THERAPY MASTERMIND CIRCLE

EXPERT: Joan Borysenko

Trauma and Altered States of Consciousness
July 2016

INTRODUCTION, BACKGROUND AND CONTACT INFO

Diane: Hi. Welcome, everybody. We're so glad to have you join us on our Therapy Mastermind
expert call tonight. I'm really privileged and honored and excited to share with you my
good friend and colleague, Dr. Joanie Borysenko. She's here talking about trauma and
altered states of consciousness. It's like going into another dimension when we go into
those deep, deep difficult woundings.

I just want to say a little bit about Joanie before I turn it over to her. She's going to give
us a great presentation and lots of information with slides. She has so much going on.
It's more of a question of what is Joanie not doing. Joan in involved in so many things.
First of all, she's a world renowned expert in the mind/body connection and she was
into the mind/body connection before it was popular to be in the mind/body
connection. She's one of the people that really created that whole understanding,
originally. She's a licensed psychologist with a doctorate in cell biology from Harvard
[00:01:00] Medical School. She synthesizes cutting edge science with deep humanity which is a
beautiful integration and I'm so excited to have conversations with her about that.
She's also President of Mind/Body Health Sciences, which is licensed in Santa Fe, New
Mexico. Of course, many of you know this already, she's a New York Times bestselling
author of seventeen books. I don't know how she finds the time but she's always writing
something. They're all different and they're all cutting edge.

It's an amazing talent Joanie has to bring us all this great information that we really
need to know that's very practical. She also has a series of audio programs for
meditation and stress management. Her work appears in the Washington Post, Wall
Street Journal, the public television, and on numerous websites. You can find more out
about her on her website at www.JoanBorysenko.com and join in her lively Facebook
[00:02:00] daily conversations on Facebook.com/JoanBorysenkoCommunity. She's very active on
that site and it's great to get her take on all sorts of different issues because she's a real,
truly a renaissance woman.

I just want to make sure you that you know she has some really exciting things coming
up. September 7 to 11, she's starting an At Home with Joan Nutrition-for-Life Retreat.
She also does writing retreats regularly. You can tell she's an amazing writer. Writing is
really a powerful form of narrative medicine. They say that you don't really heal until
you can make sense of your past, and writing about it and creating coherent narrative
is one of the best ways to do that. She transforms negative stories into
transformational experiences. She also does them from her website. They occur every
few months in several states: Massachusetts, Washington state, Colorado, South
Carolina, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is her new home. Maybe she'll tell us a little
[00:03:00] bit about her paradise in Santa Fe as well. The schedule is on her website,
JoanBorysenko.com. Borysenko is B-O-R-Y-S-E-N-K-O. You can sign up on her website

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 Trauma and Altered States of Consciousness
for all sorts of videos and extra articles. I know you're going to love Joan so get on there
and find out more about what she's contributing. There, you'll find updates and notices
and great programs for therapists and lots and lots more.

Okay. I think we're ready to dive in. She does have, remember, seventeen books. I'm
going to just highlight three of them for today. Get on Amazon and take a look at all of
them or on Joanie's website. One book is Fire in the Soul: A New Psychology for Spiritual
Optimism. This is really super relevant for our segment on Trauma as a Gateway to
Spiritual Transformation that we're studying these two months. She also has Guilt is the
Teacher, Love is the Lesson. Beautiful book also. Pocketful of Miracles, daily inspiration
and meditations.

[00:04:00] Joan, I'm so happy to welcome you to our Therapy Transformation Tribe. They're really
an audience that is going to love all the different ways you take information in so many
different directions. Let's all welcome Joan Borysenko.

Joan: Well, hi, Diane. Hi, everybody out there who's listening. What a terrific series this is.
Diane, you mentioned the book, Fire in the Soul, really is just about this whole series
that you're giving about Trauma as a Gateway to Transformation. We're going to take a
look at some slides today, get a little information. I always like to tell stories. What I find
is that the science is always fascinating. The stories are what sticks in people's minds.
Then, I'd actually like to lead us through a meditation experience. Is that okay, Diane?

[00:05:00]
Diane: Absolutely. I'd love it if you'd start that way. I was hoping you would.

Joan: Okay. I'm going to actually end with the meditation experience because we'll
understand better why it is that I've crafted it the way that I have.

THE MARRIAGE OF SCIENCE, PSYCHOLOGY AND SPIRITUALITY

I'm going to start with a little story and tell another longer story later. People always ask
me, "Why is it that a scientist has become interested in spirituality?" I always like to
tell them, actually, I've had many spiritual experiences and a major one that came out
of trauma, which we're going to look at in a little while. I decided to study science
because I was interested in how,"can we get some more insight on these spiritual
[00:06:00] experiences." All my life has been about putting together spirituality, psychology, and
science, all in the service of getting back in touch with our own good heart and our
spiritual self.

