What They Don’t Tell You About Trauma and Meditation

I have a confession to make. I've practiced yoga since I was five, but I have always hated to meditate. I taught yoga to humanitarian aid workers in post-conflict Liberia, corporate leaders and tech founders in Silicon Valley, and children in New York City public schools. And I never shared my secret: meditation just didn't work for me.

No matter how hard I tried, traditional meditation practices always left me feeling irritable and vaguely panicked.

I felt guilty about my deep and visceral aversion to meditation. I assumed that something was wrong with me, and I hid my secret in shame. I avoided teaching meditation in class, although it was a significant part of my training. I casually left my eyes open and stared calmly at the wall when other teachers' yoga classes inevitably descended into ten minutes of extended, excruciating silence.

Even on those rare and fleeting moments when I felt like I finally got it, I would experience a light, cold, and distant out-of-body feeling, as if reality suddenly became a little less real, and I was no longer attached to anyone or anything — not even myself. And that scared me. It didn't feel right, and it certainly didn't feel good.

Maybe it's my neurodivergence, I told myself. I have a hard time sitting still in the best of circumstances. I find it easier to focus when my body is moving. I know I'm not alone there.

And while neurodivergence is part of it, the real reason I loathed meditation didn't occur to me until a few years ago: it was trauma.

My intense discomfort with closing my eyes for long periods of time? It was because of volatile emotional and visual flashbacks.

My need to constantly open my eyes to check on my surroundings? Totally understandable in the context of hypervigilance, a super common symptom of unresolved trauma.

What about my fidgeting and inability to sit still for a set amount time? It was a flight stress response, wanting to get out of there because the practice itself was over-activating my nervous system — doing the opposite of down-regulating and relaxing me.

Traditional Meditation Makes Trauma Worse

It wasn't until I studied with Acharn Helen Jandarmit, a renowned Buddhist teacher in Bangkok, that I fully understood how and why traditional meditation practices are a bad idea for people with unresolved trauma. Acharn Helen leads multi-day meditation retreats but is careful to screen for anyone with PTSD.

"Traditional practices carry a huge risk of dissociation," she told me, “And that can be dangerous."

I felt vindicated for trusting my intuition all those years, keeping my eyes open while feeling delinquent, watching everyone look so peaceful and present.

Everything in the science and the research supports the fact that traditional meditation is not helpful for people with active trauma. Asking us to sit down, sit still, and close our eyes is almost always too much for our over-activated nervous systems.

We fidget. We want to leave. We may even get angry at the instructor. And the worst is when we leave our body — that spacey, out-of-body sensation I described earlier. That's when we risk retraumatizing ourselves without even knowing it. We think we're doing something good and helpful for ourselves, but we're making our trauma even worse.

Western culture is fully committed to a "no pain, no gain" approach to personal development. We think it's progress when we override our body's signals to stop. We think it's virtuous to do things that are extremely uncomfortable. We throw ourselves into weeklong meditation retreats, thinking "What's the worst that could happen?"

A lot. A lot can happen.

Since my revelation, I've spoken with meditation teachers around the world. Acharn Helen is one of a select few who understand the neuroscience of trauma and how traditional meditation risks repeating the same patterns that over-activate and overwhelm the nervous system during the trauma response.

The problem is, if teachers aren't trauma-informed, they are likely to double-down on what’s not working and push us to try even harder. They'll tell us to override the discomfort. They'll do their best to convince us that the distraction is happening because we’re not giving it enough effort. They believe that our suffering, in the practice, is somehow going to create something good, when all it creates is more suffering.

Traditional meditation doesn’t take into account how trauma changes the brain and the body. It doesn’t understand why its approaches don’t work and how they can even be harmful. Without this knowledge, it's easy to think there's something wrong with us. We must be meditating wrong. Or, even worse, maybe we are wrong or defective somehow.

This couldn't be further from the truth. Our reactions and responses aren't wrong. They just arise from a lack of understanding about trauma and meditation.

What's the solution?

A type of mind-body integration practice called mindfulness.

Now, mindfulness is not new. It's just as ancient, if not older, than traditional meditation practices that encourage you to negate your needs and put mind over matter. But until recently, mindfulness had fallen out of favor as a type of meditation.

It doesn't require much effort. It's slow and gentle. And rather than try to empty the mind, as a goal, it embraces the pulsing, messy sensations of aliveness that are always being generated in the body.

When we understand why traditional meditation doesn't work for those of us with trauma, we feel empowered to choose mindfulness practices that strengthen and nourish our mind-body connection. We know to proceed with caution and care, making necessary adaptations so we can practice safely. Doing so, we are able to experience all the amazing health and wellbeing benefits of meditation — without the risk.

When those of us with trauma push ourselves into a traditional meditation practice, we force ourselves to override the body's responses and the nervous system's needs. We feel defeated and experience self-loathing. Then we give up and think, "Meditation just isn't for me."

Nothing is wrong with us, if we can’t stomach traditional meditation.

Here’s what to do instead…

How to Meditate Safely with Unresolved Trauma

1. Explore trauma-informed mindfulness practices.

I am launching a FREE course, 3-Minute Mindfulness: Trauma-Informed Meditation, so people with trauma can safely and confidently explore the benefits of mindfulness.

When you sign up, you'll get weekly emails and audio recordings to guide you, delivered straight to your inbox. The course is based on decades of published research about mindfulness and its benefits. Each week, we'll explore a different layer of the practice.

Whether you sign up for my free course or not, I hope you explore mindfulness as a tool to improve your physical health, emotional wellbeing, and mental resilience.

2. Experiment with a short daily practice for a set amount of time.

I created my 3-Minute Mindfulness course when I was teaching mindfulness to corporate executives and tech founders in Silicon Valley. (I've taught this approach in-person to over 1,500 people around the world.)

Everyone has three minutes a day to practice. And while you can always create more time, frequency is far more important than duration. Having a practice is more important than how long your practice takes.

I invite you to try the course and practice daily for 8 weeks, to experience for yourself the benefits of mindfulness. I hope you'll be inspired to continue the practice, when you see what it does for your sense of wellbeing and your ability to stay centered during challenges.

3. Track, customize, and adjust your practice until you find what works for you.

No matter what kind of mindfulness you decide on, it's likely you'll need to adjust and adapt how you practice to support your nervous system. Practice with your eyes open. Practice under weighted blankets, lying on the Earth outside, or in the bath. Practice while you're walking in Nature. Practice with family and friends.

The important thing is to create a way of practicing mindfulness that works for you, so you can put it in your backpack of healing tools for navigating trauma.

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The benefits of mindfulness include reduced anxiety and depression, improved immune function and sleep, better focus and concentration, more wellbeing and happiness, and more fulfilling relationships.  

They are fully available for people with unresolved trauma to experience, but we need to practice in a way that works with, not against, our nervous systems.

Mindfulness gives us a way to access all the benefits of meditation without risk when we practice in the right way. Short practices, where you track what works, keep your nervous system in a state of relaxed openness. You don’t need to do more.

With a daily mindfulness practice, we build the body-mind connection that creates an essential foundation for healing.

I hope you're inspired to join my FREE course, 3-Minute Mindfulness: Trauma-Informed Meditation. You can sign up for it anytime here.

And if you know someone who might enjoy it, why not encourage them to sign up too, so you can do it together?