What One Moment Leaves Behind
Chapter Fourteen - Slow Connections
When I first began learning about trauma, one thing stood out to me.
A traumatic experience creates a pathway in the brain almost instantly.
There is no need for repetition. No need for practice. The body learns in a moment.
Touch a fire and get burnt, and the lesson is immediate. The nervous system responds with a simple message: don’t do that again.
This is one of the ways the body protects us.
But trauma is often more complex than a hand touching a flame.
A painful relationship, a frightening event, a sudden loss, or a moment where safety disappears can create pathways just as quickly. The brain stores the experience and begins shaping behaviour around keeping us safe from it ever happening again.
The challenge is that while trauma can form a pathway in seconds, creating a new one takes time.
Modern neuroscience suggests that building new patterns can take months of consistent practice. Ayurveda has understood this for thousands of years.
In Ayurveda, these deep imprints are known as Samskaras. Every experience leaves a mark, but traumatic experiences carve particularly deep grooves into the mind. These grooves become familiar pathways that thoughts, emotions, and behaviours naturally follow.
At the same time, trauma can disturb Vata, the energy that governs the nervous system. This may leave us feeling anxious, hypervigilant, restless, disconnected, or unable to settle.
If the experience is not fully processed, Ayurveda teaches that it can also leave behind Ama, a residue that becomes stored within the body and its channels. The mind remembers, but so do the tissues, the muscles, the gut, and the nervous system.
This is why healing often feels slower than the original wound.
The pathway into survival may have been created in a moment, but the pathway back to safety is built through repetition.
One breath. One practice. One grounded choice at a time.
Slowly, the nervous system begins to learn something new.
Not that the past never happened, but that it is safe to live in the present again.
My Story
Like many of us, life has thrown me some strong curveballs.
Family life began a little chaotic. Relationships throughout life have also carried their own turbulence, and along the way I have caused significant harm to both my body and my mind. There are deep memories I have had to come to terms with and slowly process, and there are still moments when flashes of past events arise unexpectedly.
In those moments, I don’t see them as setbacks. I see them as the body speaking, showing me where more understanding is still unfolding.
There is still a practice of meeting these moments without fear, without turning away, and allowing them to move through rather than define what comes next.
I am sharing my story slowly through these chapters. Some of you already know me beyond these words, and may be surprised by parts of what I share and how I came to be where I am physically and mentally today. I am sometimes surprised too.
And yet, I also recognise I owe much of where I am today to the practices, teachings, and techniques I have integrated along the way.
I am now offering The Emotional Healing Pathway
by application only, where I share the steps I have taken to come to this moment in my life.
