The Three Dimensions of Being Human: Body, Mind, and Soul

When most talk about human health, they generally focus on the body and the presenting symptoms. It has only been fairly recently that mainstream medicine is acknowledging the connections between physical disease and mental-emotional health. Still, much of the treatment for mental-emotional issues as well as for physical disease is to put the patient on medications while talking about tools to fit them back into mainstream society to function as expected. We try to fix the body through adding medications and talk therapy, however, we blindly accept that the environmental and society conditions that are often the cause of mental-emotional and physical health problems are unavoidable, that they are a necessary evil. I can’t count the number of patients I treated for carpal tunnel syndrome continuously because their jobs required them to do the repetitive motions that caused the discomfort in the first place. Patients presenting with anxiety and depression often worked high stress jobs they had no passion for, with bosses and coworkers they resented, spending the majority of their waking hours having to provide prescribed peak performance while simultaneously trying to manage their emotions and the rest of their lives.

Many of them were aware of these contributing factors, but in today’s job market and with the limitations they had in terms of lack of resources, family obligations, societal expectations and often a lack of education, they simply couldn’t see a way to change that. During my practice, I have seen patients on as many as 20 and more medications, many of which had side effects that mirrored the symptoms the patient were treated for. While this approach works well in a cookie-cutter, for-profit system with the sole purpose of keeping humans “functioning” in a dysfunctional society, it does little to improve health long-term. In fact, it creates even more problems further along the road. Moreover, the by-products of these medications are introduced back into the environment through our excrements, causing altered sex ratios and disrupted reproduction in aquatic life, and resulting in antibiotic-resistant microbes in soils that in turn threaten the health of humans and animals alike.

In one of my earlier posts I wrote about the placebo effect. The science we made our new religion has no interest in exploring this effect since it cannot create profit; it actually cuts into profits by eliminating the need for chemical drugs. My current understanding of the human as a 3-dimensional being that I’m about to explain gives me some sort of framework in which I can explain, at least to myself, how some of the healing effects we see in patients who are given placebos instead of the real medications in studies work. When I look at the body through three dimensions, I see the following break-down:

1.        The physical body which carries the past

2.        The mind and nervous system which controls, manifests, and mediates the present moment

3.        The soul which brings in the ideas of the future

The first thing to note is that through this perspective, all three, the past, the present, and the future are all interacting at the same time in one place, just like our body is one container of many different cells and organisms and systems interacting at the same time. It’s almost like our being is a bubble within the three-dimensional world we all share, carrying three individual dimensions which interact with each other within this bubble as well as with the world around us. You could see the past and body as the yin and material aspect in this equation, the future and soul as the yang and energetic aspect, and the nervous system, mind and present as the interactions, mediations, and movements between the yin and the yang aspects of our being. In this system, I am adding a third factor to the seen and the unseen, that of an evolving and ever-changing mechanism that mediates between the seen and the unseen, between the inner and the outer worlds, between the past and the future, between the body and the soul. I’m basically turning the interactions between yin and yang into a separate entity, yet one that is bound by the principles of the opposites it mediates. Let’s look at the individual parts, and how they relate to the whole organism.

The Body carries our Past

I believe that the body is the part of our being that brings the experiences, lessons, and unrealized dreams of our past, of our ancestors, into the now. To explain this a bit further, in my understanding, the body is similar to the hard drive of a computer. It is the device where everything including data, files, programs, and operating systems are stored on. It doesn’t matter whether they are turned on or off, the data stays on it, but this data can only be accessed when it is turned on or in case of the body, is alive. The flesh of each incarnation starts off as an egg inside the mother’s womb inside the grandmother’s womb. It is this egg that the physical and emotional experiences are coded into as the grandmother and the mother go through life and process what happens to them and those around them. The transcription of information is directly related to the experienced emotions, feelings, and physical sensations of the mothers and grandmothers. In our modern patriarchal societies, the beliefs, actions and behaviors of the fathers and their attitudes towards women and their role in society create the framework for the experiences mothers and grandmothers go through. Moreover, the tribes and societies each family is part of, as well as the natural environment, all influence the programming of the egg as well.

A woman living with a man who believes in equality will have more control over her own body and the input during pregnancy, birth, and parenting than the wife of a man who believes he is superior to women and takes on the role of the sole decision maker. A woman who is subjected to domestic violence will imprint very different emotions and experiences into her eggs and growing fetus than a married middle-class woman with a husband who supports her. A woman living in a moldy apartment will transfer a lot more toxins to her eggs and unborn children than a woman who can afford a house built with environmentally friendly materials. A family living in poverty will have less than optimal nutrition and may even be subjected to malnutrition, whereas an affluent family can afford organic foods and supplements that ensure the best start for their unborn child. So while all humans start out as a chunk of flesh inside their mother’s ovaries, and go through the same developmental stages from embryo to fetus to born child, the programming of the flesh they are born into is uniquely different for every child born. Even though we are all the same at the core, we are each profoundly different when we look at the totality of the experiences from when our mothers and we ourselves were conceived, to when we were born. Each of us carries within us the sins of our fathers, and the collective experiences of our ancestors over the course of three generations.

