Honest sharing
Introduction
Honest sharing, received by the German alternative practitioner Gopal Norbert Klein, is -in my current opinion- the best tool to establish safety in the connection to other members of our species and thereby open up the energetic channels to the source of our true, divine self. This can have all kinds of positive effects, including but not limited to improved physical, emotional and mental health. Until I learned about Gopal's work, I used various methods to successfully help myself and others, but something seemed to be missing. As I discovered honest sharing and looked deeper into it, I realized that it is the missing component that is necessary to truly heal mentally, emotionally and physically and integrate everything into our life in a meaningful way. I say meaningful, because a life in isolation, without some form of companionship, no matter how advanced one might be spiritually, is truly and utterly meaningless.
The reason why honest sharing is different than other forms of spiritual development, is that when we do it, we don't seek to change what is inside of us right here and now, essentially creating the very thing that we seek to get away from, but instead merely observe it, allowing it to be whatever it is, and communicate it to someone we trust without negative repercussions. Suddenly, our body-mind-unit, our separate self inside the matrix, realizes that it can express all of itself to someone else and nothing bad happens. Neither is it attacked, nor left alone, nor ignored, nor manipulated (fight/flight/freeze/fawn-response). We realize that we don't need to hold anything back, effectively closing that part of us off, hiding it out of fear, nor do we have to change anything about ourselves because it could be judged as wrong or not good enough. Whatever is there can be communicated, and this communication opens energy channels that were previously blocked, when there was a belief that expressing this about ourself will surely lead to negative consequences. Where before there were fear and insecurity, we now experience a deep sense of freedom and safety like we never did before, accompanied by a rush of vitalizing energy and joy, and that changes literally everything in our life.
Below, I explain some more of what honest sharing is and why, despite its apparent simplicity, it may be more powerful than any other healing modality. Anything else we can do is complementary to honest sharing. There appears to be no other permanent way out of physical or emotional pain that is as simple, because there is no other direct way that addresses the ultimate cause of our suffering - separation. Anything else is either treating symptoms, trying to change what feels wrong or not good enough, or attempting to flee from what is here now, and that includes very useful spiritual practices like meditation, mindfulness, positive thinking, breathwork, law of attraction, shadow work, embracing our pain, etc. The fact is, our physical body is what we experience here now, and it is what it is - a fundamental part of our existence as human beings on Earth. In order to heal, we need to relax in complete safety in our body, and that happens only through establishing an honest, open and uncensored connection with at least one other member of our species. That's all it takes. It may sound simple but is not necessarily easy, or our world wouldn't be as dysfunctional as it is. Honest sharing teaches us exactly how to (re)establish this connection that 99.9% of us lost when we were children, if we ever had it in the first place.
What it is and how it works
Let's face it - most of us are dissatisfied with one or more aspects of our lives, and we are unable to create lasting happiness for all kinds of reasons. Let me assure you right at the outset that with honest sharing it is not necessary to look at these reasons, because they will inevitably be mere symbols outside of us for a state that is inside, buried and forgotten in our subconscious.
When we practice honest sharing we are not required to dig up the past, explain why we are unhappy, who wronged us, why we hate certain things or people, what we are afraid of, why we are depressed, and so on. None of that is important. That's one reason why honest sharing does not require years of working on ourselves or psychosomatic digging by health practitioners. On the contrary, it has the potential to facilitate lasting improvement in the very first and each following session.
So what is honest sharing and how and why does it work like magic?
To understand that, we first need to get a very basic idea of how our physical bodies work. When we incarnate as human beings in this simulation, we use mammalian bodies to have an experience of life on Earth. A fundamental aspect of mammals is that we get our sense of safety from contact and interaction with other members of our species. In order to feel good and be healthy it is absolutely mandatory that our bodies feel safe. In very simplified terms, let's just say that safety translates in our body to the ventral part of the vagus nerve being active. In life-threatening situations it shuts down and another part of the nervous system becomes active, which then creates one of four different responses to the threat - fight, flight, or freeze, which are immediate reactions – as well as fawn, which can happen under threatening conditions that last longer and that we cannot escape from. Maybe you have heard about Stockholm syndrome.
