The Clean Mind Series
Trauma work is one of the most profound, painful, challenging, and brave paths this world has to offer.
It is dark—
as one ventures back to their core.
It is light—
as one learns to reparent, to hold their own hand, to become the resource they once needed.
This work asks us to move through both.
Consciousness feels like a sea.
The past can threaten to pull us under, not because it is happening again, but because the body remembers. Yet those who learn to balance light and dark begin to walk in presence. They are no longer living threadbare to every trigger. They have tools—anchors—that allow them to shine present-day light onto the ghosts of the past.
And in doing so, they learn something vital:
They are ghosts—no longer alive in the present moment.
Presence is the inner knowing that what arises is safe to feel—and safe to release. It’s the ability to keep our awareness above water when emotion swells, without abandoning ourselves or forcing anything down.
If presence is the light, discernment is the compass.
Discernment is what helps us sort what is ours from what we’ve been carrying for others. It allows us to distinguish between now and then, truth and conditioned belief, intuition and fear. It helps us recognize which emotions belong to this moment—and which are echoes from a past that no longer exists.
Discernment also teaches us who is for us and who is not. Not through judgment, but through resonance. Through how the body softens or tightens. Through what feels expansive versus what feels familiar but heavy.
Presence is keeping your awareness above water when emotional waves threaten to pull you under.
This is not bypassing.
This is mastery.
The duality is where love and beauty flourish. The depth of pain one can feel is echoed tenfold by the depth of love the universe has to offer in return. Trauma expands the nervous system’s capacity for sensation—when integrated, that same capacity becomes the ability to love, feel, and perceive more fully.
A breaking point often begins the journey.
Rock bottoms are ego deaths.
Love is light.
I find it meaningful that this is one of my movement entries where consciousness appears again as water.
As I write this, I envision myself floating at the surface of a lake—sometimes sitting, sometimes lying back—aware of what moves beneath me, but not pulled into it. Ego deaths and triggers create ripples across the surface. The reflection distorts, but the water itself remains.
Presence allows us to decipher:
– past from present
– truth from mistaken belief
– memory from immediacy
Presence allows us to live now.
Divine love cannot exist without presence. And it is in presence that we hear the heart calling. It is here that we learn to speak the language of the universe. It is here that God’s wisdom is not thunderous, but intimate.
The psyche is an ocean.
We have explored perhaps ten percent of the sea—and the same may be true of the mind. So much of what we call psychology is theory. Educated guesses. Maps drawn from partial discovery.
Which invites a question:
What happens when equilibrium is found?
Perhaps nothing dramatic at all.
The waves still come.
The depths still exist.
But we no longer confuse intensity with danger.
We stop swimming toward ourselves.
We stop fighting the water.
We float.
And from that place—
love moves freely,
truth clarifies,
and healing no longer needs to arrive through collapse.
