Is it possible to heal your past traumas?

As a yoga teacher and therapist much of my day is dealing with my business, working with clients, keeping my accounts up to date, creating meditations, planning events, learning new my skills. I am a one-woman band, so I do everything. One of my favourite skills is learning which involves reading new books, doing courses. Life can be very business centric.

But I like to work on myself too. Yoga has taught me so much about me and I have learnt to listen to what’s going on inside more. I am becoming more open-minded and enjoy challenging the fears and trauma’s that I am finding within. We all have them, and I have discovered that you can remove them, if you want to.

One of the areas of my life that I am not comfortable with is that my Mum walked out on us when we were young. She had mental health issues and in the 70’s it was very much brushed under the carpet. I generally dislike Mother’s Day and any conversation about Mum’s. She left when I was about 8 and I have blocked all memories of her. I can not see her in the room with me or my family. There are photos, but none of us have one on display, maybe we all feel abandoned. This is one of my trauma’s.

I am so glad that I discovered Yoga as it is helping me work towards releasing my traumas. Uncomfortably, I have to revisit area’s I have buried so deep. I have decided to try learning more about my mum. I am asking my dad and my sisters about her and finding out some juicy little snippets.

She was into sewing and I do remember that as a kid she made lots of clothes. I asked my dad if he kept any of her patterns, and he had a massive box of patterns, including the one for her wedding dress which she made with her Aunt. Opening the box was a trip down memory lane that I have shared with my sisters. One of them remembers that my mum wasn’t always good on amending patterns to fit. She recently told me about a pair of burnt orange trousers that Mum made her when she was 8. The crotch was at the knees, so she had to roll the trousers up at the waist, so they fitted. She recalled that she put a hole in them accidentally on purpose just so she didn’t have to wear them. But I can imagine that a patch would have been sewn on them! I do remember a sewing shop in Wickford called Richardson’s and spending lots of time in there.

So back to today and dealing with my trauma’s……. I love watching the Great British Sewing Bee and have watched most of the 9 series, but never taken it any further. Until Lizzie on the most recent series kept talking about her mum. It got me thinking, what better way to deal with my trauma’s and mother issues than to do a bit of sewing. I have a sewing machine and I make lavender bags, meditation pillows and the likes for my clients, but I haven’t made a garment for years. So, I rifled through the box of patterns and found a dress that I wanted to make. It’s a pattern from 1975 that cost 60p that has been used and it’s actually reasonably on trend. I am very much into reduce, reuse, recycle. I looked for fabric and found a lady selling some lilac gingham. I bought 3 metres for £3! She had bought it and never used it. So that hit’s the reuse spot. But why did I decide to make a dress during the hot spell in September! The dining room table is the only table to use, but it’s in our conservatory and in the middle of the day the temp was 45 degrees centigrade. I got up early and did a few hours during the morning when I could. It’s also very therapeutic as there are lots of things to concentrate on.

Laying out and cutting the fabric was easy, I had to work out if the pattern would fit and I was very lucky it did. I could have made a few tweaks, but that’s a lesson learned. The first technical instruction was “gather” off to YouTube to find out how. That turned out relatively easy. Adding an invisible zip. Hmmm, zip added, it’s not totally invisible. My fabric was the same pattern on both sides, most fabrics have a dominant side, so when I laid my two back panels down after attaching 3 pieces together, I had 2 left panels instead of a left and right. There may have been the odd swear word, but in general I was giggling at my mistakes. Final faux pas was that it has elastic in the neck-line with gathered fabric, as soon as I cut the elastic I lost the end inside the gather and had to pull it through and rethread it.

But what an experience, I have a finished dress, I have learnt how to gather, also to gather a hem that is wider when you turn it up, I also never used my machine to invisible hem, didn’t even know I could. I even chatted to my mum whilst I was doing it, sadly she has passed away. As I write this article, I feel humble and honoured that she brought me into this world.

I talk about her much more and don’t feel angry or hurt anymore. I am feeling that this little sewing journey has bought me closer to her and ultimately has helped to free my shakti from a samskara.

What can you do to heal past trauma’s? I would love to know………and love to help, if you need it.