Speaker 1 · 0:03It's a pleasure to welcome everyone today. Today, we have the pleasure of welcoming David Trelevin, who has made some big waves recently in the mindfulness world. He published a book that I recommend to everyone called Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness. He has made significant contributions to mindfulness teachers around the world, encouraging the sensitivity to trauma. For a long time, required reading around mindfulness and trauma used to be the book Waking the Tiger, which I recommend to a lot of people. And now we have another addition to this training from David Trilevin. And I think it's helpful to note that this isn't necessarily trauma-focused mindfulness, it's trauma-sensitive mindfulness. And so a lot of us as mindfulness teachers, you know, need to be sensitive to the possibility of trauma because trauma is prevalent. There's many kinds of trauma, but it's important that we know how to be sensitive to trauma as we help people in the various contexts of the work that we're in, whether we're in business, healthcare, education, coaching. David, thank you so much for being here. I really uh appreciate your time today.
Speaker 2 · 1:41In my experience, working with trauma, it involves having a deep, deep respect for people's strategies for safety. The body opens with a yes. That's in my experience. Safety strategies, they will always win. And if someone that you're working with, or anyone in our groups, if they're holding on to something that's working for them or takes care of them, then to me, the move is to just dignify, really dignify whatever's taking care of someone without an agenda. And so trauma's like that to me. People have these survival strategies and we need to support them and have this kind of element of curiosity. I was at a meditation group in Berkeley at a residential house with a teacher. The teacher was trained in trauma. We were doing a checkout after the meditation, and the prompt was like, How was that? And a new participant in the meditation group and the student, to their credit, we were really honest, and they just said, I hated that. I honestly just wanted to run screaming from the room. I didn't want to be here. This person even said, like, your voice was really grating. And I was like, Oh, there was this moment in the group. And I looked over to the teacher and I was like, How's this gonna go? And they just took a breath, they didn't personalize it, and they said, That's awesome. Thanks for letting us know. Can I ask you a question? I said, Yeah, sure. And the teacher said, You said you wanted to just get out of here. Do you know how far away you'd want to go? And the whole group was like, Wow, this is not what I expected. And the person was said, Yeah, there's a hill up this road that we were on. I said, Honestly, I just want to get to the top of the hill. And the teacher said, Well, do you want to do that? Do you want to go up there right now? There's time, and if you want to do it, you have my request is that you just kind of bring a buddy from the group to go with you. And the person's like, Oh, okay. And so they left. We still had time in the group, and they came back probably, I don't know, seven or ten minutes later. And I'll never forget the expression on this person's face. They walked in and it's like they kind of came back to life. You could just see it. There was like life in their face, just like flushed. And so, what happened? And they said they ended up doing wind sprints up the hill a couple of times, just letting their body just like run. It's what they wanted to do. And the person got a little choked up and they said, I just want to say thank you for trusting that I know what I needed, like trusting my body. And it was a moment, and I felt like, oh, that's an example of a teacher really having this approach of respecting someone's psychobiology as opposed to personalizing it and going, wow, I guess I didn't lead a good meditation and something's wrong with them. It really created the right opening. Now, I know that we're going to be in different environments, like a center where you can't just have someone go running unsupervised because of liability. And, you know, we all have different things, but I just wanted to give that as an example of that kind of approach to trauma-sensitive practice. So I'll give the high level here about where people run into trouble. The easiest way to explain this comes from the myth of Medusa. Actually, I found it to be the most helpful. Medusa is this amazing superhero who has this power of when you look it directly into her eyes, you freeze, you turn to stone. And in the myth, we have Perseus, who's tasked with defeating Medusa and goes to Athena, the goddess of knowledge. And Athena says, if you look at Medusa directly, you're going to freeze, you'll turn to stone. So what you need is you need a shield. And Peter Levine, who many of you will know from somatic experiencing, really well-known trauma specialist, he basically said, trauma is very much like Medusa. You can't go right at trauma. In a more technical way, what that means is when you're doing a session with someone, you don't ask them to just pay direct attention to traumatic stimuli, meaning sensations, thoughts, flashbacks, etc. Because what Levine said is if you pay too much attention to traumatic stimuli, you freeze, you turn to stone, you become immobilized. And that's why when I went into my trauma sessions, they didn't start by asking about trauma. They didn't say, tell me all about your trauma. Instead, the trauma therapist I saw said, tell me what's working in your life. And I was like, I don't want to talk about what's working. I'm paying a lot of money to be in the session. And the person said, I'll never forget it. They said, your capacity to be with what's working is going to support you to be with what's hard. And I'll never forget that. That's the headline with trauma is you can't just go right at it, or you can become frozen and re-traumatized, overwhelmed. So why does this matter for us then? So the other thing that Levine noticed is that people who are traumatized will tend to reflexively orient or pay attention to traumatic stimuli. So I'll give a personal example. I grew up in a house where the safest way for me to get through was to stay quite small and to hide. And that meant my lungs were very tight. So when I started meditating, the first thing I often felt was tight collapsed lungs. And when I felt that, even though I was trying to pay attention to the breath at my nostrils, my attention would immediately go there because it felt like something's wrong. This is what was connected to some trauma for me. So anyone who's