Trauma... and meditation
I sat upright, willing my mind onto my breath, when my nose began to run. I’ve always taught meditation students to just sit with things like an itch or an ache, experience the body, deeply, breathe into it. Explore it. Not will it away or move to pacify any discomfort while meditating. Like uncomfortable thoughts you notice in the mind, just sit with the body as it is. Just be? Not through your will.
The snot ran out of my nose and I could feel it working its way down, around, each whisker as it reached my lip, gelled from the dry air, suddenly thick, curiously cold, slimy. It reached my mouth and I’d had enough. I raised my arm and wiped the snot away with my sleeve.
For a moment that’s all there was. A dirty lip, a damp sleeve, and me, readjusting my posture. That’s as close to enlightenment as I’ve ever gotten. The thoughts came back, and the will to drive them away, and I coasted farther and farther beyond all that was happening to me and around me. And then it was gone.
What “it” is trips up most meditators, but it has something to do with liberation. We’re all running from something, and instead of experiencing the moment through questioning it, as in Zen, we’re always trying to shape it into what we want it to be, or the way we think it should be, as it slips away unnoticed and is quickly forgotten.
Sometimes something we most want to be liberated from, some trauma held deep in the body, keeps us chained to discomfort in ways no thoughts ever can. Perhaps it is trauma that finally divides our bodies from our minds and frees us as we move free of it. Release it. For we can’t just will it away.
There’s infinite trauma in a life with bipolar disorder. Some researchers even believe that early childhood trauma precipitates the disease. When I first met with psychiatrists at the University of Pennsylvania they took a long history. When I told the story of an accident I had when I was a toddler that left me toothless and led to years of failed, infection riddled surgeries they perked up. The body always leads the mind.
This is certainly true in meditation. All difficult moods have physical precursors. You can feel yourself becoming sick. I teach in my book how to notice and isolate these warning signs in the body and work to intervene between bodily signals and full-blown episodes of mania and depression. Meditating and experiencing what the body presents us can help us to predict and avoid dangerous mood swings.
Meditating on the feelings in the body can do something else, too. It can help us quiet the litany of thoughts that pull us away from our true experience better than any attempts to will thought away or clear the mind. The answers are in the body. Consciousness is in the body. Experience is in the body. Epiphany is possible only when the body is pre-eminent and the conversations we constantly have with ourselves quiet.
Nothing drives us into our body like trauma (I write of physical trauma, not abuse). When I had my accident a few weeks ago time slowed down. I realized a clarity of the moment thinking never could give me, and today it still seems I can recall every second of the fall. Veterans of WW1 reported complete recall of every detail of every second just before bombs went off in the trenches. Trauma imprints itself in the mind so that if similar events repeat we’re ready for the impact. This makes it difficult to shake, and can affect us long after the physical wounds heal.
The surprising thing about the fall was that nothing hurt until much later. I was able to calmly assess my condition and lucidly recover, at least enough to minimize any further damage and get to the hospital. But feelings of trauma eventually do repeat and now, danger passed, I’m dealing with trauma’s aftermath.
Bipolar disorder is insidious in its ability to take something that has gone wrong and bust it open exponentially so that it infuses every facet of your life. In the wake of trauma this deficiency doubles up. I’m tired but I can’t sleep. Taking stairs is difficult, and I can barely walk two blocks without succumbing to the pain in my knee. I’ve been holding on, meditating more, returning my focus to the Bible and managing to find moments of Grace as my moods shift, my outlook dims, and an agitated pall is pulled over all that is good during this difficult time of healing.
Maybe more than anything else, my meditation practice heals. In fact, in a moment of tremendous honesty, my doctor told me that over the 25 years we have worked together, it’s been my meditation practice, more so than any medication he has prescribed or therapy we have undertaken, that has enabled me to live well with bipolar disorder. Meditation can be that powerful, and it’s my daily meditation, without fail, that will help me shake the most difficult impact of this trauma.
Yesterday I sat before a sliding glass door while the sun streamed in, blazing a warmth that betrayed the biting cold outside. In front of me was a small lemon tree we drag inside for the winter, in full flower, scenting the room with a hint of citrus that my wife says smells like Seville in the Spring. I held a white flower in my gaze and it hung there still, like the steps that loomed before my eyes just before I hit them when I fell. I was thoughtless. I was without reaction. Every faith tradition maintains that everyone suffers. They all have prescriptions to ameliorate this suffering. But in this suffering we are formed. From this suffering we learn. In the face of trauma we have an opportunity to heal from more than just the surface wounds we suffer.
As always, the answers are in our experience more than our will, and our experience is held most accurately in the body. Don’t try to overcome trauma by thinking it away. You’ll only relive the worst of it. Sit with it. Breathe into it. Explore what it does to your emotions and moods. And heal.