Trauma is not always the result of a catastrophic event. It can be triggered by any situation that causes overwhelming emotions that we are not equipped to handle. In psychology they call these minor traumas as little 't' traumas. You also have the big 'T' traumas which involve life threatening events. Over this article by trauma, I'll be primarily refering to little 't' traumas which are the ones that are overlooked. Childhood trauma can have a more profound impact on our lives than trauma experienced in adulthood. For instance, something as simple as being left alone by parents can cause trauma. Once the body registers this trauma, it waits for a trigger to surface again. Later in life, a trigger may remind us subconsciously of being left alone, and we may experience the same emotions again. It’s easy to mistake the cause of negative emotions to be the immediate situation at hand, rather than the fact that this situation reminds us of a past event. Simple example: why do some people overreact in some situations? Trauma! Trauma makes you react to situations, and usually not in a good way. Processing and healing one's trauma is essential to breaking reactionary patterns in one's life.
Healing trauma is something you will find to be core in Western new age spirituality and psychology/psychotherapy. It's also core in Eastern spirituality except that they don't call it trauma and they don't care about the origin of the trauma (afaik). In yoga, they call it karma. Karma is not really about what you do, will be done unto you. It's really about patterns of behavior. A major goal of yoga is to dissolve the karma in the body so that we are more free and can act instead of react. Neigong is also about using physical movement, breath, and energy to clear tensions in the body. I've seen this pattern across many spiritual teachings, the only thing is everyone uses different words to describe it and has their own methods to clear it.
I'm not an expert in healing trauma, but I will recommend you to check out Teal Swan if you are interested in this. Michael Singer also talks about this and his whole practice seems to be about clearing the reactionary patterns and suffering in the body.
A few things that I have been following to heal mine are to pay attention to my feelings more. Practice radical acceptance of them - which to me is basically embracing even difficult feelings and letting them stay as long as they want. When you have a really difficult feeling arise when you accept it and drop the resistance it will become 90% easier, then you just let it stay as long as it wants and slowly it will dissolve away. But the important thing is to not try to get rid of it. Practicing this so that you can get rid of the feeling cannot be the intention.
Recently I did something and it has been a game changer for me. I think this is similar to a practice from Teal Swan's process but I just did it based on whatever felt right. I had a past situation where I was hurt and probably might have formed some negative beliefs about myself because of that. I mentally time-traveled back to the place and just sat next to my past self in that situation. I imagined that nobody knew I (from the future) was there except my past self and I had a conversation with him. Talking to the child version of me felt like talking to my son and my heart had so much love for him. I later also did with a more recent past self (6 years back self) but that felt like talking to myself only, and I didn't feel that much love for him. Hmm as I'm writing this now I wonder should I feel that love for myself? Why can I feel it for my child version and not my adult version? What do I see in the child version that I do not in the adult version? Maybe I see that nothing is the fault of the child and that he is perfect, but I somehow think the adult needs to take responsibility for his problems and that he needs to be better? Maybe I'm disappointed in myself. I think that may be true. Interesting stuff, I'll think about that later... Anyway, I told my child self not to worry about what's happening and that better things are coming for him in the future. I even gave some advice on what he could do differently from me when certain situations happen in the future. I totally changed his feelings about the existing situation. We had a very casual conversation, about my life (i.e. his future). I told him about some cool things that would happen and he was so excited. Finally, I traveled back to the present. Later that very day, I remembered one of my own advice I gave and realized that I could implement it even now and break a pattern in my life. And I followed it and I'm extremely happy that I did! The reason it was a game changer was because that advice I gave my past self somehow never occurred to me by myself. Somehow going back there and speaking my heart out surfaced it. The primary reason I did this activity was to try to heal a wound from my past, I don't know if I did but I do feel better thinking about it now. But my biggest takeaway was the advice I gave myself. I think we can gain a lot of insights if we let our hearts speak. I usually just journal and talk with myself. This was another interesting way.
So yeah try time travelling to your past and talking with your child self!
Attachment styles refers to the manner in which you attached to your parents/caregivers in childhood and how that affects your relationships and attachments in later life. I highly recommend taking the attachment style quiz at https://quiz.attachmentproject.com/ to find out about your attachment style. If you are a secure attachment type, that's great! If not, it's important to understand yourself better - both for your own good and for those you love. I discovered that I have one of the insecure attachment types, which explains the problem I have been having my whole life connecting with people. The good thing about knowing this is that, I now know what my fears and triggers are and from where they originate. So now if this fear is triggered again and I can recognize it, I can make a more rational and conscious decision instead of acting out the subconscious patterns I developed as a coping mechanism to the original trauma. Knowing the cause of my fear makes it easier and safer to push past the fear caused by the trauma because now I know that this fear is not a fear of the immediate situation but that this situation just reminds me of a past experience(s) and it's safe to ignore this fear at this moment. This also means I now know more clearly what is it that hurts me, and also be more conscious with other people that I don't hurt them the same way I was hurt. I know the pain, I wouldn't want someone I care about to feel that same pain. Have I hurt people in the same way? Definitely yes. I never imagined how much it would hurt, and when people actually got hurt by me, I would just think they were overreacting. Now I should know better.