I just want to start with a definition of that inner spiritual self that is really helpful
because spirituality itself is a confounding kind of word. Often times—this has happened
to me—I give a lot of talks for hospitals and from time to time, the hospital will send an
emissary to talk to me about whatever kind of presentation they want. They'll say
something like, "Well, we'd like something about psycho-neuro-immunology. We
know that you like to talk about spirituality, but please don't."

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Diane: I've had that happen too. Oh, dear.

[00:07:00]
Joan: They confuse it, Diane, with religion, which is a common problem. Here's the definition
that I think is a good one. It comes from the work of Harvard psychiatrist,
George Vaillant. (In fact, if you're listening in, if you Google George Vaillant, it's spelled
V-A-I-L-L-A-N-T, and you just put in "psychology and spirituality".) His definition of
spirituality goes something like this: Spirituality is not about doctrine or dogma. It's not
about sacred texts or theology. Instead, it's really a constellation of eight positive
emotions, things like attachment, Diane, that you speak to so well that confers that
basic sense of trust. It's about that sense of attachment and trust, about compassion,
[00:08:00] about forgiveness, gratitude, joy, hope, peace, I think I forgot one but you get the drift.

Diane: They're all very powerful.

Joan: They're very, very powerful. When I think of what is our work of a lifetime, I think it's to
uncover that which is our true nature, which gets buried under a variety of obstacles,
a large one being trauma. The thing with trauma is it has two sides to it. It's a
tremendous obstacle to making contact with that inner self, that best self. On the other
hand, it can be a compelling window into your best self. I'm going to be talking about
both of those things today.

[00:09:00] If we could just zip to the second slide in my slide deck, I've called it Cracks in the Fabric
of Reality. Sometimes I think, boy, life is like the Matrix and every once in a while, the
computer malfunctions and stuff bleeds in from other places that we don't understand.
Were I a quantum physicist, I could tell you more about these states, but essentially
speaking, if you're interested in quantum theory and string theory, the physicists
these days talk about things like parallel realities in which maybe you've been
traumatized in one reality and not in another. Maybe Diane, in an alternate reality, we
live next door to each other which would be a wonderful thing.

Diane: That would be great. Come over for tea.

[00:10:00]
Joan: Exactly. The fact is that science is still tracking this. We're still trying to understand what
the nature of consciousness actually is. I want to spend a moment on that since we're
talking about altered states of consciousness. What is consciousness? Essentially, I
would say it is our ability to witness whatever reality we are in and to maintain a
sense of self in that reality. Of course, sometimes we lose that in the altered realities
of trauma.

What we're going to talk about today is a little bit about the, I'm not going to call them
so much negative, but the obstacles that trauma can create and how it is that we can
clear them. Then I'm going to talk about the opposite, how trauma can open up
[00:11:00] windows definitely into alternate realities where people can see the past differently,
they might be able to see possible futures, but their intuition really comes online.
Then I'm going to talk about trauma and what my friends, Deepak Chopra and Larry

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 Trauma and Altered States of Consciousness
Dossey, both physicians and kind of great philosophers and scientists, would call non-
locality. And that is that we tend to think that our mind and consciousness always
stays in the vicinity of our brain and our body. In fact, there's a great deal of evidence
that it does not, that it is as large as the universe itself. Stealing a line from my friend
Larry Dossey who I think was quoting Erwin Schrödinger, the great physicist, "If we
[00:12:00] could measure the sum total of the number of minds in the universe, there would be
just one." We have a lot of ground to cover.

I will start with a story. This was a story about when I still a cell biologist. At Tufts
Medical School, I did cancer research at that time and taught medical students. The sum
total of the number of experiences, including the one that I'm about to tell you, helped
me make the decision to retrain as a psychologist so I could understand human nature
better. This is what was happening. I had gone out one morning to ... Actually, I was on
my way to a spiritual meeting. I had left my husband at home with our two kids. The
[00:13:00] youngest kid was a baby about, I'd say, he was eight, nine months old. He was just at a
point where he was sitting up and playing in a playpen. At that time, we had a playpen
in the kitchen. The rule was that if anything was cooking on the stove, the baby couldn't
be in the playpen.

