Meditations for Healing Trauma Quotes

“The As: Aim Attention and Allow When practicing mindfulness, we aim attention at a particular “target.” Targets can be such things as body sensations, sights, sounds, thoughts, emotions/feelings, or our entire experience moment to moment. Mindfulness is noticing, moment to moment, where our attention is. Therefore, we are mindful when we notice that our attention wandered from our target—where we aimed to pay attention—to something else.”
― Louanne Davis, Meditations for Healing Trauma: Mindfulness Skills to Ease Post-Traumatic Stress

“But mindfulness is not about controlling anything except where we aim our attention. You will learn and practice mindfulness techniques so that you can become more and more aware all the time, not just when problems show up in daily life.”
― Louanne Davis, Meditations for Healing Trauma: Mindfulness Skills to Ease Post-Traumatic Stress

“This book will help you learn to practice mindfulness by teaching you two skills—awareness and compassion. These skills are like wings. Just as a bird or an airplane needs two wings to fly, you need these two skills to help you travel on your journey to recovery. I described mindfulness earlier as steady, open, and kind awareness. In order to take in our moment-to-moment experience with kind awareness, we must cultivate self-compassion. Dr. Kristin Neff (2003) defines self-compassion as an attitude of kindness toward ourselves, especially when suffering from painful experiences such as trauma. An important part of self-compassion is the understanding that life’s hardships and emotional pain are part of being human. They are not a personal failure. Instead of being harshly self-critical, we extend understanding and comfort to ourselves. Another important part of self-compassion is accepting that all human beings are in the same boat—none of us is perfect, and we all wish to be happy. If”
― Louanne Davis, Meditations for Healing Trauma: Mindfulness Skills to Ease Post-Traumatic Stress

“When she stopped trying to control her feelings by avoiding them, she gained a sense of self-control in the present and was less controlled by the trauma and the past.”
― Louanne Davis, Meditations for Healing Trauma: Mindfulness Skills to Ease Post-Traumatic Stress

“Mindfulness involves becoming very curious about how things really are. When we are mindful, we can step back from our understandable wish to control, solve, fix, and/or change whatever is happening that we don’t like. Instead of struggling to change things, we can allow things to be as they are. We can then observe our experiences just as we find them. Trying to control our experiences by avoiding what is unpleasant may lessen distress in the short run. However, we become trapped in a reaction “habit”: we strive to control everything. This does not serve our best interests in the long run. Our understandable desire for control sets in motion a pattern of avoidance that blocks recovery from trauma.”
― Louanne Davis, Meditations for Healing Trauma: Mindfulness Skills to Ease Post-Traumatic Stress

“Errors are even more likely when we see the world through trauma glasses. We may see a threat directed toward us personally when there is no threat. When we are mindful, we aim to notice these judgments as they happen. To wisely and skillfully navigate daily life, especially after trauma, it is quite useful to notice and set aside judgments that can fuel suffering. In doing so, we can take in our experiences more fully and objectively. As much as possible, we aim to view all experiences with an impartial or neutral attitude. This is one way to keep our rational mind working when our emotional mind would otherwise shut it down.”
― Louanne Davis, Meditations for Healing Trauma: Mindfulness Skills to Ease Post-Traumatic Stress

“energy on responding and healing instead of reacting and struggling. Mindfulness can help you stay present with the pain by riding it like a wave. That wave of pain will peak and then naturally dissolve on its own as it crashes on the sand.”
― Louanne Davis, Meditations for Healing Trauma: Mindfulness Skills to Ease Post-Traumatic Stress

“Although we can expect pain as part of being human, suffering is a different story. One part of a path to recovery is to allow your painful feelings to be as they are. You already know from experience that it is not possible to get rid of painful feelings. So what can you do? Practice mindfulness. Mindfulness helps you work with this habit of trying to solve the problem of emotional pain by avoiding it—that is, trying to ignore it or make it go away. Mindfulness is a way to relate differently to emotional pain. Mindfulness can help you focus your”
― Louanne Davis, Meditations for Healing Trauma: Mindfulness Skills to Ease Post-Traumatic Stress

“But you may not be aware that suffering happens when you “feed” emotional pain with the very energy you use to resist, avoid, and try to get rid of it. Your struggle to make emotional pain go away only turns emotional pain into suffering. Suffering is part of being stuck and interferes with healing from trauma.”
― Louanne Davis, Meditations for Healing Trauma: Mindfulness Skills to Ease Post-Traumatic Stress

