Inner healing as implementation of Karma.

Most of the people alive on the planet today have been emotionally wounded, one way or another, in infancy and childhood. Many of us are trying to heal.

What are our chances? Are we to be caught forever unsuccessfully fighting our bodies' defences?
Or is there an inner drive towards wholeness and healing, which operates in our minds and bodies if we can create the conditions to allow it to occur? Personally I believe there is. I like to call this my "inner healer." My understanding is that not only our physical bodies have an "inner healer" but our psyches do too.

When we injure our bodies, they start to heal themselves, without us having to tell them to do it. If we cut ourselves, special "soldier" cells rush to the scene of the accident to deal with any infection. The blood thickens and clots, so we don't bleed to death, a scab forms for protection, and underneath that, new healthy tissue grows. It seems that the psyche works in the same way, and some of the most recent brain research is confirming this.

I believe that our minds are also "set to heal" if we don't stop them. When we go through overwhelming pain, especially in childhood, the memories of the pain, and of the unmet need beneath it, are "repressed" or "gated" in the brain so that we won't be overwhelmed and literally die. This is especially critical with early traumas such as birth, separation of the newborn from the mother, surgery, sexual molestation, and neglect, anger or violence from our parents. In fact it applies to all physical or emotional pain that is too severe to be integrated at the time.

Once the danger has passed, the mind tries to "bring it back up" to connect it to consciousness for healing. This happens in many ways, quite naturally, and if we would just allow it to happen to children, later therapy might not be needed at all.

Our dream lives illustrate this too. I have noticed that material that I need to work on often starts emerging in my dreams before I am even conscious that I am working on it. Some dreams have been like long, progressive "serial stories" going deeper and deeper over time, to bring the pain to the surface for healing.

This happened in connection with sadistic torture I was put through as a toddler. It came up in night terrors for years, with more and more insights over time. Finally I had a dream in which I "connected" to the body memory, and the bruises reappeared on my body and lasted for about a week, with no other primal activity apart from the "primal dream." That would imply that our "inner healer" works even when we are asleep.

There has been a lot of talk lately about the fact that the brain becomes "hard wired" very early in life by our very first experiences, beginning in the womb, and including birth and the baby and toddler years, by which time many pathways in the brain are "grooved" and become neural circuits that are set for life. This certainly sounds like bad news.

A lecture by France Janov in which she cites studies by recent researchers, including Allan Schore, on the "plasticity" of the brain. She says they have found that if we totally relive the traumatic event from the past, with the full emotion felt when it occurred, new brain circuits will open up and begin to operate, after all these years. Once again the "inner healing" process is at work.

This description is well demonstrated by the process of implementation of Karma.

At first the  dreams, desires, prophetic dreams, unrealized desires of former lives are coming to you, and then you begin implement the actions.

You think that you choose and act?

So  whence come dreams and desires?