The Soul carries the Dreams for the Future

Since I believe that the present and the nervous system are the mediating factor between what was and what is yet to come, I’m jumping into the future and the soul aspect of my model of a human being to explain the two aspects that mind and nervous system must integrate in the present. In my mind, the soul represents the user of the body, the spark that carries the dream for this new body and life form, and their desire to manifest this dream. That dream is born out of the collective experience and collective unconscious, which I see as the main frame that holds every single experience of the collective, putting every single bit of information into relation with everything else, analyzing the results of the collective’s actions and manifestations, and devising fixes and updates to the collective story of Mother Earth and the universe. Out of this primordial soup of memories of lives lived come the individual souls, like children born of the collective to the collective, each with a dream and a vision for a future based on the updated state of the collective, ready to make it happen in 3D.

From a spiritual perspective, I see the collective unconscious as the higher power, the great spirit, God, Allah, and all the other supreme beings described and studied in religions and spiritual systems that is rebirthing itself over and over again, in our case on planet earth. While the collective has an overall mission and narrative, at the base of which is the drive for life to survive itself, each individual soul has its own story it wants to contribute. In terms of the religious “free will” vs. “God’s will,” I think free will is the wiggle room souls have in manifesting their ideas from within their individual bubbles on a stage that is full of other bubbles with their own ideas, and from within the confines of the overall script of the main frame (universe, God, Great Spirit, etc).  Since the collective story of life is bigger than anything we could ever dream up individually, we will never fully understand why everything is unfolding the way it is. Yet, since we are all stuck on the same planet, we must operate on some sort of faith that in the end, things will work out, and that even though it sucks a lot of times, everything does happen for a reason.

When I look at the relationship between the body and the soul, I know it is quite common today to describe one’s body as a temple. The main issue I see with this narrative is that temples are stuck in one place and their purpose is to worship a deity. This makes them rigid, fixed, and exclusive. While the idea of a temple sounds all fancy, it really is a huge disability because it prevents the soul from exploring all of life outside of the limited confines of the temple. Moreover, seeing oneself as a God automatically comes with a sense of entitlement to be worshiped, not only by self, but also by others. From where I stand, this narrative is catering exclusively to the ego: look at me, I’m so special and beautiful, I’m just like God, now give me more so I can finally feel special. I see the body as a vehicle that acts as a mobile vessel for the soul, giving it the mobility it needs to find its co-creators this time around, and manifest our dreams throughout the lifetime of this incarnation. It allows us to explore different perspectives, different areas, different ways of life; it allows for healthy growth, without competing for who is the biggest, bestest, and most right god, and endless pursuits to decorate the temple to make sure it fits ego’s image. Of course, the wear and tear on the vehicle as we explore life for all it is comes as a threat to the ego, which wants to stay beautiful and shiny and perfect. Breakdowns and other humbling moments are not what ego is fond of or looking for; it prefers the comforts of a well-stocked temple.

While the body is the carrier of the experiences and the collective memories of our past, the soul is the spark of life from the future. The egg (yin) carries the experiences of the past, the sperm (yang) carries the ideas for the future. Both need each other to make life happen, neither is more or less important than the other, they simply play different roles in this incarnation in the creation of life. Going back to the computer analogy to describe this, the soul carries the programs the collective unconscious wrote as a result of the analysis for the collective experience stored within it. Since there are billions of souls, and each incarnation is limited in its time on earth, each soul can only take a limited number of programs with it. Imagine a spirit child entering a store full of programs, like video games. It jumps around, and picks whatever games and programs speak to it and sound cool. It packs its bags as full as it can before it is time to enter the flesh it will animate. However, the flesh it animates is still run by an older operating system, one that was shaped by the experiences of its ancestors, and is filled with old programs.

Moreover, the flesh is still in its beginning stages, unable to operate without help, fully dependent upon others with older programs to ensure its survival. This new body comes with its own stored memories that may clash with the soul’s chosen programs. I can totally see the excited soul entering the flesh in the womb, and then screaming in frustration when it is born from the dark warmth of the womb into the cold bright light of the world, and must face the current reality of its vessel, realizing that it might be decades before I can play any of the games it chose to come into this incarnation with. The future idea and the past reality are now bound together in one vessel, trying to figure out how to make dreams happen in a world full of outside interference and limitations. Both need to learn to compromise and mediate their differences within themselves, and in their interactions with the outside world. How do we take the outside world in, and express our inside world to the outside? How do we process information within ourselves and turn thoughts into actions? Through the nervous system and the brain.

The Mind and the Nervous System are the Present Moment

From where I stand, the nervous system with its individual parts (the mind, the central nervous system, and the peripheral nervous system) is what connects the past and the future and dictates how we perceive and interact with the world around us. As human beings living in a three-dimensional world which we share with billions of other life forms, we are constantly receiving input from the world around us, giving us cues as to our position in relation to everything else. We do that with our 5 senses: Sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste. Each of these senses gives us information about what is going on around us and helps us navigate the world around us.

• Vision translates the information coming in from the outside into respresentations in for of pictures of what is outside of us and is largely limited to what we can see from where we stand and where we consciously direct our attention to. If we are looking forward, we cannot see the bear behind us, the bird flying above us, the house to our left, and the tree to our right. We can never see everything that is around us at the same time since we can only choose one perspective in each moment.

