Triggers Are Medicine

Barriers along our path towards presence and connection are the thinking mind and the wounded inner child.

The thinking mind can be trained through meditation, breathwork and conscious movement such as yoga and qigong. The work of the wounded inner child though, because of its deep potential for obtaining the most sacred of desires, human connection, comes with trickier waters to tread.

Along the road towards seeking connection, we bump into our triggers. Afterall, if this were easy, we would already be basking in the glow of one another all the time. This philosophy teaches us how our triggers can be used as our greatest source of medicine on the pathway back to presence.

I’ll give you some examples. If someone told me, ‘Sonia, you are blonde.’ I would not be triggered. (To this date, I am still an asian-american woman with black hair).

Now, if someone told me, ‘Sonia, you are manipulative and ugly,’ we have a different story.

Let’s take it down one notch. If someone told me, ‘Sonia, you are bad at drawing and Spanish.’ Because these are aspects of myself that I have faced and accepted about myself, if someone told this to me, I would not be triggered.

Let’s go back to the more caliente trigger. Each word in that statement stirs up a feeling in me. Now, what is the difference between the feeling I get when I hear blonde versus manipulative?

Here is the radical shift.

There is no difference between those two expressions because both of them are me.

It is only me experiencing these feelings.

Your life is like a movie. There are things you watch in this movie that make you feel good and some things that make you feel not so good.

If we take your trigger as that scary part of the movie that you don’t like and take away the image (the narrative) and then ask you to listen and breathe into the music or soundtrack of that scary scene, what you might discover is how through conscious breath, you can change the scary music into a beautiful and enjoyable melody. This is called alchemy, and we are all capable of this at any moment. We can change and alchemize the experience of our feelings with presence and breath.

Here’s the trick: Most feeling is misattribution of meaning.

By taking a trigger, pausing the movie of your mind, and simply breathing in the sensation the soundtrack moves in you, one can actually begin to feel elevated from the energy the ego once labelled as ‘bad.’ One can begin to learn to breathe in all sensations of their bodies as only themselves, and in doing so, feel the satisfaction of enjoying how they feel regardless of external circumstance!

In this new philosophy, triggers signal blocks and walls towards our connection with ourselves, and where there are walls towards ourselves, there will be walls in your ability to be connected and present with other people.

Remember: presence is a feeling.

And triggers are feelings our egos think it doesn’t like.

What else don’t we like? Taking medicine.

Sometimes the things that taste the worst are the exact thing we need in order to heal.

This can be true for our triggers, too.

Triggers elicit a visceral response in your body. That response can be alchemized into a pleasant or at least neutral experience given enough time and experience. You are The Alchemist.

The more you can stay in loving connection with yourself means the greater percentage of time you will be able to stay in presence with others.

And remember: presence is bliss.

The thing with triggers, too, is that they are not semantic-dependent, they are feeling dependent.

If I am triggered by the word manipulative, it means that the feeling state this stirs inside me can appear in any other scenario of my life. If I can learn how to face the feeling I get when someone calls me manipulative, this means I am free from a multitude of other scenarios the ego had once labelled as manipulative. By taking in the medicine of my trigger, I have now re-integrated a new part of myself. And an integrated self, is a self that is happy, healthy, self-sufficient and more newly capable of connection.

Triggers are the other you. The Game of Presence teaches us how to love ourselves because it is through that felt sensation of love where we find God, connection, and ultimately, peace.