Channeling Lightning

I think "healing from trauma" is the wrong metaphor.

In 2019 I went to an Ayahuasca retreat in Peru. It was a beautiful and terrifying experience. Easily in the top five most intense and difficult of my life.

The setting was gorgeous, tucked away in the Sacred Valley between Cusco and Machu Picchu. Pictures never did that space justice. Apparently the Incas viewed the mountains towering over both sides of the Sacred Valley as gods. It’s viscerally real in person why they’d say that. The land has presence there.

Photo by Peter James Eisenhaure on Unsplash

Instead of a ceremony space buried in a swampy jungle, we had a treehouse. Delightfully free of mosquitoes. Five times over the course of a week, we all headed into that dark space suspended high up above the ground and drank the strange brew.

(Fun fact: the drink itself has a kind of intense flavor but can be kind of pleasant at first. You sort of learn to find it disgusting after a few goes.)

In the second ceremony I experienced dying, going to Heaven, and then falling into Hell.

In saying this, I want to emphasize that I didn’t see anything strange. People talk about having powerful visions and talking to beings from other worlds and so on when taking Ayahuasca. But I never saw anything odd. When I say I went to Heaven and then to Hell, I mean that my sense of what reality I was in shifted. In Heaven I saw the fundamental “done-ness” of everything, how Love had won forever, how it was now my exquisite joy to continue the divine work amongst my brothers and sisters but that goodness was not and never would be at stake. And in Hell, the fragility of Heaven became vivid, and I saw how consciousness itself was fundamentally horrid and yet never-ending, and how I could at best hope I might forget the existential horror at the root of reality for a little while longer.

Throughout this whole experience I was carrying the metaphor that whole Sacred Valley seemed to be soaked in:

Healing.

We were there to spiritually heal. To become more whole. To process our traumas and fully actualize ourselves. To heal our ancestral lineage and free our descendants of familial pain. To play our part in awakening humanity.

So there I was, writhing in Hell, aware that maybe this endless suffering was really my fault somehow for not being brave enough or not “healing” enough or something…

…and then one of the shamans came up to me and said something like this:

If you don’t face this feeling, Ayahuasca will just keep bringing you right back here.

I really don’t think she was trying to be cruel. She also had years (decades?) of experience guiding thousands of people through Ayahuasca ceremonies by that point.

That said, six years later I think her move there was at best unhelpful. The main impact on me was that I now have a clear example of someone casting a curse. To this day I cannot touch anything psychoactive without risking a return to Hell.

But I have learned a fair bit about how to face it. And it mostly came from fixing the metaphor of what “healing” is about.

Metaphor soup

The standard metaphor goes something like this:

We have an innate wholeness. But we got hit by something and were damaged. Traumatized. Emotionally bruised and cut. Those wounds still affect us today. We have to heal those wounds in order to be whole again.

But what is this “healing”? And why doesn’t it just happen automatically, the way cuts and bruises naturally heal on their own?

At that point many people switch up the metaphor. Instead of talking about wounds, we talk about energy like it’s a kind of fluid under pressure:

An emotional wound is when a feeling or energy gets stuck inside us. We learned it’s not safe to feel it, so we suppress it. We get good at suppressing it. Sort of pushing it down. But that feeling is trying to be felt so it can release its pressure, the way a good cry releases the sadness. So the compressed energy leaks out. It recruits our subconscious minds to create scenarios that will open up a pathway for the feeling to vent — or sometimes to escape abruptly, like someone pulling the trigger of a loaded gun. But then our suppression mechanisms kick in! So we’re stuck in a creation-and-resistance cycle that we can’t consciously see clearly. We get out of this by consciously venting the pressurized energy, which is to say, letting go of the resistance and feeling the stuck feelings until the pressure is fully gone.

And why would feeling stuck feelings release pressure? Why isn’t it just a physiological process, like sobbing or shaking? What is it about consciously experiencing the energy that’s so key?

Well, now we turn to a third metaphor: parenting.