  

  What we see depends on where we stand

  
  

• Smell and Hearing are not limited by direction, they are able to pick up smells and sounds from all around us. Even if we are looking forward and facing away from the bear behind us, we will still be able to smell and hear it. However, we can only focus on so many sounds at one time, so even though we are able to hear anything within a certain range, we will only be able to process a fraction of what is really going on.

  
  

• Sight, Smell, and Hearing are like surround surveillance; they allow us to assess the immediate environment three-dimensionally. Together, they create a basic understanding of the direct environment we find ourselves in, and who and what is surrounding us, even if the things we perceive are outside of our direct reach. They help us understand where we are at each given moment in time and space in relation to our environment and others.

  
  

• Touch and Taste are more personal, because they require direct contact with what we are examining and trying to define. When you touch something, you bring the attention of what you are touching to you. Instead of just perceiving something from a safe distance, you are now directly next to the subject and putting yourself within their reach. The bear walking up behind you may not be paying attention to you, but if you touch the bear, you will definitely get its attention. Taste is even more intimate, because to taste something, you must take it into your mouth, and hence, into your being. It is the first step of taking life into your body, rather than just experiencing it from the outside.

  
  

• All five senses are designed to interact with the outside world to help us create an idea or image of what that outside world looks like. However, neither of these five senses can help us understand our inner world, for that, we resort to the “inner senses.”

  
  

• All five senses are linked to the peripheral nervous system, which transmits sensations to the central nervous system for further processing and interpretation from the outside in.

I see three major players in the world of inner navigation of life: Emotions, feelings, and thought. Unlike the 5 senses mentioned above, emotions and feelings are processed directly in the brain, in the limbic system, and then interact with the peripheral nervous system which helps us experience these emotional states. The five senses work from the outside in, the emotions and feelings work from the inside out, even though they are influenced and triggered by outside stimuli as well.

Emotions and Feelings

In everyday life, we often use the terms emotions and feelings interchangeably as if they were the same, but they are not. Both are the language we use to understand, describe and communicate our inner experience of the outside world, but while an emotion is a raw, primal, and visceral reaction to a subjective experience, a feeling is the conscious processing of the physical sensations produced by the emotion in an effort to understand its meaning. This conscious processing of the emotion felt is filtered through subjective factors like memories, beliefs, and intergenerational trauma. These filters determine how each person will perceive and interpret the situation that triggered the visceral responses.

Emotions are primal and happen outside of our mind’s consciousness as viscerally experienced sensations within our body. Feelings are intellectual and are the response of our conscious mind to the experienced sensations, rationalizing and interpreting the mix of sensations into a congruent story that the mind can understand. Two individuals can have the same visceral response to a trigger, for example a clenching of the stomach and an increase in blood pressure and heart rate as they enter a room full of strangers. Yet, each one will interpret the emotion completely different. Person 1 might be an adrenaline junkie and will hence interpret the visceral response as excitement, whereas the second person might be a domestic violence survivor, and they will most likely interpret the reaction as fear or terror. Same visceral emotional response to the same environmental trigger, two completely different feelings deduced from it. Neither is right or wrong, each is simply a unique product of their past experiences influencing their present.

Psychologists generally agree that emotions are a three-part process:

1.        A subjective experience like seeing a certain image or hearing a sound

2.        A physiological response like tightening of muscles or increased heartbeat

3.        A behavioral response like smiling, crying, or withdrawal from others

How one responds to the subjective experience depends on many factors, including societal norms and family upbringing. Also, the order in which these phenomena happen is still disputed. Brain scans have shown that often, the subjective experience and the physiological response happen simultaneously. Moreover, studies have shown that a suppression of behavioral responses to stimuli, for example trying not to cry when something sad happens, comes with adverse physical effects like increased heart rate, indicating that expressing ones reactions to an emotion rather than holding these responses in is beneficial for one’s health.

       So what are these basic emotions I am talking about? Researchers and psychologists are still trying to determine this. Psychologist Paul Ekman named 6 emotions he could link to specific and universal facial expressions: Sadness, happiness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust. Psychologist Robert Plutchik came up with 8 emotions: Joy and sadness, anger and fear, acceptance and disgust, and surprise and expectation. One thing all these emotions have in common is that they are all helping us survive. Fear is a natural and necessary response to a perceived threat, and the visceral response associated with fear puts the body into a temporary suspension from which to decide whether to fight, hide, or flee. Anger is a natural response that helps us defend ourselves. Joy is an emotion that allows humans to connect in a meaningful way with each other by triggering feel-good chemicals in our bodies that encourage bonding, like oxytocin.

