Internal Invasion

That leads to external invasions

Last night I forgot to put my earplugs in. Normally that wouldn’t matter much, except every Friday morning around six o’clock a convoy of loud, clanking garbage trucks comes rumbling down the street right outside my bedroom window. If you’ve ever heard those trucks up close, you know the sound. Metal slamming, engines grinding, a kind of mechanical thunder that doesn’t politely ask if you’re ready to wake up.

I was deeply asleep when it started, and at first it seemed like part of a dream. A harsh, invasive sound moving through the dreamscape. Then I woke up enough to recognize it. Oh right… garbage day. By that point it was too late. Once my nervous system has been jolted awake like that, sleep doesn’t usually come back easily. I lay there trying to sink again into that magical state of slumber, but my body had already shifted into alert mode.

As I lay there, I became aware of a familiar feeling in my belly. A kind of jarring tension centered deep in my gut that has been with me most of my life. The night before I had been meditating with it. My acupuncturist suggested something simple: place a hot water bottle on that part of the body and bring gentle, loving awareness to it. So I had been lying quietly with the warmth spreading through my abdomen, letting my attention soften around that tension in my nervous system.

As I stayed with the feeling, memories began to surface.

I thought about my mother. She was an intelligent and creative woman with a strong life force. In many ways she was admirable, and in my adult years we had a good relationship. I mainly remember her being kind to me. Yet when I look back toward the earliest period of my life, something feels different. I remember sensing a certain hardness in her emotional field. Not cruelty and certainly not abuse, but a kind of intensity or harshness in her energy.

I was an extremely sensitive baby, a very porous little soul. Something about that intensity seemed to move through my tender boundaries in a way that my nervous system simply couldn’t metabolize. It felt like an invasion. Not a physical invasion, but an energetic one, as though a force entered my system before I had developed the capacity to process it. That early imprint had powerful effects on my psyche, effects I have spent much of my life gradually healing.

My father was very different in temperament. He was mellow, playful and fun-loving, and he didn’t carry that same sharp energy. Yet he was deeply wounded in his own way. His father, my grandfather, had been an immigrant who ruled his family with harshness and tyranny, creating profound psychic damage among his children. Each of them adapted differently to that trauma. My father dealt with it largely by numbing himself emotionally and shutting down his deeper feelings. One of his sisters later developed bipolar disorder. Another committed suicide. Another was murdered. Two others spent their lives struggling with anger and depression. Trauma ripples through families in ways that are often tragic and mysterious.

Later in life my father began exploring various spiritual paths and human potential movements. I believe he sensed that something inside him had been locked away and wanted to open it. Yet he eventually concluded that he might never fully access those deeper feelings. Instead, he came to accept himself as he was. In its own quiet way, that acceptance carried a certain wisdom.

Over the years I have often contemplated where the harshness that entered my family originally came from. Both of my parents were actually quite sensitive and conscious people compared with many in their generation. When I look further back, it becomes clear that the answer lies partly in the historical trauma they inherited.

I grew up hearing many stories about the Nazi Holocaust. My family came from Poland and Lithuania, and most of our relatives never escaped Europe. They perished in pogroms and concentration camps. Only a small number managed to reach the United States. One of my surviving relatives from Poland is still alive today, nearly one hundred years old. When he was thirteen years old he was taken to Auschwitz. Somehow he survived and eventually escaped.

When trauma of that magnitude moves through families and cultures, it does not simply disappear. It leaves imprints in nervous systems and emotional bodies that echo for generations. My parents did their best to live good lives even while carrying deep psychic wounding that eventually contributed to fatal degenerative diseases.

My response to inheriting this trauma has been to become a healer, first of myself and then of others. I have explored healing traditions from all over the world, eventually discovering accelerated ways of clearing deep traumatic imprints through Quantum and shamanic healing methods.

