Resentment, the worst of all patterns

Especially bad in terms of rigidity and persistence across our lives. It often initially feels protective and even empowering, but ends up poisoning us.

Hope you can see that we all have some resentment brewing right now. Most of us accept and often encourage resentment. We are eager to share our grudges with our friends, family members, coworkers, anybody that crosses our path, and the world.

We use social media to spread our resentment, to engage in invisible battles with people we rarely see or will never meet. Reminds me of Don Quixote’s resentful and hallucinatory battle with windmills. Just like a Quixote’s fake battle, resentment is toxic but also useless.

Resentment is the fast food of emotional-cognitive patterns: easy to grab on the go, feels satisfying and rightful, and over time it destroys us physically, mentally, energetically, and even spiritually. It’s cheap and simple, keeps your attention close to the target of your grudge, makes sense from your point of view, keeps you as a perpetual victim of the circumstances and unable to find a way out or through.

Let me make sure I’m clear here.

Resentment is like cigarettes; it will keep you hooked to it until the end of your life on this beautiful planet, like an addiction that you can’t resolve, unless you work adamantly through it, and commit to never ever touching the addictive object again.

The Research on Resentment

I found the word perseverative cognition, which means repeatedly mentally replaying a bitterness, basically ruminating about it, keeping the stress response elevated long after the actual event or series of events subsides, producing long and prolonged cortisol release, elevated heart rate and sustained sympathetic activation.

Resentment persists even when the threat is absent, when there is acknowledgment and correction of the behavior, when there is justice and they go to jail, and even after the subject(s) die. I was resentful towards my father, even 21 years after he died. He died in 2003, and I resented his behavior until 2024, which is when I finally caught this unconscious pattern.

The mental grudge can persist long afterwards because it turns into rumination and overtime becomes an automatic pattern.

Resentment can also transfer through generations, perhaps via genes, through behaviors, family loyalties, unconscious agreements, and burdens.

Looking at the research, the most concerning factors for health are in cardiovascular and immune outcomes. Chronic resentment produces a pattern of elevated blood pressure from sustained emotional arousal, a weakened immune system and elevated inflammation, linked to autoimmune and chronic pain conditions.

Closed-loop Thinking and Implicit Bias

Something particular about resentment that’s often missed: it keeps us locked down in a rigid and generalized perception about the subject of the resentment, which leads to implicit bias.

Each stage reinforces the next

As examples, if it’s a father or a man or a male figure, it locks us into a closed-loop thinking about men, generalizing all men, or all the male lineage, or that all men are potentially the same way, or it gets us stuck linking it all to patriarchy, colonialism, white supremacy, etc.

You can replace men with any race, gender, class, age, culture, religion, political side, education, and so on.

I don’t want to minimize the hurt that precedes resentment. Abuse is real, be it sexual, emotional, or physical. Power dynamics are real. People of color, especially Black bodies, experience a lot more abuse than white-presenting bodies. This racial bias is real and also produces outcomes that are ancestrally passed on.

Even though all that is true and painful, I have seen no research and have found no advantages in keeping resentment alive way past the events that caused it.

Again, many of these abusive behaviors are ongoing, chronic, and perhaps even constantly escalating.

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Race dynamics, class disparities, immigration rights, reproductive rights, gender injustices, and sexual abuse towards women and children are chronic symptoms of dysfunctional human behavior patterns, much more common in males, constantly occurring and perhaps never diminishing in an individuals life, so the chances of resentment dissipating can be low.

Outcomes of Unacknowledged and Unprocessed Resentment

What I am most concerned about is the physiological, emotional, mental, and even energetic and spiritual repercussions for you, as the resentful person.

I have thought a bit about the evolutionary purpose of such a complex and disturbing pattern of the brain. It seems to me the entire purpose of resentment is in keeping the person somehow “safer” by locking them into ruminating constantly about how bad their subject of resentment is, and how much disgust and frustration they produce in them, in order to create the close-loop thinking which eventually leads either to implicit bias, phobia, or both.

I think there are some very real advantages to tracking resentment as a preventative measure against future encounters with unpleasant or “bad” subjects. That evolutionary goal of resentment is wonderful if it comes with the skill to reflect on the topic, in order to feel the outrage, the disgust, the anger and frustration, with the main goal of processing and integrating the bad experience, preventing future similar encounters, and avoiding the subject altogether as much as possible.

Without observing and having time to process the effects this subject has had on us, it is nearly impossible to detect the resentment closed-loop and to decide when it is a healthy pattern and when it isn’t.

This is where things get messy on a deeper level. It might be an appropriate evolutionary pattern, but maybe it’s not useful or healthy to share it anywhere with everybody, or to hold it for a long time.

There are times and places that are good for this processing to be shared and integrated, and places where this can only escalate into a fight, more explosion or further disparity, leaving the subject of the resentment, feeling like the victim, instead of the perpetrator. Nobody learns when they feel like a victim. Receptivity is a crucial component of behavior correction.