If you want to explore the idea of Plutchik’s emotions further, here is a link to an interactive version of Plutchick’s Wheel of Emotions: https://www.6seconds.org/2025/02/06/plutchik-wheel-emotions/

In my mythological understanding of the human being and how it navigates its individual three dimensions of past, present, and future, I view emotions as the language of the soul. It is the energetic language relayed in frequencies and interferences, creating different beats and rhythms within our being to bring attention to the present moment. It is a language removed from the judgment-ridden words and labels we use to consciously name and describe our experiences. The soul and by extension our emotions are part of the umbilical cord that keeps us connected to the collective unconscious, the most basic beat that keeps all life connected to source, free of the binary judgments of good and bad, right and wrong. They are the connections to the world of dreams and the dream each soul came to manifest. Emotions are raw and uncensored; they are the tools and compass soul uses to navigate our being to where it needs to be to fulfill our destiny. In a way, emotions are the language of the future, forever trying to nudge us towards our dreams. For example, anger will help us to find the energy to persevere when challenged or go against the shackles of mainstream thought that is trying to hold us back. Fear will warn us of something that threatens our existence in this body, preventing us from getting eaten or dying, and joy will guide us towards our tribe and those who support us. Disgust will push us away from things that are toxic or unhealthy or perceived as wrong.

Feelings are a further progression from emotions and go beyond the basic messengers for survival. They are the mind’s efforts to understand what soul is telling us on a more complex level. It translates the visceral emotions into intellectual concepts that help us make sense of the sensations we felt so we can decide on an appropriate reaction to the stimuli that caused the original emotion. In a way, it helps soul’s ethereal nudges to action translate into manifested actions in life that help us evolve as a human being and live a life of meaning and purpose. To decide on where our being stands in relation to the stimuli, the mind needs to integrate information from multiple sources. It needs to coordinate the current experience delivered by the senses with data from previous lived experiences stored in our bodies, the data of opinions and stories stored in our minds about who we are and what the world is to us, the ideas of things we learned about but never experienced, and our deepest held beliefs about our position in relation to everything and everyone else around us in life. These beliefs and stories are imprinted into our beings continuously throughout our lives. They come from the education we get, the familial programming we receive, the societal judgments we are exposed to and the nature of the feedback we get from the outside world to our expression of ourselves in a shared space. It is these beliefs that will influence how we perceive our emotions, how we name our feelings, and how we experience our life’s stories. A simple example would be someone giving an apple to two individuals. Individual number 1 is a homeless person, individual number 2 is a high-ranking politician. It is safe to assume that the politician will cringe and deny the apple, whereas the homeless man will take it with gratitude. Same input, completely different interpretation.

In the article The Important Difference Between Emotions and Feelings by Rachel Allyn Ph.D., published online by Psychology Today on February 23, 2022, the author states that “emotions are the raw data, a reaction to the present reality, whereas feelings can be diluted by stories we’ve created in our head based on events of the past or fears of the future—not necessarily the truth of the situation.” This solidifies the understanding that emotions are not rational and don’t follow a one-size-fits-all approach that humanity is so eager to manifest in today’s world. Instead, they are highly subjective. For example, I camp a lot in bear country, and have done so for decades, often taking my young child with me into areas without phone reception and hours away from the nearest human settlements. While my research into human-bear encounters showed that chances of dangerous confrontations with bears are highly unlikely, most people around me called me irresponsible for exposing myself and my child to such “danger.” Every time we camped in areas with high bear activity, I felt the knot in the stomach, the slightly elevated heartbeat, and I could tell that my body automatically went into a mode where it was paying attention to my immediate environment. Yet, instead of interpreting this as fear, I perceived it as excitement and anticipation.

This heightened mode of perception kept me grounded enough in the moment to make sure I didn’t accidentally took food into my tent, and helped me to keep my campsite organized and clean despite my ADHD tendency to not pay attention to details. The emotion felt didn’t lead to me hiding or getting aggressive, it led to me being fully present in every moment. In more than three decades of camping, I have never had a bad encounter with bears, since I understood enough about the nature of bears to know how to be a good citizen of the forests. Yet, many people I brought camping in the early days reacted very differently. They had convinced themselves that bears were aggressive and out to get humans. The stories in their heads caused the exact opposite of my reaction: they were constantly startled and perceived every slightest movement as a threat, which took them completely out of the true nature of each moment. No matter how much I tried to explain the observed patterns of bear-human interactions, and the incredibly small chance of a negative encounter happening, they continued to stick to their false narratives, and hence had a very different overall experience from me and my son. While their reaction to the sensations in their bodies was understandable, it was neither aligned with the truth of that moment, nor was it sustainable or healthy for their beings.

One general way of categorizing emotions I like is the Geneva’s Wheel. This system distributes emotions along two major axes (pleasant/unpleasant, and high/low control) between four different quadrants:

1.        Unpleasant, High Control (Anger, contempt, disgust, envy)

2.        Unpleasant, Low Control (Guilt, shame, fear, sadness)

3.        Pleasant, High Control (Pride, elation, joy, satisfaction)

4.        Pleasant, Low Control (Relief, hope, interest, surprise)

Considering that in general, humans prefer to feel in control and at ease, it is easy to see how the unpleasant and low control emotions leave us more unsettled than the ones that are within our control, especially if they are pleasant. This also explains why many try to avoid feeling out of control and not at ease, hence trying to suppress uncomfortable emotions or whitewash the effects of what triggered the emotion to fit a more pleasant narrative. I think this is where a lot of projecting one’s own emotions onto others happens. For example, we still may feel ashamed for a mistake we made in earlier days, and when someone talks about a similar incident to the mistake we made, instead of embracing the discomfort of shame rising and relating to the other person by mentioning we made this same mistake, we may pull up a shield of anger, shaming the other for their mistake, rather than acknowledging we too have made that same mistake. Instead of taking the opportunity to accept that we are imperfect human beings and mistakes are a normal part of life, hence connecting in deeply meaningful ways with those around us, we are building a wall that prevents us from editing the story we created around the events in our minds, insisting to remain on our thrones of superiority and exclusivity.

