Letting Go

When I first began breath meditations, I would follow the directions of my teachers, and they would help me to breathe in the universe and breathe it out. I could hold focus on this objective for moments at a time, but I soon became exhausted and my attention would wander. Additional data in my ‘scan’ intruded upon the stated objective and quickly overwhelmed the process. When I asked fellow breathers how they were doing, they shrugged their shoulders and reported that they were equally confounded.

I had been meditating, sort of, for years, including summers spent since childhood in a Quaker community whose Friends Meeting services featured silence. I had taken on transcendental meditation in the 1960s, and my instructors seemed hapless in their ability to help me deal with the inner process that a mantra evoked in me. I was advised to return to my sitting and hang out with what came up, and then to let it go.

Figure 1 – A representation of the energetic portrait of brain/mind/body

My system was too problematically active for this strategy. Forced to desert it when it made me ignore urgent, perhaps important information, I became discouraged. I found many others were, too. If we considered ourselves as self-scanning organisms, we had trouble discriminating what was important in the scan from what was not, and how to focus on or transmute those differences.

I drifted in and out of meditation practice but never found teachers who would or could instruct me on my own terms, i.e., the terms I was facing within myself. They kept telling me to go to some inner place other than where I was, or, once centred in the present, to do something: they advised me to “Let go” rather than “Watch your brain let go”. Intuitively, I felt that these teachers were very right and yet, somehow, very wrong, and the distinction I drew around this issue of intentionality and witnessing became central to what I subsequently discovered.

Redefining Brain

In the early 1990s, with the help of insights developed over 30 years of focus, I consolidated my lifetime study of trauma. I developed Trauma Energetics(tm) (TE), a non-intentional modality for evoking the self-healing powers of the brain.[1]

Over time, I absorbed a ‘cosmology’ which proposes that energy flows from source, the beginning of all things, and becomes particulate, and that those transitional energetic fields are causal – they are the sites where experience can be seen to start on its way into the densifications of flesh; and that if I could bring awareness to the energetic, the particulate levels of experience would revise, beyond what Anthony Deavin refers to as formative mind.[2]

I developed a revised vocabulary to describe and foster these energetic insights, and so I came to call the narrative incarnation of source intelligence, brain, meaning the total neurochemistry of organization characterized in the physical brain and its neurochemical extensions. I found it useful to remind ‘consciousness’ that it was an expression of neurochemistry, something in the enthralment of being and doing that we easily and often disastrously overlook.

So, from a point of communication, I asked clients to consider themselves as neurochemistries, which, of course, we are. This strategy shifted classical ordinary thought and its vocabulary out of their usual dead-end trajectories; and in a way it critically objectified the scanning process of the brain as a literal, even fundamentalist experience, making it possible to observe without judgement and with appreciation.

Using these and other verbal and imagery devices, I attempted to access the energetic reality, returning brain to its causal, preverbal levels. With selective but non-intentional awareness, my clients and I could effect changes at the particulate levels of incarnation of spirit where the energy becomes particle, the particle becomes neurochemistry, and the neurochemistry becomes physiology and psychology.

I discovered that the deepest trauma sites are expressed in those parts of our neurochemistry that over time remain resistant to other modalities such as psychotherapies, yoga, allopathic medicine, and other healing arts. Previously stuck, my clients could get movement and the resolution of these unresolved trauma sites and their neurochemistries through focus on some aspect of their internal scan energetically represented by colour and shape; these form/patterns record various phases of trauma resolution, starting with shock. I discovered a method for locating shock at an energetic and causal, rather than symptomological level. Some people with greater experience than I thought I was working at subtle body levels, though other specialists who experienced TE said the territory I was exploring was different and unexplored.

In this approach I ask the client to draw or describe the energetic portrait of the brain or other areas of the mind/body without ideas, emotions, sometimes even without kinaesthetic sensations. What emerges is a landscape/weather map filled with shapes and energetic statements of some aspects of the entire human system (see Figure 1).

