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Heart Mind Breathe

Tag: trauma

  • Basic Sanity: Returning To What’s Already Here

    Basic Sanity: Returning To What’s Already Here

    When people come to meditation, it’s often because something in life feels unmanageable. We hope for relief, for a shift, for a special mindstate to lift us out of the struggle. And it’s quite natural that when experience feels intractable, we naturally look for something, anything, that feels different from what we have now.

    You may be here feeling confused, exhausted, or quietly disappointed that nothing you’ve tried so far seems to make any real difference.

    There are moments of pure panic and overwhelm where there genuinely feels like nothing to reach for. The fear is total, the circumstances feel unbearably heavy, and the combination of inner and outer pressure is so tough that no practice is accessible.

    I want to name this clearly, because I have been here many times, and it matters to acknowledge this truth before speaking about meditation as anything larger or wider than that.

    Sometimes it helps to name a concrete example, not to dwell in it, but to ground what might otherwise stay abstract.

    I am taken back to an example of such a time when even going off to sleep meant bracing for the electric-shock pain in my lower back, which came each time I drifted off and continued through the nights. It was in those moments that the despair was so complete and nothing felt reachable.

    It is precisely because of this reality, that meditation needs -so often- to be understood and seen differently to the way it is understood and seen. Meditation isn’t something to be deployed in those moments as a ‘way out’. It needs to be viewed as something cultivated in the wider field of our lives.

    I’ve often heard people refer to the fact that they have ‘tried breathing, tried mindfulness… etc’…with the desire of something…”working”…in such moments.

     And this reflects the common, wide (mis)understanding, that mindfulness is something to be taken like a pill, in difficult moments: take it and the difficulty will go away. 

    One of the things we first establish in mindfulness is that meditation doesn’t promise special moods or altered experiences. Its real gift is far quieter, far more ordinary, and ultimately far more reliable. This is because the practice begins to build our capacity for basic sanity, a groundedness that doesn’t actually depend on everything feeling good.

    Nothing here is being offered as a promise, a solution, or something to convince you of, only as an invitation to notice what is already here and how easily and repeatedly it tends to be missed.

    Basic sanity is the capacity to be less hooked by the powerful pulls that dominate both society and our own minds. Advertisements, endless stimulation, the pressure to perform, the pressure to improve, these forces tug at our attention constantly. They stimulate the senses but rarely nourish the heart.

    And our minds echo these same forces back at us, sometimes even louder. We know this pull intimately in the habit of rumination: the way the mind insists that if we just think about a regretted situation one more time, we might finally think our way out of the pain it’s causing. Meditation isn’t about escaping all this; it’s about seeing it clearly enough that we’re not automatically seduced by it.

    At the heart of practice is an impulse grounded in different values:

    • compassion
    • depth
    • closeness to life
    • the wish to feel things more fully and respond more freely

    These values don’t usually arrive as strong convictions, but as something quieter and more tentative; they present a subtle pull toward living with a little more honesty and steadiness.

    These values may start small, perhaps a faint sense that there must be a way to live with more honesty or more steadiness. But even that faint impulse is sane. It senses the possibility of being less swept up, less reactive, less lost.

    As practice deepens, we begin to cultivate a steadiness that’s not easily thrown off its centre. We become less tangled in unnecessary drama, less convinced by the frantic “values” of the world, less pulled into craving or resistance. This doesn’t mean life stops being difficult. It means we’re less exhausted by the struggle against it.

    Over time, the value of a steady and consistent practice is that our minds are able to adopt greater flexibility as a result of becoming stronger in our intentionality.

    And in this way the quiet mind, the spacious mind, the clear mind…starts to feel less like an achievement and more like a home we return to.

    As a consequence of an ongoing commitment to practising steadiness, when moments of overwhelm arise they are able to be met with less surprise and more of a sense of ground, rather than the feeling of being completely taken over.

    Basic sanity is not some distant ideal. It’s the simple capacity to be here, with what’s real, without being pulled entirely out of shape by it. And with practice, this becomes less of a momentary experience and more of a way of living.

    This perspective is what quietly frames my work.

    This is also why I continue to love exploring the spheres of awareness with people in the course I run, as a shared inquiry into the steadiness and basic sanity that this practice makes possible.

