Resource-Based, Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness – A Contemporary Approach To Mindfulness

Our organism is a structured and interactive collection of variously patterned energy flows, such as the individual cells and their interconnections, the hormonal and organ systems, and the different aspects of the mind including awareness, cognition/thoughts, emotions, and somatic sensations.

These energy flows are in a constant process of self-regulation for survival and thriving, which unfolds through self-monitoring and appraising how fluid and adaptive the different energy flows and their intricate interactions are at any one moment. Once a determination is made that these energies flow sub-optimally, the organism proceeds to modify them by creating, tapping into, and using resources in such a way as to achieve maximal integration towards health and wellbeing. Mindfulness meditation and psychotherapy are two ways of working with regulation and enhancing its successful unfolding. In psychotherapy, the therapist is a central resource the patient can lean on to learn to access her own internal resources. In mindfulness meditation, the meditator is alone without the benefit of another person’s support during formal practice, often left to discover his internal world as a collection of neighborhoods he would rather not have to visit alone. This can lead to an overwhelming struggle to feel comfortable in one’s own skin, for which simply following prescribed meditation instructions and techniques is no match. Conditioned and engrained energy flow patterns established during a lifetime of unconscious creation of suffering can interfere with the application of practice techniques and bring the meditator’s practice to a halt.

The question is: Why can mindfulness meditation become so unmanageable?

During the last one to two decades, interest in PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) revealed that around 10% of the population experiences PTSD and 70% of adults have experienced some type of traumatic event at least once in their lives. In trying to elucidate the effects of trauma on the human brain and our psyche, it became clear that more people than previously believed are suffering from some degree of trauma. Patients with complex trauma (protracted childhood trauma through abuse that deeply affects the adult’s life) are often misdiagnosed with a bipolar affective or borderline personality disorder, and therefore doomed to receive inadequate treatment that does not address the core problem.

The word ‘trauma’ comes from the Greek ‘wound’, and in this context refers to the psychological wound incurred through certain circumstances. Trauma is not just an event, although some events are potentially more traumatizing than others, but refers to the way an individual processed certain stressful life events in the past.
The extent to which an individual will become traumatized depends on two sets of interacting factors:
1. The objective characteristics of the event, and
2. The subjective characteristics that define the individual’s mental energy and efficiency.
Combined, these two factors give rise to a spectrum of trauma severities, whereby certain susceptible and fragile individuals will experience trauma under less severe circumstances, and strongly resilient individuals may not be traumatized having lived through more severe circumstances.

What does it mean to be traumatized? To try to put it simply, imagine the starlings’ murmuration – swarms of hundreds of birds dancing in perfect unison through the sky without a leader who coordinates the dance. In the same way, our organism, our brain, and our mind consist of an amalgamation of thousands of varying neurofiring and energy flow clusters that are patterned to interact collaboratively so as to provide us with a certain sense of cohesion, allowing us to live a more or less satisfying life.

Through their functional interconnectedness, these energy flow patterns are constantly self-regulating, and there is no lead energy flow, despite the fact that we like to think we are in control of our lives. Neuroception is the term coined by Steven Porges for the way neurocircuits self-regulate by distinguishing whether a situation is safe, threatening, or dangerous. This ongoing process of appraisal is how our autonomic nervous system evaluates information from our senses about our environment and the state of our body. The collection of thousands of parts our organism is made of interacts efficiently to solve conflicts that may arise and adapt to changes.

When the organism goes through experiences it interprets as traumatic, certain energy flow patterns cease to be well connected with the rest of the organism or even overwhelm the overall energy flow.

This puts us into a state of fear or anger, which combined with various degrees of mobilization or immobilization leads to various psychologically unsolvable situations. A historically recent scientific discovery has revolutionized our understanding of nervous system energy processing. Steven Porges’ polyvagal autonomic nervous system theory has immeasurably deepened our understanding of how human beings process their energy flow through the spectrum of safe, unsafe, and catastrophic experiences. Frank Corrigan‘s later expansion of our understanding of trauma processing and its treatment through Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR) provides further tools I have integrated into my trauma-informed mindfulness meditation technique.