I discovered that the critical colour stating where the brain itself is in residual shock is black. As in physics, black is where there is no movement. When the dense, hardened forms of the black dissolve, colour or movement returns, reducing or eliminating the narrative symptoms that plague suffering consciousness. In this sense, the artistic insight that black contains all colours is confirmed by the progression out of no movement into movement and colour.

The black has a number of qualities that can be internally sensed and witnessed as held energy. When the client focuses on the black merely as held energy, without physical or emotional narrative, the held-energy system begins to move, transmute and resolve. The result is often a dramatic reduction of symptom, pain, personality problems, addictions, and the like.

I wrote Trauma Energetics: A Study of Held-Energy Systems,[3] consolidating the initial insights, and I waited about a year before I could persuade someone I trained to do a session with me for myself. I naively discovered the modality’s power and potential for clarity. When I worked with a client, I somehow knew what the black was and could sense and see it, and identify the appropriate next place to focus. When doing TE for myself, I had difficulty, particularly if I applied the technique to myself, independent of a supervising practitioner.

Trauma Takes Our Breath Away

Then, a few years ago, I realized that trauma takes our breath away. The sites of held energy, which I and my clients scan, are predominantly experienced as shallow breathed and oxygen depleted, sometimes to the point of suffocation. Attempting to resolve my own traumata independent of a supervising practitioner, I realized that I could not easily scan for the black. But at least I could scan my own breath and seek out the sites of shock recorded in its shallowest sequences. All I had to do was witness them, this in an area whose mortal implications would normally incite anxiety.

I began to scan my own breath, again without intention, watching how it assembled itself, how unruly, fragmented and disorganized it could be, how there were times when I was lucky to have a unified sequence, much less a complete one. This focus upon the disorganized orchestra of my breathing process changed everything.

Whereas, before, I could not sustain breathwork, now I could not stop. My whole day became a waking meditation, focused on what was happening with the breath as it fashioned itself in my awareness. At the airport, a friend noted, “You have spent much of your life studying the Greek classics. How wonderful for you to be now for the first time visiting Athens.”

“I don’t care where I am, as long as I can breathe”, I replied, as my friend’s eyebrows rose.

In my pursuit of the black, unwittingly I had reinvented the alchemical wheel; I later found out that the early alchemists called the black the negrido. In my process, I saw that the black and lack of oxygen were two hallmarks of the site of trauma. That site must be addressed energetically if the deepest traumata are to be resolved. By examining the breath, I could discover the sites as well as with the black; and, better yet, the client and I could move effectively back and forth between these two modes, accessing the causal levels of why people had difficulty letting go of stressful patterns.

If a change expressed in psychological or insight levels did not also occur in the breath, it probably would not be sustained. The black of held energy is potent and internally experienced as risky; no brain in its right mind will go to a place, even in its own system, where there is compromised oxygen. I could roughly see how the compromising of the breath in the system could result in drastic curtailments of functioning, and how disease and immunity weaknesses could be sponsored at such sites. The Russian research on the relationship between cancer and oxygenation slid into understanding, as did other similar strategy studies.

If the immune system were to be reoxygenated at some ‘institutional’, causal level, all kinds of old and new balances could be achieved. But why did the presence of deep breathing not necessarily lead to resolution of the trauma? All we needed to do was to take some systematic breaths and everything should be all right, right?

My alchemical understanding of the black showed that the energy was at the interface between so-called spirit and so-called matter. In incarnation strategy, the densification of the soul into energy, into sub-molecular, tissue and organ systems could be observed directly at the energetic level. It could be observed in the breath as well, which had particularity as well as wave-like aspects.

I found that clients perform all sorts of quasi-superstitious manoeuvres with their breath and with their intention in order to deal with these deoxygenated places. To get the changes where the changes needed to occur, there was no point in looking at the voluntary breath; the regular, autonomic, involuntary breath offered an avenue into the trauma sites which were declaring themselves ten times a second for resolution through and within each breath. Thus I did not teach new ways of breathing, as in taking the client to a kind of special amusement park; rather, I escorted clients to the breaths they had, each time asking for involuntary breath as our baseline observation point as means to that end. What they showed me were systems as fragmented and precarious as my own.

