Los Feliz Ledger [Being Whole]
[Family Matters]
Healing Trauma
The More Lights, The Merrier
By Elma Mayer, Ledger Columnist
by Kristen Taylor, Ledger Columnist
Think back on an embarrassing moment. Here’s one of mine: years ago, I spilled coffee all over a stranger at a cafe. The memory still makes me shudder and flush. If such minor humiliation can cause physical reactions like wincing and slapping myself in the forehead, imagine the more severe uncontrolled reactions someone might experience from a major disaster, accident, abuse or war trauma. The intrusive quality of traumatic memories, small or large, can short-circuit our ability to be functional. Healing trauma has many approaches. Sufferers can analyze, hypnotise or de-sensitize. Alternative therapies recognize that trauma isn’t just a problem of the brain, mind or psyche. Trauma can be held unconsciously, in organs, glands, tissues and cells. Energy medicine even treats traumas held in the bio-field – our human energy field. In this work, it’s common to find that resonance with ancestral trauma, karma or collective human trauma, can lock in and amplify a per-
son’s individual trauma. Once we disentangle the old energy field from the present, healing happens more easily. How? We work directly with the energy component of the trauma. It’s not a process of the conscious or even the sub-conscious mind. It doesn’t involve changing behavior, or positive thinking. And it’s certainly not just a biochemical memory in the nerves or brain. Here’s a quick, easy sample of energy work you can do yourself. Find one memory you can’t let go of—perhaps it loops uncontrollably in your mind. Tune in to how much it bothers you. Now shift your focus away from the memory, and instead, focus on your Center (spine area). Press an imaginary Delete button on your spine. Now take a breath. Find that memory again. You might notice that it feels different, just from this quick exercise. Elma Mayer, MA, is a healer and teacher of energetic healing in Silver Lake and beyond. www.nowhealing.com (323) 309-7687.
My poor son. He’s a maximalist kid with a minimalist mom. Then again, pretty much every kid is a maximalist when it comes to the holidays. For Luke, the more songs, the more lights, the more tinsel, the more lawn ornaments, the more presents, the better. Though I sincerely believe that for him, it’s really not all about the presents. Luke gets excited and carried away by the magic and the novelty, the way Christmas takes an ordinary, bleary time of the calendar and transforms it into pure zaniness when the normal rules don’t apply. A tarted-up tree in the living room? Sure! Cookies everywhere, every day? Yup! The same songs over and over again on the radio and at home? Yes, and for once it’s not Lady Gaga! A two-week break from school doesn’t hurt either. Luke starts looking forward to Christmas around the Fourth of July, and for the
next five months I hear the same pleading but sincere bit of advice: “Mom, we should really get more decorations for the house.” He would like nothing more than for us to have THAT house: The one that’s featured on the local news; the one that attracts gawkers from all over the Southland; the one that causes a DWP transformer-crippling surge each day when the timer automatically trips on. It’s not too hard for me to put him off, considering the expense and eco-unfriendly status of such a display—
note to self: Investigate solar Christmas lights and compostable Nativity scenes. But that argument is really a bluff on my part, because my idea of a perfect outdoor holiday display is a wreath on the door and a single string of fat, colored bulbs along the eaves of the house. In other words, the bare minimum it takes to even qualify as having decorated the house. This year, like every year, I will suggest alternative oldfashioned and homemade decorations like paper snowflakes, pine garlands, and pomades of oranges and cloves, to no avail. He’ll say, “Sure, we can do that too.” For my kid, if it’s not plastic, glowing, and animatronic, it’s useless.
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Page 24 FAMILY & HEALTH
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Lynn Cohen, CSIP, LMT www.rolfworks.net 323-807-8986
www.losfelizledger.com
December 2009