Like many (or most) who start a regular meditation or mindfulness practice, it was part of the recovery from a traumatic period of my life. However, there are many other routes to recovery that I may have chosen, and now that I am many years away from that period, I still have a daily meditation practice, and I have spent the last decade teaching mindfulness. So the answer that meditation is a means of dealing with trauma is only part of the reason why I meditate, and on reflection after nearly 30 years of daily practice there are many other reasons.
Before meditation
For someone who spent the first decade of life as a sickly child living in the slums of Bradford before moving to a council house, I had a remarkably successful career. I wasn’t particularly outstanding at school until later years, when a knack for mathematics got me into university. I then moved into IT, and rose to a senior role very quickly. Ostensibly I was very successful, with a career path that took me to some very interesting and challenging roles.
My life strategy had been remarkably successful. I worked hard, drove myself hard, and accumulated qualifications, skills and responsibility. I was blessed with a thriving family, when disaster struck. I kept applying the strategy that had worked wonderfully well my whole adult life, but found that working harder could not cure my wife’s illness or ultimately support my children when I was left as their sole parent. At the age of 40 I was burnt out and lost.
I had already made a lot of adjustments when a friend revealed they had a longstanding meditation practice. I had been interested in meditation, and read a lot about it, particularly yogic and buddhist approaches, but I had never found a teacher and my interest had been academic rather than practical. Something inspired me to find a teacher, which began my meditation journey.
Looking back to my early life, I was always curious about what are often called the wisdom traditions. I always wanted to understand how things worked. When a mechanical toy broke that was never the end of the pleasure – I would take it apart to try fix it and even if I could not fix it I would at least satisfy my curiosity about how it worked. That curiosity was applied not just to mechanical things, but also as I grew up to people, society and philosophy.
I was regularly ill as a child, with asthma and bronchitis. I filled my time reading anything I could get my hands on. When I could visit the library, I would read widely, including books on philosophy and religion. As a teenager I read a lot of Bertrand Russell, and pretty much exhausted the bookshelves in Bradford central library on what we might now call contemplative practice. I also developed an interest in theatre while studying my degree and among other things read all of GB Shaw’s plays and the prefaces.
So I guess (and this is speculation) that when my whole life was falling apart, that natural curiosity took over, and amidst the suffering I was very much motivated to understand what was going on for me, for my family, and how I might fix things. However, the “work harder, take on more responsibility” strategy that had got me very far in life was clearly not working.
So, as a present to myself for my fortieth birthday, I spent more than I could afford on a course on transcendental mediation (TM).
Transcendental Meditation
The nearest TM teacher I could find was 70 miles away. I rang her up, and drove over for my lessons. I’d read a lot about TM, and it was presented as a scientifically proven approach. There was a small ceremony to start with (which puzzled me) involving fruit and a clean handkerchief. I was then given a mantra to repeat to myself, and some instruction on how to use it. Unsure of what I had let myself in for, I followed the instructions diligently, and I had paid quite a lot so I was going to work to get value out of it.
20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening, I sat quietly and repeated the mantra to myself. Blending that into what was a complicated home and work life was immensely difficult, but I managed it. I turned up to a monthly local meeting of TM meditators to meditate with them. Slowly a lot of my stress symptoms started to abate. I slept better, felt less anxious, and my temper cooled – much to the relief of my children.
To be honest, there were so many changes I had been forced to make in life, it is difficult to separate out the meditation as the primary cause of my improvement. Rather it was part of a radical change in attitude to life. Career ambition went, I made many adjustments to support my family, and slowly recovered.
After TM
I read every available book on TM, and kept up my practice as I first was taught it. For a few years, things were working well, and as life improved I had an attitude of “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it”. But curiosity started to take over, and I started to read more widely about meditation. At the same time I read every self-help book I could find. I could not afford (time or money) to do the more advanced TM training.
There were a few books on secular meditation, and so I started experimenting with substituting the TM mantra with other sounds. They seemed to work as well as the TM mantra. I did a course on Acem meditation which is derived from TM, but which uses different mantras. These all seemed to work just as well.
At that stage, meditation was a mysterious tool that I knew worked, but I really could not explain how. I also thought of meditation as mantra meditation. Life was improving. I kept on practicing. I kept reading and exploring.
Charlotte Joko Beck
Of all the writers who spoke to me in that period of exploration, Charlotte Joko Beck caught the essence of my exploration. Her two books, Nothing Special: Everyday Zen and Everyday Zen: Love and Work are transcriptions of her dharma talks, and embed much wisdom. They are practical books, and take quite a different line from the self-help books. I began to understand the ethical positions she took and her psychological insights, and although there was not much discussion about meditation, she helped to link meditation practice to everyday life.
Buddhist practice
In among my reading I came across Buddhist practices that sounded similar to TM, so I substituted Buddhist mantras for TM mantras in my daily practice. They seemed to work just as well. I want to a couple of Buddhist weekend courses, and began to realise the Buddhist meditations were on the whole quite different.
