So that's how I came to write my book, Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing, a collection of best practices that could be utilized, debated, and basically brought into different meditation and contemplative communities. A number of colleagues said, "Look, we want to know what to do.
I felt that while meditation teachers may know about trauma, I wasn’t sure whether they could recognize symptoms and work with them skillfully. They were curious about whether their trauma background or history might be playing a role in their struggle.
My defense got recorded and went somewhat viral-as much as a dissertation on meditation and trauma can go viral!Īs it got out there, I started receiving a lot of correspondence from people who were struggling inside of their contemplative community or inside their own practice. I ended up focusing a dissertation on the topic of mindfulness and trauma. I had a difficult personal experience on a meditation retreat at one point and when I began to talk to others about it, I realized I wasn't alone. Omega: What inspired your curiosity for trauma-sensitive mindfulness?ĭavid: As a therapist, I had studied trauma. I tend to work with the latter definition, which I think encompasses PTSD. There's an interesting tension between these two-the clinical definition of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which is important and necessary, and the broader understanding that at some point in our life a majority of us will experience something overwhelming that we might consider traumatic. There is also the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders definition of trauma: “directly experiencing or exposure to death, serious injury, or sexual violation, and that can happen through either directly experiencing the event, witnessing the event, worrying it happened to a close friend or relative, or through repeated exposure, which is more tertiary trauma or secondary trauma.” David: The definition that I use comes from Pat Ogden, who says, “It's any experience that is stressful enough to leave us feeling helpless, frightened, overwhelmed, or profoundly unsafe.”
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