Reasons Why Mindfulness is your Best Trauma Repellent

Do you feel haunted by negative thoughts and images? Are you exhausted from fruitless late-night Google searches on how to overcome your pain or trauma?

The secret is all in your mind. You read that correctly. Your best weapon for fighting traumatic and painful rumination is none other than mastery over your own mind. The mental discipline we deem necessary for defeating your inner demons is mindfulness, an enhanced state of mind that strives to increase your consciousness of the present, thus effectively removing you from the pain of your past. Not convinced??In return for setting aside a mere half an hour a day for mindfulness meditation, you can achieve life-changing benefits such as:?

1. Positive Alterations in Brain Structure

At the risk of getting really science-y here, the number one biological culprit responsible for traumatic stress is the hippocampus: a structural feature of your brain that plays a crucial role in learning, memory, and emotion processing. Scientists have identified this component of the brain as highly sensitive to negative environmental stimuli. As a result, the hippocampus in trauma survivors tends to have less volume than those situated in a non-threatening environment. Scientific jargon aside, these findings suggest that trauma survivors have difficulty forming new memories and remembering old ones to cope with unpleasant memories associated with traumatic stress. Ironically, this makes the brain more liable to hold on all the more tightly to traumatic memories lest those too are lost. By practicing mindfulness, you can increase the emotion processing capacity of your hippocampus, which then clears up more space in your mental hard drive by decreasing the negative emotional valuation of painful memories. This way, you have more headspace for accommodating mnemonic details that ground you in your present and remove you from your past trauma.

2.????Heightened Self-Awareness

Trauma occurs when a singular event rips you from one state of mental growth to another so fast you have no time to process the change. In the aftermath of the traumatic incident, your mental faculties rapidly change; namely, your memory and emotional processing abilities suffer. As a result of these sudden changes, you may have difficulty understanding your new self and your new limitations. It also doesn’t help that your traumatic memories are disjointed in your head and come back to you in isolated fragments rather than as a single clean roll of mnemonic film.?The goal of mindfulness is to further attune your senses with the sights, smells, and visions that currently surround you and increase your conscious awareness. By better situating yourself in your present reality, you can acquire the level of distance necessary from your traumatic memories to calmly slot the broken puzzle pieces of the incident into the bigger picture of your life. The negative images in your mind are then scaled down to perspective within the structure of your identity as a whole.

?If you are committed to overcome your pain and trauma, come and join us on one of our highly effective Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Workshops, which employ guided meditation exercises designed to better acquaint you with your present.?

Register your interest online via www.zentealoungefoundation.org.au/mbsr or call us on 02 8667 8666.