Thought

Thought is the mental process that takes the sensations and input from the present moment and puts it into relation with the information stored in the body as well as the programming stored in the brain up to date. It is the deciding factor in how we interpret a situation and the emotions it triggered. It involves putting all the information the mind has access to at any given moment into a narrative that feels appropriate at the time. It involves processing feedback from the body, which is a mixture of current emotions sent by the soul, and engrained “feeling protocols” programmed by feedback that was received from the outside world and are stored in the body and mind, along with the feedback we get from the outside at the present moment. The feedback we get from the outside comes in form of words spoken, facial expressions and body language, and whatever other stimuli are present in the shared environment at the time. How we interpret each of these feedback signals depends largely on the stories we have constructed in our heads as our truth.      

Thoughts are considered a mental representation of information we have access to, and have a direct effect onto our emotions, feelings, and health. Some thoughts will be turned into memories that are programmed into our mind’s map, but not all. Many thoughts are just fleeting, they come and they go without much impact. Others though, especially ones that trigger or are triggered by strong emotional reponses or strong stimuli like a sudden and very loud noise, are burnt into our memory so we can retrieve it later. In general, the bigger the bang, the stronger the imprint. Also, repetition of the same thought will literally give it more weight (experiments have shown that thoughts do have mass and weight), which in turn will engrain them into our mind’s map.

An example would be a person who makes a simple mistake like spilling some water, and their immediate reaction would be “that was stupid.” This thought is fleeting, linked to a simple mistake without any major damage. However, if that person now starts hanging on to this mistake as if it was significant in the greater scheme of life, they continue to think about how they are stupid. This often happens when that person is shamed for the mistake they made by others. A fleeting “that was stupid” turns into a persistent “I am stupid,” and by repetition of this mantra, the thought will gain traction, and this statement will become part of the mind’s map as an important and memorable message. This also translates to messages we get from our environment. When a parent continues to be critical of their child, expecting them to be perfect and pointing out every single mistake this child makes with a tone and words that imply that the child is somehow defective, the child will internalize this message and burn it into their mind’s map. This programming will lead to low self-esteem and a lot of shame as this child grows into an adult, and will have major effects in how this person will interact with others around them going forward. However, parents that are too permissive and excuse repeated mistakes despite no efforts made by the child to correct their behaviors can in turn lead to entitled attitudes, creating children that will always feel like the world owes them while they are not willing to give of themselves in return.

The mind is like a three-dimensional map within our being with many different layers and connections between data points that helps us determine where we are in relation to the outside world. These data points are stored memories, emotions, and other information our brains have processed, and are the data that influence our thought processes. When we perceive an outside signal, for example a sight or a sound, this initial trigger goes through many transformations before we can make sense of it. Imagine hearing a loud boom. This boom travels through the air as sound waves entering our ears where they reach the ear drum and the tiny bones within our inner ears. These physical structures now turn the sound wave into corresponding vibrations, which then are turned into electrochemical signals through neurons and neurotransmitters as they eventually reach the appropriate sections of the brain that process these types of stimuli. Because it was a loud and unexpected boom, our visceral response will the that of fear, which in itself triggers neuronal activity, compounding the signals sent by the ear, creating a complex experience in this moment. This experience is a result of current stimuli (the boom), a triggered emotions (fear, surprise), and stored memories of similar experiences that have become permanent parts of neuronal memories and triggered circuits in data processing.

Now imagine two people standing side by side when this boom happens. One is a war veteran with PTSD, the other is a young man who has never faced a real life-threatening situation and loves bungee jumping and rock climbing for the thrill of it. Even though both are in the same moment with the same triggers, they will respond very differently because their minds are resorting to different maps. The man with the PTSD will go into a complete freeze and panic, unable to do anything because the circuits etched into his mind’s map during the war when bombs rained on him and his friends, and friends of him died will take him straight back to that memory, literally transporting his entire being back in time. The severity of the experience in the past has not only been stored in the brain, but in the body as well, and with the new trigger, everything, including the body memories, are triggered, and the past comes back to life in a 3D format.

The young person who is the adrenaline junkie will probably jump at first, but then get all excited, trying to figure out where the boom came from. In his case, the circuits activated in his brain by the sudden noise will not include visions of bombs falling and friends dying, nor will it trigger body memories, but instead visions of adventure and the elated feeling of excitement that one perceives when their body feels safe, or when they got away with something without consequences. While the initial fear will still lead to the tensing of muscles and the increasing heart rate the veteran is experiencing, the adrenaline junkie will not be overwhelmed and frozen in fear, hence they will be able to proceed in identifying what caused this particular boom in this moment. While the young person will be able to stay fully present in the now with his entire being and hence be able to assess the risks more accurately, the older veteran will be fragmented, with his physical body still in the current moment in time, but his mind and body memories racing back to a time that has long passed, replaying images so real the veteran is frozen in the current moment without much agency. Instead of being able to rationally assess the current situation, he will be stuck in battling the demons from his past.

