Even before COVID-19, even before DT, a great number of us were carrying the pain of a trauma. But since the onset of this pandemic in February and March, the pain and suffering has become ubiquitous. Sure, many of us can be relatively safe in our homes, quite content and even happy, and we need such a refuge. But what does it do to us when we can’t stand to hear the news? Or fear leaving our homes? We often think of trauma in terms of individuals. But a whole nation can be traumatized, as we have been at different times in our history, including 9/11 and, for multiple reasons, now.
I’m reading a book that has been extremely helpful for me, called Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing by David A. Treleaven. The book has expanded my understanding of my own practice of mindfulness, how to help others, as well as how to better understand this time we are all experiencing.
A trauma is an incapacitating form of stress. Stress by itself can be helpful or harmful. But when it is deep and we can’t integrate or face it, it can become traumatic. The DSM-5, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines a traumatic event as exposure to “actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence.”
Treleaven makes clear that this exposure can come in many ways, from directly experiencing or witnessing a trauma or from learning about what happened to a relative, loved one or close friend. Children are especially vulnerable. One in four children in the U. S. have experienced physical abuse, one in five sexual. Then you add war and oppression, whether it be sexism or violence directed at one’s gender identity, race or religion, etc. and you have a huge number of people who have suffered from trauma.
There is a spectrum of trauma, of course, a difference in intensity and symptoms. We can feel stressed out or suffer from PTSD. Symptoms can vary from repeating thoughts and memories, to images flooding consciousness, to being cut off or alienated from our own feelings. We can have trouble sleeping or feel our own bodies are booby-trapped.
And what happens when we come to fear a person’s maskless face or touching a surface in a public place? Or we don’t know how we can feed our family or if we will be thrown out of our homes? What happens when our social-economic-political worlds are being destroyed, our rights ripped away, and people who look like us are killed by police without being held accountable? All while the water we drink and the air we breathe is poisoned?
Mindfulness Practice:
One way to begin is with mindfulness practice. Mindfulness is both a present centered awareness of whatever is going on with us as well as a practice that develops self-regulation. Traditional mindfulness and meditation is based on a deep understanding of the causes of, and ways to relieve, human suffering. It teaches us how to study our conditioned responses to stimuli as well as our own sensations, thoughts and feelings so we can interrupt ones that lead to suffering.
Mindfulness usually helps me with any problem I face, even when I am ill or frightened. In fact, for the first few years after I learned how to meditate, I would only do it when I had a headache or felt sick or stressed. I had headaches frequently. Then I realized if I did it every day, maybe the headaches would stop. And they did.
Some of the most common forms of practice use the breath as a point of focus to anchor attention. But if we have suffered trauma, and we try to attend to our breath or internal experience, disturbing images or sensations can arise. Knowing how to identify the signs or symptoms of trauma or the oppressive ways we’ve been mistakenly taught to respond to them can be helpful to us when this occurs.
Trauma can steal away our sense of control and power and leave us with hidden minefields in our own mind and body. Trauma-centered mindfulness practices adapt to the individual practitioner and returns power to us over our own inner world. It teaches us what to look out for, and how to respond, that we’re not as alone as we might feel and there are people we can talk to. Treleaven speaks of the 4-Rs of realizing the pervasive impact of trauma, recognizing symptoms, responding to them skillfully, all aimed at preventing retraumatization. In working with our children, students, or ourselves he recommends, for example:
watching for dissociation,
incorporating movement,
inviting, not pressuring, participation,
providing choices
⎼in pace
⎼posture,
⎼methods of practice, including switching focus from awareness of sensations from inside ourselves to outside, from the breath or belly to the taste of food or touching our hands together.
When I was teaching secondary school children, I realized that choices needed to be offered to students in possibly all areas of their education, including mindfulness practice. One area of choice was body posture. For example, sitting cross-legged on the floor or upright but not rigid on a chair. Another was whether they closed their eyes partly or fully, or let their eyes rest on a blank surface, or studied an object, like a stone, pinecone, or photo. I showed students several ways to practice, including writing and moving meditation, so they could choose ones that felt most comfortable or helpful. But I never realized all the reasons why this was so important until reading this book ⎼ and living through a pandemic.
For about ten days recently, I had a persistent and chaotic cough. Add to that the fear of COVID-19 and I was not happy. Even after testing negative for COVID, the cough continued. None of my normal practices worked. Every time I tried to meditate with a focus on my breath, I would cough. So I changed my practice to fit the present situation.
This morning, the wind was blowing. It was such a beautiful sound, more complex than I had previously imagined. It was soft and gentle and then whipped around, shaking different layers of trees and leaves, each type and layer of tree adding a different note. And when it quieted, there were cicadas, with an occasional bird call. It was almost like waves heard on a beach of sand and stone, but this time it was the wind.
Earlier in the week, it was raining, and to meditate I focused on the sounds of the rain instead of the feel of the breath. I let myself be simply an ear and the language I heard was of the earth and the rain. When I did that, my chest felt comforted and the cough grew quiet.
Early in August, I was walking down our tree-lined road and could see the sunlight on the distant hills and I just raised up my arms. I had read or heard somewhere that lifting up our arms could open and calm the lungs. So I stopped walking and raised my arms up as if I could, as if we all could, embrace this all. I was so grateful for that knowledge and for this view.
And later when I coughed, I visualized this scene on the road and raised up my arms. Maybe many of us could benefit from this right now even if we don’t have a cough. To lift up our arms and eyes in gratitude, take in the quality of sunlight, the beauty of the wind and rain. And the pain would lessen or disappear, at least for the moment.
Or we could find other ways of practice that suit us personally, as Treleaven suggests, ways that give us and our children back the control and power that frees us from the traumas or sense of powerlessness that might be buried inside and let us feel at home once again in our own skin.
And then we could work on the institutionalized causes of trauma and oppression. But it won’t be just us sweeping this nation clean of oppression, of racism, sexism, etc. and malignant corruption and self-interest. It will be the forces of the earth itself doing it.
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Photo by Stephen Leonardi on Unsplash