EMBODIMENT AFTER SURVIVAL

From my own remembering, shaped by lived experience.

Dissociation is a natural protective response to overwhelming experience. When something feels too much to bear, awareness may pull back—creating a sense of distance from the body, emotions, or the present moment. This is not a failure, but a survival strategy. Healing involves restoring safety and connection so presence can return gradually and on its own terms.

Let me begin with something that is often misunderstood. For some people, healing is not about learning to transcend the world. It is about learning to inhabit it. And those two journeys are very different.

When a child grows up in a world that is painful, unpredictable, or unsafe, the psyche does something extraordinarily intelligent. It finds a way to leave without leaving. Some children dissociate. Some retreat into imagination. Some enter symbolic or mythic modes of perception where meaning is coherent and suffering is held at a distance.

These are not pathologies.

They are adaptive strategies.

For certain nervous systems, imaginal perception becomes a primary language. Reality is understood not in linear steps, but as a whole — like seeing a play on a stage and understanding the beginning, the middle, and the end all at once. Time collapses. Meaning becomes immediate. Confusion dissolves.

Compared to this, ordinary human life can feel clumsy. Slow. Fragmented. Uncertain. So if someone tells you, “I understood more easily there,” that is not arrogance or fantasy. It is a description of a mode of knowing that once made life survivable.

Now here is the part that matters for healing. Those inner worlds were never the problem. The problem was that the body had no safe place to stand. Healing does not ask us to abandon those capacities. It asks us to change their role.

At some point — often quietly, without drama — survival ends. Not because the past is resolved, but because the present becomes tolerable enough. The nervous system begins to ask a different question:

“What if I stayed?”

Embodiment after survival is not blissful. It is not transcendence. It is not constant presence. It is weight. It is appetite. It is digestion. It is sleep. It is uncertainty about how things will turn out.

For someone who learned by leaving, embodiment can feel like a loss of elegance. Meaning no longer appears all at once. Time only moves forward. There is no overview from above the stage.

But this is where something essential becomes possible - Relationship - Service - Touch - Timing.

The imaginal realms do not disappear when embodiment begins. They simply stop being used as lifeboats. They become sources of insight rather than places of refuge. The deepest moment in this kind of healing is not an awakening.

It is a realization: “I can stay — and nothing collapses.” I can be tired. I can need rest. I can be unfinished. I can live inside ordinary time. And perhaps most importantly: “I no longer need to leave in order to be safe.”

This is not the rejection of depth. It is depth choosing to live in form. The child who left did not fail. The adult who stays is not betraying them. This is the same life, continuing — now with ground beneath it. And that, for many people, is the real work of healing.

Nigel Lott

teaandzen.org .............library

Meditation Sans Frontieres 501 (C) 3 Non Profit Registered Charity TAX EIN 81-3411835