That energy gets stuck in us because when we were little, we encountered a feeling that was too big for us, and we weren’t held the way we needed. That’s why we started suppressing the energy to begin with: it was all we could do at that age. We ended up with a version of ourselves at that age, a wounded inner child, sort of trapped inside us. Healing from our trauma is a matter of finding that inner little one and being the loving and supportive parent to them that they didn’t have when they needed one.

“About Fear” by Cécile Carre (image 4 of 6 from her Instagram)

There’s a lot going for this whole soup of metaphors. I’m glad we’re collectively talking about this stuff and creating tools that help.

But I think this view is meaningfully confused. It encourages people to develop “safety” but also to somehow “face their feelings” and let go of “resistance” (often assuming without checking that the “resistance” is an old coping strategy that doesn’t apply anymore). It emphasizes “regulation” in a way that’s ambiguously kind of like soothing a child but sometimes is brought into contrast with soothing. “Capacity” becomes a mysterious ability to somehow feel feelings without getting overwhelmed, which is kind of related to safety but is kind of something different. It also implies that “getting triggered” should be a good thing, and that the problem is actually from trying to calm down before all the emotional energy has fully released. And people using this model often swing back and forth between whether “release” is (a) a physical and automatic process (like crying) that the body just does or (b) a reference to consciously experiencing the trapped emotions.

I think this confusion is part of why there can be shamans with tens of thousands of hours of practice guiding people through “emotional releases” or “reparenting” or whatever and still be deeply unskillful. I think it’s also why so many “seekers” can go through decades of “healing” but still struggle with basic stuff like keeping a job or being emotionally available in a romantic relationship.

I think they’re aiming at the wrong target.

It’s not that you’ve got a bunch of energy stuck inside you that has to vent. As though you’re a damaged child who needs conscious attention in order to heal and return to some ideal fixed state.

It’s more like, life is energy movement. And sometimes we discover a need to move more energy than we yet know how.

Building a safe path

Here’s what I think is a more coherent metaphor:

When we build our skyscrapers tall enough, eventually lightning will strike.

Photo by Timo Volz on Unsplash

That’s part of what we sign up for when our architecture reaches for the sky. It’s not that there’s something wrong with all that energy being stored in the clouds. It’s not God’s pent-up trauma that needs to be released. It’s just a fact: if we reach high enough, we’ll encounter the intense power that was always there.

We solve this by sticking a lightning rod on top and wiring it to the ground.

Wdchk, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

This setup creates a channel that can handle all that explosive power. Without it, lightning travels through the building and destroys it. The bricks and wires and so on just can’t take that kind of voltage. But if we build a pathway for the energy, it prefers that pathway. It safely travels around the fragile urban spire.

Now that we know all this, we have basically three options:

1. We can put lightning rods on our skyscrapers.

2. We can let lightning destroy our tallest buildings sometimes.

3. We can avoid building things that high.

So if we want to sustainably reach for the sky, we have to build channels for the overwhelming power we now know lives up there.

Electric sensation

I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of reframing “healing” this way.

We run into problems because as we grow, we sometimes encounter more intensity than we know how to handle. We get “struck by lightning”.

This can be devastating, but as long as it doesn’t kill us we can usually recover. Maybe scarred, sometimes with some serious loss, but we can repair at least some of the damage and carry on.

The problem is that there was an origin of that intensity. The “lightning” came from somewhere. Which means it can strike again.

So we have three options:

1. We can learn to safely channel that energy when it arises.

2. We can just expect we’ll be devastated sometimes and take the hit.

3. We can avoid those parts of reality. Staying small. Never reaching for the dangerous sky.

One way to stay small is to increase resistance — but here I mean something analogous to electrical resistance. We can try to be less conductive to energy. Sort of hoping that the intense power won’t try to go through us and will pick some other path. Kind of like wearing rubber shoes in a lightning storm.

And we can shrink away from “storms”. Avoiding contact with the overwhelming voltage. Making a habit of “staying inside”.

