Healing Combat Trauma

Quotable Quotes -- Pema Chodron on Going into the Pain

"Bodhisattvas practice 'in the middle of the fire.' This means they enter into the suffering of the world; it also means they stay steady with the fire of their own painful emotions. They neither act them out nor repress them. They are willing to 'stay on the dot' and explore an emotion's ungraspable qualities and fluid energies -- and to let that experience link them to the pain and courage of others." -- Pema Chödrön, American Buddhist nun (Tibetan Buddhist tradition) and author.

Editor's note: The Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara (Guanshiyin, also known as Quan Yin or Kuan Yin) is pictured. Chinese, 11th or 12th century.

Also, for more on meditation, click here.

One Very Easy, Doable Meditation Exercise: Soft-Belly Breathing

There's a very simple, straight-forward meditation that those of us who attended the "Healing the Troops" program as part of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine's practitioner training and advanced training sessions learned. It's called "Soft Belly Breathing," and in a few minutes you can master it. All meditation helps with stress reduction, so whether you want to pursue learning meditation more thoroughly as a practice, or whether you just want a simple tool you can use to reduce anxiety and stress, this meditation is worth trying...if only to see how simple it is. The instructions are linked here. 

Editor's note: The Center for Mind-Body Medicine's "Healing the Troops" program is linked here.

Quotable Quotes -- Jon Kabat-Zinn on Meditation -- and -- Healing

Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., is familiar to viewers of the Bill Moyers' PBS series, "Healing and the Mind," from the early 1990s. He brought "mindfulness" or "mindfulness meditation" to the attention of the U.S. public through that series, focusing on his work at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. He's also the author of a number of books, including "Arriving at Your Own Door: 108 Lessons in Mindfulness," from which the following two quotes are taken.

And here's what he has to say about healing:

"Healing is a coming to terms with things as they are, rather than struggling to force them to be as they once were, or as we would like them to be, to feel secure or to have what we sometimes think of as our own way." -- Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D.

And here's what he has to say about the power of meditation, which is part of how we are able to reach that equanimity:

"More than anything else I have come to see meditation as a radical act of love, an inward gesture of benevolence and kindness toward ourselves and toward others, a gesture of the heart that recognizes our perfection even in our obvious imperfection, with all our shortcomings, our wounds, our attachments, our vexations, and our persistent habits of unawareness." -- Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D.

Editor's note: Kabat-Zinn founded the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society, an outgrowth of the famed Stress Reduction Clinic, "the oldest and largest academic medical center-based stress reduction program in the world." About that clinic: "Since 1979 more than 18,000 people have completed our eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) program, an intensive training that asks participants to draw on their inner resources and natural capacity to actively engage in caring for themselves and finding greater balance, ease, and peace of mind."

The Center also has an outstanding bibliography of material about mindfulness-based approaches to various medical conditions, linked here. If you'd like to search their directory for a mindfulness-based stress reduction practitioner in your geographical area, click here.

More on Meditation: Learning How to Meditate

Learning to meditate is a powerful tool in the arsenal of self-care. We talked about it yesterday in a post linked here about tools that veterans with PTSD could learn to manage their stress and attempt to gain some inner peace (and sometimes freedom from pain).  

The current issue of the magazine at left, Shambhala Sun, on newsstands now, is directed toward beginners in mediation, and has a cover story entitled, "How to Meditate," linked here. It also has helpful articles about "beginner's mind," "why meditate," "getting started," and "mindfulness: the most direct path." Most of the material seems to be available online. Enjoy!

Editor's note: There are also CDs and DVDs about meditation, such as Gaiam's "Meditation for Beginners," linked here, in the "healing multimedia" section of this website, in the lower left hand side of the far left column of books and multimedia.

Puget Sound Veterans Hospital Tries Meditation for PTSD

The Seattle Times reports in today's paper that a veterans hospital in the Seattle area is trying a version of mindfulness meditation for combat veterans with PTSD.  The article is called, "Seattle hospital teaches meditation to troubled vets," by Michelle Ma.  The eight-week course, which has been held for a year, has proved to be of some value to veterans, and current plans are to study the effects more in-depth. 

The article in the Seattle Times is linked here.

For links to other posts we've done about mind-body medicine, including meditation, and PTSD, click here.