On Triggers, Healing, and the Soul's Journey

I work with highly successful and impactful leaders who are often visionaries and creators in their own right and who have been on a journey of healing, growth, and consciousness for a while. Often, they come to me after many healing journeys, and they always ask this question, sometimes a little sheepishly, sometimes with a bit of shame.

They say, "You know, I worked on this thing. I went to an ayahuasca ceremony about it. I did a three-month container with a somatic therapist around it. I went to 20 years of therapy about it. Why do I still have this trigger? Why do I still have this problem?"

That really pisses me off because I think it is a disservice within the mental health and healing industry, where there is this idea that if a trigger comes back, it means that you didn't heal it. It means that something you're doing isn't working.

There is this idea that we will eradicate our humanity, that we will eradicate our triggers, and we will eradicate our emotions if we just heal enough. There is this illusion of perfection under the guise of healing, and there's this illusion of perfection on the other side of shadow work, and on the other side of healing our wounds.

To me, a utopia and a heaven on earth is not to eradicate our humanity and our feelings. It's not to get rid of all pain or grief or wounds...It's to have the self-acceptance and self-love and inner peace to be able to know not to waste the trigger—to be able to keep returning to ourselves over and over again with these opportunities that life gives us for the rest of our life.

Because we're not only on a journey of trauma healing from childhood developmental challenges and big T traumas. That's not the only journey we're on. We're also on a soul's journey. And our soul has soul material that we are here to work through, that we are here to grow from. We are here to grow our souls. We are here to connect closer to God, to connect closer to awe, to connect closer to the infinite.

Sometimes that is through joy, and sometimes that is through challenges. When we only orient toward trauma healing as the only way, then we are often—and I posted about this yesterday—bypassing our souls, our soul's mission, our soul's journey, our soul's purpose.

There is a reason why many trauma healers and many people in a trauma healing journey orient a lot toward healing the wound, and that's because in past generations there was tons of suppression and repression and spiritual bypassing, which is using spirituality to bypass our real feelings. But what I've been finding is that the pendulum has swung where people are using trauma healing and bypassing their own souls, and then they're wondering why it's not working.

Our soul is also a part of the picture here. Our soul, as long as it's in our body and beyond—till infinity—is always going to want to grow. And that is not a bad thing. When we can surrender into our soul's journey, into the life that we have chosen, and into the life that our soul has chosen, we can deeply understand that our soul is here to grow. Our soul is here to experience. Our soul is here to forget, to remember, to expand, to forget, to remember, to expand, and to experience all along the way.

Forgetting is part of the plan. Forgetting does not mean there's anything wrong with you. Forgetting does not mean your trauma healing is not working. Forgetting is part of the plan. It is part of the plan to forget and remember deeper, forget and remember deeper.

I always say this to myself: "Rivky, forgetting makes the remembering sweeter." The contrast is what makes life so alive, what makes life so dynamic, what makes life fun. Any feeling, in my experience, fully felt, is so blissful and so pleasurable when we can reframe our experience with feeling our feelings.

So if you have another trigger after you work through it, there's nothing wrong with you. You are exactly right. You are right on time, and all you've done is forgotten so that you can remember and expand even more, so that your soul can keep rising higher and higher closer to the truest truth, closer to God, closer to the truest nature of your being and reality.

When you stop shaming yourself—when we stop shaming ourselves for having the trigger again—we can then use it as sacred material to grow from and expand with.

The less we shame ourselves in our journey and the more that we remember that having triggers and being human and forgetting is part of the plan, the quicker we can pick ourselves up and wipe ourselves off and walk into our becoming and walk into the field of abundance and walk into true reality and walk into a more beautiful world and walk in and as our souls through this lifetime.

When you know perfection is an illusion and there's nothing wrong with you if you're triggered, even if the mental health or the healing industry or your parents or your coding or your programming might have taught you that, then you are free. You are free to go and create your life. You are free to go and create the most liberated and beautiful life that you possibly can create.