In this excerpt from Trauma-Informed Dharma, Miles speaks to students about the challenges of doing trauma work.

"The last few classes have not been easy for a lot of you. I've gotten some feedback, myself included, my own body giving me feedback about what gets kicked up and stirred up when you do this kind of work. It's important that I reiterate the fact that you're not alone.

Number one, whatever you're going through and whatever you're experiencing on your heroic journey, whatever is getting kicked up, whatever is coming out from the shadow, it's incredibly courageous of you. You have made a choice not to distract and dampen your senses and run to all that is on offer in your modern materialistic culture.

You have done something evolutionarily courageous. Something that perhaps no one has been able to do for generations. I like to keep putting this in context that we are souls traveling through vast stretches of time and space and even though modern culture is telling us you're just a brain in this body with one life to live, the reason that we have elected to listen to a deeper calling, to gravitate towards toward spiritual teachings is because we no longer want to be deceived. We no longer are interested in being deceived.

We know that there's more and because there's more and because consciousness continues we have a tremendous responsibility. Because consciousness is continuing to import from its past and to relive until it awakens. In other words, we will have this lesson again and again in this lifetime and the next until we break a cycle, until we discover something, until we make whole what has been broken, until we fully throw down the yoke or the shackles.

This is no joke what we're doing. When you tire and when you fatigue and when you succumb to despair, try to with the last ounce of resource remember that this is no joke. This is absolutely heroic. This is what no man or woman has been able to do before you. And in a way, you are not only doing it for yourself but you are doing it for all those that have come before you and all those that will come after you.

That is truly unbelievable. And more than that, the spiritual teachings that exist in the marketplace today have absolutely nothing to say about some of our deepest insecurities and deepest fears and deepest traumas. So this is an even more profound level of analysis that we're doing. So I want to keep encouraging you.

I think that we have set the frame, the intention and the setting and the mindset are all there. We have created a coherent resonant circuitry. Everybody's willing and ready and committed to doing this process. And so you are not alone. And we have created the environment to do what your deepest yearning is, to actually do and to accomplish. I want to remind you of that."

More on Trauma Informed Dharma here.