I was so resentful towards my father that we never could have a conversation about what he did, so we never had repair, and he died not having a clue of how hurtful he was. I wondered later in life if my deep resentment was in part responsible, at least energetically, for him dying so early. With a bit of remorse, knowing I didn’t know any better, I can say confidently that my resentment fueled, in part, his illness. The stress from my resentment whenever we interacted, was probably super distressing for him, but we never talked about it.

Unacknowledged, unintegrated, and unconscious resentment is like a volcano ready to erupt, but also constantly forming and slowly spreading new lava in the landscape surrounding the crater. Remember the movie Frozen where Elsa’s resentment spreads as the entire land that surrounds the castle becomes ice?

Reminds me as well of Game of Thrones and the winter that came and never left, bringing with it all the flesh-eating zombies. Resentment is that winter, and our minds become the zombies.

Unacknowledged and unprocessed resentment can have terrible health and mental repercussions and can also lead to chronic isolation and grudge-holding, sustained anxiety, and rigid patterns of mistrust and a diminishing capacity for connection. It can also lead to mental distortions, closed-loop thinking, implicit bias, hyper vigilance, mind-reading, and assuming ill intent, even from the nicest people.

On a more energetic and body-oriented level, clients have described resentment like a burning sensation in the entire midline of the body from the chest to the pelvis. Depending on how long they have been carrying, holding, and feeding the grudge, they describe the burning sensation as ranging from a mild fiery feeling to black burned coals.

The absence of resentment does not guarantee forgiveness or resolution of the conflict. It does not imply that the subject of the grudge is now free to reenact their hurtful behavior. Absence of resentment is personal work, and it doesn’t change others’ behaviors or intentions.

Resentment prevents the integration of shock because we focus all our attention on the perpetrator, making it impossible to feel what lies beneath the grudge. The grudge replaces all other feelings.

Enmeshment and Resentment

Without knowing, we also get enmeshed with the subject of our resentment. This has been the most challenging for clients to understand. A negative bond is still a bond. Part of us won’t release the subject of our grudge, so we hold them hostage in our minds. This keeps us enmeshed with them so we don’t forget what happened.

Five questions to ponder

To simplify it, pick just one resentment per answer

Why are you still holding onto this resentment?

What are the benefits of holding this grudge?

What would happen if you let go of the resentment?

Who would you be without resenting them?

Who would they be if you did not resent them?

How I stopped resenting my father and other perpetrators (personal and collective ones)

Follow the next post for this answer and subscribe to get this writing in your email.

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I used to think the power of positive thinking was the highest goal. It makes sense. After all, what else did I have to my advantage other than my mind, dreams, and aspirations when my circumstances were rather gloomy? The law of attraction, dissociation, denial, and avoidance from confronting my circumstances were my best and most promising choices since I had very little agency, power, or privilege.

You can imagine how many times I have heard immigrant women and those stuck in domestic violence say to me they could only survive their experiences by letting their minds go into automatic (survival) mode, focusing only on the brighter side of their future, while walking straight through their challenges, like walking through hot coals, burning their feet, step by step, metaphorically and literally.

If paradise is the promise on the other side of our current hell, it might be advantageous to keep a positive mindset, even if the price we pay over time is massive. I mean these dreams start really with something great, like moving to a new country, with the possibilities to leave poverty behind, practicing yoga asanas, which is exceptional for our health, or using technology, which saves us a lot of time, but the other side is not necessarily the promise land of wealth, health or advancement, the other side contains racism, ICE, control, surveillance, profit, etc.

The fallacy is that there are way too many factors involved in our future, not just our hopes and ideas, including AI advancement dangers, class and race dynamics, privilege, genetics, ancestry, trauma, stress, the economy, cost of living, job market opportunities, our skills, capacities, health, cognitive functions, focus, physical strength and endurance, innovative capacity, grit, our age, and so on.

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The thing is, focusing our attention on positivity, without getting pulled or distracted by negative or realistic factors, has everything to do with our agency, power, privilege, and genetics over those facts, but also with our capacity. When our capacity is low, plus our privilege, genes, skills and power are low too, we cannot give attention to the challenging or dark aspects of life, or what is not beneficial. Our brain can’t do that many tasks at once, so it blurs the bad stuff, at least to save us some time. We go into foggy mode, where our cognitive processing diminishes and our imagination expands in a confused and perhaps naïve direction of positivity.

When I came to the US, I didn’t want to think about the hurdles of becoming an immigrant, of losing my identity, my family, my culture, my safety, and the familiar. I needed to focus on the positive side of my decision: the new opportunities and exciting new beginnings. The roadblocks, of course, receded into the background of my attention.

Once I landed and stayed in the US, rapidly all the challenges of immigrating appeared in front of me. Suddenly, I stumbled, as if I had landed at the base of a gigantic mountain; and I quickly realized I wasn’t ready for the challenge. I didn’t fully grasp the sacrifices involved in leaving everything behind to start from scratch at 30, in a new country, with a new identity, no friends or family, and no clue where to begin or how to.

Of course, my positive focus had totally shielded me from reality, leaving me very unprepared and blindsided. Suddenly, anxiety, worry, and depression hit me after the adrenaline dissipated. I finally landed on my critical brain. Quickly, I started facing all the issues I had put aside; all the negative aspects of immigrating to the US as a 30-year-old Latin American woman came to haunt me, like a ghost tired of hiding.