I had pressure cooked some beans earlier in the day. The pressure had gone to zero in
the pressure cooker. The stove was off. I put Andre in the playpen in the kitchen
because my husband and other son were in there and I left. A little while later, maybe
twenty minutes later, just as I was getting near my destination, I felt a very strange
sensation. It was if somebody was pulling on my thymus gland, a big tug. Then I saw a
[00:14:00] vision. In the vision, I saw the pressure cooker explode and I saw the contents, it was
kidney beans I was cooking, and this arc of red bean liquid arcing through the air and
coming down on my child's back, Andre's back, just on the left side of the diaper. I could
not believe how vivid that vision was and how very precise. I got home a little bit later—
actually, was quite a bit later—and my husband had taken Andre to the doctor. They
debrided the burn. The burn happened precisely as I had seen it in the vision. Here's
the thing. I saw it before it actually happened, in a different dimension of time and
space.

Now, that was an altered state of consciousness for sure and it brought up for me, as a
[00:15:00] scientist, a lot of questions like what was that? How can science possibly explain how I
could see something so specific that I had no reason to expect what happened. There
was no pressure left in the pressure cooker. It was done. It was off. How I could see that
and how it could happen before it happened. A little bit later, I did change my field and I
went to work with Dr. Herbert Benson in what was then a new field called behavioral
medicine. That was 1978. I was very interested in the concept of healing and in healing
from cancer. I was wondering if something about that experience could apply somehow
[00:16:00] or other to our current state of health or illness. I hope that makes sense to you.

Diane: It does make sense. I was in a head-on collision and my husband had an image of it
happening exactly as it happened at the time. I mean, he didn't see it, I think, before it
happened but when they called him, he got that instant image of exactly what had
occurred. I had hit my face and so my face was injured and he saw it exactly as it

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 Trauma and Altered States of Consciousness
happened. It's this some kind of interesting, like you said, other dimension. It seems like
it was an integral part of your journey to take you to the next evolution.

Joan: That's right. A place that you can find wonderful explanations for this and great stories is
Larry Dossey's newest book which is called; One Mind. I actually have it on a slide so
people will be able to have the reference coming up.

In the mean time, let's cut to slide number three, Diane, and take a look at this. Well,
[00:17:00] what is an altered state of consciousness? This is a quote I like a great deal. It's from a
guy by the name of Bourguignon, back in 1979. He was looking at altered states in a
cross-cultural perspective. He said this, "Altered states of consciousness are conditions
in which sensations," like I had that sensation of the pull on my thymus gland,
"perceptions, cognitions, and emotions are altered. They're characterized by changes
in sensing, perceiving, thinking, and feeling. They modify the relation of the individual
to self, body, sense of identity, and the environment of time, space, or other people."
This is where we only know so much scientifically. Through the years, when I would ask
[00:18:00] people, "Have you ever heard about an altered state like the one I had where I had the
pull on my thymus gland?" I was told, "Well, there's a bond between mother and child
from thymus to thymus that lasts until the child is about seven and then begins to
dissipate." That's a whole different literature. That's a more mystical literature. But I
found it very interesting.

We're going to talk now about positive and negative altered states. If you can go now to
the fourth slide, a few examples of what appear to be, again, not so much negative
states, they're just states, but they often obscure our best self. Those are the kinds of
[00:19:00] things that happen in PTSD, for example, flashbacks and anxiety and depression.
We're going to take a look at those, how many of them are altered states, how many
of them occur in this reality. We're also going to look at mystical experiences that may
follow trauma; for example, experiences of light.

When I was just training as a therapist, one of the first clients that I had was a young
woman who had been raped as a child. What happened to her, she had a dissociative
experience but it was a very positive dissociative experience. She went to the light and
it was an experience of some angelic Being of Light who kept her in absolute safety
until the experience was over. She was able to draw upon that experience when other
[00:20:00] parts, flashbacks of the part of the experience, actually of the man coming, and of her
realizing of something not good was happening. She could go later to the light and
help herself. It was a healing experience for her. In a moment, I'm going to tell you an
experience that I had of trauma so you'll see how the positive and the negative mix
together.

Meanwhile, let's take just a little bit of a look at the literature to give you a model. You'll
find that on the fifth slide, which is called 4-D or 4-Dimensional Model of Trauma-
Related Altered States of Consciousness. This comes directly from the work of Paul
Frewen and Ruth Lanius. What they were doing is distinguishing different symptoms
[00:21:00] of PTSD that can occur. Some of them occur in what they call NWC, which stands for
normal waking consciousness. Some of them occur in an altered state of

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 Trauma and Altered States of Consciousness
consciousness, what they call T-R-A-S-C, or TRASC, which is dissociative experiences of
trauma related altered states of consciousness. Trauma related altered states of
consciousness, TRASC.

Here are the four dimensions of TRASC. I've outlined those all for you on slide six. This is
a direct quote from a paper by Frewen et al. At the bottom of the slide, you'll find the
complete reference and it's very good to have.