Feel free to stop reading here, this might be going off topic a bit. I'm just writing about things I wanted to but didn't write yet. Right now my journey in healing my trauma has been an up-and-down one. Sometimes I'm a pro at letting feelings stay and clear them super quick. Other times the feelings become too much and I distract myself from them. Of course, this is closely related to the fact that my meditation practice has also been up and down in terms of consistency. I've noticed that when I'm consistently meditating, I feel light hearted, happier and life just feels easy. Then I stop doing it for whatever reason, and gradually my life becomes worse. Not just my mental health, even my physical health goes down as both are related.
I think I can say there are two ways I've discovered until now in which meditation helps to create a good mental environment. One set of meditation techniques aims to get rid of thoughts. These majorly include mindfulness, and concentration practices. When the chatter in the mind quiets down, I can automatically see more beauty in life. You will only believe it when you experience it but the world really becomes more beautiful when you experience it without the constant chatter of thoughts in your mind. When it's all quiet, everything takes on a different quality. It's like becoming a child who sees the world with wonder. Also if my mind quiets down, then there are no more negative thoughts that can create negative feelings. So that is one way. Another set of meditation aims to see more clearly that we are not the body/mind, we are the one that's observing everything. The best one I've found in this set is the self-inquiry techniques of the direct path. If through meditation I can disidentify with my body and mind, I will just become superhuman! My resistance to life goes to near zero. My tolerance to physical and mental hardship goes up and I will be fearless. Fear is basically about the survival of the body. When I know that I'm not the body, there is no fear anymore because consciousness is not physical and only physical things can be born and die. So when I'm not wrongly identified with the body/mind sometimes fear just doesn't come up anymore. Even if fear does come up I'm much more capable of acting despite the fear. When fear is out of the equation, I think trauma/karma is also more or less out of the equation. And here is where it helps to clear trauma. I can easily let feelings arise because I do not identify with the suffering of the body. I see the body suffering and just observe it and over time the feeling just dissolves. When I'm in such a free state of mind, I can take any action I want. That is when I can think about all the awesome things I can do here on Earth without survival chaining me down. At that point when I genuinely feel that I can do whatever I want, I can say a huge YES to life.
I think those two are the two benefits I have observed of meditation. There are also techniques which are kind of in-between like Dogen or soto zen's shikantaza/zazen. Even though I tried to categorize meditation techniques based on their goals, I think both are related and one can lead to the other. When you start to meditate you may feel both of those benefits, but it will be a vague feeling of feeling good. It only gets better with consistent practice.
Even though they both are awesome and ideally should be enough motivation to meditate, when I'm not in those states I cannot even imagine what it's like to be in those states. When I cannot even imagine them, obviously it's a bit hard to be motivated to work for them. In those states, consciousness takes center stage. Consciousness has no form. Obviously, it's impossible to remember or imagine anything that has no form. So even though I'm talking about what happens in those states, I'm talking about the side effects. The core cause of it, I can never talk about or imagine, one can only experience it directly. The hardest thing about meditating is making the decision to meditate. It's only when my mental health goes down to some really bad places I get forced to meditate consistently and get my life in order again. I've been in this cycle enough and a lot of times I wish I would just be consistent and get out of this stupid cycle. You know what's funny, when I was in one of those fearless states once I deliberately decided to stop meditating from that point on to see how worse it could get. I wanted a difficult life because I really felt nothing could hurt me and I wanted a challenge. And consciousness is not a state you are in. We are consciousness. Consciousness is always there as long we exist. It is only obscured by our identification with the body/mind. I thought I didn't need to meditate anymore as I realized consciousness was always there. Boy was I wrong, there is a state to get to and that is the state of consciousness unobsured by the wrong identification with the body/mind. Now I need more effort to get into that state. Consistent practice to get into that state makes it faster to get into it and also increases the duration we can hold that state and that is where consistent meditation comes in. But when I am in the state of unobscured consciousness, nothing really matters. It doesn't matter if I meditate or don't. Life is beautiful as it is. So there is enough reason to stop meditating at that point. But mostly I guess that's just my mind creating excuses for not wanting to put the effort to meditate xD. Anyway end of the rambling. Take whatever helps you and leave out the rest. Peace out!
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