We in the West have many diagnoses to explain the phenomenon that happened to me. I thought I had anxiety and depression, but in reality, what I had was an abrupt download in my brain post adrenaline, of all the blurred aspects of my new chapter, all the limitations and stresses that had been foggy became sharp.

I had faced none of these aspects at all before this moment; unprepared by not understanding any of the troubles of becoming an immigrant in the US, especially as a BIPOC woman. All the bad stuff came rushing forward all at once. The way this can happen when someone we love suddenly leaves, without us ever noticing the signals of their imminent departure, or a sudden death of a love one, when we have never confronted the fact that we will die one day, and that our loved one’s will too. Our brain resists thinking about the bad stuff: people leaving us or dying, immigration issues, technocracy dangers, Yoga gurus, but eventually we must face the shock of all these things, of our inability to process this stuff.

Of course, we should avoid concentrating too much on the negative aspects of life, that’s why we have this feature in our brain. This would be definitely detrimental to ourselves and make it impossible to build relationships, to take risks, have adventures, or learn new things. Extremes are never on our side. I’m talking about a balance in between positive and negative perspectives, which is related to discernment.

The brain is so interesting in terms of trauma and memory processing. Our adrenaline willingness to walk on burning coals while concentrating on positive results is probably relatable to frogs happily warming up on a stove while the water slowly heats toward the boiling point.

We need to restore our capacity to face our current problems. Capacity means more embodiment and less deception, less avoidance, and more ability to connect with ourselves at that deeper level of knowing. There are always positive and negative aspects and outcomes to our choices. We can look at both sides to have a more complete picture; it makes things more wholesome.

Avoiding things makes little sense when we think about nature. In the wild, we have to be informed in order to make the right decisions. Let’s say we were going on a road trip or a trail hike, we want to know how the trail or road is, if it’s safe or dangerous, how long it takes to navigate it through, what is the weather pattern in the way, what animals we might encounter or how many people. We need to know if we need a tent or there are available places to stay overnight, if we need mosquito repellent, or bear spray, where to dispose of our trash, how much food to take, if there will be signs or guidance along the way, what happens in emergencies, etc.

We need to build capacity to confront the uncomfortable. Without it, we can’t recover from facing what’s difficult or disturbing. We need to make sure we can recover our sanity after we walk through the fire of awareness, discernment, and even painful realizations. But if we never confront the disturbances that lure around us, we will definitely not build stamina and strength, courage and resilience, and instead, we will stay fragile, scared, defensive, combative, dissociated and biased.

I’ve been talking about what shock does to the brain. Unprocessed shock is at the core of trauma, and if left unprocessed, which is often the case, it accumulates as a phenomenon I call fog. It’s a mixture of dissociation, confusion, and mental disorganization at the levels of perception, attention and even behavior. Shock accumulated becomes the fog, which overtime alters our perception, affecting our attention and changing our behavior in particular directions. One of these directions is murky and toxic positivity. We think we are accurate in our perception and attention capacities, but this is so far from the truth. Welcome to Wonderland, where everything you see is a shadow of reality.

How can we land back out of the fog and the toxic positivity vortex? We have to deal with the accumulated shock, process it, and find the patterns associated with it in the body, in our perception, attention, and behavior. I am, of course, especially interested in the patterns being held in the body because it does not keep any secrets. Everything is right here in us, showing up in real time. We can decode our body language in so many ways, including the language of organs, chakras, meridians, fascia, and more. Whichever way we take, the body is the accurate map; and everything else is not as real or as accurate.

Steps to bring more capacity to confront all sides of reality. This list is in no particular order, but I enjoyed connecting each number to an area of the body and an energy center from a yogic perspective:

1.Centeredness and strength: steadiness, firmness at the root, unwavering determination, that we can indeed walk through the fire of our challenges and survive them (unless we die, and that’s always a possibility).

2.Embodied creativity: Inside us is a wellspring of creative solutions for our challenges, but we have to train it to experience it.

3.Discernment and power: the capacity to examine things and determine the right actions to take, with the conviction that we are actually strong and can do stuff with our own will.

4.Courage and heart: doing hard things and getting to the other side is doable and good for us, with a compassionate approach and humanity towards our struggles.

5.Truth and communication: speaking from our center, truth can come forward and communication can be clear, direct, and assertive.

6.Vision: dreaming and visualizing in our minds the future we all deserve, a future that includes all of us, not just the most privileged.

7.Hope and resilience: that we will learn and come out whole from this experience, that everything is constantly changing even if we don’t recognize it, and that a deep order is at the center of life.

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Shock occurs when physiological regulation is unsteady and compromised, causing the body’s internal communication to break down, disrupting the flow of fluid, nerve impulses, and life force. The body can experience this in two general ways, depending on how the nervous system and physiology organize the survival response.

• Outward Energy Pattern-disperse and fragmenting: where energy scatters away from the body’s center, fragmenting, expanding, in an incoherent, ungrounded, and lost way. The boundaries between self and environment become porous. In its acute form, it feels explosive, like when a ball hits a glass from inside the house and the pieces shatter outward. In its chronic form, it feels like a gradual erosion, like the way the ocean erodes a cliff over time, taking pieces of it slowly until the whole cliff begins, over the years, to disappear into the sea. A low-grade sense of not quite being inside oneself, of floating, of pieces that don’t cohere.