A natural sequence of events would be to fight and defeat whatever threatens us, flee from the threat, or "play dead" and survive. In any case, the energy our body mobilized in the face of mortal danger must pass through our system and be released. In fight or flight situations this is what happens in due course, and after a freeze response, what could be called shock trauma, it might be released later through shaking, crying and other mechanisms.
If this happens, if the threat passed and the energy is released, our body then starts to reactivate the ventral vagus and returns to relaxation and a state of safety. If, however, the body does not relax and the energy stays stuck in our system, we remain in a perpetual state of high alert, which over time may be downregulated but is never fully resolved. This is what causes more and more dysfunction and dis-ease on the physical, emotional and mental levels the longer it lasts, and which separates us from others.
In the case of humans that is, unfortunately, the condition most of us are in right now, and have been since childhood. For a child it is a life-threatening situation if a parent or other caregiver attacks/hurts it (fight), leaves it alone (flight), ignores it (freeze), or manipulates it (fawn). It is very likely that one or more of these traumatic situations occurred repeatedly throughout childhood for all of us. Various problems then developed over time since these childhood traumas were never properly resolved, because our parents, themselves traumatized since childhood, didn’t know how. This self-perpetuating cycle has been going on for untold generations, where each new generation of parents inadvertently traumatized their children, without the traumas ever being resolved.
This resolution would happen if the child were able to communicate to a parent or caregiver what’s going on inside of it in any given situation in order to feel safe. It needs to express its emotions, its thoughts and any physical sensations it experiences, all in a safe environment to someone the child trusts and who does not judge the child for any of it. Unfortunately, for almost all of us this never happened to the degree that it should have.
That is what honest sharing is all about. We do that which was impossible when we were children. We express what’s going on inside of us at this very moment. What we feel, what we think, and what we sense in our body. The important part is that we do it without being identified with it, because the part that feels and thinks this is the child in us that experienced the trauma, and we are no longer that child. We are grown up, and what was a life-threatening situation for us when we were children is no longer a threat at all. We could go one step further and say we are not even the grown-up but the consciousness in which everything happens, including this simulation that we call life in Earth.
When we do that, we are the witness to what happens in us, and we communicate in a safe environment, to a person that feels safe to us, such as a spouse or good friend, what the child in us was unable to communicate back then. This reestablishes the contact to another member of our species and resolves the traumatic situation that we were stuck in. Where before we had closed down, we now open up, and as the blocked energy passes through our system and is released, our body can finally return to a state of relaxation in safety. The ventral vagus gets reactivated and our whole life changes, literally.
What I offer as a practitioner of honest sharing is this safe environment, the partner who listens to what must be told and heard, the experience of how to share without being identified with the traumatized part, and without being judged for any of it.
This work is elementary to healing. Anything else that is done, including everything that can be done alone, is a bonus. Meditation, yoga, chi gong, breathwork, energy work, somatic experiencing, mindfulness, you name it. All that can be done on top of honest sharing but none of these practices can replace it, because they lack the fundamental element of establishing a deep and safe contact with another human being. Why is this vital? Because it shows us that we don't need to separate ourselves from that which appears to be outside of us, which really is us, too.
If all this sounds a bit crazy to you, you know nothing, and neither do I. It's all truth and lies, depending on one's perspective. That is why those who reached enlightenment say they really know nothing except "I AM". Everything is an illusion and subject to change except this one fact - "I AM". Therefore, the best we can do is to simply observe what we experience in response to whatever circumstances we find ourselves in, and communicate what we feel, sense and think from this observer perspective instead of reacting. This way we reestablish a heretofore interrupted connection and strengthen the sense -and belief- that we are neither separate nor a victim of our circumstances.
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