TRE® and Awakening
How TRE® helps support awakening and deepening realization
Consciousness and TRE® — Quiet the Body, Quiet the Mind
TRE® (Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises) support the integration of awakening by helping the nervous system reorganize around safety rather than defense. As the body relaxes out of old patterns, there is a natural shift towards:
- accessing effortless presence
- openness
- emotional fluidity
- an unfiltered intimacy with experience
This isn’t about reaching special states, it’s about removing the physiological noise that makes it challenging to rest in awakened presence. TRE helps cut through the tendency to habitually dissociate from one’s immediate experience.
Clearing Chronic Body Tension / Energetic Blockages
A great deal of what we call the egoic identity is really an attempt to manage our internal experience — to control, suppress, or organize what feels uncomfortable. Most of us live in a subtle but almost constant state of dissociation, lost in thought and disconnected from our direct, embodied experience. This is true for most people until deep into the awakening process.
Most people don’t have PTSD, yet most carry more trauma than they realize. We’re beginning to understand how ancestral trauma shapes us, often before we’re even conscious of it. Tibetan Buddhist masters have long said that birth is typically a more difficult experience than death, and modern psychology echoes this recognition of early imprinting. It’s estimated that roughly half of the adult population has some degree of attachment wounding, pointing to widespread developmental trauma that can affect our capacity for intimacy and connection. Many of us grow up in environments marked by emotional repression or dysfunction, and over time, this creates layers of protective tension in the body.
As psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. notes in The Body Keeps The Score, trauma quite literally lives in the body as chronic tension. For many people, finding effective ways to release and integrate this stored tension becomes essential for the awakening process to continue its natural unfolding.
TRE® activates the body’s ancient natural tremor reflex to release these deep layers of tension. The benefits are cumulative and can significantly aid in awakening, emotional processing, reducing reactivity, and overall embodiment.
Adyashanti on Awakening the Body
“One of the ways that I mean embodiment is much more concrete than people imagine. I’m literally talking about the best way to get your attention from being lost in all your thoughts is just get right into your immediate embodied experience. And there’s something paradoxical that as we attend to our immediate embodied experience, whatever that might be, that simply by doing that, it engenders this kind of greater sense of space – a greater sense of quiet which is the foundation of consciousness”
– Adyashanti
TRE connects us with animals and all life. We experience a deep connection with ourselves, fellow animals (that also shake) and countless generations of ancestors through which neurogenic tremors and the intelligence guiding this process have evolved. As traumas are released we return to our natural state, embodying a deepening sense of connection to Earth and all of existence.