Drawing the Breath

Using pencil and paper, I came to ask the client for an initial graphic presentation of an ordinary breath, which, when one comes to think of it, is not easy to do (see Figure 2). How do we draw our breath? And, furthermore, if we use words we can only very roughly approximate this very complex preverbal experience. I had not been prepared by any of my teachers for this complexity. Starting from scratch, it took a while for me to refine the scan into in- and out-breaths, focusing on the important transitions between the in and out and out and in breaths, which meditators have been observing for generations. These strategies evolved as the client and I searched for ways to acknowledge and not interfere with the breath.

As we do with the black, our approach is to witness selectively. I find this to be essential to the full resolution of the held neurochemistry we seek. Breathing into the pain, sending light into the black, interpreting emotional states, all involve some intention, which is fine when they work. But the clients who come to me have been frustrated by these approaches because their patterns don’t change or they revert.

Picking Up the Mailbag

The trains in the American Southwest race through small towns and a special hooked arm device at the side of the mail car allows the high speed train to pick up the local bags of mail without slowing down. This is what the brain offers as it scans its self-sustaining breath process. I ask clients to observe these retrieved forms of the breath as forms, and to focus directly at those sections that brain describes as dysfunctional or not smooth enough.

“What does brain say needs to happen here?”, I ask, using brain as a generic term to mean the entire intelligence system, including its energetic and neurochemical basis. And the client reports something like, “It needs more balance, or more evening out”. We then take brain to the problematic site in the breath and re-examine it, or we take the mailbag of its dysfunctional sequencing, as it were, and begin to work with the graphics of it. In this latter phase, the black soon appears, and we are off and running again. After some sequential attention, we return to the breath to see what changes have occurred. The results are often dramatic, and often bring about healing vortexes or crises or similar neurochemical shifts resulting in greater clarity and a sense of profound evening, deepening oxygenation. By focusing at these energetic levels, the client can sense immediate changes at the physiological level.

Clients often are used to intentional rebirthing or yoga-type breathing protocols to bring the brain to these usually early developmental sectors. I caution against hyperventilation and keep the client observing where the breath is, rather than where it could be. Even with experienced meditators, I find that staying with the complex and traumatically impacted breath we have inspires a high vibratory state, which in turn immediately brings forward for resolution the deoxygenated patterns surrounding traumatic shock; and that the shock often appears to register prior to active lungs, i.e., in prenatal experience.

It was this sequence that initially devastated my early attempts to do breath meditation. It perhaps led my teachers to proffer, “Observe the breath” but not to tell me to describe the results or where to focus specifically within those results. Nor would they say what I might expect, or that the experience could be shared point by point with them. I was left alone to piece together whatever I could, devil take the hindmost. In those moments when I sensed no single breath, but rather fragments barely held together by chewing gum, I thought the directive to “Observe the breath” either ignorant, sadistic, or some Zen threshold initiation to enlightenment.

Re-centring

TE work offers a unified strategy about trauma. Trauma refers to anything that knocks us off our centre, and that in order for rebalancing change to last, that off-centre position must reset itself at a causal level without intention. A concomitant idea is that it is possible to watch the resolution internally at an energetic level, thereby being able to identify significant change, or the lack of it. With my clients, the imagery that evolves is like segments of solid geometry and cartoon animation.

The breath has structure, as well as location, though that is not so easy to define. I have trained clients to witness the edge of the breath to discover the surface of the lining of the lungs, where lungs and air interface. Here, it is possible to sense areas of lung surface as in shock.

Case Study – Gloria

Gloria, a deeply anxious client, suddenly developed an apparently narcoleptic process wherein she would suddenly collapse into unconsciousness, then return to upright and regular conversation, then, moments later, slump over. Her life thus totally disrupted, she had to crawl into my office wearing a head-protecting helmet. We conducted the session on a floor mattress.

Asked whether she could hear me during the 30-second slump moments, she said she could. Having trained her to watch the edge of the breath, I asked her to sense the ratio of oxygen intake and carbon dioxide outflow, whose imbalance led to a collapse into a dormant, rebalancing mode. I talked her through two of these moments, and on the second one she awakened with a startled look. “There is oxygen coming in, but the carbon dioxide exhaust gets backed up”, she reported. “Nothing is going out. How can I change that?”, she asked.

