Suffering is a Jewel

What does it mean to bear witness?

Can we transform our suffering and pain, into self-compassion and share it with the world around us?

In the past, witnessing the suffering of others, caused me more pain, than any direct suffering I endured myself.

When I reflect on my childhood and the flashes of memory from the serious car accident our family was in, graphic images of physical injury, grotesque medical procedures and the shadows of sensations from those experiences, echo in my body-mind.

The burning white terror of seeing a loved one’s head split open, blood, bent limbs, screws piercing my mother’s newly shaved skull, from which pulleys and weights, created traction to her broken neck… the metal striker bed upon which she was strapped, like an ancient torture mechanism, my sister unconscious or having violent seizures, my father broken and emaciated, my baby sister’s white wispy hair not concealing her scalp dotted with tiny scabs, where the broken glass had cut her soft skin…. all these sights taken in by my 10-year-old eyes and spoken of to no-one at the time, not until therapy as an adult and even then, not in detail aloud… as the reality seemed unthinkable and unutterable to anyone.

The initial weeks in the hospital were like a surreal and lonely nightmare. The years to follow, were a drawn-out destruction of our family unit, with multiple hospital and ICU dramas. My world and my family were irrevocably changed.

These experiences became a part of me, my inner world. My psyche attempted to make sense of it and to protect me from it. Some things I did not recall for many years until I was in a safe enough place in my life, to start to feel and see them again. Images came bubbling to the surface in dreams, nightmares and in waking memories.

The fact that there was no immediate trauma-informed support, meant I perceived my feelings as things to carry inside. The world did not welcome my feelings or offer space for my feelings. There was no-one else who saw what I saw, no-one asking what it was like for me at the time and no-one to see or hear me in my suffering. This was partly the way our family operated, but also the social and cultural environment I was born into.

The unthinkable happens every day in our world and any one of us, young or old, may be a witness to it.

Once witnessed, what happens next is crucial to who we then become. If we are not able to feel and express the feeling(s) that come, then the experience is not digested or processed, and we are left with traumatic imprints which affect our way of being in the world.

I often think of a dog fervently chasing a rabbit, filled with natural excitement and the thrill of the chase, the pursuit will end, and the dog will shake its whole body from head to neck, torso to tail… discharging the feelings and the energy, in order to regulate the nervous system, then lay down and rest.

For multiple reasons, humans may have their natural process of responding to disturbing events, interrupted or halted. This blocks the nervous system from completing the shift from a dysregulated to a regulated state.

If we stay stuck in a dysregulated nervous state, we survive but we suffer.

If we regulate our nervous system, we rest, recover and thrive.

To bear witness to suffering, means to convey, carry or endure what we have seen.

It is possible to transmute what we have seen into wisdom.

Our perception of an event or events, can be expressed and this then creates action, change or growth.

The trauma of witnessing does not need to hold us back or keep us stuck.

When an experience becomes part of our own inner landscape, we change. We attempt to make sense of it, how it impacts us, what it means to us, our core beliefs about the world and our approach to life.

Initially this is a survival response, but potentially we can get brave, curious and with the right tools, we can cultivate self-knowledge and transform the suffering into something we can and must use to serve others.  

We can contribute our new understanding to the world around us.

Cultivating our own healing turns our inner work into an outer service. It gives meaning and value to our past suffering.

After years of therapy, self-inquiry and mind-body healing, I can bear witness to others’ suffering without feeling their pain, in a way which validates their experience and in turn generates self-compassion, inner-growth and change.

It has not been an easy task and it is certainly not complete, perhaps never will be, but the wounds are healing and the pain is less now.

The feelings that shrouded the pain included numbness, terror, anger, shame and grief. There were many layers to work through, but as the journey deepened, so too did my self-compassion and compassion for others, as well as a new level of patience. I was only able to do this through somatic (bodily) techniques (Yoga, dancing, walking, Vipassana meditation, Embodied Processing & other somatic psychotherapies).

Bessel van der Kolk wrote, ‘The Body Keeps the Score’ and it's true. Becoming familiar and comfortable with the sensations in my physical body, gave me access to deeper and deeper parts of my inner, emotional world.

There is no quick fix to trauma, but the techniques and tools employed in Trauma-Informed Embodied Processing and traditional Ashtanga Yoga, give the healing process an organicity which is self-perpetuating, so that no force or effort is needed.

Unravelling, revealing and wisdom unfold naturally, given the right support.

The culmination of bearing witness and self-inquiry, is to convey something of our new understanding and self-knowledge to the world, by caring for or nurturing life.

It is an honour to sit with someone as they explore their inner worlds, safely feel their  feelings and discover a new, softer way of being. There is no greater gift to receive than having our truth, seen and heard.