An example is the child of an abusive parent; the child needs her parent and the attachment system gets the child to seek proximity to the parent, while the parent’s abuse causes terrible fear and anger. As a consequence, the child experiences an unsolvable psychological situation of attachment with fear or anger and no way out. To survive, the organism uses its specialized and sophisticated, polyvagal defense strategies to isolate some of those overheated neurofiring patterns from the rest of the overall energy flow and put in place substitute mechanisms to hold the whole system together. This process of isolation can be mild in the form of compartmentalization or more severe in the form of dissociation.

Let’s take a fun detour: The nervous system, both somatic and autonomic, embryologically stems from the outer membrane enveloping the fertilized egg, which eventually becomes the skin. At some point in the evolution of the embryo, a part of that membrane begins to differentiate into nerve cells, which then migrate into the center of the fertilized egg, becoming the nervous system.

Remember that a membrane’s function is to regulate the traffic of substances across it between the outside world and the inside of the cell. It can thus be seen as a relationship organ, regulating the way the outside world and the inside milieu of the cell relate to each other. As it differentiates into the nervous system and migrates inward presumably becoming the ‘mem-brain’, it does not lose its relational function. The nerve cell is the only cell in the body that does not produce anything. Instead, it is an electrical and biochemical information conduit that passes information from one end of the nerve cell to the other, and then through synapses to other nerve cells. Like the membrane, its function is relatedness. This makes the brain the relationship organ par excellence.

Healthy brain and mind functioning thus depend on the establishment of as much connectivity between all its elements and parts as possible. Since the brain’s potential neurofiring patterns exceed the number of known particles in our universe, the potential to grow as human beings is limitless during our lifetime. Chronic interruptions of that connectivity through childhood trauma, for example, are what causes psychological and somatic symptoms, as well as trauma, with all the suffering we can create for ourselves. Logically then, the essence of psychological therapeutic interventions is about reestablishing connectivity by stopping the process of connectivity interruption.

Just because a cluster of neurofiring patterns has been sequestered away does not mean it ceases to be active.

On the contrary, like unprepared musicians in one part of an orchestra, these dissociated parts continue to actively disrupt the whole system; because they are not integrated into the whole, they produce various psychological and physical symptoms that can be conceptualized as frictions within the system, which are caused by the organism’s inability to coordinate its overall energy flow in a smooth fashion. In surveying the whole patient population I have treated over the past 40 years, I can say that most people experience at least some degree of such disintegration throughout their lifetime, and we can find a wide spectrum of severity of such dissociation.

In light of these relatively new discoveries, approaches to psychotherapy and mindfulness meditation have been developed that are sensitive to what we now know about trauma and our polyvagal processing, and are therefore referred to as trauma-sensitive approaches, such as the one I developed.

An important aspect of such approaches is called ‘resourcing’, which refers to how healing trauma requires that surging traumatic memories must be met within the safety of a strong and loving sense of self.

Without that, just applying meditation techniques will not provide the necessary safety for trauma memories to be relived and rewired in an integrating fashion. This is the reason why so many people fail at attempts to apply mindfulness in their lives. In order to heal traumas, we have to be able to draw on internalized loving, strong, courageous, benevolent, and wise energy flows, and to do that we need to be able to create, tap into and use resources that are available to us from deep within ourselves. In psychotherapy, we have a therapist who can provide these resources until we have been able to internalize them, but in formal mindfulness meditation practice, we are alone having to face ourselves, whoever we may be.

Resourcing has thus been recognized as crucial to psychological healing in general, not only for traumatized individuals.

However, this has not always been so, despite the fact that over two thousand years ago, so history scholars tell us, Buddha was exquisitely skilled at teaching everyone who wanted to meditate the exact meditation technique that was uniquely suitable for them.