• Inward Energy Pattern-constricted and collapsed: the shock drives our energy, our fascia and nervous system into an inward, contractive, compressive or implosive direction. The energy withdraws from the periphery and compresses toward the core, or into a specific area of the body. There is a tightening, a bracing, a folding inward. Aliveness recedes either abruptly or gradually. In its acute form it feels like a sudden implosion or caving, similar to how we might rapidly compress clay into a tight ball. In its chronic form, it becomes a gradual armoring, becoming dense, tight, and immovable, the way a house foundation slowly sinks into the ground, persistently and almost imperceptibly. Here, certain areas of the body feel perpetually shut down, heavy, or absent from the inside.

Both are attempts, however dysregulating, to protect our body from what it could not fully meet.

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Here’s a clearer way to picture it. Think of a stone dropped into still water. Depending on the force and the nature of the impact, two things can happen:

• It could send ripples outward: the water disperses in expanding rings, disturbing the surface further and further from the center, losing coherence as it spreads.

• It could pull downward: the water funnels inward and down, creating a depression, a vortex, a temporary vacuum at the point of contact.

Over time, something replaces the shock, slower and more diffuse. Eventually a fog layer takes over the shock, as if a cloud slowly landed on top of it, or moss has grown around it. This is likely a protective mechanism the brain elaborates to manage the expenditure of energy that shock produces. The fog moves the shock out of awareness, pushing it into the background, and allows us to continue with the demands of daily life, even if it leaves us feeling a bit off. After all, it would be impossible to function if the shock kept surfacing or intruding into awareness constantly.

But this is exactly what happens with PTSD, panic attacks, intrusive thoughts, and intrusive memories. The fog cloud suddenly opened, exposing the shock layer again. This sudden exposure caused the implosive and compressed or explosive and fragmented vitality, along with the gone memories or feelings, to rush rapidly to the forefront. Combat veterans suffer this often, as do sexual assault victims, and many other survivors of deep traumatic experiences that happened abruptly, like a car accident, or during a period when the brain could store shock and memories simultaneously, like veterans experience.

This is a lot to take in, but here it goes:

1. Trauma produces shock, which becomes unprocessed trauma.

2. Fog hides the shock and becomes the unprocessed shock.

3. We have to lift the fog, find the shock and process the physical, emotional and energetic patterns of the inward or outward motion from the shock.

We need to know we have shock below the awareness, because shock is the driver of the system. And we need to understand that shock in its chronic form and unprocessed, will eventually have a fog layer on top of it, in order to forget the shock and carry on with life. The fog serves as a distraction from the shock and also creates disembodiment.

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Ways to integrate this information or journal prompts:

• What is invisible to me, but is driving my behavior and life, pulling me away from myself, my essence, my embodiment and nature?

• How can I know myself more, beyond this fog and shock?

• What can I learn from the fog and the shock? What are my lessons here?

• If I were not foggy, what would I do differently?

• What am I afraid to find if I lift the fog and process the shock?

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Share Magdalena Weinstein

Nowadays it is hard to discern what is beneficial from what isn’t. But I think it’s always been that way; we have been flooded from the beginning, just in different ways. I don’t think it is useful to blame the West, or colonialism. It’s a waste of time. This issue of feeling overwhelmed, of things constantly amplifying and exhausting us, of lack of integration, is at the heart of how we process memory, how we integrate experiences, from the beginning. Humans have been an extremely creative species, from the dawn of time. We try stuff, we learn quickly, we do it differently, we advance again and again, we ally with other humans, animals, plants, elements and systems, and we keep going. The cost of that? Lack of integration.

Related to lack of integration: since my beginning journey training in Somatic Experiencing and other modalities of trauma treatment, I have had a very challenging time making sense of and sorting the different languages and framework usages in each model, and could not fathom how they could be integrated or used in unison.

One of the reasons I started developing my Instagram account around the time I was in my SE training (2019) was my desire to synthesize the concepts I was learning and to support clients and students in having more accessibility to them and being able to integrate the information, to make sense of it, as each concept felt like a giant tangled ball of ideas and principles to work with, hanging in the ether of the mind but not solidly embodied.

I've been desiring integration all along, since my beginning on this journey, but perhaps also since the beginnings of my life. I might be one of those humans who cares about synthesis, integration and unraveling things more than others. I don't know what that means or why. I just do. I literally crave it.

While being an SE student and assistant, and later on trying to apply these concepts to my work with clients, in workshops and classes, it was kind of frustrating to synthesize and integrate the concepts, but also a good challenge, as I also have a BA in design. In a few years I made a ton of graphics to make sense of Somatic Experiencing and Polyvagal Theory concepts, parts work, attachment theory, and more, developing graphics on many fundamental SE and nervous system concepts including the cycle of regulation, SIBAM, trauma and compensations, types of perceptions, types of traumas, etc. You can find all these graphics in my IG account if you go to my profile and right below to Graphics.