That’s a totally fine option. Sometimes it’s even the best option!

But it reduces how much we can explore. What we can do. How we can grow.

A more expansive strategy is to build up channels that can handle the flow of intensity.

I find this to be a helpful way to think about “building capacity”. Instead of the ability to hold energy, we can talk about ability to conduct it. How much power can move through your body before you “blow a fuse”? When an intense current of sensation blasts through you, how much (“electrical”) resistance does it hit? Can you let the current “burn” the resistance off and purify the channels? Or do you need to increase that resistance to diminish the current for a while? How smoothly can the intensity flow through you?

I’m now under the impression that “emotional releases” work for me when they do because they strengthen my body’s ability to move that emotion whenever it arises. It’s less like venting a pressure and more like mastering a skill. My body changes shape and becomes healthier, stronger, more capable of conducting ever larger currents of sensation.

Like with “venting anger”: I find it’s less important that I “get it out” and more that I learn how to move angry energy through my body without getting tight or collapsing or losing awareness of my surroundings. Then when I get angry, I don’t have to choose between (a) pushing it down or (b) letting it take me over.

So when I approach intensity this way and I’m hit with some kind of “lightning”, it doesn’t have to overwhelm me anymore. I might even be able to use it. My whole being knows just what to do.

Riding the lightning

For about a year, the threat of re-experiencing “Hell” the way I did on Ayahuasca would throw me into panic attacks. The last one of those was December 2024. No “plant medicines” needed. Just some journaling and a bit of meditation.

(That’s part of what scared me so much: it felt like that state could just come crashing into me at any moment. Once it slammed into me while I was just taking a shower!)

But the last time it tried, I’d built up my capacity to move the intensity. Instead of knotting up like a tight ball, I could breathe and expand. Opening up the pathway from the “lighting rod” to the “ground”.

It was still pretty overwhelming. But it didn’t blow a fuse or make me collapse. And I didn’t go into a panic attack. I felt the urge, like a temptation to cramp. And I just… breathed into it instead. Expanded through it. Let the lightning blast through me.

I think the metaphor soup I referred to before can explain what happened just fine. It’d go something like this: Since December I’d worked on my capacity to hold my terrified inner child when he started “crying”. He could feel my solidity and had room to release some of those too-big feelings. That let me integrate some of the original trauma and start the healing process.

But that isn’t what it felt like. And it’s not how I thought about it as I built up my inner resources.

I “built capacity” in part by going to a punching bag. I worked on explosively moving energy with breath and expansive awareness. Being neither gentle nor tight. Letting power flow through me. Relaxing to open up the spots inside my body where the sensation would “catch”. Growing my ability to blast the bag with enormous ferocity while not harming myself at all.

Photo by Pete Alexopoulos on Unsplash

When the existential horror crashed into me this last time, I felt the urge to go tight — and my body recognized it. It’s the squeezing, exhausting thing that happens when I’m trying too hard to hit the bag. I breathed, and opened up, and looked straight through the Gates of Hell, and faced it with the spirit of “I can do this.”

And honestly it just wasn’t that bad. It was immensely intense, but actually kind of sweet.

There’s a related bit of theology in parts of Christianity. They sometimes say that the beatific Light of Heaven and the searing Fires of Hell are precisely the same: they’re both Love, just received differently. The difference is entirely in how the person views the Glory of God. Do they resist it and turn away from it, or do they openly receive it and allow it to enter and transform them?

That thought feels a bit like a poem that captures something about the experience for me.

I get the impression that lots of folk these days are focused on “healing” as though they need to return to some Edenic state of wholeness, and then everything will be okay. Kind of hitting “undo” on a bunch of what has happened to them.

But I don’t think that’s what life is made of. I think it’s made of learning. I want to be transformed by what I encounter. That’s part of being vitally alive.

Rather, I want to know I can meet and move through challenge. That I can deal with the enormous power I encounter as I grow and reach for the sky.