Spirit, Duende and Solving Trauma
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What the hell is spirit and why is it so important? For many people, the idea of “spirit” seems backward— like a relic from our primitive past that has no place in modern society. This disagreement over the presence and value of spirit shows up when I talk to people who do healing work based in the medical model.
In the medical model, the goal is to help “resolve trauma” by addressing “core wounds”. In this model, the goal is to resolve our trauma so that we can then lead a good life. Trauma and wounds are the obstacles getting in the way– and trauma becomes a problem to be solved.
In the spirit model I come from, trauma and pain are seen as inherent aspects of life, as much as the “good stuff” like love, joy and compassion. In my path, spirit emerges when we embrace and embody the totality of life, including the “bad stuff” like our pain and trauma.
This intersection of trauma and spirit reveals the path of duende
Duende or tener duende (“having duende”) can be loosely translated as having soul, a heightened state of emotion, expression, and heart… It comes from inside as a physical/emotional response to music. It is what gives you chills, makes you smile or cry as a bodily reaction to an artistic performance that is particularly expressive.
The Spanish poet Federico García Lorca offers this romantic definition: “The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought… It is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation.” He suggests, “Everything that has black sounds in it has duende [i.e., emotional ‘darkness’]
The “black sounds” come from a deeply felt connection to our trauma, to our pain. When the artist embodies duende, they connect to their pain and sorrow and turn these things into an ecstatic work of creation. This is different than collapsing into our trauma, or shutting down. With duende, we are asked to surrender to our darkness and open the door to spirit.
Duende means those moments in artistic activity when something else takes over, when something speaks through you. It’s similar to the Muse or the angel, but these things come from some lofty height, while duende rises up from the depths, from the body and the groin, from the darkness, from death itself.
You can never be sure if duende will turn up, or if a performance will simply be flat and mechanical. That is the mystery – it is not easily replicable in randomised controlled trials. It is most manifest in live arts like spoken poetry, music or (for Lorca) bull-fighting.
You could be in a bar, and everything is stale and flat, and then
La Niña de Los Peines got up like a madwoman, trembling like a medieval mourner, and drank, in one gulp, a huge glass of fiery spirits, and began to sing with a scorched throat, without voice, breath, colour, but…with duende. She managed to tear down the scaffolding of the song, but allow through a furious, burning duende, friend to those winds heavy with sand, that make listeners tear at their clothes with the same rhythm as the Negroes of the Antilles in their rite, huddled before the statue of Santa Bárbara.
Suddenly the god is there:
In all Arab music, dance, song or elegy, the arrival of duende is greeted with vigorous cries of ‘Allah! Allah!’ so close to the ‘Olé!’ of the bullfight, and who knows whether they are not the same? And in all the songs of Southern Spain, the appearance of the duende is followed by sincere cries of: ‘Viva Dios!’ deep, human, tender cries of communication with God through the five senses, thanks to the duende that shakes the voice and body of the dancer.
I hope that when you read these lines you can feel something stirring through you.
When I was a kid going through a traumatic childhood, I knew nothing of “trauma” or “wounds”. Nobody talked about that stuff. I just knew that life sucked, the world was unfair and I was miserable. I had no future to speak of, for it looked just as miserable as the present.
But there were certain points when duende hit me. I had no name for it back then, but it tore through me like an infection. It wasn't separate from my pain but it wasn’t just my pain either. One way it showed up was through dance– I started going to underground raves and the duende came through the syncopated rhythms. I let go, and it felt like a force took me over and started dancing me. I felt connected to something bigger than me that was moving through me. I had no words for it at this point. Later I would call it the kundalini, or spirit, or axé. Once I felt that I didn’t want anything else out of life. It stirred a hunger in me to eat this spirit and at the same time to be consumed by it.
I could feel that this spirit was not separate from my pain or trauma. It was in fact my trauma that was fueling the growth of the spirit in my body and life. I started crying more. I would wail, scream, cry out and all of the pain of that led to a prayer for a deeper connection to spirit.
I have a visceral agony when I feel the numbing suppression of most modern interactions, devoid of authentic connection. I feel the same agony when I hear people sincerely tell me of their system to solve the problem of trauma and suffering. While well meaning, it feels like not just a denial of the primal force of duende, but a denial of life itself. Sometimes people hear me say things like this and it feels like I’m minimizing their pain, or trying to tell them that being traumatized is a good thing. Neither of those things are true, but I get where their critique is coming from. Sometimes I’m at a loss for how to engage in constructive dialogue with people who work in a trauma based model on these things.
I sometimes ask myself “how did I get here?”-- by here I mean this time and space in our culture where duende has no place. If my goal in life was a constant communion with duende, what force inside drove me to a culture so devoid of authentic connection to the darker aspects of spirit?
I have to answer that authentically– that the same part of culture that seeks to solve the problem of suffering exists in me, and I came here both because it's inside of me and it exists as something for me to fight, in my own dance of creation.