The planer and the chisel are the easiest way to understand how this works as trauma therapy.
Our brain is a piece of wood which has deep grooves carved into it by the chisel of phasic dopamine. The chisel is sharpest when we are young so the grooves go deep. The scars of childhood hurt the most.
Many people have a planer in their toolkit, but some of us do not. We have low tonic dopamine, or our receptors down-regulated due to exaggerated phasic spikes. Whatever the reason, this is why we are unable to remove the scars of the past.
Talk therapy, CBT and gratitude journalling do nothing for us, because the surface has too many deep gouges already for the small phasic bursts these things provide to have an impact. EMDR might work because of how it mimics the dopaminergic tone seen in dreams.
But the best thing we can do is to sharpen our planer. It’s there; it’s just rusty.
If you want to overcome the trauma of your life, you need to prepare the surface before you start trying to patch on top.
This is where we intentionally alter our dopaminergic states. We can do this with drugs, which are risky, and I hope one day we will be able do it with electrical stimulation, but the tried-and-tested method has been around for millennia: meditation.
Meditation you say! Argh! But I can’t even sit still, never mind meditate.
That’s ok. Meditation is just the final step. That’s the 30,000 grit that takes your planer to a razor. You need to start sharpening it with coarser grits.
So we start with something stimulating like cycling or dance; a 300 grit. We make sure it’s a rhythmic action like sharpening a blade which is, actually, one of my favourite meditations.
We use this stimulating action as an on-ramp to finer and finer grits. We ride the wave of neurotransmitters while always being mindful that our aim is to reduce reactivity to phasic bursts. We feel great and wanna go hard, but we don’t. Because that would be reacting to a burst.
We keep our steady rhythm and our dvar calms down and then we take that brain chemistry and we step down to walking or vocalisation. We are on to 1000 grit now and things can start to happen; the planer will cut. We keep working our way finer and finer.
This is preparing the surface. This may not be necessary for people with stable dopamine signalling, but it’s necessary for me and probably necessary for most people in our oversaturated world.
So we plane away. It’s slow at first; those grooves are deep. But the progress happens. Lighter layers of trauma are removed first; some unkind words from a friend or a manager maybe. As we keep going, diligently, slowly, we see that deeper layers start to come out. The wood is becoming receptive. The old code is unravelling.
And we just keep going. Things export naturally at their own pace. Don’t rush; that’s your chisel. You want to be planning how you will use it but you don’t want to bring it out yet. It will come out on its own when the surface is ready.
So off you go, ardently and diligently planing the trauma out of your soul.
And then one day you’re on a walk and you have a flash of joy and just know that you are free. Or you are sat meditating and you see the face of the corpse you found and it dissolves into the ether and you know that it is done.
All it takes is steadiness.
An intentional cultivation of a dopaminergic state.
And then trusting the process. Change happens slowly and then all at once.
You will see the shavings of your soul and you will leave them behind. You will have a pure sheet of glassy wood where your chisel will be able to imprint the code you lined up over the preceding weeks or months.
This is how it works.
It’s so simple.
This is why religion works for so many.
But for people like me: I needed evidence.
I got my evidence by accident and worked back from the results to figure out the process.
This is it.
Anyone can do it.
It is free.
It will improve your world.
And it’s fun.
So get on your bike and ride but not too hard.
Put on your dancing shoes but don’t go wild.
This is all for your brain.
And your brain is your world.
The devkit without religion.
The tools without the belt.
The belief because of evidence.
Give it a try.
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