Years ago - in spiritual circles - I was often advised to "take my hands off the steering wheel" - to just relax out of trying to control and manage the traumatic-storm energies colliding around inside me. When I would follow this advice, it would feel like being thrown off a cliff in a sack full of angry tigers.

So - what a blessing to find Somatic Experiencing and other body-based therapy models. SE taught me to create a sense of containment in which a person could carefully, gradually work with the body's intelligence to work with trauma. And it introduced me to the possibility that intense sensations in the body didn’t have to feel like something piercing me from the outside: it was possible to align with them and work with them. This opened up a decades-long research into ways of holding a sense of agency, sovereignty and presence while experiencing the extraordinarily intense energies and emotions associated with trauma. SE also started me on learning about the polyvagal nervous system's complex interplay with beliefs emotions, instincts and waking dreams. And ultimately, it continues to teach me how attunement to physical sensation and the inner world can transform trauma...

This lineage has shown me a way of sitting in the Heart that isn't clenched against loss: how the Heart can settle onto the graveyard soil of the world, letting itself be saturated by sorrow. You'd think a person would drown in grief with this approach. So what a surprise to find instead that this openness offers its own support and sustenance - a wild aliveness that can carry the weight of grief without being worn down by it. The idea of a counsellor carefully holding someone's pain at arm's length in the name of professionalism has always made me grit my teeth. The grief tradition offers another way: to meet people human to human, heart to heart. Finding common ground in the shared feeling of how incredibly painful being alive can be sometimes...along with the unshakeable knowing that we are so much more than what we feel in any given season of suffering.

Jung has offered me a map of psychic reality that matches and helps make sense of my own direct experience and that of my clients. And he roots all his elegant thinking with beautifully simple advice for creating a space that fosters wholeness: “The utterances of the heart - unlike the discriminating intellect - always relate to the whole. The heartstrings sing like an Aeolian harp only under the gentle breath of a mood, which does not drown the song but listens.”

I also feel grateful to Donald Kalsched, a Jungian who describes our "archetypal self-care system". His work offers a Western framework for understanding how the characters of our inner world shape themselves in response to trauma.

Each of the spiritual teachers I've learned from has mixed their own personal experience with the ancestral knowledge of the lineages they were involved in. Or - maybe more accurately - each held the context of a tradition (or traditions) as something that supported them in a direct meeting with reality. The experiences and instructions handed down from old cave dwelling saints and fire-breathing shamans and masters of all kinds helped them settle and root into their own unique intimate meeting with self and world. I'm apprenticed to this way: of deeply respecting inherited wisdom and tradition, without being strictly limited to its viewpoint. Or as the poet Gary Snyder put it, “All of us are apprenticed to the same teacher that the religious institutions originally worked with: reality." — This is my approach.

The Zen and Chan tradition have taught me how it’s possible to grow the ability to stay steadily present during intense experience. The incredible revelation that staying still and letting things unfold can be the key to longed-for change and freedom.

Zen also points to the incredible beauty of falling back to an Open Spaciousness - what the Tao te Ching calls the "Valley Spirit". So: the endless learning of what it might be to show up as a receptive spaciousness that imposes nothing. The long apprenticeship of finding out how emptiness naturally give rise to genuine compassion. The ongoing discovery of mountainous, timeless stillness as the background against which all our experience of change unfolds. And the deep intimacy with the world that becomes possible when we can ease up off on our defence mechanisms and let the world the touch our hearts.

Daoist Alchemy, Magic & Soul Retrieval have taught me to sense energy...its flow and nature inside the body, the value of rooting it up into the Stars and deep into the Earth. The revelation of how energy can be structured through intention for purpose. How much it matters - when working with the wild energy of life - to be rooted firmly in the bone and gristle of your physical body. And how crucial it is to channel that wild energy through a carefully constructed, firmly grounded sense of integrity and altruistic purpose...

The Tantric Traditions have taught me that the wild energy of life (and of consciousness) can saturate into the body in a way that feels dense, vital, and potent. How the present moment can soak into the body in a way that shifts posture, animates subtle movement, triggers self-advocacy and a sense of sovereignty that have their seat in the primal body. The ancient tantric traditions offer the invitation to let the wild energy of awakened consciousness enliven our body’s ancient instincts for protection and survival…while at the same time staying deeply rooted in compassion and integrity. In this way, the body’s instincts to express strength can be felt as “sacred” qualities - rich with heart energy.

These ancient tantric traditions offer conditions for us to do something with wild and unpredictable energies other than “release” them in the hopes they’ll disappear. The insight that wild, ragged energies can be welcomed in…given space to self-refine and infuse into our sense of sovereignty, self-possession and strength.

Advaita Vedanta teaches me the value of falling back to original innocence: to care for and honour that expression of awareness which can be so nakedly vulnerable to people's negative judgements..while at the same time understanding that innocence is not separate from the power that hangs stars in the sky and uses thunder to wake the flowers in Spring :).

Shamanism has taught me that radical possibilities are unlocked when we open ourselves to a reality in which the material and the spiritual form themselves together in the moment. And this tradition has shown me how much these possibilities unfold through etiquette, respect, and rooting into integrity through contract and vow. The ongoing, endless surprises of what can happen when one learns to relate to - and bow to - something bigger than our ordinary human frame of reference. How fluidly things can move and change then. And - exploring of a perspective like the poet Jane Hirshfield's: "To see the world truly, we need a consciousness that has been steeped in the more than human - that has travelled away from the tamed, from the familiar, from the narrow limits of self."