The impact of trauma on personal meditation practice

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We had our first BPS community zoom call last weekend, and it was a very positive step for our community. In that call I shared some thoughts about meditation and trauma, and I’d like to share them again here.

In one Buddhist teaching, it is taught that there are three kinds of gifts:

1. Material gifts

2. The gift of fearlessness (calming people who are afraid)

3. The gift of meditation

Each kind of gift is more valuable than the last. The reason the gift of meditation is the supreme gift is because our mind is the part of us that perceives, and meditation is a technique to work with the mind. So if we have a way to bring gentleness to our mind, then our experience of life will improve.

But… What happens when your meditation community goes into crisis?

We naturally form relational attachment to the people we learn meditation from, and the community we practice with. That attachment gets tangled up with our own personal meditation practice.

When the teacher and leadership of the community where we learned meditation turn out to be untrustworthy, it can be shocking and traumatic. Shaken spiritual community attachments can deeply impact our relationship with our own meditation. The attachment to a guru who turns out to be a sexual predator can have an even deeper impact on our meditation – and relationship to our spirituality all together.

BPS offers a space to begin to untangle the connections that are no longer serving you, to free your ability to meditate. Our next community zoom is this weekend. See details in the BPS Online Moderated Discussion Group!

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Be sure to check out a very special offering happening right now: The 29 Day Meditation Invitation