Very helpful, thank you!

Thank you for this wonderful post! It’s indeed a gift.

When I started researching meditation, I already had gone through roughly 18 years of psychotherapy and due to my most severe PTBS no therapist had ever been able to teach me any calming or relaxing techniques. I grew up in a small but terrible cult and because of that yoga, meditation and everything to do with it was part of my complex trauma. When anybody told me to breathe, I got into a stupor, as I had been programmed to do (so I wouldn’t struggle when assaulted). But I had escaped the cult about ten years before and by then learned to at least focus through flashbacks using simple mindfulness techniques. They were still terrible, but nothing life threatening anymore because I could keep in touch with my current reality of safety and wellness even though my amygdala made me relive torture. That was the start. With a new therapist, the very first one that really knew about the mental and neurological aspects of mindfulness, I approached the topic from the safer distance of a scientific angle. I worked through my fears, one by one and I kind of developed my own kind of mixture of sitting and lying yoga (I’m a wheelchair driver) and mindfulness and loving kindness meditation. Lately, I discovered that the purring of a cat is, for me, a great substitute for the still triggering om or other chants. And finally, I have learned to listen to at least some guided meditations. Mostly, it’s when the guide is a woman. But the breakthrough came about 2 years ago when I first tried to do a course for the first time and the wonderful Vidyamala Burch tought me that a wandering mind is the most normal thing, it’s what minds do. And that everytime you realise that the mind wandered is that magical moment of mindfulness. It’s a success, not a failure and instead of becoming annoyed about the supposed failure and forcing the mind back to the meditation, I learned to welcome these moments, cherish them and gently guide my mind back to what it was supposed to concentrate on. I am, among other stuff, autistic and many think autistic people can’t learn to meditate. On the contrary :our minds do flow with great ease if we give them a focus they crave. This is often seen as another problematic feature of autism that should be trained away (never really works) but there I am, getting steadily better at meditation and mindfulness through exactly that feature: hyperfocus! Others may listen to monks singing, I listen to a cat purring or, indeed, to Harry Potter audio books, because that’s what my minds focus latched on to. Fine, then, you take the monks, I’m happily meditating on Harry Potter. Because it’s completely irrelevant what you train your mind to calm down with as long as you achieve calm, peace and mindfulness… Hope this helps someone…

Thank you I needed to read this.