I'm now quoting from their paper directly. What we see is, in considering the following
[00:22:00] as forms of TRASC, we recall that's trauma related altered states of consciousness. Their
four-dimensional model differentiates four things.
1. The first is a reminder that distress does not entail a prominent experience of
reliving. In other words, what they're saying is, there is an experience of
flashback and that has to do with the dimension of time, past time as coming
into this time. Sometimes you just remembering something from that
experience, that's not a flashback in time.
[00:23:00] 2. Second is hearing a voice. Voices can be your own voice from like negative
self-referential thoughts like, "I'm a victim. I'm always a victim," or they can
be an actual voice that seems to come from somewhere else that's related to
the dissociation experience.
3. The third dimension is truly a disembodied experience of depersonalization.
And that, they consider the body dimension. You lose the sense of self and
you might be outside your body.
4. The fourth is an experience of emotional numbing, real affective shutdown
which happens from non-dissociative forms of negative emotionality, so
experiences of fear and anxiety, of sadness, guilt, or shame. I only mention this
because you can learn more about it and see how these states are delineated. I
just wanted you to have that reference.

LARRY DOSSEY: THE 3 ERAS OF MEDICINE

[00:24:00] On the next slide, we're getting into some of the non-local dimensions as well as local
dimensions that Larry Dossey talks about. Here's a very interesting model that he calls
the Three Eras of Medicine. I want to present that to you so that I can expand it to what
I think three eras of psychology are all about.

Diane: I love that.

Joan: It links to the four dimensions of TRASC which really are having to do with time, body,
emotion and thoughts. The three eras of medicine that Dossey talks about,…
1. What most medicine is based on… is something simply physical. Something
goes wrong with the physical plant, we understand the patho-physiology,
what happened to create that and then we do what we can to put it back on
[00:25:00] track. We all know that that works really great if you're setting a bone, for
example. It works really, really well if you have pneumonia and then you get
the right antibiotic. Then, for many chronic illnesses, it hardly works at all and
the medications cause further problems. Then if we begin to understand that

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 Trauma and Altered States of Consciousness
mental health and physical health are really a continuum, it doesn't work all
that well for many of the kind of mental problems that we can run into. I'll get
back to that.

2. The second era of medicine, Dossey said is, when mind/body medicine came
into being, we started to recognize things like the placebo effect and recognize
[00:26:00] that our opinions of things make all the difference in the world. That a pill of a
certain color may have a better fortune at relieving an illness or that if you
believe in a pill, even though you know it's a placebo, it will still help you.
Depending on what kind of treatment we're talking about, placebo
treatments, whether they're pills or the face of a kind therapist, do about 50%
of the work, which represents quite a lot of the healing.

3. Era three medicine is something else. Era two medicine, you can look in your
own nervous system, look at the relationship of the body to the environment
and you can figure out what the mode of action of mind/body medicine is in
[00:27:00] many cases. When you get to era three medicine, something else is going on.
What era three medicine is is this. Yes, my mind affects my body and your
mind affects your body, but what if my mind can affect your body and your
mind can affect my body? That's era three medicine.

PLACEBO, NOCEBO, TELECEBO EFFECTS

Dossey talks about this. He says, well, you have an era two medicine, the placebo effect
that we just talked about, and also the nocebo effect. If you know that there can be
harm from an intervention, you're like to manifest symptoms of the harm, that's what
nocebo is. He talks about, most recently, the telecebo effect. That is if a doctor or
therapist is thinking, "Oh, boy. That person is never going to get better," the thoughts
of the healthcare professional actually affect can the healing of the person that
[00:28:00] they're thinking about. That's pretty interesting, I think. In fact, it's quite fascinating
that if we hold the space of hope for our clients, then not only does it change the look
on our face and our immediate interaction with them and acts as a positive
mind/body thing, but it works later in terms of just thinking of them. That taps into
the same kind of research as action at a distance, that is, "is prayer active?,"… things
of that nature.

I want to give you now a kind of interesting hypothetical model based on what we've
talked about already. If you go to slide eight, you'll see I'm a scientist by training and I'm
[00:29:00] always hypothesizing things that might be testable. If we take a look at trauma and
altered states of consciousness in trauma, there are three eras that I'm adapting now
from Larry's work.

3 ERAS APPLIED TO THE TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCE:

1) PHYSICAL, 2) IMAGINAL/EPIGENTIC AND 3) NON LOCALITY

First of all, era one would be the trauma that actually occurred physically in a normal
waking state of consciousness. You can go back and remember this is what happened.

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 Trauma and Altered States of Consciousness
This was the moment that the car crashed. This was the moment that I witnessed
something that was really terrifying. This was the moment that, God forbid, I was
raped or tormented or whatever may have been. That's era one, the actual physical
experience.

