agree on the number of energetic bodies a person has. For the purposes of this article, I'm just going to list FOUR because anything beyond that is beyond the comprehension of most people anyway. Here they are:
Physical - Your physical body is the foundation and anchor for your animating spirit. All of your other energetic bodies overlay/permeate the physical. Depletion of energy from this energetic body could come from: mowing the lawn, construction work, jogging, working out, etc.
Emotional - This energy arises from within us based on what is going on around us (your boss just fired you) or within us (your mind wanders to your father's funeral a week ago). Depletion of energy from this energetic body could come from dealing with the loss of a pet or loved one, dealing with a break-up, etc. *On a side note, emotions are often confused with feelings. An emotion has a specific frequency that presents itself (objectively) the same way to all humans. Feelings are how a person translates that specific emotional energy and are therefore subjective. A person generally translates emotions based on: conditioning/programming from throughout their lifetime, their accumulated trauma, past reactions to this same emotion that have been anchored into their nervous system, and how they're currently feeling. Think of it like taking 5 people, sitting them down side-by-side, and then dumping a entire stein of beer onto each of their crotches. The emotion of anger will most likely arise in all of them, but they will probably describe their feelings about that specific energy differently. The first person might just say he feels a little angry, but the second might say he feels rather irritated. The third might say he feels slightly annoyed. The fourth might say he feels rageful. The last person might say he feels completely indifferent about it. This is as deep as I want to go regarding emotions and feelings.
Mental - Humans are constantly thinking from the moment they wake up until they eventually fall asleep. The brain of an average person is said to consume (according to the general consensus) about 20% of your energy. This can go much higher from my experience as I recall eating abnormally large portions of hearty meals (plus snacks) at the Monroe Institute throughout our 5 hemi-sync sessions (aka "naps" in my case lol) each day for an entire week and not noticing any weight gain or change in how my clothes fit. Depletion of energy from this energetic body could come from spending the day crunching numbers in Excel or writing an in-depth article on how trauma affects energy bodies (I foresee a nap in my future).
Psychic - This will be the most nebulous for people to grasp since most people aren't in touch with this energy body, but regardless of their awareness, people are still subject to experiencing the effects from it. Depletion of energy from this energetic body could come from working as a medium all day at a metaphysical fair, doing back-to-back remote healing/shamanic sessions, etc.
All of these bodies affect each other, so if you spent all day working in your garden, that physical exhaustion will most likely prevent you from using any other "fully charged" energetic body. If you spent the day crying over your divorce, you're going to be too tired to get out of bed, cook, or write in your journal. The Chinese have a saying that "the brain eats the body"; scholars and intellectuals were usually in poor physical health and looked much older than they were because their brains would be stealing energy from their physical for mental processing. I think you get the picture now, so onwards.
Types of trauma Let me simplify the definition of trauma: It's basically shock.
What I wanted to clarify is that most people think of trauma as something that is negative. This is only half of it. Duality is a foundation of this 3-D realm and if you've read my other stuff, you know there will always be a yin or yang component to everything down here. So what are some "positive" trauma examples?
Winning the lottery
Having a baby
Getting married
Adopting a puppy/kitten
Buying a new house
Moving to a city/country you've always dreamed about
The list goes on. All of these carry a degree of shock, but because they are on the flip-side of "negative" trauma, your reaction to them is completely different and therefore, most people don't consider these "traumatic". Regardless of whether a trauma is bad or good, they can still cause issues if the energy from the shock isn't transmuted or released.
Transmutation
This is simply changing something from it's original form to a new one. Every aspect of life is constantly changing. Always. Some things change faster than others, some things change more drastically than others, but nothing stays the same. Not everyone knows how to transmute energy, but some people that you may perceive to be very resilient to what life throws at them might be doing this unconsciously (or they may just be compartmentalizing which is akin to sweeping shit under a rug - you're going to trip on it and bust your ass when the rug "lumps" get big enough).
Things to keep in mind
Trauma can cause energetic blockages. If the energy from a trauma is not transmuted or released in a timely manner, it can condense/solidify into an energetic blockage and lodge itself anywhere in your energetic bodies causing issues down the line.
Trauma can start in one energetic body and ripple out to others. I'm going to give you some examples of the effects of rippling. Your mileage may vary.
Source of trauma: Physical body If you accidentally ingested something that you were allergic to, this will usually cause immediate issues in your physical body (anaphylaxis, facial swelling, green apple splatters, hives, etc.), but it would also probably spread to your emotional body (anxiety, panic) and mental body (difficulty thinking clearly, thoughts spinning out of control) as well.
