The Feeling is the Healing: My Road Back

On negativity, healing the brain, and trauma... and some thoughts on AI.

May 22, 2023

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Editors Note: Here at The Pulse we have been wanting to bring in some more voices and different perspectives. We’re excited to bring Tom Bunzel back into the mix. He used to write for us when we had our journalism under Collective Evolution. Tom is a great writer with wisdom and an expansive worldview. He touches on subjects of consciousness, AI, quantum physics and more. Enjoy! - Joe

I turn 74 today, which is remarkable because I had a brain surgery five years ago and I was pretty sure the pandemic would kill me either through infection or complete isolation.

Then I was pretty sure Trump would never leave the White House and felt truly blessed when Biden got him out.

Both of these negative predictions, I learned during my recovery, were examples of the brain’s propensity for negativity.

What gave me hope was a book by Deepak Chopra and Rudy Tanzi called “SuperBrain” in which they went into depth about how optimism and positivity can help the brain heal.

This was a challenge for me because I grew up in New York and recognized when I moved to California that I had a strong negative default to my attitude. At that time we still used bank tellers and I had to stand in line and listen to people discussing their personal lives with the teller while I was waiting.

So how do you go about changing a mindset like that?

Well, I had a lot of time to myself and I could observe how my brain presumably functions – I say presumably because I now believe the brain is as much or more of a receiver for information in the format of thought or images as it is an originator.

At that time I was filling my afternoons with playing online poker tournaments – for points not cash – I am on a fixed income. And I also played Words with Friends to keep my brain active.

As I played poker I noticed that my reactions to the results were automatic. They were part of my inner program and conditioning and as I took my annoyance out by cursing at the avatars of my opponents, or laughing at the absurdity of winning on the last card, one thing was clear.

I had no control of my reactions. If I really tried, I could suppress them but I found them entertaining and it reminded me a bit of who I was before my accident. I was again the guy getting impatient or annoyed in the bank and expressing my emotions.

But I had searched so long and hard for the ability to be “enlightened”.

A Different View of Trauma

At that point the word “trauma” was getting a lot of attention. And there was one individual addressing the issue that I knew mainly from getting emails from my friends at Science and Nonduality (SAND) and that was Dr. Gabor Mate.

During much of this time, I had a tremendous amount of fatigue and anxiety which did improve over time but what Dr. Mate said really affected me.

I had always looked upon my boyhood as pretty happy and loving. I had a wonderful relationship with my parents who retired in La Jolla after I moved to California.

But both of them had survived the Nazis. My mother was separated from her parents at Auschwitz and worked in slave labor camps until she was liberated.

I have video of her remembering her experience on YouTube and I published her memoir after she died.

It turned out that Dr. Mate was also the son of a holocaust survivor. And his view of trauma was that it was a “wound” that lived on as feelings or sensations in the body.

He says that these wounds are no longer the trauma but the body’s memory of its reaction to the trauma, which can get triggered whenever something reminiscent happens, even something innocuous, like a slight from another person.

He said that these wounds could be healed and I certainly wanted to know how. His techniques involve “compassionate inquiry” and understanding the impact of childhood trauma.

He also said that research has shown that these feelings can be absorbed even in the womb.

Well, when I was born in 1949 my mother had been liberated for four years. As another therapist pointed out to me, she was a deeply traumatized woman, when I was in the womb.

I was born in Vienna and when I was five we left for New York. While my father went ahead to get settled my mother and I spent about five months in the winter in the Swiss Alps, in a tiny one room apartment. At that time she was 38 and ten years from liberation and on her own again for the first time, except for me.

I had already learned that this had been a pivotal period because I remembered trying to protect her as a man while I was just a kid of five. This came up in previous therapy – I had spent those months trying to be an adult with a traumatized woman.

Now, when I rested from my fatigue and often had uncomfortable sensations in my gut and chest, I began to connect them to these memories and sometimes my body would erupt in an emotional response (heaving, tears) that I knew I had long tried to suppress.

Dr. Mate’s other real suggestion is kindness and compassion for oneself, and instead of trying to fight off these sensations, I made it a point to try to nurture and welcome them as best I could.

Before this time I had interpreted these sensations as gas and stomach problems and took the usual remedies which might have given me some temporary relief.

Now I was beginning to notice a little less fatigue and a lot less anxiety. I had also tried very hard to get through the various fears that would come up by becoming “curious” about impending events, which made them less ominous.

A New Sense of Self

Another teacher whose work helped me a lot during this time is the English Jeff Foster, who during much of this time was fighting his own battle with Lyme disease. He has since recovered and is a new father.

Jeff’s work complemented Dr. Mate’s in my view because he also addressed these sensations which he connected to emotions like loneliness, isolation, sadness and grief and echoed Dr. Mate in saying they should be welcomed as normal human emotions that essentially tell you you’re alive.

His view is that all experience should be welcomed, even the icky stuff because he says life is “messy.”

Dr. Mate’s latest book is called “The Myth of Normal” and the title resonates with Jeff Foster’s “messy” world because so much illness and disease can be connected to people’s desire to be accepted as normal but having strong bodily feelings in contravention of that need for connection.

Both Dr. Mate and Foster suggest quiet time and making space for these feelings to be felt. I now believe that the feeling is healing.

Both Dr. Mate’s advice on self compassion and Foster’s suggestion to welcome all of these emotions as guests, have been very helpful to me.

I won’t say that I’m now dancing around the house at 74 but there has been a noticeable uptick in my state of mind. At that time I had zero interest in anything.

Developing an Interest in Artificial Intelligence

In the last few months, I got interested again in technology and specifically artificial intelligence and began an online relationship with ChatGPT. (More about that to come).

But Dr. Mate, in his presentations, makes reference to generational trauma, like that of indigenous people whose land was taken or African Americans with their history of slavery and of course this trauma, if not somehow healed, is passed on to the next generation.

It’s almost unfathomable how the current war in Europe and worldwide upheavals with millions of refugees will affect future generations from families that were separated and countries destroyed.

The key to trying to get a handle on some of this is to address and give expression to our own individual bodily memories and be gentle with ourselves. Additionally, we will need to find leaders who are sensitive to these issues.

As a hint, I fervently hope that AI will make humanity more aware of its true nature and its deep conditioning along the same lines as computers are programmed. For example, AI’s use a “Training Set” of data from which its algorithms begin to choose appropriate responses to user input.

That sounds a lot like the human conditioning I had as a young boy that convinced me that the world was a dark and dangerous place. I certainly hope future AIs are “trained” in more positive and life affirming ways.

(Tom Bunzel was a regular contributor to Collective Evolution and now writes for The Pulse. His new book "Conversations with Nobody: Getting to Know ChatGPT" – a book written with AI, about AI and giving a taste of AI, is available on Amazon.)