“But in the highest alarm—a life-and-death situation—the fight/flight/freeze system shuts down your rational mind. This prevents you from thinking too much. Why? Because thinking would delay quick action to get you out of harm’s way. The problem with post-traumatic stress is that it doesn’t take much to kick your fight/flight/freeze system into alarm mode. And false alarms are common. The higher the level of false alarm, the less your rational mind is able to do its job. This makes it difficult to function well in your life after trauma. For”
― Louanne Davis, Meditations for Healing Trauma: Mindfulness Skills to Ease Post-Traumatic Stress

“Mindfulness skills will also help you to relate differently to distressing trauma symptoms—symptoms that you have gotten into the habit of avoiding. You will learn to spend more of your time in the present, which is the only “time zone” in which you heal from trauma.”
― Louanne Davis, Meditations for Healing Trauma: Mindfulness Skills to Ease Post-Traumatic Stress

“If you are stuck in PTS, you are also trapped in a cycle of avoiding reminders of the trauma. This gets in the way of your recovery. You become more and more disconnected from yourself and other people. In fact, trauma expert Peter Levine (2008) believes that trauma has much to do with loss of connection. For example, over time, you may have disconnected from your body because certain body sensations became linked with emotional distress. You may also feel disconnected from who you are as a person. You may also lose connection with other people and life in general.”
― Louanne Davis, Meditations for Healing Trauma: Mindfulness Skills to Ease Post-Traumatic Stress

“beautiful scenery that you would not see on a highway. Avoidance keeps the cycle of post-traumatic stress going. Avoidance robs you of the chance to learn that you are, for the most part, safe in the present. It also robs you of the opportunity to know that you can handle your memories, thoughts, and emotions.”
― Louanne Davis, Meditations for Healing Trauma: Mindfulness Skills to Ease Post-Traumatic Stress

“Intrusive memories of the trauma and distressing thoughts and feelings fuel arousal and reactivity. This vicious cycle is maintained by the fourth symptom—avoidance. Your life becomes more and more limited as you avoid people, places, and situations that remind you of the trauma or that you are afraid will remind you of the trauma. You avoid these situations because they may trigger upsetting thoughts, emotions, and/or physical reactions.”
― Louanne Davis, Meditations for Healing Trauma: Mindfulness Skills to Ease Post-Traumatic Stress

“What are your hopes for practicing mindfulness? How would you like it to help you in your daily life? Before you dive into the next chapters, take a few minutes to consider these questions. Record your answer on paper or electronically in your computer or smartphone. Then put your hopes for this mindfulness adventure on the shelf, so to speak. Being curious means being open to whatever might happen. What we expect shapes our reality. By looking for specific results, you may miss the unexpected. What you don’t expect could be more valuable than what you think you need right now.”
― Louanne Davis, Meditations for Healing Trauma: Mindfulness Skills to Ease Post-Traumatic Stress

“After learning about mindfulness, you might now wonder if there is any science behind it. Research studies find many benefits of mindfulness practice, such as stronger concentration (focused attention) and greater body awareness. Mindfulness practice also increases the ability to stay present with life experiences instead of avoiding them by time traveling in the mind or zoning out (Holzel et al. 2011).”
― Louanne Davis, Meditations for Healing Trauma: Mindfulness Skills to Ease Post-Traumatic Stress

“With regular daily practice, we actually come to know that mindfulness is not always relaxing. All human lives have ups and downs. Because mindfulness practice is part of life, it will also have ups and downs.”
― Louanne Davis, Meditations for Healing Trauma: Mindfulness Skills to Ease Post-Traumatic Stress

“Generally speaking, mindfulness is not about pushing yourself to make something happen. For example, mindfulness is not aimed at reaching some ideal state of relaxation—or any other state, for that matter. However, being more relaxed is often one of the first things those new to practicing mindfulness notice and find helpful. But that may not always be the case.”
― Louanne Davis, Meditations for Healing Trauma: Mindfulness Skills to Ease Post-Traumatic Stress

“For instance, mindfulness is not aimed at clearing the mind of thoughts. However, both your body and your mind may become settled and calm when you practice mindfulness. The more regularly you practice over time, the more likely this will happen.”
― Louanne Davis, Meditations for Healing Trauma: Mindfulness Skills to Ease Post-Traumatic Stress

