Hi All,
I think mindfulness can be a very beneficial tool. In my case I’m remembering losing the ability to access it under the conditions of acute trauma. I’m still haven’t been able to recover the capacity for mindfulness I once had in terms of meditation.
But I’m probably actually practising it again now in terms of the walks I do in nature and becoming absorbed in my surroundings. So perhaps it is a case of modifying how it’s practised under certain circumstances, or perhaps altering the terminology and reframing it somewhat.
I do agree with Paul that the term “mindfulness” can be an issue when dealing with large amounts of pain - emotional and/or physical. The only way I’ve been able to successfully approach trauma is through starting with the feeling body. In trauma there can be dissociation that persists in the case of PTSD. So grounding techniques of sensing and feeling through the body are often the only way back to some kind of equilibrium. I think that’s where the term “mindfulness” can sometimes lose a traumatised person.
To me, “groundedness” or “feeling-connectedness” better explain what helps me. Theoretically “mindfulness” is meant to help access body connection and groundedness, but the very idea of “mind” can get in the way when the mind is experiencing dissociation, spacey-ness and confusion.
Basically I have been on both sides of the fence - when mindfulness meditation was a wonderful, helpful tool, and when it became completely inaccessible when saturated with trauma. The brain no longer works the same after a certain number of trauma impacts.
I’d love one day to re-access the kind of mindfulness I could once do. I was practising Theravada-style insight meditation. I was starting to sometimes reach what are called jhanas and enter a state of pure being.
I’m now still finding it helpful to work with altered states of consciousness but in a way that I’m not sure is “mindfulness”. It’s more a kind of feeling and then releasing of autonomic stress through things like chanting, singing and sound healing (calming and healing the vagus nerve), so quite physiological. When I go into a parasympathetic state my body quite often then goes into an altered state of consciousness automatically and produces healing imagery and resolves internal conflicts. It’s quite an active state and very much a process of letting go - probably less refined and more active, involuntary (once consciousness shifts) and primal than mindfulness. But it’s what works best for me as I work towards healing trauma states. They are starting to use psychedelics in trials with people with PTSD because of an awareness of this process. I haven’t used psychedelics but my brain seems to enter states akin to those induced by psychedelics, probably just less intensely without them. It’s like intrinsic self-healing.
Not sure how much sense that makes, but I just wanted to give a trauma recovery perspective. The healing stuff that works for me now is probably somewhat akin to “mindfulness”, but is much more visceral and raw, which I think is meeting trauma where it’s at in the body.