Era two would be a trauma that occurred in an imaginal realm. You're in your body
[00:30:00] but you're having an altered state and it might be dream or fantasy or story. That
dream, fantasy, or story gets embodied in you as if it had actually happened. Era two,
there's also another form of trauma that didn't happen immediately. I'm going to put it
in era two. It's epigenetic trauma that's inherited across the generations. We'll get to
that in a moment.

Era three is trauma that originated non-locally. We already talked about the telecebo
effect of Dossey. What do I mean by non-local trauma? I'm going to tell you this story
because it's really informed my interest in altered states over many, many years now. I'll
try to tell it in a short form.

[00:31:00] When I was growing up, I had a great deal of contact with a family associate, I wouldn't
even call him a friend. He worked for the family. He was a very interesting man. He
taught me all about Yates, Keats, dreaming, altered states, from the time that I was five
years old. He was very, very interested in that. He was particularly interested in lucid
dreaming. He used to ask me every time he saw me, he's say, "Well, I was in the dream
state last night and I met you here or there." He'd describe what it was. He'd say, "Do
you remember anything?" I actually never, never did. You can hold that thought for a
while because, I'll come back to it, but what was actually happening in the dream state
[00:32:00] is that was the way he molested children in experiences. I found that out many years
later when other people who knew him, several of them said, "You know that guy. I was
always wondering why he was so interested in my daughter. She's been waking up
screaming, 'No, Tom, no!' Then, she'll tell me the content of her dream and Tom would
be actually abusing her, sexually, in the dream state." I found that out much later so let
me go back to my childhood experience.

I saw this man with fair frequency. In fact, quite frequently. I don't want to say any more
because I don't want to give up who he actually is in any way that he could be traced.
[00:33:00] What happened was, I moved when I was about ten and was out of immediate contact
with him but, of course, always within the possibility of dream contact. And I started to
have a series of very, very distressing dreams which—they were terrifying dreams—
which involved symbolic genitalia. It was always a snake leaping out of a deep and a
snake detector going off. This very bad series of dreams came at a time where my
mother then took me to see a very frightening movie. The movie was about jungle. It
was about some tribe in the jungle that were headhunters and had poison darts and
blowguns and things like that.

All of this came together for me and I developed an obsessive compulsive disorder
[00:34:00] with psychotic features. I was really psychotic, actually. OCD with psychotic features
means that you don't, at some level, recognize that the rituals you're doing are just
that, that you've got a brain glitch and you do these rituals. You really do think that

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 Trauma and Altered States of Consciousness
you're doing them for a good reason. I thought I was doing them to keep the
headhunters from killing my family. I developed more and more rituals, missed quite a
bit of school over this, and lived in a state of perpetual terror for maybe six months.

ABUSE IN THE DREAM STATE – DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHOSIS AND OCD –

TERROR RESOLVED INTO AMAZING LOVE

Finally, I sat down one day and I thought, "My god. Is there anything that I can do about
this?" Psychiatry back then— I'm 70 years old. This was 60 years ago. There was no
Klonopin, there was no Prozac, there was no behavior therapy. There was no possible
[00:35:00] understanding of it. What happened for me is that I finally said, "Maybe if I prayed, it
would help." I was not from a prayerful family but there's that old saying, "There are
no atheists in foxholes." That's about where I found myself. I sat down and I prayed
and I had an immediate experience with an altered state of consciousness in which
the tremendous terror dissipated. It was replaced by a sense of amazing love, such
safety I cannot begin to tell you. I felt like nothing could touch me. I was seen. I was
safe. I was loved. Then, an incredible intuitive knowing. The knowing was I could
recover from the terrible trauma of the OCD and the psychosis. It was possible to
[00:36:00] recover. And I knew precisely how to do it.

People always ask me, "Well, can other people with OCD recover this way?" I would say
not the same way, not necessarily, but I'll tell you what it was. I had to do all these
rituals and the knowing that I had was if I continued to do the rituals, I would stay stuck
and I had to quit doing them. And then, the next question I had in this altered state was,
"How on earth can I quit doing them?" When I'm out of this state, I recognized it was a
very different state of consciousness. When I'm out of it, I'm going to be scared again.
How am I not going to do rituals to stay safe?

ACCESSING THE LIGHT

I got the download of a poem. It wasn't somebody else's poem. It was a poem from my
[00:37:00] own best self that was befitting a ten-year-old child. I wrote that poem out in that state.
I still use it when I'm scared. It was really simple. It was a poem. I called it The Light. It
went like this: "Somewhere in the darkest night, there always shines a little light. This
light up in the heavens shines to help our God watch over us. So when a small child is
born, the light, her soul does adorn. When our only human eyes look up in the
lightless skies, we must know, we must know that this light burns far into the night to
help our God watch over us." The whole experience was about luminosity. Light.

