Discovering Seemorg Matrix Work: a Journey in Healing

Asha Clinton, MSW, PhD

As a psychotherapist, I worked hard with my clients, but those with difficult disorders-- narcissism and other personality disorders, OCD, the dissociative disorders and bipolar disorder-- often took many years to treat substantially; some never improved as much as we would have liked. Something valuable was clearly missing that would more quickly and completely alleviate their suffering.

As a healer, I worked with people whose problems tended to be physical. Often we would achieve tremendous results, only to see them fade days or weeks after a session. Something crucial was clearly missing here as well, and their suffering was not alleviated permanently.

And in my work as a spiritual guide and meditation teacher in the Sufi Order, I worked with people who desired wholeness, illumination, enlightenment. Often they would take tremendous steps forward, but it would take many years of concentrated spiritual practice. I could feel that their way was often blocked. Something was missing that might allow them more completely to be reunited with the Divine.

When I combined psychotherapy, spiritual practice, and healing into Oneness Therapy, results improved remarkably. A deeper level of interaction between issue, body, spirit, and psyche produced permanent results. Emotions that had refused to clear with work on any one of these levels alone cleared fully. Although my more disturbed clients made better progress than they ever had before, they profitted from this new synthesis only to a degree; clearly, there was still a missing piece, and suffering continued longer than it might have. Then my colleague, Vivan Guze, the eminent bioenergeticist, knowing of my frustration, suggested I get trained first, in EMDR and then, in TFT. I felt a new world open up before me during those seminars. These methods drained the human system of traumatic emotion more quickly than Oneness Therapy had done. And now I had a language and a theory to think with. I felt hope that it would be possible to move further.

Thinking from Arlene Shapiro's definition of a trauma as a past incident which, when remembered in the present, produces uncomfortable emotion (Shapiro 1994: EMDR Level 1 training), I realized that trauma has many more aftereffects than intense emotion, aftereffects which TFT and EMDR did not fully address.

Then I attended Fred Gallo's EDxTM training and learned his Core Belief procedure. Core Beliefs are the beliefs, ideas, and attitudes which we use to define and conceptualize ourselves, other people, life, and the world as we have experienced it. Some negative examples: Life stinks, and then you die; men are bastards; women are bitches; I am stupid; the world is a veil of tears; God is dead. I returned home with mind and heart in high gear. I was excited because I saw that Core Beliefs were the key I was looking for. But I wanted a simpler method than Fred's diagnostic one, a method which any clinician or client could easily do, a method which was like a TFT algorithm.

As I began to experiment with Fred's Core Belief procedure on myself and my friends, I discovered an important fact: Core Belief clearing didn't seem to hold consistently like trauma clearing did. Also, clearing a single Core Belief seldom seemed to hold for any length of time at all. Clearly there was a lot more to discover about transforming these building blocks of inner reality.

When I attended Gary Craig's Becoming the Ultimate Therapist Seminar some months later, a new solution emerged from his approach. He used one algorithm (or parts of it), working from the head downward, for everything that had to be released. After some experimentation, I came quickly to agree with this, especially since it accorded with my knowledge as a healer: When I did healing, I could usually feel energy move down the client's body and then out the bottoms of his feet. I could feel the same movement when I used EFT or TFT on myself. I realized that, to remove what is unwanted in the human system, moving the energy downward is usually the simplest and most natural way to release it, since that is what the body often does if left to its own devices.

However, I was somewhat uncomfortable using the acupressure points which Roger Callahan had discovered and which were also used in TFT and EFT; I knew relatively little about these points and what I knew came from reading rather than personal experience. My training had been in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sufism, which focus on the Chakras, a group of seven or more major energy centers in the body, each of which governs specific spiritual, psychological, and physical aspects of the human being. I decided to try to do EFT with Chakras instead of Callahan's points, and discovered that the Chakras functioned at least as well as the acupressure points did. In fact it felt to me, and still feels to me, like the Chakras each access deeper and more numerous levels of energy than the acupressure points do.

One Sunday morning a month or so after Gary's Seminar, I was napping in the tub and awoke with the ideas that have become the basis of Seemorg Matrix Work: First, that, if we tap downward to remove negative emotion, we need to tap upward to instill something positive; second that, for positive Core Beliefs to be permanently instilled, related traumas have to be cleared first or their negative energy will be in the way; and third, that any given Core Belief does not exist in a vacuum-- it is connected naturally, by experience and association, to a whole net of related Core Beliefs-- a Matrix of them. It stood to reason that an entire Matrix of related Core Beliefs needed to be cleared in order for Core Belief clearing to be permanent.