  • Frustration Unleashed: a Candid Rant…

    Frustration Unleashed: a Candid Rant…

    I’m always on the lookout for podcasts that align with my values around embodiment, and different journeys of healing approached with depth and care. Last night, I listened to an ‘expert’ claim that mindfulness should be avoided in trauma work: encouraging people to stay present teaches the nervous system that the present isn’t safe, he claimed.

    This  once again frames mindfulness as just another option, in some wellness toolkit, showing limited understanding of its true nature and potential.

    If you’ve ever been told that learning mindfulness doesn’t apply to your situation, especially because of the trauma you’ve lived through, I want to say this plainly:

    That’s not true.

    Mindfulness isn’t a neat little practice reserved for quiet minds or calm mornings. It’s for this: for grief, fear, exhaustion, and the kind of pain that doesn’t always have language.

    Personal Story: Mindfulness in the Midst of Trauma

    Five years ago, my parents both died within two weeks.
    The lead-up to their deaths was a relentless combination of palliative care for my Dad alongside the upheaval of hospital and intensive care visits for my mum. It was a punishing regime marked by exhaustion, sadness, and a fear beyond words. My whole system didn’t settle during those years; it never had the chance. I was already carrying the weight of secret miscarriage, the disenfranchised grief of childlessness, relationship rejection due to my own physical condition, and early life trauma that had yet to surface in my awareness.  (I have since learnt that old pain can only be released from the body proportionate to the amount of safety you feel internally.)

    How could I have navigated this level of uncertainty and suffering without anything to hold onto?
    The small seeds of understanding I had begun to cultivate in the years prior were all I had. Mindfulness wasn’t a practice I ‘chose’ in calm circumstances, it was the only thing truly available to me.  The only thing big enough, wise enough, intelligent enough, loving enough to hold all that I came to it with, trauma included.

    The idea that mindfulness forces us to ‘stay in the present’ at all costs is a misnomer of Titanic proportions, and it needs calling out.

    Because an equal part of navigating presence is knowing when it’s too much to stay with, too much to bear.

    Distraction as a Vital Component of Presence:

    In contrast to the narrow view that mindfulness demands constant presence, we need to clarify what it really teaches: how to stay when it serves us, and how to step away when it doesn’t.

    Because distraction, when done with full intentionality and awareness, is an entirely different thing. Instead of shutting out pain blindly, we recognise what is tolerable in a given moment and make a conscious choice to shift focus if necessary.

    Not only that, but the kind of discernment which knows when presence serves and when it overwhelms, doesn’t come by accident. It requires training in presence itself, so we can recognise our limits not as failures, but as signals. When tuned into with full awareness these signals deepen our self-understanding, not just emotionally, but somatically, cognitively, and relationally.

    Notwithstanding all the misconceptions, it was the training in presence itself which led me to a potential of peace I hadn’t known was possible. Through learning this practice intentionally, we tolerate more with greater ease: we actually can be with more than we could before.

    In other words, being present doesn’t imply pain for the sake of pain.

    Expanding Understanding of Mindfulness

    You see, in trauma, reality is often fragmented, overwhelming, and deeply alive. Mindfulness, when taught with integrity, doesn’t ask us to bypass that. It meets us inside it, with choice, with nuance, with care.

    To dismiss mindfulness outright in the face of trauma is to miss its depth and versatility as a practice that evolves with the person and the situation. It isn’t rigid: it’s fluid, adaptive, and built to meet the full complexity of life.

    When mindfulness is stripped of its roots, reduced to a quick fix or productivity hack, we lose what it was always meant to be: a compassionate, discerning way of meeting reality as it is, not as we wish it to be. This is a sad consequence of the fact that so much of the original depth and nuance of these teachings has been shaved down to the extent that what we’re left with is a hollowed-out version, presented as lifestyle advice rather than a path of liberation.

    So rather than rejecting mindfulness in the context of trauma, we need to reclaim it. Not as a tool of control, but as a practice of relationship, one that invites us to turn toward what’s here, and just as importantly, to turn away when presence would be too much.

    That’s not avoidance. That’s wisdom.

    And it’s time we made more room for this wholeness. The kind that doesn’t fracture under pressure, but softens around it, steadily, intelligently, and in service of healing.

    To make whole, sweeping claims implying the appropriacy of mindfulness, we need a wholer understanding of what mindfulness is. Not a lifestyle edit. The whole practice: complex, compassionate, deeply relational.