Take one Aussie, add two parts amazing personality, a cup of brutal honesty, some traumatic events that led to shame, guilt and self-harm, mix thoroughly over 7 cities and 40 countries traveled to, and you’ll get my friend Kirsty Spraggon. She’s an inspiration to all who come across her infectious smile and warm aura. She draws out the pain from people’s soul, like an emotional sponge.
I met her a couple of years back during an event at the Fairmont Miramar, and we have lots of friends in common through the National Speakers Association and the local Santa Monica community of spiritual warriors. Her story is one of overcoming the guilt and shame of a medical condition. You can learn more about that part of her life through the TEDxMalibu talk she gave in 2014.
Since that time she has pursued a greater purpose, that of helping others find their way to a personal truth. Her mission is to be a Truth Teller for Truth Seekers, which is also very much her brand. Last year she put on a one day event that brought together a few hundred people to confront their traumas and discover a new way forward.
This year she’s producing a series of events in local venues to help people confront and recover from their traumas. The concept of trauma is ‘any deeply disturbing or distressing experience.’ We’ve all had something in our lives that qualifies, the question really is to what degree, and how well, we have moved past the effects of it.
When I’m representing fathers in family court I frequently have to explain to them the deeper meaning of the events they are going through. It’s not just the having to move, and now seeing their kids every other weekend and a Wednesday night, it’s the loss of the dream of their family. It’s the pain of being sidelined in their kid’s lives and relegated to being nothing more than an ATM and a target for blame. It impacts their sense of self, their role in society and it’s the loss of meaning for them. These traumas are all there, but frequently the men don’t have the vocabulary to understand them until I suss it out for them.
The lack of understanding of our traumas is one of the major problems people have with them. If you can’t identify something, you can’t treat it. Which is why so many men default to just venting their frustrations in anger or self-abuse with alcohol, sex or gambling. Women suffer from this as well, but in different ways.
That woman you see who is morbidly obese? Frequently she has been victimized sexually by someone in her family and is trying to protect herself from further attacks by her bulk, and soothing her pain with food. The ‘crazy cat lady’ who hoards felines? She’s likely hurting and lonely from the loss of a parent’s love and nothing can fill that hurt. How do I know this? Years of working in the family courts. I see a great deal of trauma being played out on innocent people’s lives.
That’s why when Kirsty is hosting events that help people uncover, discover and discard their traumas I want to support her. I’m not being compensated for this in any way.
I know that our pains, are not ours alone. We will lash out at others when we’re hurting, or hurt ourselves instead. We leave our friends wondering “Why?” when there’s a suicide (I’ve had way too many of those in my life.)
She has three events coming up. The first is this Sunday the 8th is being held at NAAM YOGA located at 1231 4th Street, Santa Monica, California 90401. It is a guided meditation that discovers what people “most need to let go of. It’s incredible. We then discover where it’s showing up in their present. The kind of people who come to these events vary dramatically. In Malibu we have participants who lost their homes in the fires. We had incest survivors, cancer survivors and people who experienced domestic violence. And they all were able to have incredible experiences, where astrotravel is possible, one lady said she felt like all of her chakras opened up. People generally feel lighter and freer. Some people have very specific visions and know what their working through, others they have no idea where they went, but they just have this sense that stuff was cleared. And so we do the meditation and the sound modalities and finally we do breathwork techniques to finish, because the breathwork is like the release part of the evening.”
This is all very California, the drumming the soundbaths, the breathwork, it’s all work that would be pooh-poohed by anyone on the East coast. However, I have personally found that some of this California spirituality work is very useful. Some of it I love and has worked for me and the traumas that I experienced as a child of a violent alcoholic household who then had to contend with being gay in a world where that meant certain death.
If you have traumas, or you know that something is off in your life, but you don’t know what, I suggest you try something new. Do a soundbath. Go for a guided mediation. What’s the worst that happens? You’ll fall asleep and snore.
I recommend my friend Kirsty Spraggon and her Truth Telling for Truth Seeking events. The upcoming series is called Breath-Release-Transform and you can find it at www.KirstySpraggon.com/product/breathe-release-transform-l-a-event/ she has events on September 8 at NAAM in Santa Monica, September 14 in Brentwood and September 22 in Malibu.
David Pisarra is a Los Angeles Divorce and Child Custody Lawyer specializing in Father’s and Men’s Rights with the Santa Monica firm of Pisarra & Grist. He welcomes your questions and comments. He can be reached at dpisarra@pisarra.com or 310/664-9969.You can follow him on Twitter @davidpisarra