I jumped out of the bathtub and ran downstairs to my computer to write down my ideas before I forgot them, only to realize that I could easily be electrocuted. Once dry I wrote the first Core Belief Matrix and, later that day, tried my new method on a friend: First I cleared the trauma she presented. Next I deduced a group of Core Beliefs that seemed to be connected to the trauma she recounted. This became a second Core Belief Matrix.

In muscle testing her I discovered that she tested negatively for the majority of the Core Beliefs in this Matrix. I used Fred Gallo's Pause Lock method to tell both her body and her unconscious which negative Core Belief we were expunging. Then I had her hold each Chakra point in turn, beginning with the first one at the base of the spine, and moving upward while she repeated the positive Core Belief at each point. She did this until she reached a SUDS of 10. In this way she replaced all the negative Core Beliefs in that Matrix with positive ones. She says they are still holding, and it is a year and a half later as I write.

A few months after developing and using a number of Core Belief Matrices with clients who had personality disorders, I began to notice that some of their rigid, negative character structures were softening and changing! As I wrote more and more Matrices and focused my attention on character structures, I began to suspect that character structures must consist of Matrices of Core Beliefs. It seemed as if trauma was the foundation for negative character structures, and Core Beliefs, and to a lesser extent desires and fantasies, were the girders which hold up the characterological edifice. If this was the case, Seemorg Matrix Work could transform character structures by clearing traumatic emotions and transforming Core Beliefs, desires, and fantasies.

It began to seem that Seemorg Matrix Work could treat the personality disorders and other hard-to-treat disorders. And having spent 10 years early in my therapeutic career treating cancer, auto-immune, and heart patients with approaches pioneered by Lawrence LeShan and Carl Simonton, I suspected that Matrix could probably be used to treat diseases with a strong traumatic component as well. And if it could treat the physical and psychological levels, it probably could treat spiritual and creative blockages of various kinds. And all because trauma and its aftereffects-- negative Core Beliefs, destructive desires and fantasies-- must be the basic building blocks of all these kinds of issues.

And this has been my experience. In subsequent months, my clients taught me that, a trauma is any occurrence which, when we think of it or it is triggered by some present event, evokes difficult emotions and/or physical symptoms, conditions, or diseases, gives rise to negative beliefs, desires, fantasies, compulsions, obsessions, addictions and/or dissociation, blocks the development of positive qualities and spiritual connection, and/or fractures human wholeness. I learned from them that most disorders having any of these symptoms could be cleared by clearing the underlying traumatic emotions, core traumatic patterns, and core beliefs. More complex disorders required that desires, fantasies, obsessions, compulsions, addictions, sensitivities, diseases, and more be cleared as well. As I followed where my clients led me, one new Seemorg Matrix Work protocol emerged after another, and suffering decreased.

Seemorg Matrix Work is now taught in four levels. The first covers the basics: the therapeutic healing presence, the experience of the chakra points, the Core Traumatic Patterns, the Traumatic Emotion Protocol, the Core Belief Protocol, the nonobligatory use of the computer in Seemorg Matrix Work, and more. The second level works entirely with physical and spiritual issues, and covers allergies and sensitivities, auto-immune diseases, a variety of more unusual physical abreactions such as snoring and involuntary movements, clearing one's relationship with the Divine, grandiosity, and other Shadow and darker characteristics, instilling positive Divine qualities, and combining Matrix with meditation. This level also includes Matrix Healing, the healer's version of Seemorg Matrix Work.

The third level is focused on treating the personality disorders with Seemorg Matrix Work, and covers all of them, synthesizing relevant material from child development, self psychology, analytical psychology, and spiritual practice. It also includes an exposition of Insight Matrix, the depth version of Seemorg Matrix Work. The fourth level focuses on more difficult and unusual issues such as the Seemorg Matrix Work treatment of dissociation, bipolar disorder, and hard to treat character structures such as masochism and harsh judgment, and psychopathy.

Seemorg Matrix Work has grown out of these ideas and experiences, and this definition. To date I have used it successfully to treat borderline and narcissistic personality disorders, dissociative identity disorder, obsessivecompulsive disorder, a number of auto-immune diseases including asthma, arthritis, and ulcerative colitis, spiritual blockages of various kinds, and some terribly irritating conditions like snoring, tinnitus, and food and other sensitivities. There has not yet been time to fully examine its potential. As Seemorg Matrix Work has developed, it has morphed into a number of variant forms which are particularly useful to healers, transpersonal and Jungian psychotherapists, and bodyworkers. I hope it will continue to develop and change as we all learn more about how we function.

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