The Role of Current and Intergenerational Trauma    

Our mind’s map doesn’t only hold our lived memories within its network, it also holds memories from generations past through inherited intergenerational trauma. Trauma is considered an experience that causes significant distress, harm, or a threat to a person’s life. The death of a child, the loss of a friend in a car accident, being a victim of domestic violence or living in a war zone where bombs are regularly dropped onto the place one lives are all examples of trauma. Trauma is a natural part of life; anyone who has witnessed a birth can attest that our first experience in life is a form of trauma. However, the effects of trauma can be minimized if the person who experienced it is given the tools, support and time to process the events in a safe space. Unfortunately, in today’s busy world where ego rules and demands from us to constantly do and be busy to appease its fears, we don’t allow the time and space needed to heal from trauma we have experienced.

Moreover, we have glorified trauma in whitewashed stories of heroic wars, heroic soldiers, and heroic doctors who treat the effects of the trauma instilled by humans who choose aggression over words for conflict resolution, trying to minimize the violent world we continue to support and create with our “heroic” actions. Instead of allowing for true healing of the soul, the suppressed traumatic experience loop is engrained into the maps of our mind, ready to be triggered whenever any stimulus reminds us of the traumatic experience. Once triggered, the mind overrides any logic or common sense and takes us into the dark world of our minds, unable to read any current situations accurately. When a society creates a cult around winning, being heroic, and being strong and tough, like we are witnessing here in the United States, it becomes almost impossible to effectively work with trauma. Facing trauma means admitting one is traumatized and acknowledging one’s own vulnerability, and in a narrative obsessed with strength and control, this in itself is shame-inducing.

Releasing stored trauma from the body is no picnic; it is one of the most scary and painful processes a human can face other than the original trauma itself. In my healing journey, I faced multiple dark nights of my soul where I saw no way forward and out of the painful hell life has been for me over the years. During Covid, I spent entire weeks just sitting on my bed, sobbing and crying, grieving the countless times I was hurt by other’s lies as well as by my own idealistic expectations. To heal our being from the terrors old trauma has imprinted into their bodies, we need to step back into the traumatic experience in a safe space, allowing ourselves to feel all the fears and terror once again, but this time, with someone at our side who reminds us that we are safe in the now, which is the process necessary to release the old demons.

The idea of meditating our darkness away by imagining floating figures of light is about the best way to further push our demons into the deepest crevices of our shadow. Part of healing is to show yourself with all your demons to someone else, someone who will not judge you, yet who will also hold you accountable for the times your demons wreaked havoc in other people’s lives. Healing includes states of not being able to function in the present at all, which can last for weeks. In our busy world that insists we need to work to be worthy and does not allow for extended down times with nothing but rest and reflection, healing becomes virtually impossible. As a result, we have humans that are either pretending the trauma was a way to get stronger, sentimentalizing the real damage that was caused during the traumatic events, or hiding behind their trauma, seeing it as a disease that has no cure. Both pretending that trauma “wasn’t that bad” and hiding behind trauma and using it as an excuse for damaging behaviors and avoidance of personal accountability in present moments will ensure that future generations will have to fight the same demons we were unwilling to face.

From where I stand, unaddressed trauma will fragment our being by freezing the body in the now and keeping the mind trapped in the past which eliminates any movement towards the future. Trauma addressed will enable a being to keep all three planes, the body, mind and soul as well as the past, the present and the future, in one place: the current moment, allowing for free movement in the now. Not everyone will agree with my approach to trauma, but I firmly believe that the only way out of the perpetual hell unaddressed trauma causes in our lives and that of others is by entering the hell consciously and with guidance of someone we trust, requiring us to face and enter our triggers rather than to avoid them at all cost, and not only to acknowledge the damage that was done to us in the traumatic moment, but also face personal accountability for when our triggered trauma turned us into the villains in other present moments because our past made it impossible for us to read the current moment correctly.

Intergenerational trauma is the genetic record of the unprocessed traumatic experiences our ancestors lived through, especially the ones our mothers and grandmothers went through, since our flesh was already present within their bodies in form of an egg. Our understanding of intergenerational trauma and how it is transferred between generations is still in its infancy, and there are many different theories out there. We know that epigenetics plays a part in this transcription. Epigenetics is the study of how our genes are affected by environmental factors. When we go through highly traumatic events that threaten our lives, it doesn’t only affect our behaviors and reactions to our environment in the future, it also affects our genetic code. While our DNA sequence remains the same structurally and in sequence, these traumatic experiences change the way how our DNA is read and expressed. Turns out, our body has a mechanism that equates a user manual, and that mechanism is affected by our lived experiences and and by our thinking. It’s almost like environmental and behavioral factors rewrite and change the instructions for the usage of our specific DNA sequences.

