Meditation is not about sitting very still and thinking about nothing... It is actually one of the very best ways to release trauma and painful events from our lives
Buddhists teach that there are two arrows in life. The first one is the one life shoots you with, and causes pain Illness, divorce, death, whatever stimulus it is that causes pain...that is life shooting you. That pain is inevitable.
The second arrow life hands to us, and that is the one we shoot ourselves with over and over again as we relive painful events in our mind and don't move on. That is called suffering, it is self-inflicted, and is entirely avoidable.
The purpose of meditation is to allow us to gain awareness of our mind and eliminate our suffering.
One of the key points of meditating and being mindful about our problems is gaining the ability to let go of things that are hindering us and causing us suffering. The idea of allowing yourself to feel pain and to feel the hurt and anguish, to let it have all the room it needs to grow in your heart while you hold that feeling with compassion is that it is allowed to expand and let the energy behind it out. Once it is fully expressed and you are holding it with compassion...you’re holding your hurt with compassion... then you begin to realize that other people feel the same thing you do, this suffering. the same pain and it lets you disassociate yourself from the story, this personal pain and let it become more impersonal.
The process of observing the story and disassociating ourselves from the pain and anguish we feel allows us to see events as a shared burden to have compassion about because it is our shared pain now. It’s no longer a part of my identity... it becomes a shared experience where I have compassion in unity with others in their pain and suffering. When this happens we can let it go much easier and as we let it go we heal.
so with a three step process is that we acknowledge our pain and face it while we allow it to take up much room I didn’t need in our heart and we view it with compassion.
Secondly When we view our pain with compassion we understand that it is not a personal unique pain but a shared communal event.
And the third step is that as we see that it is a communal compassionate event we let go of the identity and the story so that it no longer is attached to us. We let it go and choose to stop suffering.
I know this is a great simplification of the process but I wanting to write the core of the truth tonight, so that hopefully one of my readers may realize that relief is possible, peace can actually happen, and it starts with self-compassionate meditation.
Namaste