The Role of Meditation in Healing
I’ve been meditating for over 20 years, sometimes consistently, and other times not at all. In recent years, as I’ve studied healing and trauma, I’ve developed some ideas about how meditation can aid in the healing process.
When I talk about healing, I specifically mean healing trauma. My definition of trauma is any past experience that negatively affects you in the present – not just terrible things that happen to people in the news. With this definition, healing means completely resolving those past experiences so they no longer impact your life. This goes beyond insight, understanding, reframing, or catharsis. True healing transforms painful memories into something so ordinary that they become almost forgettable, and they stay that way.
This sounds great, but what exactly is happening when trauma heals, and how can meditation play a role? Just as your body knows how to heal itself when you get a cut, your consciousness knows how to heal from emotional distress. Most of the time, it does so naturally. However, trauma is the exception. Traumatic memories often feel too overwhelming to process, so we unconsciously block healing. The solution lies in fully experiencing and accepting these traumatic memories, but this is challenging because they often feel terrifying and dangerous. Trauma healing modalities work by helping us relax and feel safe enough to fully experience them, allowing the natural healing process to occur.
Meditation can support this process in a similar way. One of its most useful effects is that it acclimates us to discomfort. By immersing us in our direct experience for extended periods, meditation helps us stop instinctively reacting to difficult emotions and become more comfortable with them. Additionally, meditation can provide insights into the origins of these emotions. Insights and self-understanding are empowering, which creates a sense of safety. The combination of safety and emotional tolerance can enable us to approach traumatic memories without reacting, allowing the natural healing process to unfold.
The downside to using meditation as a method of healing is that sometimes traumatic memories are so intense that the effort a given person can put into meditating is not enough to overcome them. In rare cases, they act like landmines, surprising us with their intensity and causing distress instead of healing. While I did not experience the landmine effect, I found that meditation and insight alone, even with a teacher, were not enough to resolve my larger traumas. Meditation helped with emotional tolerance, but when I realized that I was tolerating the same emotions over and over, I knew that I needed to continue searching for answers.
I spent the last 17 years trying to resolve the distress of losing my mother and living in a dysfunctional world. I found that when healing is the goal, the best way to use meditation is in combination with a trauma healing modality. Meditation increases mindfulness, insight, and the ability to tolerate difficult emotions, allowing deeper and more effective work with a practitioner. The modality I use pairs particularly well with meditation because it consists in large part of sensing emotions and sensations in the body. This allows precise location and characterization of the underlying trauma, which we then resolve and eliminate.
Meditation can be a powerful tool in the healing of trauma, particularly when used in conjunction with a skilled practitioner. By increasing mindfulness, insight, and emotional tolerance, meditation prepares you to face and process traumatic memories more effectively. While meditation alone may not always be sufficient to heal trauma, its ability to cultivate safety and self-awareness can significantly enhance the healing process. Combining meditation with targeted trauma work can lead to profound and lasting recovery, allowing you to move beyond the past and fully embrace the present.
