World Mental Health Day: Meditation works upon our energy field and subconscious mind, while psychoanalysis works upon our conscious mind.
We must be aware that psychotherapy helps us find the essential meaning of what we have gone through, and helps us orient consciously to even the most unpleasant Mental trauma.
Since we, human beings, are wired to seek and find a sense of meaning in our life experiences. Therefore, when we undergo a Menatl wound experience, often what is needed to move past it is an awareness of the meaning of the traumatic situation.
If we can shift our perspective, we can change our experience. With a sense of purpose and renewed orientation, we can become more capable of overcoming our emotional pain.
Psychotherapy helps us work consciously through our traumatic past.However, our traumatic wounds exist on many levels of our being . Deep trauma severely damages and overwhelms the emotional region of our brain and our nervous system. It also manifests as self-limiting beliefs in our subconscious mind.
According to Rohit Sahoo, a highly sought-after meditation and breathwork teacher, “childhood trauma wounds may affect our instinctive emotional responses as well as our habitual thought processes. That’s where – meditation, deep breathing and energy work can prove to be of great benefitfor our inner healing.”
These practices seep into layers beneath the conscious mind, and help to repair wounds on the subtle layers of our energy field. Evolving scientific research in the domain of trauma healing is presenting us with clear evidence on how we must combine psychotherapy with meditation, breathwork and energy work, to achieve true lasting healing from our trauma’s.
Rohit further added¸ “The scientific evidence is clear! We must integrate and combine meditation, breathwork and energy work with talk therapy, to be able to truly liberate ourselves from the prison of our traumas.”
Usually, the traditional trauma healing therapies were based on the belief that the best way to heal trauma symptoms was to deal with the conscious, or rational thinking part of our brain.
Talking through the traumatic experience was thought to help a person understand the trauma and slowly desensitize them to the emotional intensity of it.
Rohit believes that these techniques can deliver us complete freedom from the shackles of limiting beliefs, past emotional trauma, PTSD, anxiety and can improve mental health a lot.
To achieve lasting healing from inner wounds and emotional traumas, we must combine psychotherapy with spiritual modalities such as meditation, chanting and breathwork.
The healing power of psychotherapy lies in its ability to help us make sense of our past traumas. Whereas, the healing power of spiritual modalities lie in their ability to harmonize our energy field.
Although these therapies were proving useful to a point, they were proving ineffective in healing & calming the damaged emotional regions of the brain of people who have had repeated trauma experiences.
We must remember that it’s our limbic system, the emotional region of our brain- which carries our trauma memory as sensory fragments.
The science on trauma healing is now clear. Our frontal, thinking part of the brain has a limited ability to change & heal the deeper emotional part of our brain- especially when we are always in a ‘ trauma response ‘ distressed state.
If we’ve had repeated traumatic experiences, the rational cognitive part of our brain will always be overwhelmed by the damaged emotional region of our brain. In that case, we will not be able to access our higher order brain regions and make sense of our traumatic past during conventional talk therapies.
Therefore, for any healing modality to be truly effective – It has to help us heal and calm the distressed emotional regions of our brain, before we can access the higher cognitive regions of our brain to integrate the trauma memory which was earlier looping in the distressed emotional region of our brain!
That’s where meditation and breathwork is proving to be a game-changer for mental health healing. In clinical studies, scientists have found that only after a few weeks of meditation, the distressed emotional region of our brain calms down and our brain’s “fight or flight” centre.