Those graphics had a very important role in my personal journey of organizing, unraveling and understanding the current and rapidly changing Western approaches to trauma treatment, the science behind it, and the earlier and later research on nervous system regulation. I think this background was an essential step in my skills development. I'm grateful for all the knowledge I acquired; I could not be where I am now without it, and my work could not be as effective without it.

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Biodynamic Craniosacral Perspectives

Later on, once I started training in Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, those concepts started to move a little bit to the background, in order to give room to a more subtle and less obvious or tangible way of seeing the body, from an energetic, fluids, tissues, nerves and bones perspective. I had been on the energetic journey before when I learned and practiced Reiki a couple of decades back, and my fascination with energy work only got spiked up by learning the biodynamic perspectives of touch work.

This journey took me to a wider but at the same time more atomical perspective, a subtle and perhaps more ancient level of comprehension, where what was more relevant was the relational field of the treatment than the treatment itself.

Among the many things I learned to refine was where I placed my attention and orientation: was I way too forward and clingy, or too removed and back? Was I too spacey or too rigid in grounding? I also learned the nuances of the type and level of touch I was giving to the body parts of my client: was that too much or too little, too tight or too loose, too close or too far, too clenched in my hands and arms or too soft, too involved or too removed? And about my posture, how tense or relaxed my whole body was, slowly letting go of concepts, ideas and preconceptions about the person in front of me, letting go of my knowledge about trauma, letting go of my learnings about trauma resolution, about defensive responses, about discharge, keeping all the mental noise (even if it was trauma recovery knowledge) in the background while focusing on a more fluid and energetic way of awareness, but at the same time centered and grounded.

My teacher would say: come back to the midline of your body and now widen your awareness, two opposing instructions, in order to soften the effort, and be able to gently work with the smallest and most subtle changes in the body, like CSF flow in the brain or small lymph and blood changes, and even staying open and receptive enough to work with the embryological (and beyond) field of the person.

Trauma, Distortions, Elements and Layers

I have named 5 layers in my last post that seem to happen over time with traumatic experiences. I have thought about these experiences from different modalities, Western and Eastern perspectives, and they match in an interesting way. These 5 layers are seen in degrees in SE, in BCST, in Kathy Kain’s work, and many other models, including Yoga philosophy (5 koshas), Polarity (5 elements), Chinese medicine (5 elements), and Kabbalah (5 klippot). Staying in my lane of training and experience, I am going to focus on Western and yogic approaches, as there are enough parallels already, but I am learning Polarity and the 5 elements in Chinese medicine will be included eventually.

I am curious about kabbalah as part of my ancestral lineage, and the parallels with Yoga concepts like chakras and koshas, but probably won’t dive on them much, only will name them occasionally.

I hope this combined approach can help you understand trauma at a richer and even more interconnected level. Most of these understandings take slow, patient and gentle time to track in ourselves and others, and even longer to find supportive directions for them.

I will slowly (titrated) introduce an element or kosha to a layer of this sequence, in order to avoid overwhelm and allow integration. My intention is to support you in finding out first where you are in any given moment in the sequence, in the kosha or in the element. I would throw in here that I think in general the global human field is stuck at the first and second layer, pretty much unable to go beyond them. But each person is different; even if the field in general is unable to flow, we can individually process and integrate from our side, which helps and informs the field and allows some movement in the whole.

A lot of somatic trauma work is basically trying to bring us from the first to the third layer and land in the fourth. If we process or discuss too much the first layer, like in talk therapy, we exacerbate or irritate it, and that causes the layer to become more rigid or increase. Interestingly, anything done too much in one layer, no matter which, increases the intensity and rigidity of that layer. That's perhaps why trauma treatments can be so complex. That’s why obsession on any layer exacerbates it, but does not bring more flexibility across the layers. This is basically the principle of “energy wells”. I will come back to this concept; for now just remember it, if you can.

Here is the sequence again.

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Some of these posts or part of these posts will be only for paying subscribers, especially when I describe mechanisms in more detail. I am not currently offering classes or group work, as I have a busy practice, a busy family life, I'm writing a book, and doing trainings in Polarity and bodywork. If you are not currently a client, and/or are a client and want to dive deeper into this work outside of sessions, this is the place to do it. Thanks for supporting my writings, I really appreciate it.

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Share Magdalena Weinstein Unweaving

This was a big power hack. We did not need to actually be the strongest person; we just needed everyone else to get confused (foggy) and appease, fawn, and follow our directions, and that the gods, the spirits in nature, and the invisible forces of the universe had our back, and if they followed our instructions, they would have their back too. Lies and manipulation became the technology. That discovery expanded and institutionalized, building power systems through ownership that eventually became formalized by sedentarism and followed by “rulers” like elites and kings, later becoming more complex and sophisticated through laws and systems like castes, classes, races, birthrights, wars, conquerors, nations, etc. Nowadays, it is hard to tell what is true and what is a lie. It is also very hard to track or even exit deceptive behavior and manipulation.

Is manipulation what mostly moves the wheel nowadays? Probably. Are there ways to exit its trap? Yes, but not easily these days, as we are finding out. It wasn’t easy to exit a cult for me 10 years ago, and now cults are not even the most influential system we have going on. We have AI at our hands, the most obvious and notorious deceptive tool we could ever imagine.