When I was first introduced to Zen by Karlfried Graf Dürckheim, who had already modified the original Zen instructions in a way that made them more accessible to Westerners, the original Zen instruction to meditation was short and not sweet, but brutal: ‘Just sit!’. No wonder Zen with its ‘just sit!’ invitation became somewhat of an exclusive club only a few people could stomach. For those with any degree of trauma, ‘just sitting’ most often would lead to retraumatizing experiences that would stall their progress in meditation and cause them to become psychologically more troubled than before.

With today’s knowledge about the brain and the mind, and in particular, about our polyvagal wiring, it is clear that for a successful journey in meditation, we need to know how to properly resource as a way of gaining the necessary strength needed to then roam our pained internal neighborhoods alone. I am therefore suggesting the term ‘Resource-Based Mindfulness Meditation‘ for an approach to mindfulness that embeds the necessary techniques of attention, awareness, and kindness within a solid cocoon of both internal and external resources we can draw upon any time to make sure our inner journey towards healing remains safe and productive.

The importance of accessing, creating, and knowing how to use resources when working with the mind is not just limited to trauma, but quite generally a central concern for anyone wanting to successfully work with the complexity of the human mind.

Plenty of scientific evidence for the importance of resourcing is now available, and we can now practice very specific exercises and mindfulness techniques that have been shown to have scientifically established targeted effects we can count on.

As far as mindfulness meditation is concerned, this requires a resource-informed, trauma-sensitive modification in our approach to meditation that honors each meditator’s unique mind configuration and conditioned hindrances for maximal results. ‘Resource-Based Mindfulness‘ introduces a new, modified approach to teaching and learning mindfulness requiring exposure to resources as an integral part of learning.

‍

Share This Story, Choose Your Platform!

More Blog Posts

Automaticity of the human mind

Human function, action, cognition and behavior under the lens of automaticity

...

1. Left brain perspective

For several consecutive early spring days, a single, distinctive fly appeared to relish the bright sunlight illuminating my bathroom. We have grown familiar, coexisting as two entities engaged in our respective routines. I designate her as "she"—perhaps influenced by the feminine grammatical gender of la mouche (French), la mosca (Italian), and die Fliege (German)—an intuitive attribution rather than a biological assertion. She occasionally positions herself on the curtain railing above my bathtub, observing as I shower. More frequently, she rests on the windowsill, tracking my movements as I shave, and at times briefly alights on my hair for a few seconds. I have been aware of her presence throughout, akin to an inquisitive cohabitant sharing this confined space, but today I intentionally sought a deeper engagement.

She was once again stationed on the windowsill, basking in the sunlight, as I shaved. I approached closely, examining her large, compound eyes, and posed the question, “What is it like to be a fly?” Initially, my cognition activated a predictable analytical response, retrieving stored knowledge about her physiology: a head encasing a compact brain; expansive, multifaceted eyes affording a broad visual field; antennae functioning as olfactory and gustatory sensors; specialized mouthparts adapted for sponging or piercing-sucking; a thorax anchoring six articulated legs, rapid wings, and club-shaped halteres for flight stabilization; and an abdomen housing digestive and reproductive systems, concealed from view. Her exoskeleton, black with muted grey striations, bore a subtle, fur-like texture, as though she had ornamented herself for this encounter—a sizable specimen, impossible to ignore.

Yet, I deliberately suspended this intellectual framework, opting instead to engage her in a silent, receptive state. My question became more personal and changed to “what is it like to be you”? I consciously down-regulated the default mode network—the neural substrate of self-referential thought—relinquishing the ego’s persistent drive to assert its permanence. This ego, in its dualistic framework, projects constructed identities onto the external ‘other’, rendering her so alien that I might, without reflection, swat her away, extinguishing a life deemed insignificant, irritating, or even repellent by that limited perspective.