These changes can be passed down to future generations. The next generation will not only be affected by the behavioral patterns that parents adopted in their fight for survival that determined how they parented their children, but also through the events being inscribed into the expression of our DNA that is passed down to us. Everything we experience daily and how these experiences are perceived and encoded into our neuronal connections and mind maps is influenced by this inheritance. Luckily, these changes are not written in stone, and can be changed over time with consistency and a willingness to face the discomforts that come with changing one’s ways. For anyone interested in learning more about epigenetics and the power of our beliefs over the expression of our genetic code, the book Biology of Beliefby cell biologist Bruce Lipton is a great resource. It is written in very easy-to-understand language, and I found it fun and fascinating to read.

Other than genetics, parenting has a lot to do with how children handle and interpret emotions, so does the generally accepted narrative regarding emotional expressions of the society one finds themselves in. How our parents reacted to us when we expressed strong visceral emotions like anger, sadness or fear will have a huge effect on how we interpret and express those emotions going forward. A boy who was taught by their parents that crying is a sign of weakness and inappropriate for a man will grow up hiding their tears and suppressing any signs that could be interpreted as weakness. The more he does this, the more it becomes part of his neuronal memories and pathways, preventing him from expressing the natural reactions his physical body needs to process the emotion, keeping the energies of the emotion trapped in the body with nowhere to go.

Studies have shown that tears cried in response to a stressful or highly emotional event contain various stress hormones. Allowing those tears to flow without internal judgments not only releases stress hormones from the body, but also helps to increase substances like oxytocin which helps us feel better. The natural response to a trigger that causes sadness or stress is to cry, which creates a mechanism for hormonal adjustments and releasing of stress. When these tears are held back, it can amplify the stress response and keep us trapped in a tense and uncomfortable state. When unhealthy prescriptions for emotional expressions are supported by societal customs on top of the parenting, we are creating long-lasting patterns of harmful emotional dysregulations that will be passed down from generation to generation. I believe that a lot of the physical and mental-emotional disease patterns we see nowadays are the manifestation of emotions trapped by internalized judgments.

All these factors show that our experience is never just one-dimensional and linked to one event only, but instead are multi-dimensional and complex processes of integrating past ideas about life and the encoded experiences within our body with visions for a future to make sense of what is unfolding in the present moment. At any given moment in time, our past is just as present as our future is, leaving the nervous system to figure out how to bring these two different stories onto one page within the present moment, amongst all the other energetic influences and interferences that are present in that moment. Each human in each moment carries their own versions of “the” past and “the” future, and no two versions of either “the” past nor “the” future are alike, nor are they THE Truth. Each human will understand shared moments from a different perspective, funneled through the limitations of their own perception based on their life experiences. Each has their own story about life within the web of life’s story itself. We do not understand the world around us by isolated facts that are fragmented throughout time and space; we understand it through the stories we tell ourselves that connect all the dots and details of our experienced lives to give it meaning, using concepts we have been taught and our memories and dreams to spin together a narrative that makes sense to us and feels right. You may be the hero in your version of current events, but rest assured that in many other versions, you are the villain or the fool.

The Fragmentation of the Human Being in a Binary World

              We are at a point in history where we are more fragmented as a species than ever before. We are divided along international borders, state lines, city vs country, science vs religion, man vs woman, gay vs straight, trans vs cis, neurodivergents vs neurotypicals, even though all these lines are invisible and imaginary. The invention of the internet with social media and other online hubs to connect with others is only enabling this divided narrative, creating echo chambers  full of heroes and victims, since we are sitting comfortably within our own bubbles at home, and literally don’t have to stand behind what we are expressing. It is easy to paint a picture of oneself as the victim or the hero when the person we are painting this picture for isn’t in the same space to confirm that how the person on the other screen describes themselves matches what one sees in 3D. How we see ourselves is often very different with how others perceive us.

For example, I met a man online on a dating site, and we talked and texted for a good three months before I drove cross country to meet him in person, assessing whether it was worth moving from CA to NC for. The conversations went great. We geeked out over liberal politics, made fun of conservatives, and talked about the poly community he was trying to build with his other girlfriend on the land he owned. When I arrived for my month-long test visit, everything went beautifully. His other girlfriend and I had a lot of interests in common, and her other boyfriend was sweet as pie. We discussed how to move forward and decided that I was going to move there and rent one of the suites off their main house. A month passed, and once everything was packed up, I got on the road to NC.

However, once I got there, things looked very different. It turned out that the land didn’t belong to him, but to his girlfriend. The other boyfriend didn’t live up to their expectations, so he was being driven out. The man I had moved east for turned out to not have any employment except for two half days at a church, which he made fun of the second he was home. He didn’t even own the car he was driving and gave me the sob story of how his girlfriend made him sell his car and gave him the one he was driving now. His entire assets were his computer and video games, and the big screen TV. It also turned out that she had actually bought and developed the property with several other people with a poly community in mind more than 20 years ago, but one by one, the others left and bought her out, leaving her alone, and the guy we were both dating was the only one that stayed - mainly because he didn't want to work and enjoyed being a kept man. They had none of the emotional skills necessary for living in community, no ethical compass, and I witnessed them stealing from a woman who had lost pretty much everything during Covid, making up excuses of how she deserved it. The way he presented the story and himself as a competent and responsible land owner in a 2D format, and what the story actually was like in 3D were literally different dimensions.

