Trauma is an Energetic Event and Here's How to Heal It
Updated: Sep 18
Written by Diana Beaulieu, Womb Healing Teacher
Diana Beaulieu is the founder of the InnerWomb Method, an innovative healing modality empowering women to awaken their embodied feminine power through Womb Healing. She trains practitioners globally to bring profound emotional and energetic transformation to women’s lives.
Most of us meet trauma on two fronts. There is our mind, the memories that replay, the stories we tell ourselves, and the beliefs that subtly wire in. There is our body, a nervous system that learns to be on alert, the emotions that live within our organs and fascia. Talking therapies have transformed how we process the past, and somatic, nervous system, and breathwork approaches have brought incredible release to the physical spaces our conscious minds cannot easily reach.
But there is a third front. What if trauma is not only an emotional and physical event, what if it is also an energetic one? We are an ecosystem of mind, body, and energy, and lasting healing must tend to all three.
The mind: Rewriting the story
You experience yourself through your thoughts, your memories, and the stories that play out inside you. If trauma has been part of your life, it needs conscious processing: to understand what happened, how it shaped you, and how to resolve your relationships and the limiting beliefs that linger. Talking therapies are invaluable here, they give you space to metabolise the past and write a new story, one in which you are empowered.
The body: Where emotions live
You are also your body: your organs, your nervous system, your fascia, and the memories you hold at a somatic level. The body is where your emotions reside, and it is very difficult to separate the two. Chinese Medicine describes emotions flowing through our organs and structures, and disruption to that flow as the principal cause of imbalances in health.
Trauma affects the nervous system and ripples into the patterns we hold. Stress, anger, fear, guilt, and shame are metabolised inside our physical body, showing up as contraction and constriction, often in the fascia, where unexpressed emotion locks in for years. That is why working through breath, touch, and nervous system practices can bring such profound release, shifting patterns directly at the root.
The light body: The layer we cannot see
Yet there is another layer still, your energetic layer. A shamanic practitioner might call it your soul. Set aside, for a moment, any religious connotations, and consider soul in its simplest form: light, or energy, that precisely overlaps your body and extends slightly beyond its edges. You can think of this as the life force that enlivens your body. It subtly informs and organises the processes within your physical body systems. It is a form of consciousness or intelligence interweaving through your organs, nervous system, fascia, and blood.
The image I find most useful is a crystal vessel holding a clear liquid. The liquid is your unique frequency of light, the sum of the information and consciousness that makes you who you are.
When that light is shining and full, the body is fed down to the cellular level with vitality and inner fullness. But like any crystal, this vessel is fragile.
Here is the central question: what if trauma disrupts the integrity of your light body, the way a dropped vase shatters and leaks its contents? For example, just as a physical assault generates physical injury, fear, and a lasting memory, what if it also wounds your light body in ways you cannot see? Long after your body has healed and you’ve processed your memories, your light body may still be unmended.
Shamans call this a soul wound: a lingering energetic rupture that does not resolve with time and is not healed when the other layers are treated. It is why, decades after trauma, you might still feel, “Since this happened, I have never felt the same.” Something joy, trust, sexual connection has been lost, and no amount of talking or somatic therapy brings it back.
An ecosystem of support
The harm done to our light body then has a significant, hidden impact on your emotional, physical, and mental levels of being. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, and all the king’s horses and men could not put him together again. The horses and men, the physical, active, doing aspects of life, could not do it. Which begs the question: who could?
The return of the shaman
Shamanic practitioners in every culture know the light body, and ancient shamanic medicine is dedicated to tending its integrity, because that integrity is understood to be the foundation of well-being for the individual, family, ancestors, tribe, and the Earth herself.
Yet over the last six thousand years, beginning in Sumeria, a patriarchal system of control spread across the globe, culminating in Western colonialism. Wherever it went, it exploited the Earth and enslaved people, and worked to eradicate shamanic medicine, our human birthright. The old knowledge was a threat because it relied on direct seeing: the shaman could perceive the energetic realms and could not be controlled by organised religion or rule. Patriarchy did not only traumatise us collectively, but it also removed the people who could help us heal.
Where shamanic traditions remain intact, those peoples and lands are still threatened, but shamanic medicine refuses to die, and today it is resurging. For many, core shamanism, a simple, universal way of connecting with the energetic realms, opened their eyes to the hidden light body within and offered constructive ways to heal.
Soul retrieval: Healing trauma through energetic integration
A core focus of shamanic and energetic healing is soul retrieval, or the ancient art of calling back and integrating lost soul pieces that were dislocated by trauma. Many of us walk the Earth incomplete, having lost soul pieces along the way through traumas big and small.
With the help of energetic healing, we can call pieces back perhaps those that hold aspects of our self-love, creative power, identity, and more – and bring them back to our bodies in the now to become more whole.
Feeling wholeness gives us power and allows us to source energy and love from within, rather than constantly seeking outside ourselves through relationships, money, alcohol, and other addictions, in order to “fill the hole” within. This is the ultimate healing from trauma, regaining energetic integrity and emotional wholeness to finally embody who we were before trauma took place.
Putting Humpty Dumpty back together
We have spent decades perfecting the king's horses and men, brilliant talking and body-based therapies that have helped countless people. They are essential, but on their own, they are not enough because they were never designed to mend the energetic vessel itself. The rhyme's question has an answer: the healer who understands the light body.
Trauma is an energetic event, healing, at its deepest, is energetic too. When we learn to put ourselves back together, piece by luminous piece, we recover the joy, trust, and aliveness trauma took from us, and that is the most empowering story of all.
Read more from Diana Beaulieu
Diana Beaulieu, Womb Healing Teacher
Diana Beaulieu studied Biology and Human Sciences at Oxford University and brings over 20 years of experience in anthropology, writing, shamanism, and energy medicine. As the founder of the InnerWomb Method, she has trained practitioners in over 40 countries, including doctors, coaches, and therapists. Her pioneering work blends somatic healing, shamanic practice, and quantum transformation to help women reclaim their feminine power. Diana is recognized as a leading global authority in the field of Womb Healing.
