One of the most significant elements we can find within our psyche is the accumulation of difficult and bitter memories – negative imprints left from one’s encounters with life and the world. The most difficult among them could be defined as “traumas” – life blows which shook to the root our centers of perception, causing them to maintain over-cautious and suspicious relationships with all that surrounds them.
The psyche stores these memories, as it is by its very nature memory-based, and eventually becomes clogged with them. What could unravel these memories? Or, more precisely, what could unravel the imprints accumulated in us as a result of such memories?
The great problem with the psyche’s attempts to free itself from the burden of these imprints is that they are wholly based on the story we tell about ourselves and the way the world treated us. This makes it fundamentally hard for it to disengage from its profound identification with the memories. Even worse, since it tends to arrange the memories to a degree that they eventually disengage from the actual past events, due to its narrative interests, it is far too invested in storytelling to be genuinely interested in a total liberation.
Many therapies preserve the person’s self-image as the victim of the story; one that others did wrong to; one who never wanted to be but was overpowered by someone else’s will. Such therapies are able, of course, to ease pain and even revise the negative conclusions that were formed as a result of one’s clash with that piece of reality. Nonetheless, these therapies still operate from within the personality continuum, and so the trauma or bitter impression will still remain active, even if in a rather hidden manner, since they have never been truly uprooted. The personal self-consciousness still essentially needs the story and will therefore subtly cling to it. In other words, the freedom from the memory could never be radical and absolute.
What we ought to do is make it possible for our higher mind to turn its perspective into a usable and active power; that is, a liberating force for the sake of the psyche. In this way, a highly meaningful bridge between the two levels of the mind begins to form, one that allows a free flow from the higher, seemingly unapproachable level, to the lower, personal level of the mind. Owing to this bridge, the unlimited can finally act on the limited reality.
How we can transform negative memories
Naturally, to enable this, we need a sort of mediating language – one that can connect two levels which ordinarily do not maintain any obvious link. Such a mediating language can be found in the set of techniques for emotional healing that are within the system of the “Expansion Method.” This set of techniques aims to uproot memory imprints through the active power of enlightened states of consciousness.
What these expansion-based techniques do first is bring to life the memory within the different centers of perception and experience: the instinctive center as well as the feeling center, the emotional as well as the cognitive. With the memory alive, one can efficiently spot the imprints and conclusions that formed within the centers. In the second phase, these techniques expand the memory pattern. This process, in itself, is a sort of alchemy. The dense memory becomes more and more translucent, allowing the light of consciousness to pass through.
The expansion enables a whole shift of focus. Now the person can comfortably immerse his or her awareness in an enlightened state of consciousness. The mind is shifted to the higher level, which is free from memory, or more precisely, from any instinctive or emotional impression in relation to the memory. One’s consciousness is free and unaffected, and here one can see for oneself the hidden law that consciousness can shape the denser reality. The centers of perception and experience, all the way to the most physiological level, quickly respond to this law with profound relaxation and peace – even when confronted once again with the memory.
From this state, in which the mind is free from memory, the higher mind can begin to act on the imprints and to neutralize them. It easily disconnects the functional memory from the interpretation or psychological content that was previously instilled in it. The memory remains just a memory. Out of a purely positive spirit, which was previously unimagined for the person who entered the process, one no longer needs to battle with the memory. This makes it possible, at last, to endow the past event with a new interpretation: a new context within the evolutionary “story” of the psyche, as well as a positive developmental meaning and purpose.
Above all, the person who is empowered by the higher level perspective can saturate those past moments, which were originally experienced in quite a semi-conscious state, with a complete awareness. Back then, the instinctive, feeling, willing, emotional and communicating centers of perception were lacking the presence of a fully mature awareness to genuinely direct instinctive reactions that otherwise turn at once into rigid mental imprints.
The therapy of the higher mind is a completely positive one. It comes from a world of gleaming positivity that holds the power to redeem, not out of faith or hope for the best but out of the power of its own presence. In this way, it is possible to root out large pieces of past impressions from both the conscious and unconscious memory.
Becoming bigger than your memory
In trauma, or in any difficult memory, our experience is that the consciousness that meets with the memory is smaller than it. The memory is a big and aggressive entity that has overpowered our tiny fraction of awareness. Since we experienced ourselves as smaller than the event, and therefore helpless victims, it left in us an extraordinary impression of invasion and taking over.
Through the act of expansion, we finally become far bigger in our consciousness than the memory. If before we were but a speck of dust within the memory that seemed to swallow us, now the event, in its entirety, turns into a speck of dust within our consciousness. This is a state of such sheer liberation that we lose all fear of this past event. Bigger than life, we can thus return and govern our own story of life.
If you wish to study and practice the Expansion Method, read A Guide to Bliss
