Middle East through the teachings of Tantra and Psychodynamics

I usually keep my distance from politics and do not put myself into that space, but this time I want to step forward with my perspective because I want to act and call for the development of consciousness.

Understanding the psychodynamics of conflict between two warring sides is actually the first thing that can help us heal the conflict.

I also want to show you that tantra can encompass far more than sexuality alone, because its principles of reconciling polarities reach into every pore of our lives, not just into the bed under the covers.

Most analyses of war in the Middle East deal with borders, UN resolutions, or military tactics. I personally see that level only as a symptom, not the cause, and that is why I do not think we can find a solution there.

Beneath what is happening on the surface lies a deep, pathological dynamic of two peoples trapped in cycles of trauma that refuse to heal.

To understand this conflict, we have to look at it as a collision of two collective psyches that are not reacting to the present, but to the ghosts of their past, in other words, they are recycling trauma.

As a psychotherapist, I constantly observe how dynamics of power, fear, and trauma spill from the collective into the individual. If we want to understand why humanity is bleeding, we have to look deeply into the mechanisms that drive those wounds.

1. Israel and Palestine

These are, in fact, two historical, unhealed PTSDs.

They feed one another. They are a symbiosis of victim and aggressor.

This conflict is not just a struggle for territory, it is a collision of two irreconcilable traumas that will never heal if they remain at an ethnocentric level of consciousness (only we matter).

Healing begins the moment one side acknowledges the pain of the other without diminishing its own. That requires a transition to a higher level of consciousness that Ken Wilber calls worldcentric (we are all human beings).

In tantric philosophy, this is the moment of integrating polarities, we stop choosing one side and begin witnessing the whole, understanding that both sides are threads of the same wounded fabric.

Israel

The trauma of the Holocaust etched into Israel's collective consciousness the belief that survival is possible only through absolute military superiority and uncompromising control of its environment.

In that constellation, every threat, real or perceived, is a direct threat to existence.

This results in hypervigilance, a state of constant readiness.

If a person is afraid and constantly in a state of alert, what do you think they will see in the world around them?

They certainly will not see beautiful flowers.

They will see some dangerous suspect.

The result is identification with the aggressor. And that is one of the darkest aspects of the psychodynamics of trauma.

The victim, in order to overcome the feeling of helplessness they once lived through, unconsciously adopts the methods, rhetoric, or mechanisms of control of their former tormentor.

And so the archetype of the invincible soldier was created, Israel.

In this scenario, Palestinians cease to be a people with political demands and become a canvas onto which the figure of the “eternal enemy” is projected, because a soldier needs an enemy, otherwise he has no purpose.

When Israel carries out sieges or restrictions on movement, it sees them as a security necessity, while those looking from the outside may recognize methods of dehumanization to which they themselves were once subjected.

Palestine

The trauma of the Nakba is etched into the collective consciousness of Palestinians. It refers to the exodus of approximately 700,000 to 800,000 Palestinians from the territory of present-day Israel during the 1948 war.

More than 400 Palestinian villages were destroyed or emptied.

For a people who were primarily agrarian, tied to the land and to olive groves, this was not merely the loss of property, but a violent uprooting.

Most of those people and their descendants, now numbering in the millions, still live in refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria.

The trauma of “unfinishedness” that they carry is actually a “continuous trauma”, unlike the Holocaust, which is viewed as a historical event with a clear, though horrific, end.

The symbol of the Nakba is the key, because many families still keep the keys to the homes they left in 1948.

This creates a psychological state in which the present is not accepted because people are waiting to return to a past that no longer exists.

Trauma is thus transmitted transgenerationally to children and grandchildren, not only through stories, but through the daily reality of occupation, checkpoints, and loss of land.

Every new house demolition or settlement expansion is experienced as a replay of 1948.

Their identity is defined by the fear of erasure. The British gave their land to the Israelis, and they in truth never accepted exile. They never stopped weeping and longing for their home.

Israel fears extermination, Palestinians fear disappearance.

One side’s search for security directly produces the humiliation of the other, which gives rise to resistance that confirms the original fears of both sides.

The result is a total loss of empathy. In the psychodynamic sense, acknowledging the suffering of “the other” is experienced as a betrayal of one’s own victimhood. If an Israeli acknowledges the depth of the Nakba, it can feel as if they are threatening the legitimacy of their own right to a safe refuge. If a Palestinian acknowledges the gravity of the Holocaust, it can feel as if they are justifying the occupation under which they live.

The path of healing is to break the monopoly on suffering.

As a little girl, during the war in Croatia, I sat in the basement and imagined a Catholic priest and an Orthodox patriarch reconciling, and some good God and good people praying for all of us together. I am proud of little Gorana, who had already then developed a glimpse of worldcentric consciousness. ❤️

A year and a half ago, at a tantra retreat, I found myself in a circle with many Israelis and one Palestinian woman.