“What Mindfulness Is Being mindful is being attentive. You aim your attention on purpose and observe your present experience in a particular way—with an impartial, friendly, and curious attitude. When you are mindful, you are aware of where your attention is moment to moment. Therefore, you are also aware of when you are not paying attention. In this way, mindfulness helps you stay connected with what you are experiencing in your body, heart, and mind right now. Now let’s take a look at how mindfulness can help you in the present moment with judgment, control, and compassion.”
― Louanne Davis, Meditations for Healing Trauma: Mindfulness Skills to Ease Post-Traumatic Stress

“You now know more about how post-traumatic stress often causes your body, heart, and mind to get stuck in life-or-death survival mode. Survival mode makes it difficult for the rest/repair/restore system and rational mind to do their jobs to restore balance in your body, heart, and mind. This may partly explain the research that shows a relationship between trauma and poor physical health (McFarlane 2010). People who have PTS often talk about how much mental and physical energy they use up just to get through each day. PTS also interferes with sleep. The daily experience of feeling threatened is exhausting and leads to both physical illness and emotional suffering.”
― Louanne Davis, Meditations for Healing Trauma: Mindfulness Skills to Ease Post-Traumatic Stress

“of the fight/flight/freeze stress response system. The sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems make up the autonomic nervous system. “Autonomic” means it doesn’t need any direction from us. The sympathetic nervous system sends stress hormones to activate fight or flight, like turning the dimmer switch all the way to “on.” The fight-or-flight responses are meant to occur quickly and strongly to meet immediate danger. Unlike the sympathetic nervous system, the parasympathetic nervous system slows things down. It turns the dimmer switch to “off” to activate the freeze part of the stress response (Porges 2011). It is also responsible for the rest/repair/restore functions that help to return your body, heart, and mind to balance once the threat is gone. The sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems usually work well together. But with post-traumatic stress, fight/flight/”
― Louanne Davis, Meditations for Healing Trauma: Mindfulness Skills to Ease Post-Traumatic Stress

“freeze is overly active, and the rest/repair/restore system isn’t able to do its job of returning balance very well.”
― Louanne Davis, Meditations for Healing Trauma: Mindfulness Skills to Ease Post-Traumatic Stress

“Mindfulness skills will also help you to relate differently to distressing trauma symptoms—symptoms that you have gotten into the habit of avoiding.”
― Louanne Davis, Meditations for Healing Trauma: Mindfulness Skills to Ease Post-Traumatic Stress

“After trauma, your ideas about yourself, others, or the world in general can become inflexible and quite extreme. Here are examples of changes in thinking: you believe that you are a failure because you did not prevent what happened, that the world is now a totally unsafe place, or that no one can be trusted. An example of a change in feelings is that you may feel more irritable, short-tempered, and angry after the trauma than you did before. Trauma memories can cause painful feelings that can be overwhelming. You can become so overwhelmed that you may quickly zone out or go numb. When unpleasant feelings are repeatedly numbed, it also becomes difficult to feel pleasant feelings, such as happiness and love.”
― Louanne Davis, Meditations for Healing Trauma: Mindfulness Skills to Ease Post-Traumatic Stress

“The effects of these symptoms on daily life can range from mild to disabling. The four groups of PTS symptoms will probably sound familiar: intrusive memories, changes in thinking and feeling, changes in arousal and reactivity, and avoidance (American Psychiatric Association 2013). However, you may not have noticed the link between all of the symptoms and the traumatic event that you experienced.”
― Louanne Davis, Meditations for Healing Trauma: Mindfulness Skills to Ease Post-Traumatic Stress

“Freezing may also take the form of “checking out.” That means you zone out: You’re in a state that is not really awake yet not really asleep. You go somewhere else in your mind when the threat causes emotions that overwhelm you.”
― Louanne Davis, Meditations for Healing Trauma: Mindfulness Skills to Ease Post-Traumatic Stress

“Mindfulness is your inborn ability to be attentive to what is happening in your body, heart, and mind as well as what is going on around you moment to moment. You will begin to reconnect with your body, heart, and mind in a way that helps heal what was disrupted by trauma.”
― Louanne Davis, Meditations for Healing Trauma: Mindfulness Skills to Ease Post-Traumatic Stress