Living With Trauma: The Healers, 20

I have lost close to fourteen pounds since July, or, around two to three pounds a month. It is a slow process, and I'm not dieting really conscientiously. I simply changed my eating habits during the warmer weather, as usual, and found myself ingesting a lot more fresh fruits and vegetables, and slightly less other stuff. So, I began to lose weight. I did the math, and figured out that if I kept eating plenty of fresh produce, and refrained from switching to the heavy, calorie-laden comfort food that we tend to crave during fall and winter, then I would be more likely to continue to lose weight. So, that's what I've been doing and the pounds are still sliding slowly off my body. I emphasize here the word "slowly", because the human body is always much more eager to acquire fat that to surrender it. Which is also a segway to what I want to write about today. The human body lives in a state of perpetual survival mode. Our past century of incredible food abundance is but an aberration in our human history, where over the millennia there have been alternations of food abundance and food scarcity with often killer famines. By the same token, our human collective unconscious has not changed one bit, concerning this living in survival mode. Capitalism really goes to town on this one with its survival of the fittest Neo-Darwinism. I think that our species, having begun as a prey species, has always known trauma. This must have begun in the steppes of Africa before our earliest ancestors' first emigration from the so-called Dark Continent. They were under perpetual threat from alpha predators: lions, leopards, crocodiles, pythons, you name it. In Ice Age Europe there were the cave bears, sabre tooth cats and wolves, and more lions and leopards since they enjoyed in those days a much larger range. There also would have been competition with other humans and other hominids for territory and resources. There would have been attacks, small wars, massacres. And the constant struggle for food, warmth and shelter. I would challenge anyone who boasts about the Paleo diet to actually try to live like one of our Paleolithic ancestors for just one week: no condo, no internet, no tech toys, no electricity, no stores, no money, no health care. Just weapons and tools hand carved from stone and hopefully the cooperation of your fellows as you survive together the elements and wild predacious beasts. Now try doing this for a year, for a lifetime. Imagine this being the only way of life for centuries, millennia. Still want to go Paleo? Then put your stone axe where your mouth is. The fear and trauma that came with the necessities of immediate and uncertain survival, played out for over one hundred thousand years would have left on us quite the lasting imprinting, lasting intergenerational trauma carved and branded into our collective unconscious, into our very DNA. This is the baggage with which we have played out ten thousand years of agriculture and civilization. This kind of unconscious genetic coding is not going to be quickly changed, undone or unlearned. This kind of collective trauma, more than anything else, has influenced and directed our development of culture and civilization: millennia of rule by despotic kings and priests, with the odd and very brief outbreak of anything resembling democracy. In the meantime, war after war after war for resources, land, power and glory. Humans making enemies of each other because all those thousands of years of being preyed on by wild beasts, then by one another has caused a kind of collective trauma, even a collective paranoia. We have always needed to invent an enemy where none have existed because this is the urging of our imprinting. Visitations by the founders of the great world religions, and I cite here especially Jesus and the Buddha because they alone really promoted peace and loving-kindness (Mohammed, and the Children of Israel, were notorious warmongers!) taught us that there was another way to live. We have only too quickly forgotten or perverted and subsumed their teachings in order to further nourish and justify our ancestral war-likeness. Only in the last two hundred years of our long and sad history do we appear to be finally beginning to learn the ways of peace and this is going to take an awfully long time, so long that there remain no guarantees that our species will survive its own violence in order to enjoy these fragile fruits of our earliest forays into peace and peace-making.