Resistance, Trauma and Memory
Graham Bennett
Resistance
"Resistance is useless." Marvin, the paranoid android
Dr Ray perhaps more elegantly stated that, "What you resist persists," although Marvin, the paranoid android, from "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" was right on the money.
Resistance can simply be thought of as an unwillingness to experience things just as they are. It can be in the form of mental resistance, emotional resistance or physical resistance. Although our continued resistance to life is somewhat at the root of our problems, or at least the perpetuation of our problems, resistance is also essential for creation, for making things change or move. Try pushing a shopping trolley while standing on an ice rink and see how far you get.
Unfortunately, we're such experts in resisting things that we are not aware of most of it because we've even resisted our own resistance, thus we've not only dug a hole for ourselves, we've half filled it with a nice pool of water to drown in.
So it's all very well to try to "experience it on the mental level" but in reality most of us have weighed ourselves down with so much emotional junk that we really have only one way of conducting our lives; according to our patterns.
This is where we must realise that we need to peel our onion of many layers starting from the outside and working inwards. The first layer will be physical stuff, followed by emotional stuff and finally the otherwise elusive mental stuff - the place where our creations all began.
"Why do we resist?" - funnily enough, because we want to. We're not compelled to but we've been painting ourselves into a corner for so long out of choice that we've left ourselves with no choices.
Body Electronics provides a systematic method to uncover and release these resistances.
Trauma is in the Eye of the Beholder
It should be obvious that traumas come in all shapes and sizes; from car crashes to shopping trolley crashes, from broken bones to broken fingernails to broken hearts, from lost eyesight to lost toys. What is perhaps less obvious, at least in any tangibly practical way, is that the measure of a trauma cannot be an absolute. What is traumatic to one person may be amusing to another (especially when it's happening to someone else); adversity to one person may be utterly defeating, while to another the same or even greater adversity may be met with an equal determination to overcome.
Trauma is clearly in the eye of the beholder; the degree to which any given experience is traumatic is in the eye of the beholder.
It cannot be possible to make valid quantitative comparisons between experiences - which experience was more traumatic? Yet this is what we try to do without realising it every day in the form of value judgements. Furthermore, these judgements are influenced by our prior experience of trauma, or that is to say, our judgement of prior experiences.
Through our experiences and our attitudes towards them we have progressively programmed ourselves to interpret future experiences with a greater degree of bias. Furthermore, we are more likely to have experiences we will deem traumatic, as a result of our prior traumas. In other words, trauma begets trauma. Dr Ray put it this way, "What you resist persists."
The major aims of pointholding are thus to expose our resistances, regain specific memory of old experiences, including moments of memory of decision as to whether we would love a given experience or not, and the judgements associated with these moments. Often, the body heals when these moments are revealed, or as Dr Doug Morrison has stated, "Healing is a pleasant side-effect of consciousness change."
Whether we realise it or not, we have and are continuing to suppress more of our experience than we love. As children (and in most cases even before) we have decided over and over again not to love a given event for what it is, favouring instead wallowing in our hurt feelings about not getting things just as we wanted them. We see things exactly as we want to see them, as it suits us to have them be, even if that means having an unpleasant experience. In effect, we become martyrs or victims of our own creative efforts in life. We create events and we create our attitude towards them, thus shaping how we experience them.
This has established not just habit patterns but "programs" of behaviour and experience, wherein in the absence of committed discipline to correct principles a specific stimulus guarantees a specific response, just like an involuntary reflex or knee-jerk reaction.
The reversal of all this is the realm of Body Electronics - all the judgements, all the programs, all the physical effects of traumas - all can be undone if one is willing to change the attitude to one of unconditional love. This is not the conditional love of, "I'll love it if I think it's lovable," but the unconditional love of, "I love everything, no matter what, whatever."
The big question regarding freedom from the effects of old traumas is, "How can I possibly learn to love what I have already forgotten?" Body Electronics, in the form of pointholding, provides an answer, a methodical approach to regaining the memory of suppressed moments of decision not to love and the opportunity to reverse those decisions and thus be freed of their effects.
Thus, to consider a couple of hypothetical examples, Fred doesn't realise his inability to trust women stems from his experience as a little boy when he fell off his bike when mummy let go of the handlebars. In his mind it was all her fault, when the truth was that if she never let go of the handlebars he would never have learnt to ride his bike. If he could remember that moment of deciding to never trust his mum and in fact all women again and at the same time forgive her and see the purpose of the experience, he could become free of his current problems.
Alison doesn't realise her asthma stems from her childhood experience of being trapped in a wardrobe, full of the scent of her mother's flowery perfume. Whenever she smells flowers today she feels she can't breathe, just like it was in that stuffy wardrobe 20 years ago.
This is not an intellectual exercise. Intellectual efforts to make these same breakthroughs by psycho-analysis, hypnotic regression, counselling, etc are insufficient because for consciousness change one must have:
Absolutely specific memory of an event
Full re-experience of the event and memory of the decisions involved
Willingness to see the multiplicity of perspectives involved as being equally valid
Willingness for that event to be just as it is forever, with no desire to make it or wish it to be anything else
Knowledge and motivation to embrace the dualities so revealed
All of this absolutely must come from within, not as an outside suggestion, if it is to be unprogramming - outside suggestions, once accepted, merely form an additional layer of programming, less freedom instead of more.
The Importance of Memory
"Pain is the capstone to memory." John Whitman Ray
We cannot love what we cannot remember, nor can we fully remember what we are not willing to fully experience. Any attitude of less than love towards an experience is a partial suppression of that experience and the memory of it. We cannot release or be free of that which we are suppressing, that which we do not have full specific memory of, that where we acknowledge only our perspective as being valid.