Since she was alone and there were many Israelis, emotions were boiling inside her because she was afraid to speak. By chance, we connected more deeply on the very first day, so she opened up to me and admitted her fears and resistance. I listened to her, and by doing so I supported her frightened inner girl in expressing herself.

And when the space opened, she released her voice. Silence fell, and the whole group wept. Spontaneously, we formed a circle of shared prayer.

In that moment, big Gorana was crying with them while little Gorana was healing her war trauma at the same time, because I saw that my childhood imagination was coming true.

Together, we prayed for the children of Palestine and Israel.

Someone saw the pain on the other side and chose not to strike back, but to meet it with presence.

That was when I understood that tantra becomes true peacemaking when we develop the capacity to hold another person’s pain in our hearts as sacredly as our own.

This is the path of healing for Israel and Palestine.

USA and Iran

With the USA and Iran, the story is a little different. Here we have a symbiosis of profit and rigidity.

I see them as a “pathological relationship between former partners” and as a conflict between two narcissists who serve each other as the perfect justification for their own pathology.

Narcissistic consciousness is the lowest level of consciousness in the development of an individual or collective consciousness, and it is very difficult for a narcissist to understand that they are a narcissist.

Here we have a clash of two narcissistic ideologies, each of which would gladly rule the whole world from its own side.

The USA believes that its version of democracy is the only correct path for humanity.

Iran believes that it represents authentic Islamic resistance against Western materialism and imperialism.

One cannot stop controlling, and the other cannot stop defying.

Both sides need the other as a “necessary enemy”.

What is darkest in these dynamics is how much the opposing sides actually need each other.

Without America as a bogeyman, the Iranian regime loses its main tool for suppressing internal dissatisfaction and repressing women.

Without Iranian fanaticism, the American military-industrial complex loses a key argument for its presence in the region, and with that it loses profit because it cannot sell weapons.

The path of healing is the withdrawal of projections (Shadow Work).

Healing begins when we understand that the enemy is actually our “mirror”.

The solution lies in integrating the Shadow, in acknowledging that what I hate in you, I carry repressed within myself.

Tantra teaches us here not to reject the darkness, but to bring it into awareness and integrate it, instead of fighting an outer demon, we meet the inner one.

And that is the hardest war, but also the only war I warmly recommend.

I can explain this dynamic more simply with an example from my own home.

When I am under pressure and do not have the capacity, I often “regress” to a lower level of consciousness and become a “narcissist”.

My neurological system drops into survival mode.

And what do I do then?

I project onto my husband what I myself do not have the courage to face. Maybe I am passive and have not taken action to create something I want, and it is easier for me to attack him for being slow and passive and throw projectiles into his yard than to look into my own.

In that moment, he ceases to be my partner and becomes the “enemy”.

Well, that is what is happening with Iran and the USA.

Events in the Middle East are a mirror of the human psyche under extreme stress.

And they are clear proof that trauma that is not processed becomes a weapon.

The path of healing is for me to reclaim my projection and acknowledge my part in the situation. As I acknowledge vulnerability, fear, my passivity, or whatever is present, I allow peace to enter the space.

For real healing to happen, both peoples must go through a process more painful than the war itself, they must renounce their most precious possession, the status of victim.

As long as these peoples define themselves exclusively through their role as victim, peace is impossible. Peace requires the deconstruction of one’s own myth of innocence and the recognition that the “enemy” is actually only the other face of the same unhealed pain.

The current situation shows that humanity is still more inclined to repeat the hell it knows than to risk peace with those it has turned into monsters in order to justify its own fear.

The remedy is not that they should begin to love one another.

1. The remedy is that they stop recognizing themselves in the roles of tormentor and victim.
2. And that they finally begin to grieve. It is easier to hate than to grieve. Healing requires collective mourning. Instead of spending their energy on revenge for the past, both societies must go through a process of grieving for what has been lost and will never return: old homes, lost lives, and the illusion of a clean victory.
3. The transformation of anger into responsibility. It is a shift from the state in which you ask, “What did they do to us?” to the state in which you ask, “What are we doing to our children by supporting this cycle?”

That is tantra in everyday life, the courage to remain fluid and present in the midst of our own emotional chaos, without the need to hurt another in order to protect ourselves.

Conclusion

Peace as an act of consciousness.

Peace is not diplomacy. Peace is an evolutionary leap in the consciousness of all of us.

As long as we choose and take sides based on a childlike need to be “right”, we remain part of the machine that grinds up lives.

True consciousness begins the moment we recognize that the one on the other side of the gun sight, or on the other side of the kitchen table, is actually a mirror of our unhealed pain.

Only then do polarities cease to be battlefields and become a space for wholeness.

Our goal is to build an identity based on what peoples are, their culture, science, and spirituality, and not on what was done to them.

This is the evolution from victim-peoples to creator-peoples.