experiencing trauma will tend to naturally put their attention on elements of trauma. Again, that could be flashbacks, sensations. It could also be external reminders. So, for example, a street corner, a smell. You might have had the experience where you become very sensitized to a smell because you had a bad experience or for any reason. So, as a way to try to take care of our safety, we become sensitized and we will automatically reflexively orient to traumatic stimuli. So medusa and then reflexive orientation. Basically, we will reflexively look at medusa. So then if that holds water for you, what I'm saying, imagine the setup in meditation. So you're someone who's struggling with trauma, say, you come to meditation without knowing any better, you just start paying attention to what's dysregulating. If you don't know any better, you just keep following basic instructions and you don't do things to modulate the intensity of practice. You just keep hanging in with it. And at worst, someone is just looking at Medusa over and over and they can freeze. They can become re-traumatized. So because of that, and because meditation is so intense, we as mindfulness practitioners or as clinicians, whatever role you're in, the myth here or the headline is offering people shields. We want to give people and empower them with practices to help them avoid this pitfall, avoid this trap. And you know, four or five years ago when I started teaching more publicly about this, I was just trying to wave the flag to people who were meditation teachers who were like a kind of like a hammer and everything was a nail. Like, just take it back to the cushion, take it back to the cushion. That's changed. But to me, the path that we can go on, and when I'm training people, it's about the tools. I would want you to have, you know, 20 to 60 tools that you could bring in at any moment and you could go, okay, let's try this. All in the service of someone's meditation practice. Maybe they shouldn't meditate, that's fine. But otherwise, if we can help them to be in practice, then all the better. So that's the headline of a setup. There's a lot more I could say, but we need to offer people a shield. I got to hear to Sharon Salzberg, who some of you will know. Sharon was doing work with survivors of gun violence, actually, primarily at a parkland in Florida, but also families of mass shootings who had survived mass shootings in the US and abroad and primarily US. And Sharon said the number one term in that setting was tools, that people just need tools, like give me whatever I got to work with trauma. So here's one practice that I've seen a number of meditation teachers start to use, especially in mindful self-compassion. Some of you might know mindful self-compassion or MSc. MSC is now using this model in their classes because they're working with compassion specifically. So they're working with suffering and asking people to do challenging work in their practice. And so right at the beginning of a course, they'll say, here's three different zones. We have a safe zone, a learning zone, and an overwhelm zone. Safe zone is when you're feeling safe, you might not be stretched, you kind of know the territory. Learning is when we're asking you to stretch into a place that you might not feel comfortable, but you're not yet feeling overwhelmed, which is the third and final circle. And the point being, if at any point inside of a practice, if you find yourself feeling overwhelmed, you're welcome to take a break. Just building that in at the beginning of practice, I think can be very useful. And when I say take a break, I think this is a nuanced place. It's not saying that if you start to feel uncomfortable, then stop. To me, there's still an encouragement with practice to stay in with what's difficult. But people will all start to know their windows where they start to get into overwhelm. And we want to empower people to be able to take breaks or to shift things up. A second what you can do practice to know is to help people apply the breaks. And by that I mean to modulate the intensity of their meditation practice. This comes from Babette Rothschild. Bebette said that when she was a teenager, she was the first person in her friend circle to get a driver's license. So when she went to the parking lot with her friends and she's driving the cars around, she said, the first thing I made sure my friends knew is where are the brakes. Like, do they know how to hit the brakes? And Babette said, whenever you're working with trauma, this is really the first step is you want to make sure that people can modulate the intensity of their experience. Do they know how to slow things down if things start to get out of control and feel overwhelming? Here's the reason I'm mentioning this in terms of hitting the brakes. One of the more surprising things in the research that I found is that people who are in a meditation class will often give their power away because of compliance. Some of you will know compliance is like a very well-studied psychological concept that if you are in a position of authority and power, someone will want to please you and they will do many things to please you. Now, of course, this will play out differently, class, race, class, gender, and we can bring in social context. But in general, when you're holding a position of authority, someone wants to make you happy. Given that, and given that there's such a positive word on the street about meditation, people will often just kind of stay quiet and they won't approach the teacher and say, Hey, I'm having a hard time in practice. Can I talk to you about it? Unless there was a prompt. Unless you said in a gentle way, if at any point you feel overwhelmed, like those three circles, you're welcome to come and talk to me after the meditation, you know, something like that. The number of people I've met who said, I kept my eyes closed. I didn't know. I didn't know I could open them. I just felt like I wanted to be a good student. And I'm a good student. I'm doing the best I can. So I kept my eyes closed. I stayed still. Everyone else seems to be having a great time or they're doing well, as you've probably experienced on retreats. So building in these little modifications to help people break up practice, I think can be very useful to have in your back pocket if that's something that you need to offer. So here's a couple of ways that you can do that. I mean, these are so obvious in some ways that it almost seems strange to mention them, but it's important for a reason I'll talk about in a minute. So one is just opening eyes. Someone has their eyes closed. That can really, as you can imagine, intensify one's