Enter the body

I have been studying the body and embodiment practices for some decades. Going back to 2000, it gives me a bit of an advantage when I look back at the beginning process of realizing how disembodied I was before I started my journey back to my self and my body. And how tumultuous this beginning was, as I became a full time yoga teacher, travelled to India for months, and followed a yoga guru for a decade and a half after that. And again, that is part of the same pattern, which is that no matter how much embodiment I tried to pursue, I was always immersed in a mental spell, or perhaps it was a deceptive trail, but whatever it was, I was way too foggy, or had too much shock to even notice it. I will interchangeably switch from spell to deception often. Interestingly enough, the spell or deception was able to hide how foggy things were, and the fog was able to hide the disembodiment, and the disembodiment was able to hide the body, with its traumas and shadows.

We cannot know what we cannot notice, like the fog machines used in churches that supposedly enhance the light and atmosphere and create something called “worshiptainment,” like a concert vibe for worship purposes. The fog machine is yet another distraction from the fact that the whole thing is deceptive and moves people away from the body. This is a full mouthful, but I really want you to get the sense of what I am unweaving in these writings. I was dissociated for so many reasons, including the fact that I was conceived and lived in a dictatorial atmosphere for 17 years plus 9 months in utero. That was the bottom of the iceberg for me. And the experience was okay and unnoticed because my system had created that disembodiment purposefully so I would not have to suffer even more from overwhelming, unprocessed and unitegrated memories.

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The spell or deception was way beyond my own body and my own experiences, as I came to understand decades later, because for a while everything was about me, deeply personal and isolated and pointing to me as the center of the whole matrix, but in a very negative way, the way children and babies feel. I will discuss conception trauma and undifferentiated trauma later in other posts. Everything was about me and how I had done this or that, how I could make things better if I did x, y, or z.

I followed gurus, I followed Buddhist teachers, Zen and Tibetan, I followed a cult leader, I followed mentors’ directions, but nothing made the feeling of dread and anxiety about everything and every move I made better, until I realized I had to stop following all the people I was following for decades, because they exacerbated the feeling, especially of guilt, for maybe not doing the yoga pose right, not doing or saying the thing they asked me to do the right way, not understanding the nature of reality, spirituality, trauma, and the body the way they understood it, the way they wanted me to understand it, the way they believed it. And eventually I realized that no matter how much effort, diligence, and devotion I put into following their way, things went the way they went, which is my way, regardless.

I had teachers, mentors, gurus, and peers who had outbursts at me, scolded me, blamed me in front of a class or group of people, mortified me in trainings, shamed me covertly or openly, discussed my failures and flaws, and attempted at all costs to capture and control me. And I was in a fog. I could not tell what was right and wrong. I sometimes had a feeling that things were a bit off, but I kept blaming myself and my flaws. Until little by little I woke up from the deception and the fog that it caused. First, realizing I did not have to put up with scoldings and bad moods, controlling and obsessive people, including covert and overt narcissists. Little by little I have been waking up to the spells and layers of deception in unsettled human behavior and my own fog underneath them, and the more I do that, the more I turn to the body and nature as supportive systems. At this point, any behavior that looks too love-bomby or emergency-driven is going to take me back to the fog, distance me from myself and nature, so I avoid it like the plague.

Back to the spell that hides the fog, and the fog that hides the disembodiment: I had to do four steps to come back to the body, and I will name them here in order. I added a 5th step for once we come back to the body, as I think the body is not the end game, the realm of shadow, the void is, at least for me. This will make sense of my writings for future purposes.

Before we continue I need to make a distinction in between fog and shock, as I know there is shock immediately after traumatic events, but later on the shock becomes the fog.

Shock is acute, the nervous system’s immediate response to overwhelming input. It’s protective, a sudden freeze or dissociation that protects the system from what it can’t yet process. It can involve narrowing perception, tends to show up in acute muscular bracing and breath-holding. It often needs titrated movement and discharge.

Fog (often called “brain fog” or dissociative fog) tends to be more chronic, what happens when shock doesn’t fully resolve and the nervous system stays in a low-grade protective shutdown. Thinking slows, memory gaps appear, emotional flatness sets in, we tend to have some collapse, heaviness, and reduced sensation. Fog often needs resourcing and very slow, gentle reactivation.

In Somatic Experiencing we see them on a continuum: when shock doesn’t complete, when the body never fully discharges the overwhelming experience, it doesn’t disappear. It settles into the body as a baseline. And that baseline, that residue of frozen, unprocessed activation, is what chronic fog lives on top of.

The fog isn’t random. It has roots in the old shock that never found its way out.

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1. The trauma (deception in this case) that creates the fog

2. The fog of disembodiment that hides the shock

3. The shock under the fog of disembodiment

4. The body sensations, baseline material for processing the trauma, the shock and the fog

5. The shadow realm, I also call it the void/avoid realm, that contains the ancestral, transpersonal and systems traumatic with fog and shock material

1. The trauma (deception) that creates the fog

I am just going to focus on the first of the five steps in this article.