Diane: It was beautiful.

[00:38:00]
Joan: It was an amazing experience. What happened, Diane, was that, of course, I came out of
that experience. The headhunters reappeared. I could always see them there. They
were just behind a very thin veil ready to manifest. It was only by doing various rituals
that some of them were like hand washing, some of them were reading. Anything I
read had to be upside down so you had to read it backwards and do it three times

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 Trauma and Altered States of Consciousness
without being interrupted. I had a lot of different rituals.

What happened was that I would need to do a ritual and I would just say the poem
instead. You could call that a super-ordinate ritual, I suppose, but what it did, is the
poem was linked to the light and the safety. It would bring back enough of that
[00:39:00] altered state that I could actually tolerate the headhunters and I could recognize,
"Okay. They're not going to manifest. I know that. I trust that they're not going to
manifest." Then I'd go about my business, still scared, but I could function. In about
three days, all the dreams stopped and the headhunters went away and that was
completely the end of the experience.

It reminded me, you know, later on when I had that client I talked about who was raped
but went into the light and was able to take the light experience back with her and it
helped her deal with actual fears from the era one actual body, physical trauma. That's
[00:40:00] something I'm very interested in. How can we, in any way, help a client to experience
their best self and then bring that back to a traumatic situation? I've seen it work in
cases where people have had these luminous altered states. The question is how can
we actually bring it about in some way? I'm going to do a meditation with you in just a
couple of minutes that looks at that.

Era two, the trauma for me occurred definitely in a different realm. It occurred in era
three.

ERA 2 TRAUMA - EPIGENETICS: INTERGENERATIONAL TRAUMA AND

INTERGENERATIONAL HEALING

Moving on, I just wanted to say a word about the era two type of trauma that results
from epigenetics. On slide nine, you have a picture of twelve people. The picture's
[00:41:00] marked Trauma and Heredity. When I was growing up, I'd heard about these twelve
people but I'd never seen their faces. These are twelve relatives of mine who perished
in Auschwitz. Now, I'm going to cry.

Diane: Oh, I'm so sorry, Joan. It's horrible. I'm so sorry.

Joan: You know, you hear these things as a kid but it's some past history. You don't have
context for it. I got this picture, Diane, as an email maybe now six years ago or so from a
relative I'd never even heard of. It just appeared in my inbox. I looked at it and the tall
man in the far left was my grandfather's brother. Tremendous resemblance. He could
have been my grandfather's twin. The little girl at the bottom right, I have a picture of
myself at her age and we were literally indistinguishable. There's such a family
[00:42:00] resemblance. I looked at that and I thought, "My god. No wonder I've worked so hard
all of my life to become a stress-hardy person." Yes, of course, I know I am a
traumatized person in a way. I had that trauma as a ten-year-old which was deep and
dark and lasted six months. I think I call myself kind of like a clone of Woody Allen. I
have this basic pessimistic world view that I've had to deal with all my life. It's really
served me well as a therapist because—I'll echo Martin Seligman. I think most of you
listeners know him as really one of the founders of positive psychology. He said, "I'm so

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 Trauma and Altered States of Consciousness
good at teaching optimism because I'm inherently a pessimist so I really understand
[00:43:00] the inner thought process that can transform that for you."

I think that my pessimism, the Woody Allen effect, for me, came through epigenetics.
That is not only was my family traumatized in Auschwitz, but my grandparents, on
both sides, had come here to escape pogroms in Russia. Actually, for almost as long as
you go back generationally, there was persecution of the Jews. Your listeners who are
African-American, you've got a history of persecution within four generations that is in
your family heritage. So many of us have come from holocausts. Armenian friends
who went through the Armenian holocausts. You think about all of the trauma now in
[00:44:00] Syria and the refuges and then the fact that that is going to be transmitted through
the germ line, through the maternal germ line for up to four generations.

Let me just describe that. Epigenetics. This is slide number ten. What is epigenetics?
Essentially what the slides say is this. Your human genome is constant and that's good.
Like a baby born today, it looks like a baby born 10,000 years ago, not like a giraffe or
a hippopotamus or an ostrich, because the germ line, the genes themselves are
conserved. Things in the environment like trauma actually can affect which genes are
activated and which are silenced. Most of those epigenetic changes disappear when
you make the egg during gametogenesis. Trauma does not disappear and is inherited
[00:45:00] for up to four generations which I think is very, very interesting.

