Influence through mass communication need not be blatant—it can be very subtle indeed. Even when communicators are not making a direct attempt to sell us something, they can succeed in influencing the way we look at the World. If my assumptions about you are incorrect, I will continue to perceive you in incorrect or incomplete ways. Through education, books, encounter sensitivity groups, and programs on television and other media, we are trying to bring about awareness of such problems. Racism, gender discrimination, elitism—all these are increasingly being brought to our collective attention. Love is that blessed wand which wins the waters from the hardness of the hearts. Emotions become volatile over time and officially prove to be the greatest weakness for many. We can also recognize messages from the collective unconscious when we experience synchronicity, making meaning out of sheer coincidence. Nothing happens by accident. There is a profound significance in what others may perceive as random, inconsequential coincidence. On the path to individuation, a person examines synchronistic events as meaningful expressions of the collective unconscious.  We all have the innate capacity to walk a path that leads us to our true selves. We gather strength from a connection to God. This force has wisdom to share—wisdom that brings with it peace, balance, and wholeness, but to benefit from this wisdom, we must first learn to feel. The body responds to extreme experiences by secreting stress hormones. These are often blamed for subsequent illness and disease.

However, stress hormones are meant to give us the strength and endurance to respond to extraordinary conditions. People who actively do something to deal with a disaster—rescuing loved ones or strangers, transporting people to a hospital being part of a medical team, pitching tents or cooking meals—utilize their stress hormones for their proper purpose and therefore are at much lower risk of becoming traumatized. Nonetheless, everyone has his or her breaking point, and even the best-prepared person may become overwhelmed by the magnitude of the challenge. Helplessness and immobilization keep people from utilizing their stress hormones to defend themselves. When that happens, their hormones still are being pumped out, but the actions they are supposed to fuel are thwarted. Eventually, the activation patterns that were meant to promote coping are turned back against the organism and now keep fueling inappropriate stand your ground and freeze responses. In order to return to proper functioning, this persistent emergency response must come to an end. The body needs to be restored to a baseline state of safety and relaxation from which it can mobilize to take action in response to real danger. In the powerful body-based therapies called sensorimotor psychotherapy and somatic experiencing, individuals learn to deal with issues by taking the story of what happened and letting it rest. Instead, they explore physical sensations and discover the location and shape of the imprints of past trauma itself, which helps an individual to build up internal resources that foster safe access sensations and emotions that overwhelmed them at the time of the trauma. This process, which we have already discussed is called pendulation—gently moving in and out of accessing internal sensations and traumatic memories.

In the way, an individual is helped to gradually expand their window of tolerance. Once a person can tolerate being aware of their trauma-based physical experiences, they are likely to discover powerful physical impulses—like hitting, pushing, or running—that arose during the trauma but were suppressed in order to survive. These impulses manifest themselves in subtle body movements such as twisting, turning, or backing away. Amplifying these movements and experimenting with ways to modify them begins the process of bringing the incomplete, trauma-related action tendencies to completion and can eventually lead to resolution of the trauma. Somatic therapies can help individuals to relocate themselves in the present by experiencing that it is safe to move. Feeling the pleasure of taking effective action restores a sense of agency (agency is the technical term for the feeling of being in charge of your life: knowing where you stand, know that you have a say in what happens to you, knowing that you have some ability to shape your circumstances) being able to actively defend and protect themselves. When people can physically experience what it would have felt like to fight back or run away, they relax, smile, and express a sense of completion. Love is better than a pair of spectacles to make everything seem greater which is seen through it.