“I don’t know”, I replied. “But maybe your system can work on it. I don’t think intention will help, but perhaps you can focus specifically on the energetics of the sites we observed.” The next day she returned, striding helmetless into the office; she reported that after some focusing, the pattern had rebalanced. To this day, some years later, she reports that the pattern has not recurred.

The lining of the lungs at the air/alveoli interface encompasses a huge number of agencies and vectors. The oxygen is, as it were, mail coded specifically for delivery into specific inner sites in the body, depending upon declared need and overall systems analysis by brain. If the respiratory system is in shock, entire inland regions are compromised, including immunity and endocrine systems. If these early alveolar sentinels are compromised by shock, then they do not function well and, with them, inland systems lacking clear oxygen supply, which is not just rendered as numbers of oxygen molecules, but as vectors of information.

Going Crazy

The most deliberate of the strategies I have devised so far involves locating some severe site of deoxygenation, some impossible dead-end place in the energetic which cannot climb itself out of stolidity or morbidity into the classic source radiance. I ask the client to draw interiorly a line around this phenomenon, including all its problematicity (see Figure 3), then invite witnessing an involuntary regular breath and breathing up to the line, but not into the situation. In the old Reichian days, with some considerable, but not predictable success, we used to ‘breathe into the pain’, or in other similar ways rescue the besieged castle by directly bringing in new supplies.

But that is not what we now do.

There are two time-neurochemistries at work here (see Figure 4). The first (A) states the early, unresolved, deoxygenating trauma site, going back to significant early, spindle trauma stages in development. The second (B) takes place in the neurochemical present, where there is no umbilicus wrapped around one’s neck, nor a mother and infant who are drugged by natal anaesthetics. The client focuses on the graphic sense of the impossible A, and simultaneously brings ordinary involuntary current breath up next to but not into the pattern. I usually name the current breath after the town in which the session is taking place (“Take Boulder 2002 breath…”).

Using the graphics, we juxtapose the two and the client remains focused on the graphic midline between A and B, witnessing only. Usually, black appears on this line, and what results is a series of disordered moments as the brain recalculates the two modes in an English ‘muddle-through’ sort of way, with tectonic shifts and realignments quickly occurring (see Figure 5). Thus tossing the cat in the air, the oxygen will land brain on its feet automatically, at a systemic causal level, so that no will is needed to solve the problem. All the client has to ‘do’ is witness the random animation of the transition, which in fact, if understood as such, is an enthralling vista.

The result is that the client reports the unpredicted resolution, partial or complete, of the initial A pattern in a new and manifest way, as if the system is oxygenating from a completely different vector, by new lungs. This juxtaposition technique is without intention, though it is deliberate in that the directive the client observes is a chaotic, ‘crazy’ processing, but only in a specific, witnessing way. As clients see the function of this process, it becomes part of their toolbox and capacities, not something to be feared or associated with the fear of loss of oxygen; the fear of loss of oxygen can be seen as at the bottom of all anxiety, no matter what its narrative forms. Over time, this way of siting on the midline between rather than in the breaths becomes an acquired taste, not just an experience of terror.

The Only Craziness

To me, reworking the juxtaposition of two time-chemistries is the only real form of craziness there is, and one that is desirable and creative; it leads to greater centredness, radiance and connection at all points in the system to what mystics call source. Other forms of craziness (‘word salad’, psychotic ideation, etc.) are expressions of toxicity, and have within them difficult, but not impossible blacks, sometimes connected to phenomena that the brain characterizes as foreign to itself (inorganic anaesthetics, drugs, alcohol, nicotinic acid, etc.).

This idea of juxtaposition has been present in Western classical literature of healing since the Jews and the Greeks, including in particularly distinctive forms in the Edenic myth, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the medieval theatre of juxtaposition, the poetry of John Donne and John Keats, Freud’s analytic, and contemporary therapies including Quantum Therapy[4] and possibly some aspects of EMDR. In the Eastern modes of dwelling with paradox as well as their translations in the parables of Jesus and the Sufi and Zen traditions, juxtaposition is crucial. What differentiates these approaches, and certainly others from the ones I have devised, are brain’s own energetic graphics and the importance of focusing on those forms, at certain points, graphically, as opposed to narratively, emotionally and cognitively.