You wonder how does this relate to people who are prone to dissociation, who are very
sensitive, who may have borderline personality disorder? And you're looking for a
stress in the family system and you're not finding it. Where did it come from? This is
just an interesting part of this. I would call this, like, Era Two PTSD. What you can see on
slide eleven is one of my seven grandchildren, little Bodie.

Diane: Aww, beautiful.

Joan: He's six now. It was a baby picture.

Diane: Oh, he's gorgeous.

Joan: He is. From the time that he was a small person, some of this had worn off by Bodie's
[00:46:00] generation, this incredibly resilient, stress-hardy kid. He's actually quite fearless and
smiles almost nonstop. It's interesting. I think eventually we're going to look and find
epigenetic changes that we can see maybe in the temperament of small children.

Diane: Don't you feel that all the personal work that you did on yourself in your own journey
and all the transmuting negative experiences into expanded spiritual states may have
affected the epigenetics or just even in the way that you are in relationship with your
children and grandchildren so that something shifts? I really believe we shift in a way
that we heal our ancestors upline and also provide healing for our children and their
children. You've seen these generations unfold from all of the personal work that
you've done as well as your teaching and the wisdom you've accumulated about all
this.

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 Trauma and Altered States of Consciousness

Joan: That was so well said I couldn't say it better myself. That intergenerational healing, I do
[00:47:00] believe is a possibility. That's what the era three is about. That's non-local healing. We
go back to do we know how this happens? I don't know. Are there parallel universes?
How does it work? As you saw in that experience I had with my son Andre, when I saw
him being burned before it happened, time is quite squirrely. Our healing does heal our
ancestors.

I want to really wrap up in a moment here, because I want to end with a meditation.
What I have put into this slide set for people to review as they wish to are some very
interesting slides about non-local healing and does it work. Let's take the quickest look
at slide number thirteen.

ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELDS, BIOFIELD THERAPIES AND BIOELECTRIC CELLS

[00:48:00] This comes from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
They're looking at energy medicine. Sometimes I get asked to lecture on energy
medicine. The question is: Is there basis for this? It's non-local healing. Is there a
scientific basis for it or not? The NCAM slide tells us, well, we can look at energy
medicine in two ways. One, veritable studies and that is, we can actually measure
something. We can measure sound or light or actual rays from the electromagnetic
spectrum or pulsed electromagnetic fields, for example, that work on healing bone
[00:49:00] fractures. Then, there's a whole different kind of research, and that is the putative
effects of energy. We can't really identify the mode of action here, not so much.

What we do know is, for example, so many different cultures talk about a life force
energy like prana that flows through the nadis, that flows through the chakras. If
you're looking at Ayurvedic medicine or Chinese medicine or Japanese medicine, these
kinds of things are considered real phenomenon. What we can look at, I'm going to let
people read slide fourteen themselves. What it is… is a couple of scientists from Tufts
Medical School, Adams and Levin, were investigating bio-electrical signals during
pattern formation in embryonic cells and showing how it is that electromagnetic fields
[00:50:00] can change how embryonic cells develop. These fields that may be heritable can
affect, for example, the way that your brain develops.

Then, I'll just skip over quickly to slide fifteen. It's a review, a very good review article, I
thought I'd include it for people, that looks at biofield therapies. This is a wonderful
researcher whose last name is Jane. I actually met her at some energy medicine
meetings. She's a wonderful person. She reviewed 66 studies using three commonly-
used energy medicine modalities like Reiki, therapeutic touch, healing touch. She's a
very good researcher so she weeded out the weak studies. I can't tell you how
[00:51:00] important that is. In the studies that really passed muster, she found overall right now
they're of medium quality. There's very strong evidence that these techniques can
reduce pain, moderate evidence for decreasing negative behavioral symptoms in cases
of Dementia, moderate evidence for decreasing anxiety in hospitalized patients. It's
interesting to think these can act at a distance and there you have maybe Larry Dossey's
telecebo effect that how we think about our clients and think about their healing has an

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 Trauma and Altered States of Consciousness
effect. If you think, "Oh my god. This patient has such bad PTSD, they'll never get
better," that could actually be having an effect on inhibiting their healing.

[00:52:00]
Diane: You might be in the way and we want to make sure we're not in the way as therapists
and caregivers.

Joan: This slide sixteen, is the last slide before our meditation. It's what I call a big wow. This
was a wonderful study that was done. It was part of a series of studies done at Harvard,
I believe. They were doing Qigong and sending energy through Qigong to cancer cells.
Not only could they inhibit the growth of colorectal cell cancer and cause cell death,
what's called apoptosis in tissue culture, but this is really interesting. If they treated
the tissue culture medium and then put that on the cells, they got the same effect.
Then, there was an effect that, I'm going to read it to you, that another study reported
[00:53:00] a contextual effect. If you put cells in an area where other cells had received biofield
therapy a day before, there was still healing.

