Trauma

An important stage in the breath meditation is being aware of the whole body as you breathe in, the whole body as you breathe out.

Ajaan Lee compares it to running an electric grid through a wilderness and then sending energy along the grid, lighting things up. In the same way, we have a sense of everything being connected and then use that sense of connection to energize the whole body. The fact of the interconnection gives you a sense of strength. You’re not just calm, you’re energized. Then, after you energize the body in this way, you allow it to calm down.

But sometimes, as you go through the body, you’ll find there are parts that are resistant to being connected. Either they feel blank, as if there’s nothing there, or they feel hard and resistant.

These spots usually have to do with trauma, either physical trauma or mental trauma, emotional trauma.

The basic way of dealing with them is the same, regardless. It’s just that the emotional and mental traumas have more layers.

The first basic principle is that you don’t push things. It’s as if that part of the body, or the part of the mind associated with that particular part of the body, doesn’t trust you. You’ve been harsh with it in the past, clamping down on it in the past, mistreating it in the past. So it doesn’t want to open up. The more you try to force things, the more it pushes back.

It’s like pushing a north pole of a magnet against the north pole of another magnet. The closer they get, the more resistance they put up.

And you yourself may not be ready for them to open up, especially if it’s an emotional trauma. If it isn’t a trauma, it’s just the fact that you’ve tended to seize up on that part of the body to protect it. It was tender, injured, and now the injury is gone.

But the sense of holding that part of the body as separate is still there, getting in the way. The basic approach is to work around it. Be very gentle around the edges of that area. If there’s any breath energy that’s going to penetrate, it’ll penetrate without pressure, without any force. So be very patient and work around it.

In working around it, of course, you’re creating a safe space around it as well for you to stay when things open up. This’ll be important when dealing with emotional traumas, as part of you may not be ready to deal with whatever the memory may be until you have a sense of a safe space. So try to create a safe space, with whatever part of the body you can make comfortable by the way you breathe.

It’s like those videos you see of a guy going into a little cell with a very vicious dog with the purpose of taming it. You have to be very unaggressive, presenting no threat at all—very patient, very steady. After all, the dog is both dangerous and fearful. It’s dangerous because it’s fearful.

In the same way, you need a certain amount of patience and steadiness in creating for yourself a good space, inasmuch as some people with really strong trauma have trouble connecting with their body at all.

There must be some part of the body, though, someplace in the head, perhaps in the neck, or some random spot in the body where you actually do feel safe. Focus there. Create good energy in that spot.

And learn a lot of patience. Learn a lot of gentleness. You can augment this practice with thoughts of goodwill: goodwill for yourself, goodwill for whoever harmed you, goodwill for all beings, realizing that we’ve lived in this world where there’s been a lot of injury going back and forth.

A lot of the injury comes from fear. So try to be trustworthy. Try to be steady. In other words, hold your focus as steadily as possible but with a sense of gentleness. The little islands of safe spots in your body will have a chance to grow and to connect with one another. They may grow in strange ways. They may follow different channels in the body that you might not expect to allow them to grow that way.

The important thing here is lack of aggressive force. But there has to be a steadiness to your focus and a gentleness to your touch. Then someday, things may open up.

When I first started meditating, I found that there was a spot around my heart that was very resistant. The more I focused on it, the harder it got. The more I tried to push the breath through it, the more it pushed back. This is when I learned that you have to work around it, showing that you can be gentle and steady. And reliable.

Then one day, it was as if a ball of ice suddenly melted. I wanted to cry. The funny thing was, there was no specific memory associated with it. Just a gentle sense of injury. I know other people, though, who have very vivid memories of what the event was that they had tried their best to forget.

Which is why, as I said, it’s good to have your safe space in the other parts of the body, because it’s only when you feel that you’re in a safe space that you can be willing to deal with these memories and not feel threatened by them.

So you go with an attitude of goodwill for yourself and for others: goodwill for the breath, for the parts of the body that you can make comfortable, goodwill for the parts that are resistant.

Steady gentleness: That’s the key, both for the parts of the body that don’t trust you and the sense that you don’t trust them.

This is where you see very clearly that there are many senses of self inside you, and one very scared and injured sense of self is trying to protect itself. Part of you is trying to wrap some boundary around it so that it doesn’t spread.

How long this is going to take, you can’t say. But then again, samsara has been very, very long. Who knows how many times you’ve injured others, how many times others have injured you? You might be carrying all kinds of things around with you in this energetic body, the body of the breath.

So allow some space, allow some time, but show that you can be trustworthy. Show that you won’t stomp on it again or clamp down on it again. Be ready to be open when it’s ready to open up.

And as I said, however long that takes is not the issue. In the meantime, you’re going to learn an important lesson about patience, which is that you don’t focus on the things that are difficult. You focus on the things that are positive. Here you’re focusing on the parts of the body that you can make positive, that you can make comfortable by the way you breathe, that you can connect. That makes you feel safer, makes that other self inside you feel safer, too. The patience becomes less of a burden because you know how to strengthen yourself in the meantime.

So, as you breathe in, breathe out, think, “Whole body breathing in; whole body breathing out.” Any parts that are not ready to cooperate yet, just work around them. As I said, if any part of the good breath energy is going to penetrate there, it’ll do it without pressure. Just be open to the fact that the little rivulets that go into that closed up part of the body may go in directions you might not expect.

So, as you breathe in, try not to force the breath in a particular direction too much. Think of it just suffusing, suffusing the body. Think of it as an energy field. Every cell in the body is breathing in; every cell in the body is breathing out—broad, diffuse, at ease. That creates the environment you’ll need for things to open up and dissolve.