What we perceive as “the world” is not objective in the classical sense. It is not independent of observation, and more crucially, it is not independent of the observer’s inner structure. Beliefs, expectations, emotional residue, subconscious narratives these act like lenses or filters. They do not just color perception; they generate it. Most of the time, our projections are unconscious. Because of the unconscious operates beyond our conscious awareness and can significantly influence our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors without us realizing it.
You don’t see the world as it is. You see it as you are. From a psychological perspective, this aligns closely with Carl Jung’s insight: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” The more fragmented, incoherent, or repressed our internal landscape, the more our reality reflects disorder, confusion, or suffering. Conversely, inner alignment emotional coherence, mental clarity, spiritual grounding transforms the outer experience. This is not magical thinking. It’s not bypassing or pretending pain isn’t real. It’s the deep recognition that your inner structure is participatory, we are not just a powerless observer. You are not reacting to a fixed world you are co-creating it.
During our workshop Unveiling the Shadow, I teach techniques to bring to the surface aspects of yourself that were repressed or suppressed. It is like discovering other people have been living inside of us without our permission. Once we uncover them, we stop giving them power and stop projecting them onto others.
Karma: Not a Moral Score, But an Energetic Loop
Karma is often misunderstood as a cosmic scoreboard punishing or rewarding us for our deeds. But that’s a fatalistic and very limited view. At its core, karma is an energetic and psychological pattern, a loop of thought, emotion, and behavior that keeps replaying itself endlessly.
But what is this loop? Where does it come from? And is there anything we can do about it?
It’s obvious this loop is very powerful, especially because we believe we cannot stop it. What if, unconsciously, we are feeding it? What is the antidote? If this loop is a forever movement that repeats itself, then the opposite is stillness.
What is stillness? In Becoming Supernatural, its author, the neuroscientist Joe Dispenza, emphasizes the importance of stillness as a pathway to accessing the quantum field. Why we would want to access the quantum field? Because it is the realm of infinite possibilities where everything that could exist already exists as potential energy.
This state of stillness or being fully present can be achieved through meditation by disconnecting from the external environment, the body, and the perception of time. It allows one to enter a state of pure consciousness, where they can connect with the infinite possibilities of the quantum field.
Joe Dispenza explains that when we are still, we are no longer operating from the limitations of our physical senses or our past experiences. I completely agree. However, if we are still hypervigilant and overreacting due to old traumas wounds, it becomes very difficult to be fully present.
To be fully present is the act of seeing what is, without fleeing from it, or trying to fix it. This pure witnessing is not passive. It’s alive, precise, and transformative. But when we are traumatized, it is very difficult to relax into stillness.
Healing Childhood Trauma: The Foundation of Presence
The first step is to heal our childhood traumas because we can only be present when we stop overreacting, defending ourselves, justifying, attacking. This process is individual and can take months or years until we are free of the pain, so we don’t need to keep overreacting or perpetuating it.
Sigmund Freud first proposed the concept of “repetition compulsion” in a 1914 article. People unconsciously repeat past experiences, especially traumatic or emotionally charged ones. This repetition manifests itself in actions, behaviors, or even relationships in the present, often without realizing that we are simply recreating something from our past. We will keep attracting what it is familiar, even when familiarity brings more of the same. By trying to control the original painful experience, we achieve the opposite: we merely perpetuate the old dynamics, keeping the wounds of the trauma alive.
During the Inner Child Regression workshops, I teach how to rescue the child we were from the trauma loop, no longer needing to unconsciously reenact the same pain, the same circumstances, the same feelings of powerlessness and despair. It is then that we are free to go to the next level: being fully present. The feeling of relief is incommensurable, difficult to describe with words.
In this stillness, something extraordinary happens: the karmic loop begins to unravel on its own.
The quantum physicist David Bohm described reality as an unfolding of patterns within an implicate order an invisible field that shapes everything we experience. Karma, then, is like a wave of momentum flowing through this field, repeating because nothing has stopped it.
Trying harder, struggling, or chasing freedom only adds more movement. It’s like swimming against a current with more force, it exhausts you and tightens the loop.
The spiritual sage Ramana Maharshi captured this beautifully: “The desire to be free is a kind of bondage.” The very effort to escape the net binds us tighter.
Caught in the Loop: Pleasure, Pain, and Repetition
Whether we grasp for pleasure or flee from pain, we’re caught in the same mechanical loop. Our reactions are repetitive, patterned responses triggered by old emotional imprints.
Every time we label or judge something, we reinforce the cycle.
This is not just philosophy, it’s physics, psychology, and metaphysics converging.
We Are More Than Our Stories
Transpersonal psychology reminds us that we are all more than our personal stories. We are fields of consciousness, channels through which ancestral, cultural, and collective energies flow.
We carry a huge baggage because karmic patterns are a mixture of childhood traumas, generational traumas, and projections from other people. After all, we are portals where all these unresolved patterns seek resolution.
The only way to get out of these traps is to be completely present and neutral. But reaching this point is the most difficult part.
The Challenge of Meditation and the Path to Stillness
What happens when we try to meditate? Most people cannot stop the voices inside the thoughts, the worries.
During our workshops, all meditation exercises are done under a light trance. This is to avoid mental noise. Through light hypnotic states, we enter in a deep relaxation and focus, and slowly we let go. Without realizing it, in a certain moment, we will reach stillness.
When we reach neutrality the stillness, we stop feeding the monsters. Everything that was worrying and consuming our energy starts losing its power. In this precise moment of stillness, we realize: I am not this problem. I am not this situation. And we stop charging it, recreating it.
Disidentification: The Key to Liberation
This process of liberation is completely proactive, grounded in the simple but difficult state of disidentification ceasing to identify with a particular situation.
During our Regression to Childhood workshop, we revisit the most traumatic moments of our childhood. We become that child again and experience their vulnerability, pain, and the survival decisions made at that moment. These decisions become the future scripts of our lives.
Every time we encounter the same trigger, we feel the same desperation and danger the child felt. Because of this, we overreact we are re-experiencing the trauma. This is what trauma specialist Peter Walker calls a flashback.
A flashback is re-experiencing an old trauma when a trigger puts a person into a trance like, timeless space where the child felt hopeless, desperate, and in danger. This is the loop where the child was trapped, and where our inner child still is, and it is the loop that keeps us overreacting today like a vulnerable child.
Breaking the Loop
After practicing the techniques I teach during the workshop, eventually we feel less and less triggered until we reach a point where we can wake up in the middle of a flashback and understand: Now I am safe. I don’t need to react. We can stop the reaction. We can stop labeling and judging. We can just be there and feel.
Healing these traumas makes us less defensive and helps us exit the loop of danger.
Quantum Insight: Witnessing Without Judgment
Quantum theory shows that particles don’t exist in definite states until observed. Similarly, karmic patterns don’t solidify until you judge or resist them. Simply witnessing without judgment keeps you in the quantum field of possibility, not trapped in a collapsed timeline of repetition.
This is where ego dissolves, time loosens, and karma loses its grip.
A Life Free from Loops opens the path to the source
All our workshops have the purpose of reaching a life free of the scripts written by our traumatized inner child, by our traumatized ancestors and by all projections from others. Our determination to stop the wheels and regain sovereignty requires mastering the most pacific tools, stillness and awareness.
Author: Silvia Polivoy, Argentinian clinical psychotherapist, specialized in modified states of consciousness and co-founder of Spirit Vine Retreat Center in Bahia, Brazil.
