The first book in the MahaSati reading list is Peter Levine's Healing Trauma. Levine has worked extensively with people who suffer from PTSD or sexual trauma and has developed a set of exercises designed to help these folks. I have to admit that I approached the book with a certain caution because, while trauma seems to have become trendy, I'm quite grateful that my life hasn't felt very traumatic. Levine, however, insists that we almost all of us have some level of trauma stored in the body. And in the context of MahaSati training, the point is simply to explore strategies for dealing with reactive patterns stored in the nervous system. So if you too can find talk of trauma triggering, the ideas may make more sense if you recall that we all have bodies with nervous systems. Over time these systems acquire many reactions that operate well below our consciousness, and only some of them are useful and adaptive in the present. 'Healing trauma' then could be thought of as nothing more than developing some intentional regulation of our nervous system.
Levine's book is short, and mainly reads as an extended preface to the exercises he uses in a therapeutic context. Which is perhaps what makes it a bit unsatisfying from an intellectual perspective. It could be that he develops a more interesting theory of trauma somewhere else, but here at least there's no real explanation of why these exercises work. Instead, we really just get a metaphor. Trauma is what happens to the body of an animal when the natural stress-response mechanisms of flight, flight, or freeze are somehow interrupted in running their course. Note that it's not these instinctive mechanisms themselves, nor even the life-threatening stress of feeling like prey that lead to trauma. Trauma is fundamentally the 'stuckness' of being unable to respond to stress in a 'natural' way. I think it's fair to object that this metaphor doesn't even really rise to the level of being an explanation. But this objection carries less force when we see how adamant Levine is that trauma is not a psychological but a somatic problem. If this is true -- if trauma doesn't have much to do with how objectively awful the stimulus was, or how subjectively intense our psychological response to it felt, but is simply a sort of somatic blockage that leads us to repeat fixed reaction patterns -- then it's actually hard to imagine what a better explanation would look like. Why does the body get stuck? What causes it to release? We'd have to ask the body these questions directly, and ignore any psychological story that purports to articulate the body's response.
It turns out that this is exactly how it feels to do the exercises. There's a lot of physical shaking, discharge, and energetic flow. And it doesn't seem to mean anything. For me at least, this doesn't happen with every exercise, or even with most of them. But in my experience the ones that do work, work repeatedly, and, as it were, randomly, without any clear sense of understanding why they work or where this energy is coming from. There's no story, no images or words, there's just energy. In fact, it's unexplainable enough to make one wonder whether any progress is actually being made. It gives none of the satisfaction of 'figuring it out' that talk therapy can provide. It's just ... tension and release. I trust that over time this is doing something good for me? At a minimum, these practices do seem to improve awareness of the body.
Just for future reference, here's the list of 12 exercises.
1) Feeling physical boundaries -- tapping, showering, string tracing, massaging
2) Grounding and centering -- feeling feet or sit bones, feeling a pet
3) Resourcing -- listing internal and external resources
4) Focus on positive -- find an object with positive valence and think of positive past moments and feel their effect on you
5) Tracking the effect of thoughts and images on the body (pendulating)
6) Tracking the sensations of guided imagery -- this one requires tracking sensations as you listen to a brief audio story
7) Discharging fight -- feel the desire to push back against and defend by pushing against a partner
8) Discharging flight -- feel yourself running away from a predator by making running in place motions
9) Discharging freeze -- let yourself feel completely slumped, overwhelmed, and in despair, then slowly straighten out of it
10) Feel into the physical sensation of immobility, and then let it pass -- a low level everyday version of 9
11) Orienting -- let yourself look slowly around the room as you find your place in it
12) Settling -- hugging yourself in a series of postures designed to finish discharging energy
No comments:
Post a Comment