In this shift, a different entity began to emerge within my awareness—not a mere object, but a presence actively relating to me, exhibiting a form of consciousness distinct yet perceptible. Her curiosity, perhaps reciprocal, prompted her to take flight and settle briefly on my hair. I remained immobile, registering the faint tactile sensation of her tentative exploration of my surface—an interaction probing my identity as much as I sought hers. The contact was transient; she soon returned to the windowsill, fixing her gaze upon me. I speculated that she might, in her own unknowable way, ponder a parallel question: “What is it like to be this massive, terrestrial organism, incapable of flight, beyond my capacity to name?” The perceived separation—me here, her there—dissolved into a unified ‘we’, marked by a tangible exchange of vitality through our shared, living awareness. Though our modes of consciousness diverge, they intersect intimately, each of us enacting existence according to our inherent capacities. Together, we participated in a dynamic interplay, a microcosm of the universe’s unfolding, so affecting that tears briefly surfaced, reflecting regret for the countless instances of inattentiveness lost to automaticity.

This encounter with such a remarkable organism illuminated a progression of awareness. Initially, I had navigated the ‘dark night of the soul’—a dualistic state of nihility, a relative nothingness characterized by existential desolation and the collapse of meaning within a self-other framework. Beyond this, I accessed a non-dual absolute nothingness, a broader mode of awareness where subject-object distinctions dissolve into a unified field of being, devoid of relational constructs. Yet, this was not the terminus; it opened into emptiness—the ultimate awareness mode, a boundless, vibrant expanse where the extraordinary manifests within the ordinary flux of daily existence. This state, achieved through direct presence with this fly, surpasses any chemically induced psychedelic experience in its clarity and depth, revealing a profound interconnectedness inherent in the fabric of life, the extraordinariness of ordinary existence. No answer could ever come close to the tantalizing peace of timeless questions.

‍

2. Right brain vantage point

For several radiant spring mornings, a singular, remarkable fly has basked in the golden sunlight flooding my bathroom. We have become familiar companions, each merrily tending to our daily rites. At times, she—yes, she, anointed feminine by the lilting echoes of la mouche, la mosca, die Fliege, a soft intuition humming through language—perches atop the curtain railing above my bathtub, a silent witness to my shower’s misty veil. More often, she lingers on the windowsill, her gaze fixed upon me as I shave, now and then darting to alight for a fleeting instant upon my hair. I’ve felt her presence all along—a curious housemate in this shared sanctuary—but today, I vowed to bridge the chasm between us.

There she rested once more, cradled in the sun’s warm embrace upon the windowsill, watching me wield my razor with quiet intent. I leaned closer, peering into her vast, prismatic eyes—kaleidoscopes of a secret world—and murmured, “What is it like to be a fly?” At first, my mind thrummed with the familiar pulse of knowledge: her head, a miniature cathedral of instinct; those grand, jeweled eyes unveiling a boundless vista; antennae, fragile wands of scent and savor; mouthparts sculpted for sipping or piercing; her thorax, a delicate frame bearing six crooked legs, wings that shimmer with thunderous speed, and halteres, poised like a dancer’s plumb line; her abdomen, a veiled chamber of life’s mysteries. She gleamed, black as night with faint grey stripes, her form cloaked in a gossamer sheen, as though she’d adorned herself for this tender rendezvous.

This time, like as many other times as I can possibly honour in daily life, I let this torrent of facts dissolve, beckoning her to meet me in the hush of silence. The question changed to become more personal: “What is it like to be you?” I stilled the restless clamor of my mind, loosening the ego’s tenacious hold—that brittle self, desperate to cling to its mirage of eternity, casting endless conceptual shadows upon the being before me. So remote she might appear, I could, in a careless flicker, swat her away, deeming her life a trifling annoyance, a speck of disdain. But no—a different essence began to bloom within my consciousness.

A presence unfurled, no longer separate but alive with me, awake in her own cryptic grace, her curiosity a mirror to my own. Suddenly, she soared, settling upon my hair. I stood statue-still, captivated by the faint tickle of her pilgrimage across my scalp, a gentle quest into the enigma of my existence. The moment was ephemeral; she soon returned to her sun-gilded throne, gazing back at me. Perhaps she mused, too: “What is it like to be this lumbering, wingless colossus, a riddle beyond my silent tongue?” The gulf between us—me here, her there—dissolved into a luminous we, tethered by a pulsing filament of shared aliveness. Our ways of knowing diverged, yet entwined, each of us threading life’s arc with singular devotion. Together, we spun a strand in the vast loom of the cosmos, a dance so piercing that tears brimmed in my eyes, lamenting a lifetime’s moments lost to the fog of unawareness.