I'd say to all therapists your office is a place of healing. When people step into it, the
contextual effect of the fact that maybe you've meditated there, that healing has
happened there is important and lots of things happen in an office. I would say it's
important for us to clear out traumatic energy from our office - which you can do by
lighting a candle, opening the window, saying a prayer. That's also part of this whole
field of non-locality in altered states and trauma treatment.

[00:54:00] We're going to end with a meditation that I've used for many, many years and I haven't
done studies on it but I can tell you that it's made a tremendous difference for many
people. I'm going to give you maybe a three or four minute version of it. After people
have done it a few times, they can literally call it up in fifteen seconds and create a
sense of light and safety when before they had felt a sense of no boundaries and
perhaps a feeling of anxiety. As you all know, depending on where a client is in their
treatment, some people can't yet close their eyes and do visualization exercises because
they dissociate. This is up to you and what you know clinically about your client to see
whether it's appropriate for them.

THE EGG OF LIGHT MEDITATION

[00:55:00] Let's give it a try. The Egg of Light. Many of you may know this already. We'll do a
quick version. In it, you just will be closing your eyes and relaxing your body. Mindfully
tuning in on the embodied sensation of the in-breath and out-breath. Now, imagine
that above your head is a bright star of living, loving light, a star that radiates safety,
[00:56:00] luminosity, love, and imagine that light pouring down over you like a waterfall.
Sometimes you might even want to just lift your face to the light. You can imagine also
that that light enters through the top of your head and it washes down through your
body and it washes away anything you're finished with, washes away fears, washes
away any kind of pain. There's something similar in Qigong practice called a bone
[00:57:00] marrow purification. You can just imagine that light moving through every cell
including the marrow of your bones and washing anything, any pollutants right out

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 Trauma and Altered States of Consciousness
through the bottoms of your feet. You can see those as moving out, light moving in,
darkness moving out through the bottoms of the feet into the earth where it will be
composted and transformed.

As that light washes through you, imagine that it scrubs the boundaries of your heart,
revealing the inner light within you, that light which has always been there of love, of
[00:58:00] joy, of peace, of safety, of forgiveness, of gratitude. Let your inner heart light expand
and fill your body and expand beyond the body itself into the space around you so
that the light from above and the light from within coalesce and form an egg of light
that extends about three feet above your head and below your feet and three feet
around you in every direction.

Now, know for yourself and affirm for yourself that any negativity from other people
that comes toward you will bounce off that egg of light and a blessing will return to
[00:59:00] the center. Know and affirm that any thoughts that you have toward yourself or
others that are less than whole and holy will bounce off the interior of the egg of light
and a blessing will return to you. Any time, day or night, you can call up this egg of
light and find safety and inspiration and intuition within it.

The time for our very quick meditation is done. I invite you to return and open your
eyes. That, Diane, has been a wonderful intervention for people for thousands of years.

Diane: I can see why. It's really beautiful. It really shifts your energy and I could feel myself shift
[01:00:00] as well. It's really beautiful and a lovely one that we can practice and, like you said, call it
up even between clients and during sessions even when we're working. It's beautiful.
Thank you. It's a beautiful contribution.

THREE WAYS TO ENLIGHTENMENT: SPIRITUAL PRACTICE, SEXUAL ECSTASY, & TRAUMA

Thank you for a wonderful exploration all the way through with trauma and spirituality.
It's such an important topic and a new dimension that we're highlighting a little bit more
strongly in this series. I love swimming in these waters with you. It's really beautiful.
There was someone and I can't remember, maybe you know, a Monk or someone that
said that there were three ways to enlightenment, of course, spiritual practice, then
he's included sexual ecstasy and the third one was trauma. I've tried two of those.
You can figure out which ones. I think that's very powerful.

You gave us so many things to think about and digest and references to follow up on. I
love George Vaillant. He's one of my faves. I think I was first introduced to him through
[01:01:00] you in a talk a long time ago. I'm so glad you resurrected my memory of him. I love Larry
Dossey's work as well. Thank you for such great resources. Ruth Lanius, Frewen, all
these different ones that you mentioned, they're going to be really, really great places
for us to continue to explore. Thank you so much, Joan.

Joan: You're very welcome. It was a pleasure. It always is, Diane. To all of your listeners, I'm so
excited that there are so many of you out there who are interested in the upside of
trauma as well as the downside. I know that together we can make a difference.

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 Trauma and Altered States of Consciousness

Diane: Absolutely. Thanks again and I appreciate you sharing your time and all of the wonderful
explorations that you've done personally to share them with us so that we can also look
into our own lives and expand as well. Thanks so much for joining us.

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