I was last weekend, I was teaching at the Networker Conference Psychology Conference

and I usually teach on bringing together meditation practices with difficult emotions that genre and one of the questions that always comes at these times is how do you work with meditation if you've been traumatized and it's really, really an important question because most people have had some trauma and meditation can actually get you in touch

with trauma and even if we haven't been traumatized, we all hit times in our life where we're absolutely frozen, are in complete flight or reactivity. It becomes a really important question, what do we do with meditation at those times? How does meditation serve us?

So I want to speak to that and really share with you the three elements that I have found are really key if we're to untangle trauma. If we're, trauma really is a condition of disconnection when we're traumatized, we disconnect from our bodies and our hearts and our presence, how to reconnect and I'm going to talk about three elements that I think make a big difference.

But I want to say that trauma is more common than most people acknowledge some statistics between 75 and 100 million Americans have experienced childhood sexual or physical abuse. That's a very big number.

The AMA says that over 30% of all married women have been beaten by their spouses and 30% of pregnant women have been beaten by their spouses. 30%. That's a big number two. And then there's all the less recognized sources of trauma such as difficulties in birthing which happen all the time, are the sudden loss of a loved one.

What happens in surgery for many? Then of course natural disasters. And if we just consider how many are living in war zones are places that are like war zones, we might not call them that, but where there's unpredictable violence.

Trauma watching somebody else be violated trauma. It's huge.

So part of the reason I'm bringing this in is to respect that our own nervous systems have certain situations that can easily trigger us into a state that we then can get down on ourselves for.

But it's just the way the body and mind respond when overwhelmed by stimuli when something's too much.

So and that is the definition of trauma when our nervous systems overwhelmed and we don't have access to our normal coping strategies. And then we dissociate.

And for some people after trauma there are ways of processing what happens, fighting, responding, fleeing, successfully getting out of a situation.

In some way finding some power, some way to control things that actually allows for a digesting of the trauma.

But for many people, trauma happens at times in our lives where we don't have that resourcefulness. And then it just gets lodged in our bodies.

And then what happens is either we successfully dissociate from it, but then experience all the symptoms of dissociation, which means we're not in touch with our bodies.

We're not able to feel the feelings we want to be feeling. We're not able to be spontaneous.

A lot of undercurrents of anxiety, depression. Those are just some of the symptoms. Addictive behaviors.

Are something gets triggered and tripped off and we get plunged into and flooded by the feelings.

So we're either disconnected from the rawness and we have a whole mess of other symptoms or we're plunged into the rawness.

Does this make sense as the basic ground of the conditions?

Okay.

The description maybe from a Buddhist perspective, I use the word trance a lot, that when our systems are overwhelmed, our way of trying to handle it is to go into a trance.

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