Artists, shamans and other radical experiencers have long appreciated the importance of so-called madness, and some have lost their way, even disastrously. But the tradition, as stated for example in Shakespeare’s King Lear, shows that our centre can be found amid the inner storm, and that one can creatively witness the power of brain to bring about its own healing, separate from ego. The Buddhist tradition offers visions of tranquillity in which ego-less states are cultivated. But one must confront those places in the chemistry compromised by deoxygenation, again a task no brain in its right mind will take on readily without support or guidance.

In this sense, suicidal ideation can appear linked as a symptom of lack of oxygen and may be transformed through breathwork, a connection also alluded to by Gertrude, Queen Mother of the suffering, death-pondering, ‘to be or not to be’ Hamlet.

Queen. Be thou assured, if words be made of breath,
And breath of life, I have no life to breathe
What thou hast said to me.
Hamlet, III, iv, lines 198-200.

Summary

In summary, the breath is a place where the incarnation of spirit can be observed, its densification into matter witnessed, and the places of toxicity and traumatic shock can be directly, causally addressed. The power of such focus to bring healing resolution and transformation is profound and has been known for millennia, with varying degrees of specificity and success. To me, the importance of adding this realm of focus to the client’s toolbox is manifest, and it can be folded into the soufflé of standard as well as alternative therapies.

When other breath strategies have failed to bring resolution, often for the client, the observed breath is voluntary, intentional, and is intentionally witnessed. The client has not been supported in going to the least oxygenated places, where the immobility of the black is expressed, and in remaining witness to the energetic processes in those places within the traumatically bound neurochemistries. When these unsafe deoxygenations are juxtaposed with current (safe) breath, a confoundment occurs, and brain relocates its centre without wilful, emotional or cognitive intervention into the specific trauma site in fascinating, unpredictable ways. This resolution brings with it often a new sense of oxygen direction, as if the breath is coming from some new area in the lungs. And the levels of stress and anxiety are significantly reduced as the trauma pattern resolves, and with it, problematic narrative symptomology.

References

1. Redpath William. Trauma energetics. Positive Health. 60: 47-50. Jan 2001.
2. Deavin Anthony. Releasing trauma through bodywork: the power of awareness. Positive Health. 55:46-50. Aug 2000.
3. Redpath William. Trauma Energetics: A Study of Held-Energy Systems. Barberry Press. ISBN 0964-7730-07. 1995.
4. Wolinsky Stephen. The Tao of Chaos. Bramble Books US. ISBN 1-883647-02-9. 1996.

About Trauma Energetics

In the healing arts, professional and personal paths intertwine. I began my journeys studying intellectual history. After a period as psychoanalysand, I became a Reichian therapist, special education teacher, and finally a certified advanced Rolfer. Because of my background, as a Rolfer I have worked primarily with clients with histories of abuse.

At the age of eight, while chasing my sister, I crashed my left midfoot arch down on a glass milk bottle shard imbedded in the ground. Forty-three years later, with trauma resolution therapist Peter Levine, I examined this trauma. Essentially, Levine’s approach leads clients to complete momenta that get stuck in the original moment of trauma where we are caught in the classical animal sense between fight and flight.

During that session with Peter, rehearsing the situation for the third time, I recalled an image of tomatoes on the back porch of my family home in New Jersey, a few feet from where the accident occurred. Levine invited me again to describe the image, and I could see the red tomatoes on the porch wall shelf, and the mosquito screening behind them.

“What is the colour of the screen?” he asked.
“The screen mesh is black,” I noted.
“That’s where the energy is traumatically held,” he advised me.

Black as Held Energy

I focused upon that black, not as a net weave, but as held energy, nothing more or less. I realized that the site I was scanning in the porch screen image located where the trauma was fixed, contained and memorialized. In physics, where there is black, there is no movement. And an unresolved trauma process contains an impasse with no movement.

