How do we sidestep a familiar and unhelpful pattern of thought or behavior in that moment when trauma or pain begins to assert itself and trigger a response? Can we in the triggering moment find a uniquely creative and new response that helps illuminate and loosen the trauma’s grip?

Learning to pause before reacting to a triggering feeling or memory might be one of the most important moments in the healing process. Deciding how we will respond, if at all, engages a larger awareness or consciousness that lifts our perspective above the immediate, often polarized, circumstance. In this view of healing, consciousness is the medicine.

In this moment we can remember there is no separation: we are naturally integrated with larger universal patterns of regenerative energy and intelligence. Which means as we heal, the universe heals, and we co-create a new future.

We explore further into the realms of light and shadow and healing with a group of Portals friends who bring an amazing depth and breadth of experience as practitioners, authors, and teachers. In this new addition to the What is Healing? series, Aviv Shahar is joined by Lonny Jarrett, Alexander Love, Randine Anderson Lewis, and Lorie Eve Dechar.

Among their insights:

• I have to trust there is a goodness to the universe; I don't know the difference all the time between right and wrong, and in that place something beyond comes through.
• In the consciousness of the larger meta-healing of the planet, there's also a sense of the meta crisis, where the old way and completely new way of organizing reality are both here. Can we survive the transformation?
• What can I do that's uniquely creative; that I've never done before, that nobody's ever done before; that can catalyze the emergence of something new? This is the shift from healing to evolution.
• Healing’s many faces include: reclaiming functional capacity; releasing and liberating from what was preventing or arresting possibility; discovering purpose; being joined to something bigger than oneself, and even healing in realizing truth.
• The pause is the space where healing can happen. Without the capacity to pause, all the survival drives and old ways our organisms sought to perpetuate themselves will kick in.
• Feeling our pain or traumas as burdens can obscure the picture and make life appear fragmented and warped. Bringing the soul into the process can liberate the burdens.

This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel.