The Double Edged Sword of Mindfulness: Making Mindfulness safe for everyone including trauma survivors.
If you deliver any mind body practices such as mindfulness meditation, yoga or any other type of contemplative practice, trauma is likely to show up in your classroom. Perhaps you are a mindfulness teacher, psychotherapist, a guidance counsellor or work in pastoral care and hospice care. You may have noticed how class participants’ sometime react in a way you didn’t expect.
As the mindfulness teacher or facilitator, you have an inkling that something may not be quite right but you are not sure what? Perhaps it could be an old trauma, an upsetting memory or a reaction that the person didn’t quite expect. It could have been a something that required support and guidance. As a mindfulness teacher or therapist it is important to be equipped to recognise and respond to this.
Mindfulness is a proven stress reduction tool that has become increasingly popular and while this is a good thing- it can be like a double edged sword- good in one way, for stress reduction. However, mindfulness has the potential to exacerbate symptoms of traumatic stress. As teachers we need to know how to take good care of our participants.
This evening talk will explore the intersection of mindfulness and trauma. You will be introduced to Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness by David Treleaven. David has made the study of this his life’s work and is an expert in the area, he offers an authentic understanding of trauma, that includes his personal experience while on meditation retreat. We will explore the ways in which we need to adapt our teaching or therapy sessions so that we can integrate mindfulness in a safe way for everyone and especially trauma survivors.
David Treleaven, PhD, is a writer, educator, and trauma professional whose work focuses on the intersection of trauma and mindfulness. He is author of the book Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing (W. W. Norton, 2018), which was acclaimed by Rick Hanson as “a rare combination of solid scholarship, clinically useful methods, and passionate advocacy for those who have suffered from trauma.” He’s lectured on trauma-sensitive mindfulness at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and the Omega Institute in New York. Trained in counseling psychology at the University of British Columbia, he received his doctorate in psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies and is currently a visiting scholar at Brown University.