For Trauma Survivors: 3 Tips For A Positive Meditation

Practising trauma-informed mindfulness and self-kindness can assist trauma survivors to experience a safe and positive meditation practise. This short talk offers 3 suggestions that can help to create an enjoyable practise, especially if you find that charged emotions or trauma content arises when you come into Presence. Peace is possible no matter where you are on your healing journey.

Transcript

Hi there,

My name is Bec.

Today we are going to briefly speak about three tips for creating a positive meditation for trauma survivors.

If you are a survivor of trauma,

Whatever type of trauma that might be,

You might have noticed that when you meditate it can be challenging.

You might have content of old memories store trauma arise.

You might simply have a very busy mind.

You may find that you feel disconnected or numb.

These are perfectly natural experiences that you are living with as a result of the experiences that you had.

These effects on the mind are the result of having experiences that were so overwhelming that the present moment was not tolerable.

And to survive you disconnected from the present moment and you also hold stored in your energetic bodies that trauma that has been unresolved that is simply awaiting loving presence to be able to flow and heal in the way it would have if you could have successfully coped with the experience and survived.

When we have a traumatic event occur we are overwhelmed and it becomes stored in the bodies.

This is for later healing and it is a survival experience.

So when you come into presence you are really asking yourself to face what has been stored.

Meditation creates the correct conditions for your healing to naturally begin to occur.

Like the physical body that just simply goes about healing a wound without instruction and is able to do that successfully in the right conditions with the right tools etc.

Your mind and your emotional body wants to heal and so when you start to create the conditions of presence and alignment that might allow healing to happen things come up to be released,

To be purified,

To be faced,

Felt and released.

All of this doesn't mean that you can't successfully meditate.

So here are three things that I found really helpful in my experience and for some of my clients.

We want you to stay within your window of tolerance and be prepared to ground and soothe yourself should you come out of your window of tolerance.

A window of tolerance is a pretty common therapeutic or psychological term that is referencing our ability to tolerate being here and now grounded and feel whatever it is that we are experiencing.

In a way where we are grounded and we are aware and we are not essentially dissociating into,

Pulling away from the present moment and into completely into the wound,

The thoughts.

This is a spectrum where we have experiences of some people we all get wrapped up in thoughts from time to time.

But on the extreme end of the spectrum,

Just for our explanation,

Is if you have a flashback experience.

Someone who has a flashback is really being pulled into re-experiencing that in a very full way.

And so our window is about really being able to feel or be aware of whatever is here and knowing that you are safe and staying calm with what's here and allowing it and being here and now.

Trauma survivors tend to have a very small window of tolerance due to various reasons including difficulties with emotional regulation and the fact that there is a lot of stored trauma there.

And so we tend to swing between having too much emotional content and extremes of emotion or emotional flooding and the more other side which is a protective mechanism of numbness and disconnection.

So the way to stay or sense if you have gone out of your window of tolerance is things like if you start to feel fearful of what you are feeling or what's come up in your meditation.

If you start to feel strong feelings of stress.

If you start to get really really wrapped up in a thought or a charged thought or emotion that's here.

If you lose awareness of the here and now,

If you can no longer hear the sounds around you or really feel very much of the seat that you are seated on.

These are some signs that you might be out of your window of tolerance.

And when we come out of it what we need to do is pull ourselves back into the here and now.

We need to ground ourselves into here and now and we often need to soothe or comfort ourselves as well.

Meditating basically means to emotionally regulate yourself.

So if you are meditating and something comes up you are really invited to pause your meditation.

Open your eyes and really feel and hear and see with all of your senses and all of your focus what it is and where you are in this moment now.

You really want to be able to register where you are.

You want to be able to tell yourself that you are safe now.

This is only a memory or a thought or a charged stored stuff in your body.

Touching into our senses in this way is one way to ground yourself and just by virtue of grounding you will find that you start to soothe because you are calming your nervous system.

You are no longer emotionally reliving an event of trauma.

Soothing can mean different things to different people.

For example some people would find getting up and making a cup of warm tea very soothing.

Some people might find it soothing and helpful to call a friend.

Perhaps now you need to go for a mindful walk.

We want to just take this break with love and kindness and make sure that your break activity or soothing activity is something that has a sense of wholeness about it and really nurtures you.

Another suggestion for having a positive experience with meditation as a trauma survivor would be to try different types of meditations.

Often it's the stillness that creates that invitation for those feelings to come up and also really for our focus to be so completely there in a way that can sometimes become unmanageable if our window of tolerance is small.

Something like mindful movement such as mindful walking or simply mindful movement or even something like tai chi type of exercises.

These things can be another way to meditate.

There are many ways to meditate and to come into the now moment and to be aware of now which is all we're really doing.

You can also use something that kind of focuses mindfulness like mindful coloring.

You might also enjoy sound meditations,

Putting on peaceful sounds or just simply really bring all of your attention to a beautiful crystal ball healing thing that you find on the internet.

You might benefit from what's called loving kindness practices.

These are softer compassion,

Self compassion and world compassion based meditation.

You may find that a mantra meditation would be very useful for you.

Something that allows your mind to have a little bit of something to do so that you are also enjoying yourself as you meditate as well.

And the third suggestion or tip that I have is that you want to be kind and compassionate to yourself.

This can really mean for most of us to release our expectations of how your meditation should be,

What it should look like,

If you're doing it right or wrong and trusting in your own journey.

Believing in your own path to stillness,

To presence and to love.

So I hope that you find these suggestions supportive in your journey and really take care of yourself.

Thank you for connecting.

Reviews

Really useful for what was happening for me, or had just happened.

You’ve got my head thinking of putting together your self soothing list with a piece of advice a MH worker gave me on having like a lucky dip of pre-written soothing exercises, written on cards. So when in need, no having to scratch your head, you pick one card, and just do what it says.

Thank you. One for my lengthening list of regular tracks and to share with friends . 🙏🏻🖖🏼

This is so helpful. Having PTSD as well as significant dissociation from it, this talk helped crystallize some concepts that I had begun to intuit around the edges of in how modifications to a sitting still meditation can help. And also how necessary meditation is to healing the stored body memories. Thank you. Can't wait to share this w my meditation group.

Incredibly helpful, beautifully delivered.

Very calm pace and kind voice. I appreciate the topic. Thank you.

If you are new to meditation, these tips will show you the way. Nice guidance.