Source of trauma: Emotional body If your significant other passed away, the emotional body would probably experience despair, sorrow, abandonment, etc. This could cause physical issues such as lethargy, lack of appetite, or in extreme cases, even broken heart syndrome (I experienced this after someone very close to me died). If it spreads to your mental body, you could experience thoughts of not being worthy, being unlovable, or even suicide. These low-vibrational thoughts from the mental body could permeate your psychic body which could attract discarnate spirits and entities feeding off your depression and egging you on to lose yourself in drugs/alcohol, hurt yourself, or end it all.
Source of trauma: Mental body If your work is mentally stressful, this trauma would probably permeate the physical and could start you down the fun road to heart disease, cause high blood pressure, or give you a heart attack. It would no doubt permeate your emotional body causing anxiety issues and a short fuse. Your psychic body would carry the frequency of stress and you could unknowingly attract shitty situations that have the same frequency such as having a road rage incident where you and another stressed-out individual come to blows.
Source of trauma: Psychic body If your psychic body was traumatized from psychic attacks or entities tormenting you in your dreams/astral, this could affect your physical body because not sleeping well from the nightly tormenting could weaken your immune system and throw your circadian rhythms out of whack causing issues down the line. It could affect your emotional body by instilling fear which could also pop into your mental body as evidenced by thoughts akin to never finding someone who will understand the intangible tormenting that you've been subjected to or thoughts of being "crazy" and losing your mind (if your "reality" consisted of not understanding the non-physical).
Trauma can sometimes skip energy bodies. If one of your energy bodies isn't developed enough, trauma can skip it and move to the next body. Think about being in the womb and absorbing trauma that your mother was going through. You felt emotions, but you didn't have words or a sufficiently developed mental body to analyze/understand these emotions. This trauma could just stay lodged in your emotional and/or psychic bodies. If it plants itself in your physical body, it can be the start of a birth defect or developmental disorders as you grow. So seeking out "talk therapy" to deal with your issues (like many Westerners have been programmed to do) won't fix this particular one. This is where non-verbal therapies, psychedlics/entheogens, and/or shamanic work would be much better suited to deal with this type of trauma.
The level of development of an energy body determines how well a trauma is transmuted/processed/released. Think of it this way: If a person has a well-developed intellect balanced with intelligence, logic, and critical/out-of-the-box thinking, most everyone would agree that this person would be well-suited and adept at solving problems utilizing mental energy. The term "emotional intelligence" describes those with well-developed emotional bodies. They're more adept at understanding, processing, and managing emotional energy. Someone deeply grounded in their physical (an athlete, survival skills instructor, etc.) is proficient at handling physical injuries due to their familiarity with their physical body. A shaman is aware of and present in multiple non-physical realities simultaneously and is skilled at navigating and dealing with psychic perceptions and non-physical entities from all of these places.
Do you need to be consciously aware of what specific trauma caused the energetic blockage?
No. If you still believe that recalling the details is necessary for true healing, this comes from what Western psychology has been pushing for years because they've confused innate human curiosity and desire for understanding with being a requisite for true healing. Your mind blocked out that horrific experience FOR A REASON. It is NOT necessary to remember/re-live it to fix it and you don't need any of the details. Think of it this way: If you were thrown in prison for 5 years without any explanation (a blocked out traumatic experience) and one day, the guard opened your cell door and said you were free to go (the trauma had been resolved), is it absolutely necessary to hang around and ask questions about why you had been imprisoned in the first place (which would be re-living the trauma that had been blocked)? Not really because this would only have satisfied your curiosity/desire to understand and wouldn't necessarily have contributed anything to freeing you any sooner. In fact, knowing details probably would have made it more difficult to process the trauma in prison because these things have an interesting way of ending up on a repeating loop in your head.
Can you experience/suffer from traumas from your other incarnations? How do you transmute/release these?
Yes. It helps to keep in mind that time is simultaneous (your "past" lives are happening right now) before you start to ponder why you have certain aversions to certain experiences or places. If you have an aversion to swimming in the ocean and you're confident that you've never suffered any trauma related to water in your current lifetime, then consider that one or more of your incarnations may have suffered in the ocean (drowning, shark attack, etc.) and because this other incarnation is YOU, it can very well become your baggage in this lifetime. I'd surmise that this is probably because your other incarnation isn't capable of transmuting it, you're psychically sensitive and adept enough to do it on behalf of your other incarnation, and/or you have access to better resources to help transmute/release the trauma (for example, they didn't have Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in 1670).
If you think about how difficult it is to process your existing traumas, trying to do this for your other incarnations adds a bit more complexity. Some have reported success with past-life regression. These can also be dealt with on the astral or in lucid dreams if you know what you're doing. An adept shaman can also assist you with this. Instructions for this process are beyond the scope of this article.
As with most of what I write, I hope it gives you a better understanding of the effects of trauma in your energy bodies. In a future post, I'll cover techniques to transmute and release trauma.