Build From the Ashes

Severe trauma is like a forest fire.

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Transcript

Conor Clapton, a four-year-old boy, was traveling with his family in New York. They were staying on the 53rd floor of a building. One of the cleaning staff left a window open, and Conor, with the curiosity of any child, leaned out. He didn’t understand the height. He fell to his death.

His father, Eric Clapton, already a world-famous musician, was the one who had to identify the body. After that, Eric disappeared. For months he didn’t play. He didn’t sing. It was as if grief and guilt had swallowed his entire identity.

Then, a year later, he returned with a song for his son. *Tears in Heaven.* A song so raw and true it would later be named one of the greatest songs ever written.

What happened to Eric wasn’t just that he accepted what happened. He transmuted the pain into something beautiful. Psychologists like Richard Tedeschi call it post‑traumatic growth. Some people don’t go back to “normal” after devastation. They grow beyond who they were.

The Yogis taught this long ago. They explain that pain itself is not what destroys us. What destroys us is identification—when the mind says, “This pain is me.” When that identification breaks, the old personality collapses, and something deeper is forced to emerge.

Think of your brain as a forest of familiar paths. Your routines. Your relationships. Your sense of self. These are trails so well worn you walk them without thinking. Severe trauma is like a forest fire. It burns everything down. The old paths cease to exist. That’s why loss feels like the end of the world, because neurologically and psychologically, it is the end of that world.

The Yogis say suffering arrives when an old structure can no longer contain the life force moving through it. Pain breaks the form so consciousness can reorganize at a higher level. In other words, pain pushes you to change how you think, relate, and cope, so you can handle more of life.

Energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed.

Clapton’s pain didn’t disappear. It couldn’t. That energy had to go somewhere. The mind will always transform pain into illness, despair, or creation. There are pains in life so great they leave only two choices:

Die with the old self.

Or build something entirely new from the ashes.