Creating the space to heal
Meditation can’t be the only way to work with trauma
Simply put, meditation is a method to practice feeling into our relationship to the moment. For many reasons, we tend to either obsess over or avoid phenomena that appear in our lives instead of just staying put. We then either grasp and become attached — or even addicted — to that appearance, or repress our desire or fear, building a deep well of energy that’s sure to reveal its ugliness down the road.
This last point is important. Chögyam Trungpa wrote:
“Most of the problems in life don’t come from being an aggressive or lustful person. The greatest problem is that you want to bottle those things up and put them aside, and you become an expert at deception. Meditation practice should uncover any attempts to develop a subtle, sophisticated, deceptive approach.”
Meditation equips us with tools to manage our attachment and repression in the moments we are not meditating, even allowing us, after years of practice, to root out of habits of deception, and to relax in life’s constant alternating currents of disappointment and joy.
Therefore meditation can be used to create space in our lives to work with and eventually heal trauma — but it can’t do it alone.
For those of us suffering from deep trauma, professional, or at least skillful, therapy might be the only way for us to grow. Even kinks or blocks caused by childhood should probably be worked out with a therapist or at least the help of close, skillful friends. This is important to remember in a society that, because of the economic system it’s rooted in, values the individual path. To survive, let alone thrive, we must puff out our chest and build a personal brand so much that asking for help habitually feels “not for me.” “I’ll just meditate more. I just need to make more friends. Ahhh, Facebook.”
But for societal trauma — caused by capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and other oppressive systems — we need an entirely different set of tools altogether.
For example, one of the enduring traumas of American society is the isolation and alienation of the way most of us work: a job, or “wage labor.” We are living just over three decades into a period of stagnation in terms of compensation for working Americans and a growing exhaustion. Americans work more hours per year than citizens of any other “developed” — that is, wealthy — country. Americans get less vacation time, work longer days, and retire later, too. And that’s not including all of the unpaid work done at home — still mostly done by women — or the increasing time many of us spend checking email and keeping track of social media notifications and accounts, creating value for tech and telecommunications companies along the way.
Yet the share of the economy’s growth going to workers remains flat as the share going to those that own or invest in capital — those that make their money off of workers — rises.
No amount of meditation, alone, can turn this chart around.
We need meditation, therapy, healing, community, compassion…and collective power, whether through more union membership, cooperative economies, or other forms.
Throughout the history of capitalism, collective action is how people have created the space to heal societal trauma and then take it on.
Luckily, we seem to be entering a time of renewed interest in class. The Bernie Sanders campaign is but one sign — there’s reason to believe that the Republican Party is rupturing along a class divide, as Trump’s anti-establishment message resonates with the most racist portion of the white working class.
Meditation can help us live with more compassion, acceptance, and presence. But just like each of us, it, alone, can’t reverse the tendencies of an economic system that runs on inequality. And that’s to say nothing of the growing threat to the Earth posed by climate change or the deep injustices of white supremacy and patriarchy that persist in American life, all of which are deeply tangled up with capitalism itself.
This post first appeared on futuredebris.com.
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