Wanting to understand more, I started attending a Buddhist centre and took some courses on Buddhism. I did my first silent retreats. I got to understand some of the basics of buddhism. The centre I joined was a Tibetan group, and there were regular visiting teachers as well as local teachers. There were lots of esoteric concepts that were difficult to understand, but I particularly enjoyed the community, and got quite involved, eventually joining the board of trustees.
Mindfulness
I can’t remember exactly when I first read Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book Full Catastrophe Living. It was a very different take on buddhist teachings, It was the first presentation of meditation practice that emphasised scientific evidence of its effect. It must have had an effect because as I approached the end of my 50’s I decided to train to teach mindfulness. Despite being heavily involved in a buddhist group, I was drawn to the more contemporary approach, and I applied to join the masters programme in mindfulness-based approaches at Bangor University.
There is a strong emphasis on different mindfulness practices – breath meditation, body scans, mindful movement. Also, there is a strong emphasis on bringing mindfulness into daily life. Meditation is a term that covers a wide variety of practices, of which sitting watching the breath or repeating a mantra is only a small part.
Masters in Mindfulness Based Approaches
I arrived at Bangor University in October 2013 feeling like a teenager starting university again – nervous, wondering if I had done the right thing thing, aware that my background as an IT specialist was an unusual one for someone embarking on a journey to teach mindfulness. The first year was a struggle in many ways – the teaching style was one I had not met, I had never written essays about my personal experiences, my research orientation was shaped as an IT person. There was as much unlearning as learning – I could not use my previous academic approaches to good effect. Somehow I got through – dogged determination won through, and I began to understand the approach. I started teaching mindfulness in 2014, and completed the masters in 2016.
Learning about myself
No doubt without meditation I would have naturally reflected and learnt a good deal about myself. Meditation practice invites you to observe your own mind, but there are other ways to do that: natural maturing, therapy, supportive friendships. There is a psychological process called de-centering, which means that you can observe thoughts and feelings without being completely swept away with them. The more I practiced meditation, the more I learnt to de-centre. This means that slowly, over time, I related differently to thoughts and emotions. It became easier to respond more carefully to events, rather than reacting. Early on this materialised as a more even temper. Having seriously burnt out at the age of 40, as I moved back into work I was able to take on more and more responsibility without being overwhelmed.
I began to understand how events had shaped my life. For example, on a meditation retreat during a compassion practice, I realised that the trauma from being bullied by a teacher at the age of 11 had shaped my attitude to work and study; he had repeatedly criticised in public my scruffy work, my general inability to follow precisely his instructions, and told me I would never amount to anything, so my response over much of my life was to prove him wrong. A deeper understanding of how my life was shaped has helped me change slowly some behaviours, and be a little kinder to myself.
Learning about others
As I learnt more about mindfulness, as I started to open up about my personal experiences, and as I started to teach mindfulness, I began to understand how diverse people are. I have been amazed at how open people can be, given the right conditions, and how healing that can be for many people.
As a manager, my movement towards a more reflective style of management began on a management training course when I was 32; I had expected to be taught how to do better planning and instead we did lots of reflective exercises that tested our awareness of ourselves and our impact on others. Meditation started to accelerate that reflection, and in due course I rose to a senior level in a way that, for the most part, resulted in teams that were more harmonious than if I took a more directive stance. At a pragmatic level, I learnt to pick my battles. I am pretty sure that my quieter style of leadership worked well for most who worked with me, and over time I learnt to facilitate discussions that meant that decisions of a team had more buy in than if I had enforced them.
That learning continues. At present I am beginning to understand more about neurodiversity, as family and friends are beginning to understand the impact of neurodiversity. I am beginning to explore with curiosity how different we all are, and how to relate in a more open, non-judgemental way. I can say that in some cases it has radically improved my relationship with some family members.
Meditation and mindfulness enhance life
Meditation and mindfulness is so often framed as a way of dealing with difficulty, we often miss that it has another positive side. By opening our awareness out to the pleasant aspects of life, we can open up to how much is to be enjoyed in the world. I remember a mindfulness retreat where the lead pointed out this oft-missed aspect. Mindfulness is not just about eradicating suffering, it is about enhancing life.
The exploration continues
So, as my 70th birthday beckons, and the 30th anniversary of my regular meditation practice, I shall keep developing and exploring my personal meditation practice. It has become much more than a stress-response, rather it is a way of being in the world that continuously surprises me. I was delighted when Willem Kuyken, Professor of Mindfulness at Oxford University published his book Mindfulness for Life, which is a much fuller celebration of mindfulness than I can present in this blog.
So, the way meditation helped me to respond to trauma was hugely important. But it turns out it was much more than that – it was the source of a deep and fulfilling exploration that continues. If I am lucky there may be a couple or more decades to explore it.