My sister Laura has also become a healer in her own way, writing books that heal and supporting groups of people around the world in self-exploration through writing. Our methodologies and belief systems are different, but we are each dedicated to supporting others’ healing and empowerment.

As I lay there with the warm water bottle resting on my belly, sending love and compassion into that old knot of tension, I could feel the residue of that history inside my own body.

Over the years I have also had memories that seem to reach beyond this lifetime. One recurring memory involves the civilization of Atlantis, where I experienced myself as part of a group of scientist-priests experimenting with ways of working with Earth energies and cosmic forces. In one phase of those experiments, some of us crossed ethical boundaries and opened interdimensional portals that were never meant to be opened.

Through those openings, harsh astral forces entered our world and began influencing human consciousness in destabilizing ways, contributing to patterns of mental illness still rampant today. Whether one interprets that memory literally or symbolically, it conveys a powerful truth: human beings have repeatedly opened doors without understanding the consequences. Sometimes I wonder whether some of the mental and emotional instability we see in our world today has roots in ancient disruptions like that.

Human history certainly contains many examples of similar invasions. Centuries of warfare, plunder and persecution have left deep scars in the collective psyche. My partner and I recently watched a documentary called The Burning Times, which recounts the centuries in Europe when many thousands of women were tortured and burned at the stake simply for being spiritually sensitive healers who did not conform to the dogmas of the Church.

I do not see myself as a victim of these forces, nor do I believe that adopting a victim identity is helpful. Yet it is important to recognize patterns. The United States itself was built through waves of invasion. European settlers brought diseases and violence that decimated indigenous populations across the Americas. Many historians estimate that native populations declined by 80–95% through disease, displacement and warfare. The early American economy was also built heavily on enslaved African labor.

These are uncomfortable realities, yet they form part of the historical field we are all living inside.

Today we are witnessing new forms of harshness emerging in political leadership and national policy. The language of invasion is used constantly while constitutional protections and human rights are steadily eroded. Policies framed as security measures often generate enormous collateral damage that falls upon ordinary people, children, animals and ecosystems. When I feel the harsh tension in my own nervous system, I can sense how it resonates with this much larger field of human history.

The pattern of invasion seems to be intensifying, with the most recent example being the U.S. government and Israel choosing to invade Iran. Again, it appears that the leaders creating this war are largely unconcerned about the devastating consequences of their hubris in human suffering, expanded conflict and environmental destruction. They are embodying the essence of wetiko, the distorting mind virus I’ve discussed in a previous Substack post.

Yet something beautiful happened last night as I continued resting with the warmth of the water bottle and bringing loving awareness into my belly. The harsh, jangly energies in my belly began to soften. For a few minutes I let go of the part of my mind that is always pushing toward the next task on the to-do list. Instead I simply stayed present with that wounded place, offering acceptance and kindness.

The shift was subtle but unmistakable. It felt deeply right, deeply healing.

Experiences like that remind me why this inner work matters so much. When we bring real compassion and awareness into the wounded places inside ourselves, our nervous systems begin to reorganize. From that place of greater coherence we become much more capable of helping others heal as well.

This is why it is so important that we stop running from these uncomfortable parts of ourselves. Many people attempt to medicate them away, bury them under busyness, or project them onto others. But the deeper invitation of this moment in human history is to face them with honesty and compassion.

This is a time of reckoning for the human race. The only path forward that truly works is love, acceptance, compassion and awareness. That may sound corny to some people. After centuries of violence and trauma, the power of love can sound like a naive philosophy or a spiritual slogan repeated in yoga classes or churches.

Yet love is not an abstract ideal. It is the fundamental organizing force of life itself. It is the greatest power in the Universe.

When we reclaim that force within our own nervous systems and begin sharing it with others, even those who hold very different beliefs from our own, something profound begins to shift. The long cycle of invasion that has shaped so much of human history can begin to dissolve. We don’t need to invade others when we rediscover that what we need most already lives within us.

And it dissolves not through more force, but through the quiet, steady and extraordinary power of love

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