Jed, I came into adulthood with deep childhood developmental trauma of physical, mental and sexual abuse. My mother f@#ked me up seven ways to Sunday. I've been a seeker all my adult life - not that I really knew it - but looking for nothing other than escaping the suffering of the heavy emotional thought cascades that occurred regularly, daily. Over the decades I'd gone to retreats, workshops, lectures, sat songs, therapy, PMA adjustments, ad nauseam ... desperate to find an antidote to the emotional torment of anxiety, panic, paranoia - mistakenly believing that 'spirituality' was the route to this.
Through reading your books I became intrigued with the concept of spiritual autolysis (SA); but confounded about exactly what's what. The one piece I didn't grok in your books was the thought/emotional percolating that ends up on paper.
Then I discovered a particular approach that I believe does much the same but is more structured - identifying heavy emotions as "senses of the soul". Much like the nervous system will alert us to the sting of touching a hot stove, our heavy emotions are an alarm that our soul is sending us that will guide us back to our birthright of serenity and contentment. This is what appears to be the same kind of pioneering work (well, elegantly re-packaging for a Western crowd) that you're doing with SA - a sort of 'self therapy'.
So anyway, I was guided to the work of GuruMeher (pronounced Guru Mare), a teacher (from kundalini fame) who's written a book called SOS - Senses of the Soul ("Emotional Therapy for strength, healing and guidance") documenting what he calls the seven heavy emotions: fear (anxiety, panic), desire, anger, depression, grief, guilt and shame.
Through regular daily breathe work that evokes the emotions in order to identify them, feel them and flush them, over time, each emotion is brought to the fore in order to ask it (i.e. ask our body/soul) what is it trying to tell me so emphatically? "What exactly is the danger and what is it threatening?" And being able to stop and listen and identify the source - my body? my reputation? future prospects? (Mine had been feelings of a deep inadequacy where I'm not smart enough, ambitious enough, lucky enough, simply, I'm not favored by the Universe ... mostly everyday, many times a day.)
I know that it appears that SA would be a fairly straightforward matter - regurgitating on paper. But it escaped me and, upon hindsight, I believe it's because of the degree of trauma I was laboring under. I mean those are pretty deeply grooved neuropathways. I've been doing the SOS work and developing new ones, it seems, that have greatly alleviated the panic, anxiety, etc. I'm headed toward serenity and feeling peaceful much of the time (I have more work to do).
So I'd be interested in your thoughts regarding the SA and being able to have a more definitive "how to" approach to show folks eager to work it (you used good examples in the books, but it escaped me) - and maybe this is what you're teaching in navigator.
However, in contrast, through the SOS, I'm now more in touch with my body/soul than I've ever been and hearing it quite clearly. I had been so strangled in the trauma, I believe, that only something really pointed and codified like this could stir the emotions to the top so I could work them. I'm also interested in whether you have noted the spectrum of heavily traumatized to not so traumatized - and whether it matters regarding who makes progress.
Thanks for your good work. Love ya, b