Hi all,
Since last article, I have been thinking a lot about the lessons of wrong turns and what is true within what we do or believe that is “wrong”.
Then I heard, this weekend, in a talk about quantum physics, this idea around closed systems and open systems. Technically, an open system can have an exchange of matter and energy from outside sources where a closed system can only exchange energy – the matter never changes. The matter in a closed system stays the same until the system is opened.
The idea is this – when there is a closed system, there is little room for change. It’s like all the things in the system are in a box and the only change possible is from mutations of the already existing matter. The things inside can just get all tangled and everything ends up collapsing or mutating in not good ways.
When there is an open system, then new things are introduced which means there is possibility for new things to emerge, new possibilities to be created. Change.
Most systems that are closed are either hypothetical or, in the world, either rare or created in lab environments. Open systems are about adaptability, change, becoming new.
I have been thinking of this in terms of the work of dreams and what happens when we are working with becoming, with the issues of trauma and our responses to both.
I think that trauma and merely surviving trauma can create an intensely closed system inside of us. If we experience trauma and have no space for healing, then our survival becomes based on the trauma narrative that is a closed circuit, closed system and how we survive.
If I experience sexual trauma, for example, and am told it is my fault [or it is implied] because of my gender, then I may try to survive by hiding or at least hiding my body in some way.
Which is, of course, what happened in my experiences. If my trauma happened because I was a girl and I had need, then I won’t have needs and I will hide. Hide my body in big clothes, hide from the world. Or even hide behind some big persona.
And when this works, which it can, then the systems becomes closed.
And the more I live this, the more closed it can get. Tightly closed. So closed, in some way, that I may not even realize I am living a closed system reality.
A reality that has no space for anything but my narratives, the narratives I have been told, the narrative of my way of survival. Closed. No room for anything but mutations of the same narrative.
Mutations. Just different versions of the same thing. Just stories turning in on themselves over and over.
So that our hearts and minds feel mutated, feel there are no possibilities and that everything is small. Because this kind of closed system is indeed small. Keeping us small and smaller.
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We are not closed systems, as people with hearts and bodies and minds and wild souls. We are systems that need openness for change and growth. Not a mutation of things we have been told or told ourselves because of our experiences.
Dreams! What dreams do is this – they work to identify our closed systems, to crack them open even a little so that new “matter” can enter in.
To crack us open.
What I love about this relationship between the ideas of quantum physics and dreaming is that it is so true to both.
Because when our closed system is cracked open and new possibilities enter, when new narratives are introduced and offered, it is not just that we have room to breath, room to heal.
It is that literally new things can be forged. Created with past materials and energies AND with new. New things, new possiblities.
So we can become big, in our own ways. So we can stand before ourselves, feel the possibilities and make choices on what we want to grow in ourselves. And how we want to change.
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A newer friend was asking me about some of my past experiences recently and I found myself, in some of the sharing, feeling how foreign some of my past selves feel.
Not that the experiences are not true, but that I have changed, I have allowed the dreams to create an open system in me so that I am not that person I was 10 years ago, 15 years ago. Hell, even 2 years ago.
It was kinda amazing – to speak of difficulties I experienced and feel the open system in me around it all. It was quiet and quite an amazing moment.
When I was younger, I truly believed that I would feel tainted, wrong, wounded for my entire life because I was hurt, because I experienced trauma. Not just as a kid, but as a grown-up, too.
It was part of the narrative of my closed system. It is something that our culture believes, too, about people who have experienced terrible things. That they will be a victim or a wounded soul for all time.
But that is not true. Our dreams help us to break the closed seals for healing, yes.
And, our dreams help to break the seals of our closed systems so not just new things can be made possible, but so we can evolve and be the new things. Be the new, big, possibilities. Even in a world so challenging.
More on this in our next article…