Ordinarily, intention or will propels ‘guided imagery’ sessions. Now, through a radical shift in perspective of the foot trauma memory, something beyond ego control was resolving into an embodied awareness more vivid, more compassionate and more real than before. And inwardly, I witnessed the held neurochemistry and experienced it resolve within a matter of minutes.

Soon, I applied these new insights about black and non-intention with clients. I discovered that, unprompted, the black showed up often immediately, so that, without intention, clients and I could focus quickly and directly upon the place in their neurochemistry where the brain described itself as having no movement. If we asked the system to describe its inner experience in the form of sensations, pressures and colour, a whole set of landscape phenomena, increasingly familiar, even predictable from client to client, began to appear.

We used the ‘cursor of consciousness’ and focused specifically on the black in the client’s inner portraits. Neither I nor the client predetermined these scans. A series of experiential problems emerged at these preverbal levels; and these could be examined in particulate, graphic form.

Clients Perceive Forms, Vibratory States

Traditional analytic or narrative content was put aside or ‘archived’. Clients perceived interior architecture: right angles, horizons, arcs, walls, whirlpools, black holes, spheres glossy and matte, pyramids, tunnels, caves, cloud banks, and stones. And we learned to focus upon specific sites in these images, like the corner of a black cube, or the interior of sphere. We thus watched specific vibratory and vector states of brain’s chemistry.

When we did this in brain-proper sequence, the black dissolved. The images transformed and the held chemistry began to move: a radiance was restored. When the black remained, we merely tried alternate positioning sequences until it resolved. We could check our progress at each point, for the prior graphics declared how much traumatic holding remained.

As clients observed some portion of brain-identified black and watched it self-dissolve into radiance, they reported all sorts of immediate kinaesthetic sensations, including, often apparently miraculously, the resolution of chronic stress, pains, alignments, obsessions, addictions and immunity weaknesses.

I came to understand more completely how most of us are in moderate to extreme forms of dissociation, where our energy is not clear and ‘flowing’; or that these portions of our system, perhaps very small, remain dominant until they can be ‘solved’. These dissociative chemistries are thrusting forward for resolution at every possible point, particularly when inspired by a higher internal vibration or the experience of an outside stimulus.

The trauma patterns of perpetrating parents, who themselves have been victims of abuse, are set off by the higher vibratory states of their child, whom they then abuse, though the abuse has nothing to do with the child who sets it off. Here was a tragic vision commensurate with the dramatic tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles I studied in graduate school.

We Witness Chemistry

When clients and I witnessed the brain’s energetic self-mapping, we viewed not a symbolic representation of the chemistry, but the chemistry itself, at energetic levels. On the hierarchical ladder of incarnation, we were at a crucial transition, watching spirit densify into matter. This process of central intelligence, this densification of spirit into energy, energy into molecule, into neurochemistry into tissue, muscle, organ and body – I began to call brain.
I could see that most of us refer to inner experience as mind; to use the term brain restored to awareness the physical and neurochemical ground within which these states of consciousness are occurring. As a result, a truly different, and sometimes ‘weird’ perspective is gained, one that is so different that it evokes the resolution of a preverbal pattern within which clients have been suffering, in some cases, for a lifetime. Increasingly, the moment of shock is characterized as a densified black, often as hard as obsidian.

We can escort brain to the deepest levels of magnification of these forms by discovering brain’s portraits of the particulate, in Aristotle’s term, atomic, structures of the black. Black is the absence of vibration, yet it also contains a radiance at its core which in the trauma moment has been lost through compression. Examining the densified black forms at atomic, particulate levels allows brain to solve the now bite-size problem, which in the densification of trauma is considered too dangerous, too overwhelming to enter.

Black Shows No Oxygen

Some years later, I discovered that where there is black, functionally there is no oxygen. Brain sets up its own police cordon around the ‘memory/chemistry’, and no brain in its right mind will go where there is decreased oxygen potential. Yet, disturbed by trauma’s energy-draining detours, brain offers them up to itself for resolution at least ten times a second.