experience, especially if someone's having intrusive thoughts, memories, and flashbacks. So letting someone know, hey, if at any point you want to open your eyes, you're welcome to do that. Second is shifting posture. Immobility or that sense of being frozen, that is often a part of trauma. And so extended periods of practice can sometimes evoke an immobility response in people. So we want people to know that if at any point they need to shift posture, they're welcome to do that. Again, I'm not saying that the moment that someone's shoulder starts to hurt that they can shift or they should shift, but just that they know that's an option is helpful. Taking breaks, maybe an obvious one, but should I work with shorter practices? That's one. Little breaks, maybe five, 10 minutes of practice, then come back. Probably shorter the better at first. Let's try a three-minute body scan. Let's try a three-minute guided practice and then let's check in. So I think little bits at a time are probably better than some kind of like 20-minute guided body scan meditation, which can be people are like, oh my gosh, I can't move. So little bits at a time. That would be the place to start. And then stay curious with them because some people might really benefit from the longer practice and take it on, and others might not. Big part of my work is the window of tolerance, which some of you will know from Dan Siegel, which is a frame that we can use for like assessing whether someone is going to be benefiting from practice or not. So, one brief note around body scans. When I first started this work, I was very cautious about body scans because I had heard a lot of stories about people doing guided body scans for 30 or 45 minutes and felt very activated for those of you that teach body scans. But research just came out, it was two contain groups of survivors of sexual violence. And they found that the body scans were the most helpful aspect of the program. So it changed my thinking, at least it opened me up to new ways of thinking around it. And the other one is the breath. Sometimes people will benefit from like three to four deeper breaths. You've probably heard that one where you like four in, pause for four, four out, all sorts of different breaths that we can do. You know, the breath in many traditions is often the anchor object of attention to cultivate mental stability, which, you know, for most people that will work. However, the breath is not always neutral for someone who's experiencing trauma. So our respiratory system is completely tied to our sympathetic nervous system, which is tied to trauma. So if you're asking someone to pay close attention to the breath, just be evocative for them. And the point being, it's just not the most helpful way to cultivate stability. And I want to make sure I'm really clear about this that if you ask someone to pay attention to the breath and they get a little bit activated or they experience some feelings or emotions, that's actually not a bad thing. It may be that that's exactly what needs to happen in practice. Where it goes off the rails to me is if someone becomes highly dysregulated and can't come back into a place of more stability. But this isn't about making people comfortable all throughout practice. Sometimes people mishear that. So the breath, not always a neutral anchor. So we can introduce different anchors of attention or objects, sometimes called the two that I often will work with is sound or hearing. Sometimes working with external anchors of attention can also be very useful. So someone that you're working with might say, honestly, paying any attention to the body feels too much, is dysregulating, but I can be with that tree, for example, or I can be with the sound. I guess sound is still on the border of experience of listening or hearing. But sometimes people will use anchors like something in nature, visual, could also be an external, like you know, I have a little bell here. I could just be paying attention to the feeling of the metal and the coolness on my hand. That could be an anchor that I could work with. So don't be afraid to also work with external anchors as well. And a number of programs now, one is the inward bound meditation. And their first meditation, it was so cool. I think it started with sensations and then to sound and then to breath. And then they said, for the remaining five minutes of this meditation, go ahead and choose the anchor that feels most stable or most supportive for you. I was like, that's so smart. Yeah, the breath wasn't immediately put up as if, like, oh, if you can do the breath, you're, you know, you're here, and and anything else is just kind of you're in trouble. So I thought that was a great way to equalize the anchors. One thing I'll mention is some of you might know Kamala Masters, a meditation teacher in the Pasana tradition. And she's telling me that she likes to offer people secondary anchors if the breath isn't working. And she says that often inevitably they come back a couple days later, and they usually say, I just feel really bad about myself because I feel like you had to give me a special anchor and I must be kind of broken or something's wrong. And Kamala's like, I gave you a special anchor. Like, that's awesome. And they're having a totally different experience. And they've been spending a couple days in retreat being like, oh my gosh, I can't believe that I needed a different anchor. And da-da-da-da-da-da. So, you know, I think when you offer these anchors, try to do it with some tact to not make it like so. Oh, well, if you can't do that, then you need to do this. It's whatever works. To me, it's whatever works.
Speaker 1 · 20:35David, thank you so much for sharing all of this. I really appreciate you sending the slides. I'll make those available in the members area in the post on this session today. Obviously, this is a really important topic that I think all mindfulness teachers need some exposure to and some learning and practice with. And so I feel very fortunate that you've shared a lot of your wisdom today. I do encourage everyone here to go to David's website, sign up for some of his offerings, listen to his podcast. He has one of the coolest podcasts ever with some of the top mindfulness teachers. He has some wonderful courses. I can't recommend his work highly enough. He offers webinars for people. So, David, thank you so much for being here. I really uh appreciate your time. I appreciate your contributions to our understanding of mindfulness and how we can help heal ourselves and others with mindfulness in very safe, respectful ways. So I just truly can't thank you enough for your work and for your time today. Thank you for coming.