In that tranquil void, beside this astonishing fly, I brushed against an abyss beyond sorrow—a stillness forged in the crucible of the soul’s dark night, rising into the infinite embrace of nothingness. From there, it was but a tender plunge into the world’s embrace, a surrender that let peaceful nothingness blossom into vibrant emptiness—a radiant field teeming with the miraculous veiled in the everyday. This quiet epiphany, outshining the wildest psychedelic odyssey imaginable, unveiled life’s timeless poetry: unspoken, extraordinary, woven into the ordinary cadence of days. The nameless question remains.

‍

Searching Everywhere But Where It Counts

Forgetting that we have a mind.

...

October 12, 2024

Before you worry about symptoms such as depression and anxiety and how to improve or get rid of them, before you get your blood boiling arguing with people who can't deal with anything beyond their own viewpoint, before you develop and become ensconced in your own opinions, before you vilify who disagrees with you, before you shake your head wondering how seemingly obvious facts cannot be agreed upon, before you assume you have no blind spots, before you despair that crowds never learn from history, before you become bitter at humanity's collective stupidity, before you get passionate about religion, mythology, and archetypes, before all that, wouldn't it make sense to inquire into the source of all of it - these symptoms, views, opinions, thoughts, actions, distortions and, frankly, miseries?

While it does not take rocket science to realize that the source of it all is the embodied human mind, for most, embarking on its exploration is at best a big challenge, at worst insurmountable, non-sensical or incomprehensible. How many times have you heard nonsense like “I don’t believe in psychology”, as if the existence of the moon were a matter of belief? How often do patients enter their physician’s office complaining of being anxious or depressed, and are sent home with a prescription without one question that would try to understand how their mind creates such suffering? Many people, including professionals who should know better, live and act as if they had no mind.

The mind is the source of all subjective phenomena and experiences, and we are astoundingly unaware of it. Our mind’s task is to ensure survival and the propagation of our species, not to ensure we live our best life. To this end, it needs to be efficient, rather than concerned about maximizing its potential. Efficiency results by pairing down information processing to the bare minimum. Embedded in the way mind functions are mechanisms that cause reality distortions, delusions, wild beliefs, and a profound obliviousness of one’s own ignorance. Whether we like it or not, our mind drives our lives like our heart pumps blood through our veins. The universe's natural processes have caused us to evolve that way, and for better or worse, we are stuck with a mind that functions sub-optimally as it creates profound reality distortions that seem at first blush to have successfully allowed us to multiply and propagate towards earth dominance. In the long run, however, it turns out that humanity may end up stampeding dangerously close to extinction. To thrive both individually and as a species we must come to terms with our rather dangerous mind and train ourselves to use it beyond its basic survival mode by accessing its inherent potential evolution has graciously also built into it. That takes work, training, effort and patience.

Our human mind provides the capacity for reflection. The mirror reflects what’s in front of it, meaning that as reality beams itself onto the mirror’s surface, the mirror beams it back to us as an image we can then examine from the outside. Notice how what gets examined by looking at the mirror is not reality itself, but an image of it. Our brain provides a similar process in the form of consciousness, whereby it maps reality in a virtual form we then can observe and manipulate. However, while the mirror reflects reality exactly as it is, the virtual reality consciousness creates is not only a map of reality, but that map is modified into a new creation. The brain as mapper functions as our central relationship organ that enables us to reflexively develop a relationship to reality and ourselves by having access to a virtual, mapped and modified reality we can ponder and manipulate. This is how we are self-aware.

As an aside, the mind is more than the creator of a virtual adaptation of reality we can reflexively relate to and have a relationship with. It can transcend self-awareness, and knowingly experience reality and awareness without the detour of mapped mirroring duality. That is the shift from observation to being, from knowing we exist in a universe to realizing we are the universe. More about that in another context.