In the compression registered within its shock phase, trauma response to crisis appears to blacken our energetic cell intelligence often to its core. I encourage the client to set aside the labelling which brain uses to describe these states, as a dream does narrating the energetic vectors with recognizable images and story (“I am fighting this dragon…”) Rather, we focus on the portion of the image which has black (a point in the dragon’s eye, or a space between its teeth), and then escort brain to the particular magnified level at which brain, not I nor client in the ego sense of personality or identity, resolves the heretofore insoluble problem.

“There is a black sphere.”
“Take brain down to another level of magnification, and how does brain describe a particle form in the sphere’s surface?”
“It’s a porous black cube.”

Thus we can pointilistically consider its particulate structure. Brain then re-establishes its connection to the radiance at the core of each part of its system. To effect the deepest change, we merely have to follow the directions which brain gives, to the particulate level of its deepest impaction. There is no special need for diagnosis; the entire presenting problem can be framed as following the rubric of trauma, even perhaps to the genetic level.

No Intention

Using this technique, there is no intention such as sending blue light or channelling Christ/Buddha energy, or guiding oneself to meet one’s higher self. Rather, there is merely a selective witnessing until brain solves the problem. And the solution, though perhaps anticipated, is always a surprise in its sequencing: some alternate portion of brain activates a solution which client and I would not have expected. We witness the fireworks animation at a graphics level: “The black triangle is now bending and fractionating, and oxygen is coming in from some new direction, and my neck is involuntarily rotating to the left, out of its spasm.”

We often view aspects of the neurochemistry that are presented in molecular, atomic, organ, anatomical forms, but, at each point, we return to the energetic portrait by means of the shapes and colours and the breath; traditional therapeutic devil take the hindmost. We do not know necessarily the history of the trauma we are working on, nor what densified kinaesthetic experience will be transformed, nor can we. One client said after a session, “Guess what happened after the session. I mowed my own lawn. I have never done that before.”

We laugh at our attempts to diagnose and prematurely affix the results of the work. Yet often the self-healing capacities of brain are directly activated so that a person resolves exactly what they bring as symptoms into the session.

Non-Intentional Re-Edening

The interaction between practitioner and client can be filled with humour, irrelevant asides, taking a pause, making historical commentary, even venturing interpretively as to where we are in the psychodynamic or developmental sequence; or we can guess about whether brain is suggestible and that what is being sensed is the result of suggestion. But it is with the understanding that all these commentaries do not matter. What matters is the re-establishment of movement within the held-energy systems protectively set down in the moments of the trauma. And the means to that re-Edening is non-intentional, particulate focusing upon the black and its correlate, the loss of oxygen.

Over intervening years, I have come to consider colour values and shapes; they do not stand for something, for that implies a symbolic distancing, and dissociation. Rather, the colours are vibrational statements of energy, true in themselves, and can be witnessed as such. I am not particularly concerned with the chakra colour systems, for traditionally they do not place at their centre the critical colour for the shock phase of trauma, namely the black.

Many theoreticians now see that if you do not help brain to take out the shock phase, as it were, further levels of resolution will not occur. In Trauma EnergeticsSM, the name I gave to the modality built around these insights, and for brain, there are only two colour/vibrational states: black (no movement), and all other colours (where there is movement). And the first that must be attended to is the black.

Vibratory Colour States

I have developed an understanding of the hierarchy of these vibratory colour states, with black being at one end, then the usual colours occurring, and the second highest colour vibration being gold (of halo, Christ/Buddha, and personality in balance fame). The highest vibratory state cusps from gold into an ascendant, ethereal white and finally into radiant clear.

There are interesting variations on colours such as the sometimes appearance of black with orange as the held-energy system is about to resolve out of shock, the appearance of faecal or swamp brown, and purple and pink, and pastels. And there are recognizable forms and colourations for the energy of substances brain experiences as foreign. In this latter area, clients have reported the resolution of prenatal trauma in the forms of maternally transmitted alcohol, nicotinic acid, caffeine, anaesthetic, and ‘psychodynamic’ toxicities.

