Stuck in Time
By: Zainab Amadahy
The Mayan ancestors were masters of time, mathematics and astronomy. They had at least 50 calendars, most depicting cosmological cycles that Earth experiences over vast eras of space time. These cycles are characterized by energetic shifts and serve as a kind of background music to our solar system’s galactic journey. One could say they are the theme songs to our collective life force. In the same way that we can choose to dance rhythmically to our playlist, dance out of sync, or sit and watch others dance, the energetic rhythms of this current era offer us the song of expanded awareness. We can choose to fear, ignore, or align with it.
The Maya had a clear understanding of the impact of trauma, whether experienced yesterday, years ago, or centuries past. Instead of dancing to the rhythm of the moment, those of us carrying collective and ancestral trauma, dance to the memory of discordant songs, earworms repeating over and over, like a scratched record. When our trauma is activated, we go backward around the circle, subconsciously referencing the original wound, even when it is not a helpful response to the present moment. In other words, trauma leaves us stuck in time.
Traveling in a circle, backward or forward, is not progress. It is not evolution. You go round and round, returning over and over to familiar places you’ve visited before, unable to offer a different response to life, one that breaks you out of the cycle. If that cycle drops you into victimhood, harming, depression, judgment, or saviorhood it’s likely to create conflict – within, between, and among.
Luckily, the Earth and other planets in our solar system don’t circle around the galaxy. They don’t speed along a linear pathway either. Because Earth revolves (re-evolves) around the Sun and as our whole solar system re-volves around the Cosmological Navel (Galactic Centre), we actually spiral through space. With this spiralling, Earth, and those of us upon her, never travel through the same point in space time twice. Thus, in every moment of our existence, the shower of cosmological energy in which we swim always offers new information. Hence, every activation of past wounds we experience arrives with the promise of opportunity to explore the story from a different vantage point, deepen our understandings, and formulate new questions.
With every completed cycle around the spiral of either our galactic journey or the smaller healing spirals within it, our flower of awareness blossoms wider. We become conscious of more and more of reality. Specific healing practices may vary but the process is the same: we feel, sense, make meaning, release, transform and create safety so that the soul fragment that fled at the time of wounding (decades, centuries or millennia ago) can return.
Foundational to many global Indigenous worldviews is the idea that each of us has chosen to limit ourselves to the material realm for this short lifetime because that’s the experience that most excited us. As preborn souls, we intended to experience every exciting feeling on the roller coaster of human emotions. We understood that in experiencing the ups and downs of life we would be motivated and inspired to transform, create, re-create, and evolve. Evolution is a Universal Impulse.
On arrival into the material world, we forgot all that. But some of us are starting to remember.
***
