Ritam Studio Podcast With Jonni Pollard and Carla Dimattina

Healing in a Traumatized World: Finding Your Baseline

• Jonni Pollard • Season 5 • Episode 1

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What we label as PTSD is actually a condition experienced by nearly everyone, with most people suffering from both past and present traumatic stress in our chaotic world. True mental health—the freedom to actualize our deepest desires—is declining as people feel increasingly overwhelmed, anxious, and unable to self-actualize in today's environment.

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Speaker 1:

I'd like to ask a question about PTSD, because that is essentially the experience that Sammy is having, but in a negative light and on a physiological level. You're experiencing those same emotions you felt at the time where the trauma was happened. Yeah, could you just expand on it a little bit within this?

Speaker 2:

yeah, post-traumatic stress disorder is a kind of medical psychology um term to describe a condition that pretty much every human is experiencing. It's just that, you know, they, they, they only really sort of assign it to people that are unable to function within the insanity of our society. You know they're just incapable of functioning and so they pathologize that. But actually if we look at the condition of human, the, the average human consciousness and the dysfunction, what we notice is that everyone is experiencing some post-traumatic stress, but they're also experiencing present traumatic stress. It's not just post, it's present traumatic stress. It's not just post, it's present traumatic stress. You know we have normalized turning on the TV or listening to the news or whatever. And then you know hearing about, you know dystopian agendas and just everything that's happening in the world right now. This is so traumatic for us and yet the demand on us is just to kind of normalize it and sort of put it to the side and get on with what it is you're supposed to do, and it's really quite dehumanizing and it's causing a great deal of stress in the average human being.

Speaker 2:

The level of mental health is at an all-time low right now. And what is mental health? It is, you know, the ability to feel free to actualize your deepest desire in life. People are feeling less and less capable of that, more and more afraid, more and more insecure, more and more overwhelmed with what's going on in the world and finding it very difficult to self-actualize. And the result of that is a deterioration in the quality of experience. Anxiety, depression kick in and people feel quite helpless and stuck. So you know that's just to kind of expand the definition of post-traumatic stress that it also relates to present traumatic stress as well, and it is a disorder. Our consciousness is disorderly, it's incoherent. If we're not detecting the intelligence of being, then we're operating on the surface level of things and externally referencing to gain orientation for our value system, for what's what, what to do next. And you know, taking our cues from the world, you'd be going off a ditch every 10 metres into the ditch.

Speaker 1:

That's what it felt like. That's what it felt like for me, having been diagnosed with it and experiencing, you know, living within that for an amount of time. Yeah yeah, was so traumatized and stuck in that trauma that you couldn't move in any sense without just melting every 20 minutes.

Speaker 1:

So, going back to what sammy was saying and how you were saying, you know it, when you're going back and reliving that experience, you're pulling that all the way forward to the present moment. Can that be done in a negative way? When you're reliving the traumatic moments like with PTSD, when you're in the like now, I can look at the traumatic events that happened to me and be like, oh, of course.

Speaker 2:

I understand that, but when I was in? And why do you think that's the case? Why do you think you have the capacity to?

Speaker 1:

I meditate.

Speaker 2:

Exactly, you meditate. You have done a lot of work to establish a baseline of the self. If we do not have an experience of the self, how do we process those experiences? What are we processing it in reference to? What is the context? And if we do not have the self-established, a knowingness that what and who I am is powerful, lovable, because these are all the things that are challenged or overridden by the narrative and the memory of the experiences.

Speaker 1:

That's what I want to understand is like the mechanics of it how? I don't know how to ask it.

Speaker 2:

The mechanics of post-traumatic stress.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, when you're going back into that time. Does it have that same action of?

Speaker 2:

If you're not established, yes, it could.

Speaker 1:

Right.

Speaker 2:

You become what they refer to as re-traumatized.

Speaker 1:

Right, so it's kind of pulling you down every time you revisit it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, because you don't have a baseline to stand steady as the emotions come up. Right, if you don't have that baseline, it's going to come up and you're just going to revert back to the child and be re-traumatized, whereas if you have the baseline, when it comes up you're like whoa, but you hold steady. You hold steady in it and you process it and you reaffirm the truth, and then that's how healing takes place. The only way to cure this is to establish the self. There is no cure unless there is the establishment of the self Period. And so that's why I say and everyone is in a state of post-traumatic stress and present traumatic stress and the only way that they're going to recover, humanity is going to emerge out of the dysfunction of its traumatized state, is to establish coherence by establishing self and confronting the trauma, healing it and then breaking the cycle by behaving differently and avoiding all the things that they've been trapped in experiencing.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and that requires going against the grain and sitting in discomfort, and things are already uncomfortable. It's a hard sell. Enlightenment is a hard sell. If you don't feel the call, trying to get somebody on the program, it's like, oh thanks, why would you want to just sit there with yourself? You know.

Speaker 2:

Yeah yeah, it's like are you insane?

Speaker 1:

I can't possibly sit with my thoughts for 10 minutes.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, it's like are you insane, no no, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:

But you know the work that we're doing and that the vast, a huge amount of people are doing on the planet right now, because our consciousness is all enmeshed in a collective experience. What we do as individuals is informing the collective of who and what it is and, by virtue of the work that we do, those that are awake, doing this work deliberately, day in, day out, are informing the collective of who and what it is, and it's waking everybody up. It's making it easier and easier and easier and, for those that might have been shy or on the precipice, they're getting tipped over very easily. Now. Think about meditation. You know, when I started meditating 30-odd years ago, more I was a freak. Nobody knew what it was, or I had some very ignorant sort of response oh, or something like that you know you, hippie, you want to join, you want to join it. Or that you know you, hippie, you want to join. Or you know, and now it's like it's everyone's meditating. I mean, what a remarkable shift in a small period of time.

Speaker 2:

And this is as a result of the momentum that's being generated by those that are awake. So it's having its effect. It's waking up, yeah, and there is an increasing demand for us to face our collective trauma. And that's why we're creating so many traumatic events now. So many traumatic events now, where we're starting to actualize what's in our collective psyche. It's materializing. We always manifest what we fear most so that we can confront it. So that's what's happening in the world right now. Ultimately, it's just a manifestation of our collective psyche, so we can confront it. And it'll get so bad that it'll be very difficult for the vast majority of people on the planet to ignore. And there'll be an awakening event of some sort, not like overnight, but I mean the awakening event of some sort. Not like overnight, but I mean the awakening event is happening now. But it'll get to a point where there'll be a tipping point. I just hope that it doesn't get so bad.