Triggers are spontaneous eruptions of emotional terror that can seize the heart, take the breath away, or throw one into a rage. Logically, we seek to avoid such encounters. In fact, loved ones and friends often know to avoid certain topics with us rather than trigger such explosions.

What are actual triggers? Simply put, triggers are current experiences that resemble prior experiences in life that were never fully put to rest. Triggers can also be schemas, in the form of powerfully negative beliefs about the self, which overshadow our comfort with current life and self.

Triggers thus represent unfinished business, current reminders of past experiences and the emotional outbursts generated by those reminders.

Triggers are inevitable encounters that will, ultimately, be fully mastered. Life reviews in Near Death Experiences frequently send a soul back into life in their body, with the charge to fully resolve a trigger in their current life.

Buddhists believe that triggers are the seeds of reincarnation that must be completed in an otherworldly bardo adventure upon leaving this world and before beginning the next life, or that they are an actual reincarnation in a human life, which must be dealt with before life can progress.

Carlos Castaneda’s loving advice to us all is to take all the time we need, but, to hurry up! The evolving journey is magnificent; let’s free our energy to fully go forward into it!

Triggers are composed of life experiences we have already had but have been unable to mentally and emotionally digest and, ultimately, fully metabolize. Full metabolism is nothing short of love for everything we have ever experienced or believed. Fortunately, we have the innate capacity to achieve this radical acceptance of all of our lives.

At some level, most triggers exist in states of isolation from the greater personality and typically generate sadness. This sadness is separate from the actual sadness of a traumatic experience or core schema. This sadness results from the imposed isolation of the trigger as being too much or too powerful for the rest of the personality to bear.

When the ego is ready to go and be with a trigger, suddenly that trigger is no longer alone. The weight it has borne in isolation is in some degree lifted, as the ego—in whatever state of fear and trembling— proves, simply by its presence, that it can be with the contents and intensity of the trigger.

This act alone introduces a primary love, love for the unwanted and undesirable. Some sadness can be released at this rudimentary level of acceptance. With this act alone the past begins to be completed.

Regardless of the nature of a trauma or schema the truth is that it has been stuck in a suspended animation of no time. All experiences naturally find their home in our personal storybook of life. However, given the suspended state of triggers, they have never been allowed to be calmly put to rest in that loving storybook.

Once the ego, on its hero’s journey, is perseveringly present to a trigger, other resources within the greater soul are able to offer their resources. The subconscious generally provides dreams and synchronicities that offer a needed memory trail that support the full recapitulation of triggers.

The High Self might also point one to helpers, or clinical modalities, to support this natural processing of life experiences.

Processing such triggers or experiences changes the past because the past was never previously fully known or fully completed. Ego’s engagement with the trigger brings its own broader view and inclusion of elements not available to an earlier state of self.

Acceptance of everything leads one to fully loving every aspect of one’s lives lived, which renders all former triggers to become colorful and  neutral pages in one’s personal storybook.

And that storybook could easily be shared with all—no legacy of shame or limitation attached.

And then, the unfettered journey resumes,
Chuck