Traumas from the past: Should I treat them, or is just chanting enough? Bodily identification and spiritual bypassing
It would not be an exaggeration to say that most of us have psychological issues due to traumas and different unfulfilled needs faced at some stage. How to deal with them in spiritual life?
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It would not be an exaggeration to say that most of us have psychological issues due to traumas and different unfulfilled needs faced at some stage of life. A perfectly healthy person demands loving parents and other relatives, as well as a whole social structure we don’t have nowadays. As a result, by the time we reach adulthood, we are usually badly scarred by all the neglect, violence, scarcity, and abuse we suffered as we were growing up.
What happened has already happened, and we can’t do anything to change it. The question is what to do from now on.
Sometimes, traumas and other mental issues hold us back in spiritual life, preventing us from being stable in our practice, and we may not be able to overcome the hurdle with spiritual practice and friendly talks alone. In such cases, it makes sense to take time to deal with the issue by searching for a counselor, a devotee psychologist, or any other form of help that is necessary.
However, there are also cases in which these issues may be manageable. Everyone has to deal with such challenges to a certain extent, and as long as we have enough balance and support to deal with them, just continuing without paying so much attention to them may be the best option.
Maintaining the body and mind is necessary, since they are the very tools we use to complete our journey. On the other hand, becoming obsessed with fixing them completely can make us lose the opportunity.
Some become so identified with trauma that healing itself becomes their identity. That’s a mistake. On the other extreme, we have spiritual bypassing, which is to ignore serious psychological issues, hoping that chanting alone will make them disappear. The unfortunate fact is that, more often than not, it doesn’t.
Understanding that both strategies have their shortcomings, how to find the balance?
There is a story connected with that.
It may look now like something very distant from our reality, but there was a time when Germany was separated into two different countries. East Germany was Soviet-backed, while West Germany was integrated into Europe. The division between the two countries was symbolized by the Berlin Wall, which divided the city into two.
In 1989, with the weakening of the Soviet Union, the wall was dismantled, and people from East Germany became free to go to the other side. Many were so fed up with life in the Soviet Union that they just took their Trabants, drove to the other side, and abandoned them, starting a new life, never to return.
The Trabant was an interesting car. It was even worse than the Ladas people were driving in Russia. It was a tiny and uncomfortable car, and prone to many mechanical problems. It was practically impossible to keep a Trabant in perfect working condition. However, good or bad, these were the only cars people had. When the opportunity arose to get out, they just drove the cars they had, without caring much about the discomfort or problems. When they would get to the other side, they would just abandon their Trabants and start their new lives.
Similarly, there is a clear division between the material world and the spiritual world, and life here is not very comfortable. We also have very uncomfortable cars (the material bodies we use), and they give us plenty of difficulties. However, these are the vehicles we have. Therefore, when the opportunity of getting out appears, we should just take it, without caring much for the discomforts we may face on the way.
Some mechanical issues are structural. A broken axle has to be fixed before the trip. A flat tire has to be changed. Brakes have to be checked. Similarly, serious psychological issues may undermine our practice and have to be dealt with. These are the cases where spiritual bypass can be dangerous, just like driving a car with a loose wheel or without brakes.
If, on the other hand, we want to first fix all small issues before the trip, chances are we will never go, because there is always going to be something wrong. We can imagine that if someone in East Germany were to first try to somehow transform his Trabant into a comfortable car, he or she would never have gone anywhere, because it was not possible.
Similarly, the more we try to reach a comfortable situation in this life, solving all the numerous issues connected with the body and mind, the more we become entangled, because the situation is not solvable. For each issue we can solve, two new problems appear.
Thus, our approach to solving material problems should be multifaceted. On the one hand, we should take time to solve serious problems that can jeopardize our practice, solving them before they have the chance to grow, but on the other hand, we should exert tolerance in dealing with the different small issues and discomforts we face daily, which, although annoying, don’t prevent us from performing our duties and advancing in spiritual practice.
The idea of Kṛṣṇa Consciousness is to use the current body and the current situation we have now as a vehicle to go to the other side, despite all the limitations, since if we first try to come to a perfect situation, chances are that we will become distracted and end up never going.
We hear that there are two types of karma: prārabdha karma (the karma that is already giving fruits) and aprārabdha karma (the karma that is stored in the form of a seed). When we start practicing Kṛṣṇa Consciousness, and especially after we are initiated by a bona fide guru, all the vast stocks of aprārabdha karma are quickly destroyed. However, the prārabdha karma, the karma that is already giving fruits, continues. Therefore, we continue with the same material body, with the same imperfections, and we often continue in the same material conditions, without much change.
We may question why it is so, and the answer is simple: If Kṛṣṇa were to take all our prārabdha karma from us, together with the aprārabdha karma, there would be nothing to maintain the material body. The problem is that we are not ready to just drop dead; we still have a trip to do, and for this, we need a vehicle. In this way, Kṛṣṇa allows us to temporarily keep the vehicle we have, be it good or bad, so we can go through the lessons we still have to learn and complete our trip back to Godhead.
Therefore, it doesn’t matter much if the engine is smoking or if the windows don’t open; the idea is to just use it for the trip and then abandon it. The discomfort is temporary, but the gain is eternal.
Therefore, in one sense, we need to be practical and maintain the body in working condition, since if it breaks down prematurely, it will not reach our destination. On the other hand, however, we need to understand that it is just for a little while and thus not become distracted from our final goal.
The point about spiritual life is thus not about completely fixing our current situation, but just dealing with the pressing issues that hold us back in our spiritual practice. Once this is reached, we can advance further by just using whatever resources we have now (be it money, intelligence, attention, or whatever else we may have) to serve Kṛṣṇa and thus use the opportunity to purify ourselves and conclude our journey.
Check the book where we discuss more dangerous mistakes in our spiritual practice, free for everyone:
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