I could never imagine what I would discover when I was in Peru in 1995, my second trip to Cuzco, two years in a row doing the Inca Trail all over again. My purpose in redoing the Inca Trail was serendipitous; I was going again because one of my best friends was going for the first time, I had an empty summer schedule, and her plan and group of people looked fun, safe, and adventurous enough. I never thought I was going to find my first clue of the “deception that hides the fog,” comparable to the way the church owns and uses the fog machine, straightforward, the way humans cast systematic spells on other humans to hide deceptions.

I was studying design, so I was very interested in anthropology and human behavior, but I was quite naive about human deceptiveness in the history of colonization. I had lived in a dictatorship for 17 years, since the day I was born, and the nine months prior to that as well, in my mom’s belly, as I was conceived three months after the beginning of the dictatorship. Of course, I would not have been able to detect the fog machine because my whole life had been inside the spell of it. But the fact that I was in a different country, Peru, helped me witness the colonizers’ spell on the Incas by destroying their temples and installing churches on top of them. The main plaza was surrounded by churches built on top of destroyed Incan palaces, like Coricancha, or the Temple of the Sun, the most revered temple in the Inca Empire, which was dismantled and converted into the Church and Convent of Santo Domingo. There were 20 churches left in Cuzco built during those days. It is a small city, and that is a lot of churches.

The second time I had the same realization, that there was a spell hiding a fog, was when I was working on my college thesis. I decided to do research on the Indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego, or Fueguinos. They lived in the archipelago at the tip of Chile, where the continent ends before Antarctica begins. The only sources I could find about them were the journals of Martin Gusinde, an Austrian priest and anthropologist who made four expeditions to Tierra del Fuego between 1918 and 1924, spending over six years living with the Selk’nam, the Yámana, and the Kawésqar, three of the four Fueguino tribes. He was the only outsider ever admitted to both the Selk’nam Hain ceremony and the Yámana Kina. The 1923 Hain was one of the last ever held, and Gusinde documented it while the Selk’nam were already on the edge of extinction. I was lucky to find the journals in a local library and was able to read most of them.

“Kterrnen”, Selkman, Patagonia

The most interesting thing for me of all his writings was the Hain ceremony. It was the central ceremony of Selk’nam life, an initiation marking the passage of teen boys into manhood. For a couple of months, adult men would disappear into a large ceremonial hut. Then the “spirits” would emerge through terrifying masked figures with their whole bodies painted in red, white, and black, representing supernatural beings from the Selk’nam cosmos. They would run through the camp, sending women and children fleeing in fear. The women were told these were dangerous spirits the men had to control and appease, that the men stood between the community and supernatural violence. Women’s exclusion from the hut and from the knowledge inside it was the ceremony’s purpose.

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We live in a world where excess, status, money, and power obsessions drive our hallucinatory direction. They cloud perception, making us mistake snakes for ropes, not the other way around. The ancient saying “the truth shall set us free” rings true, but where are those truth instructions? We’ve inherited stacks of written maps that feel like riddles hidden in old, inaccessible languages.

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Why? Wisdom was guarded for good reason. Those who held it spoke in tongues only initiates could decode. Truth wasn’t for casual readers, it demanded an experiential process of coming back to the center of the Self, to the embodied, free of grasping and goals driven experiences.

The Temple’s Hidden Logic

Temples weren’t built downtown. Tibetan monasteries perched on 15,000-foot cliffs. Daoist caves were hidden in Wudang mountains. Tantric yogis meditated in open-air graveyards. Access was the first filter, we had to want truth enough to risk freezing, starving, or facing demons, literal and psychic.

The texts assumed we were already there: body trained, breath steady, still-minded. No hand-holding and no TED Talks. The maps were for those who’d climbed the mountain.

What got swapped

Embodied (old way):

• Truth learned through body practice: fasting, breathwork, physical discipline, direct sensory contact with reality

• Wisdom earned by living consequences: trial, sweat, direct perception of what works vs. what fails

• Knowledge stored in muscle memory, organ function, breath patterns

Abstract (modern way):

• Truth = reading opinions, consuming content, collecting information

• Wisdom = accumulating credentials, quotes, book writing

• Knowledge = Google searches, podcasts, scrolling wisdom memes

Why it matters for truth

Embodied truth rewires physiology: the adrenals calm or replenish, the liver detoxes confusion, the thyroid supports speaking clearly. Abstract truth keeps us stuck, which means we know the right ideas, but our body still runs on fear, addiction, dissociation, and rage programs.

We read about truth but don’t live it. Money creates urgency, comparison, shiny distractions, and we chase symbols of security while our adrenals scream and colons clog. Organs aren’t side characters; they’re the hardware running truth, and their dullness or overfunction keeps the illusions.

The Real Instruction Manual

“The truth shall set us free” wasn’t a metaphor. It was engineering advice. But the instructions got lost in translation literally. Sanskrit manuscripts moldering in the Himalayas. Tibetan geshes debating philosophy while laypeople starve for practice.

