I just finished listening to Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness, by David Treleaven with Willoughby Britton, and enjoyed the heck out of it.
Not only is it extremely explanatory of many phenomena we see happening with meditation as it relates to trauma, but it is also very practical and applicable, offering numerous helpful, insightful suggestions about how to modify approaches, paradigms, and practices, as well as when to refer out to higher levels of expertise if you run into someone dealing with levels of trauma beyond your scope.
It is also a book with much larger social and political implications, rooted in a long, broad conversation about race, class, gender, social justice, economics, sexuality, power, history, culture, and how these may be traumatic and impact meditation practice and teaching, as well as psychological function and healing, as well as all sorts of other aspects of how meditation instruction might be delivered.
It got me thinking in typical slightly hypomanic style about a grand project that would integrate the teachings in this book with books like For a Future to be Possible, by Thich Nhat Hanh, the secularized founational stuff Shinzen has created, the core attention and awareness founational tech from TMI, foundational Buddhist stuff like Mindfulness in Plain English, and The Path of Serenity and Insight by Bhante Gunaratana, the advanced technical stuff from MCTB2, the magickal/elemental/dream stuff from Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, the Mahamudra/Dzogchen-esque persepctive of books such as Clarifying the Natural State, the works of Pema Chodron, Lovingkindness by Sharon Salzberg, the commentaries such as the Vimuttimagga, the core practical texts of the Pali Canon, all compiled into something searchable and hyperlinked, to come up with something that filled in the gaps of each and collectively provided something vastly more complete than any individual has so far produced.
Obviously, one could easily debate what I just included on that list, but it is more to express an idea than to be a complete index to the essential books for the path, and copyright issues would likely be expensive to overcome but not impossible, and it would take a lot of time, and there would be heavy politics to deal with, but I can’t help but dream of such things, as everything I see out there misses stuff and is imbalanced, very much including my own works.
As I write this my hairs stand on end, and I get the sense that I might just be mad enough to tilt with such a windmill, and I wonder what strange karma is playing out and where it will all lead.
Back to the point: Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness is seriously important and very, very highly recommended reading. I think back on many conversations here at the DhO and much of the politics that has occurred over the years that the information in this book would have helped inform had we had it back in the day. May we all do a better job of incorporating this book’s wisdom and the related resources it references into our helping work.