The eye has a blind spot where the optic nerve enters the retina, but you don’t see it. You have the impression of enjoying a seamless field of vision without two black holes in the middle, even though the holes are there. The brain manages to fill in the missing information to make the field seem seamless. Extrapolate that to the whole brain to realize that to function effectively for everyday survival our brain adapts our field of consciousness in two ways: It fills what’s missing to provide a sense of continuity and simplifies available information to not overwhelm you. It hides blind spots from you to provide continuity and withholds information to ensure efficiency. Both these mechanisms distort reality to ensure survival, while simultaneously laying the foundations for ignorance and suffering.

We each have many blind spots, but the core blind spot affecting us all is the proclivity to live as if we had no mind. We use our minds without realizing the extent to which our experience of reality is created by our mind. Without our conscious knowledge our brain creates the reality we experience. We don’t notice that the reality we experience is our brain’s creation. We mistake our brain’s constructions for reality. This results in a dangerous situation, in which we ignore the fact that our experience is subjectively constructed. We mistakenly believe that what we see and experience is automatically true, and because it seems true it seems real, and because it seems real it cannot be changed. Our primordial blind spot towards the brain’s constructions robs us of freedom of choice, of the power of clear view, wise discernment, and respectfully compassionate mutual understanding.

Our mind’s constructions seem so real that we hold on to them for dear life and want to shove them down other people’s throats without exploring their veracity. We get strongly identified with what we believe we know, emotions take over, and the capacity to hear each other vanishes. Identification with mind processes is the single most destructive problem in the way humans use their minds. Emotions suffocate the mind’s spaciousness to freely consider, question, doubt and explore, and before we know it, we are in conflict. If we cannot agree on facts, emotions drive us to use force to impose our views instead of inquiring more deeply into the divergent realities, and if necessary, compromising to try to resolve complexities. Force can take the form of yelling and screaming at each other, or legal and physical action.

The reality our mind constructs and we can have a relationship with, is in fact threefold. We first have objective reality, which is what happens in the universe independent of whether we know about it or there is anyone around to witness it. This reality consists of energy flow that is independent of how our brains and minds construct reality, and therefore as far from information as energy flow can get. The black death virus killed thousands of people without them knowing what viruses are or being able to see them. Although this is the easiest reality to agree upon, like in the case of flat-earthers, emotions still manage to cause distortions of objective facts.

Subjective reality is our own private experience nobody else has access to. This energy flow is entirely within as a construction by our own brain and mind. Although it is largely independent of objective reality, it is profoundly shaped by interactions with others. Even if everyone denies that I am in pain, if I experience pain, it is totally real for me. That is a difficult reality to agree upon, because seeing it from the outside requires trust and our capacity for empathy.

Then there is intersubjective reality, which is the reality of stories. This energy flow is deeply symbolic in the sense that language and stories are symbolic, therefore experienced as information flow, and a mutual co-creation with others. It is the reality that emerges through mutual narrative construction and is neither objective, nor subjective. It only exists in the interpersonal realm containing people who are willing to participate in it by accepting the shared reality. One such reality is money, but there are many others such as all collective ideas we can share. Money means nothing and has no reality unless it is shared in the interpersonal space. This is also a difficult reality to deal with, because it depends on the mutual capacity to regulate the multilayered energy flow between our intuition, our emotions and our intellect. When that occurs, empathy and clear insight become possible, allowing a degree of harmony within the intersubjective dance of energy and information flow to emerge. Any dance couple may dance a Tango, but those in conflict will not be able to present a harmonious dance.

To manage these three realities we each have a relationship with, requires a good deal of self-awareness and emotional regulation many people don’t have. Much of the time, the mind remains transparent like air to our eyes, invisible or not known, yet profoundly determining how we relate to real reality and live our lives. Like children playing in a house on fire, we remain oblivious to the many ways our ignorance of mind causes suffering and destruction all around.

Latest Blog

Novel ideas and information on what’s coming straight to your inbox! Subscribe to my newsletter now.

SUBSCRIBE!