You don’t need to climb Everest. The body you woke up in is the temple. Train it systematically:

• Release what doesn’t belong (colon/adrenals)

• Filter lived truth from illusion and toxins (kidneys/liver/gallbladder)

• Speak what’s real (thyroid/throat)

• See and hear past distortion (pineal/eyes/ears)

Money’s maze collapses when the body stops hallucinating ropes. The old maps work, and they always did, but they were only given to extremely thirsty wisdom seekers. It doesn’t need to be that way. We just need to return to our own wisdom, not climb Kathmandu for it. Truth is in our own cells.

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The Wizard of Oz and the labyrinth

One of the early scenes that appeared in my mind while writing about the maze and labyrinth which are a fascination for me, was reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy falls unconscious and, in a wild and fast sequence, the house is torn from its foundations flying high into the air. Everything around passes floating past the windows: Objects, animals, and even people. Gravity no longer works, rules dissolve, and Dorothy is no longer in Kansas but flying through the sky. It wasn’t exactly Dorothy in the wizard of Oz scene, but it was a similar event, like somebody being swept away fast in the air through a tornado.

This experience reminded me of the many fairy tales and folk stories tied to the same theme: the protagonist abruptly leaves the familiar world, landing in a strange world that externalizes their inner confusion: distorted rules, symbolic figures, and trials that make little logical sense, yet immense psychological sense, in other words, they have to enter a deeper level of their maze.

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And over time, the journey begins to reveal its meaning. Across these stories, there is always a necessary process of navigation through the maze, through the confusion, that requires a distancing from familiar entanglements that keep them stuck in the many maze trails. This process of navigation through distancing or differentiation leads to maturation, and only after that can the protagonist exit the maze, and eventually return home, now able to see what was always there. Home hasn’t changed; the Self has. We often must leave the familiar and or separate in order to differentiate and unweave, and only then can we return without being enmeshed or unconscious. The “return” becomes possible only when we are more integrated within ourselves. The journey through the threshold is what makes this possible.

I want to clarify something that has always fascinated me about many fairy tales and folk stories Each of these tales describes a unique journey of discovery of unknown realms within themselves, forced to separate from their routine life, away or extracted from their family and societal norms, even out of time, and it is a priority that we explore our confusing and entangled relationships with all external frames that bind us, and find the right amount of support to return to our inherent strengths and resources.

This aspect of leaving the familiar, finding the Self and returning home more whole is crucial in the transition from childhood to adulthood that happens through adolescence. So many of these stories are speaking about the transition not just from fragmented to whole, but also from the child stuck in the familiar system to the differentiated adult. There used to be rites of passages for adolescents that marked the transition from dependent on the family to contributor to society. I will speak more about this transition in a later post.

Another interesting aspect in these stories is that the protagonists think they need an external source to guide them, but eventually they realize no external source can replace their internal journey. Sometimes they find peers and companions, witches and ogres, magic cats, angry queens and divine or earthly support and guidance, but it’s up to them to gather internal discernment and wisdom in the way of these encounters. This has always resonated deeply within me. Wisdom is within, not without.

There is no external figure who can make this journey for us or resolve our most pressing challenges. In fact, the more they search for external answers, the more chaos and resistance they encounter. When they finally realize that no outside source can offer the clarity they seek, once they can surrender to the fact this is an internal journey, the chaos begins to dissolve, and the path becomes clear. That clarity signals that it is time to return home and society with greater internalized power, discernment, sovereignty and no confusion.

And ultimately, the loss of identity, the chaos, and the temporary losing of oneself inside the maze in pursuit of external answers and enmeshment are not curses, but necessary blessings. We are not meant to know who we are without leaving ourselves first, without discovering that nothing outside of our internal lighthouse can provide the answers that only proximity to the Self can reveal.

Entanglement dynamics

While I keep reflecting and understanding the themes of labyrinth and maze, in my sessions with clients the topic of entanglement dynamics continues returning, almost every time. Overtime I’ve been having a gradual realization that most of the themes my clients present at sessions have to do in one way or another with some sort of energetic entanglement with others (alive or dead), but also with past traumatic events (personal or external), with their own birth memories, as well as with cultural, religious and systems values, and even deeper cosmic levels. I even started noticing this theme in babies, realizing that they also want liberation from forceful, non consensual energy and entanglement with family and cultural systems, with their parents and caretakers, and with their ancestral tree.

I have known all along that enmeshment is a deep problem, the level of the knot we have made unconsciously and how this has affected us (and the earth with all other living beings) at physical, emotional, social, systemic and energetic levels is unparalleled. This could only be true because we are interconnected, otherwise entanglement could not be possible.

I don’t want this to be interpreted like we are not supposed to be connected with each other. Connection is the core of our existence, we are interdependent on each other, we thrive on bonding and community, to the point that we depend on support and strong bonds for our survival and thriving, which optimally should last at least for our first two decades or longer. This writing is not attempting to break this bond, or discard how fundamental deep connection is for our development and survival. Enmeshment is on one side of the spectrum and neglect on the other, and as opposite forces, both can have deep and lasting negative effects in our life. I will be discussing how neglect and enmeshment are connected and how to return to a balanced place, in between them.

But first I want to invite you to follow me in unweaving the entanglements, to find our way home, to the body. This is the real intention behind my writing.

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