Moreover, I had to face that my own intellectual arrogance had caused me to connect via ego more than via soul. In hindsight, there were many moments where inside, a little ting went off, which I know now was my soul trying to reach me, making me aware I was ignoring important information because it didn’t fit my ego narrative. Not only that, once I moved the North Carolina, it was the religious and more conservative-leaning people I had made fun of who were kind and compassionate, who didn’t stand on soap boxes, trying to lecture me about my ego and why I was suffering. They simply opened their hearts and arms and embrace me in my imperfect humanity without judgment, only compassion.

This was not the only time I met others online and learned about them through electronic communications for months before taking the steps to meet them in person. Each time, who I met had nothing to do with the image that I conjured up in my mind about them based on their narratives of themselves. The common denominator between them all was that their narratives of their own pasts were exclusively divided between being the victims, and being the heroes; there was no in between. The villains were always the others, the reason why they were stuck were always because of something outside of them. As I was experiences these discrepancies, and the associated crashing on my attempts to realize my dream with each failed connection, I started to see a pattern emerge that I had manifested for many decades as well. I realized they were older versions of myself that I had never taken full accountability for, and that my soul kept attracting into my life to help me break through projecting my own shadows onto them. It wasn’t easy to acknowledge just how much I had avoided taking accountability for choices I made, and that not a single one of my memories about the past was as black and white as I had insisted they were. I too had become addicted to the hero and victim narrative, never voluntarily stepping into the role of the villaink. My past moments were carefully curated to keep me feeling righteous. It was much easier to focus on all the bad the other party had contributed, and simply skip over those parts where I had a choice to step out of the dynamic. The same went with my relationship with my parents.

Relationships with parents are always tricky. They are the ones who created us, and who we were dependent on without any conscious choices until we matured enough to be able to exist without their contributions. It is easy to get lost in the current (and constantly changing) narrative of what proper parenting is supposed to look like, abiding by the most up to date standards, and then villainize our parents for not providing what we knew was right, and we felt we deserved. However, our parents were born in a different time, when this knowledge wasn’t available yet, and carried experiences within themselves we may have not even survived had we been in their shoes. For example, my mother has always been a force of nature. She is the master critic, always pointing out what is wrong in everyone else, completely unable to control her violent emotional outbursts, and in every narrative, she was always the victim, and the other the villain. It was difficult growing up because despite her obvious love for her, there was so much abuse going on because she simply couldn’t change the way she over-reacted to everything, and she had no means to own and control her emotions. It is still literally impossible for us to be in the same space for more than a few days before war breaks out. Everything I do and everything I am triggers her. In the past, I hated her for that, and blamed it all on her. But in my work on my own trauma with mentors, I looked beyond my own experience, and started to look into the early experiences my mother had. Turned out, she was a 3-year-old toddler who was in the bunker with her mother in Frankfurt during an air raid during WW2 when their building got bombed to the ground by allied forces. She still remembers the flames, the dead neighbors being pulled out of the burning building, and the overall shock all the survivors were in as they observed the aftermath. Yet, instead of getting treatment for her PTSD, she had to carry the shame of the Germans, because even though my parents were the victims of the war of the country their were born into, they had to carry the burden of the villain who stirred the war. How can I judge my mother for the trauma that kept her hostage all her life?

I can’t even start to imagine what this experience must have done to the mind and soul of a 3-year-old girl. I can’t imagine how my grandmother managed to find the courage and strength to go on, to be evacuated to the countryside, not knowing if her husband would ever come back, not knowing if they would survive the next day. Yet, she held on, and my grandfather, who was courageous enough to refuse to march into Russia with his army fellows, deserted, and ended up being the only one to survive, did make it back. Neither of my grandparents caused the war, neither of them wanted the war; they were simply pawns in the games of power-hungry men who have no problem sacrificing others in their sick ego games. Yet, once the war was over, they were burdened with the guilt over being German and having killed so many in concentration camps. Neither of them made those choices, and all of them were simply victims of the time and place and body they were born into. Not only does my mother carry the trauma from almost dying in a bombing, she also had to carry the judgement and shame of the world for having been born German. Today, we have come to the point in time where the old victims of the German ignorance have now become the new Germans with their war and genocide of the Palestinian people. I feel for all of them, the aggressors, and the victims, because most of the humans caught in the middle are just like my mother: human souls that just want to enjoy the short life they have on this planet without being used as pawns in wars to revenge the glorified image of our ancestors.

Hate and ignorance and lack of compassion are not limited to one race, one country, one group of people; hate, ignorance and lack of compassion are equal opportunity employers, they come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. We have all been the victims as well as the villains and the heroes at different moments in time. What is important for us is to have the courage and willingness to let go of our past and the need to rectify wrongs done to our ancestors, or to make our ancestors proud. We need to be willing to go through the discomfort of acknowledging that we are all children of God and the Devil equally, but that we have a choice to stay in the middle, where compassion, common sense, and sustainable life is found. It may not be eternal paradise free of pain and suffering, but it will be the closest to a fair chance at a dignified and purposeful life any human can get. Never forget, when two people are in one room, we have 6 different entities that are wrapped into two bundles of three. We all have a past we are still trying to come to terms with, a future which we are hoping to meet some day, and the variations in perception in the present moment, which all depend on where we stand, and what colors our past experiences throw onto the lens through which we view the world.