One way to look at it is that trauma is a reality that shatters the illusion of safety. Our challenge, which people tend to perceive as "spiritual" becomes to find a way to tolerate living without illusions of safety.

Idries Shah has collected sufi stories and tells the one of the sufi who boarded a cruise ship. It was customary for people to ask a wise man for words of wisdom. This sufi said, "keep your death always in mind". Naturally, the cruise passengers thanked him and avoided him. He sat alone in meditation.

A storm arose and tossed the ship about, and the passengers screamed and shrieked and carried on, except for the sufi who sat calmly looking out to sea. Someone shook him in anger and shouted, "boy, what's wrong with you, don't you know there is nothing between you and death but the rotten boards of this cheap and crumbling ship?". The sufi shrugged and said, "but before we boarded the ship, what was between us and death then?".

The man punched the sufi in the jaw OK? Because no one wants to know how precarious life is. And yer If we just scan our memories we all know families whose lives have been radically changed by a car accident, a Medical anomoly, a war. We keep them marginalised in our minds because we dont want to be frightened by our common vulnerability. We find ways to blame them. Then outrageous fortune makes collateral.damage of us and we are the ones marginalised, and naively shocked to have been the victim of misfortune, trauma and neglect.

Trauma takes us to the big questions, the deep questions about purpose and meaning.

I wake in terror and.have dificulty controlling my heart rate. I feel death in the room. Then I wake and eat something andbfeel ok. The reductionist in me says prozac
Yanks blood sugar and I will improve when I can eat regularly again. The mystic says when death comes to look at you you better look back and make friends. I do both.

We all belong to each other and the meaning of our individual traumas occur in the context of the world. Our world is dying. Our society is collapsing. We are collectively in crisis. If we choose to survive we will need to make radical changes in the way we live. My suburban childhood was really optimal, but really unsustainable and even as i child I understood something was very wrong about some of us having spacious air conditioned homes and plenty of cheap fruit we didnt pick while other children died of thirst or disease stemming from lack of drinkable water.

I know our first world trauma is real. I feel it in my body. I wake in horror. I feel like a truck has run through my middle. But, we arent in Gaza. We are prisoners of our mind's habits, nothing else. Our trauma isnt happening now. We have choices. Our individual survival is no longer in direct jeopardy and it may be self indulgence to dwell on our traumatic losses when sometimes a simple exercise of will can bring us back to present.