In addition to my private practice, I teach at a special education school for severely disturbed adolescents, where I practise these techniques in the context of little red schoolhouse classroom settings teaching language arts. My students and I examine traditional literary texts within the framework of trauma recognition and resolution, that being, I propose, the primary (hidden?) task of adolescence, as the soul rebirths into the adult mind/body. Most of the craziness of that time of life can be creatively set within that perspective, one not often offered to young people.

Handshaking with Abused Adolescents

I cannot touch the students, as I do clients in private practice, to support them as they traverse these non-verbal, energetic slopes. Many have been abused, so I developed handshaking as a way of establishing primitive brain connection, particularly when we appear to be connecting to levels of difficult prenatal traumata, which is perhaps the territory we are traversing all of the time. The students begin by drawing the images on a primitive map of the physical brain and then focusing within on some part of the landscape.

They are active and appreciative in the process, often claiming, “This really works”, in contradistinction to the usual verbal and medication interventions in which, even as fifteen-year-olds, they are already very, often jadedly, experienced.

One hallmark of the technique means following the pattern which brain offers, not one that is superimposed by the outside. Brain shows the way, and the patterns resolve or they don’t; when they don’t, brain is reporting that we haven’t followed the directions on the package.

With the ‘assistance’ of my meditation and therapy teachers, I often felt I radically abandoned my process in a kind of bait and switch manoeuvre: I was encouraged to breathe in the universe and breathe it out, but I was never allowed to follow the actual sequencing ‘I’ had, including compromised breath. Thus to be stuck is the right place from which to get unstuck, and for brain, it is the only place which matters.

Once getting the hang of the process, clients similarly trained then can work over the telephone, prorating the fee time spent, depending upon the need. Experienced clients have taken three minutes to resolve a classic five-day migraine, at the time of the migraine, not waiting until they can make an hour’s appointment they don’t fully need at a time when they don’t need it.

When, with Levine’s help, I first came upon these insights about the black, they consolidated over three decades of studying trauma theory, beginning with work on tragic theory at Cambridge University. In the subsequent torrent of integration, I wrote Trauma Energetics, A Study of Held-Energy Systems, describing my process and discoveries. I could find only scattered information about vibrational black, most of it incomplete and peripheral. I felt I had discovered, or connected to, something in a new way, which in some sense I still think I have.

But five years ago, while working intensively using Trauma Energetics with one of my sixteen-year-old students, the young man said, “Mr Redpath, you are an alchemist.”

“What is that?” I asked, sort of, but not really knowing.

“Look,” he commanded, showing me a history of alchemy. “You work with the black, and the stone-like forms, and so did the medieval alchemists. They called the black the nigredo.” Sure enough, the text quoted the concerns and focus on colours and the black of these early scientist/healers. And they wrote, “When the nigredo appears, the angels sing”, by which I took it to mean, when you could witness the black, self-healing brain was positioned to resolve the problem. And the stone, whose dissolution could restore inward (third eye) perspective from an impacted traumatized chemistry, they called the philosopher’s stone.

Reinventing the Alchemical Wheel

So, there is nothing new. On my own, I had taken certain premises and reinvented the alchemical wheel, but in the process had set it within modern understanding and vocabulary. Yet I appropriated alchemical insight from within, as it were, because I had followed my own insight sequence, not that from historical record or tradition.

The alchemists in Europe were ultimately concerned with the relationship between spirit and matter, as they still are in advanced physics and biochemistry. And they could escort ‘clients’ spiritually from the black vibratory state, as in lead, and bring them to gold, or Christ/Buddha energy states. But in the Judeo-Christian West, it was mortal heresy to claim that each person contained this Christ energy and could access it themselves within themselves, at their core, even perhaps, God forbid, without the sacerdotal controls of the political and religious establishment or the intercession of Jesus, though the latter was often a narrative means to that end.

And that the story of the ascending Christ energy into the clear was a description of trauma resolution, available to all; and that the turning of lead into gold, in the literal worldly material sense, would ultimately lead to plastics and Prozac, where the particulate nature of both object and subject, of spirit incarnating into matter, could be witnessed and made manifest.