The Role of Mindfulness and Meditation in Somatic Therapy for Trauma Healing
Somatic Experiencing is a methodology that helps the mind and body work together to heal people from trauma. Combined with mindfulness and meditation practice, this can be a great way to support the whole person inside and out of session, as well as improve and speed up outcomes in therapy.
What is the Connection Between Mindfulness, Meditation, and Somatic Therapy?
What is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness is defined as “the quality or state of being conscious or aware of something,” or a “mental state achieved by focusing on one’s awareness of the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts, and body sensations, often used as a therapeutic technique.” Meditation takes mindfulness a step further, by engaging in this type of “mental exercise” of noticing and focusing awareness. Meditation helps build the muscle of noticing on purpose.
This ability to be present and willing to acknowledge difficult thoughts, feelings, and sensations is the key to being able to do somatic therapy work. Therefore, meditation helps to strengthen the ability to do somatic therapy.
Benefits of Mindfulness and Meditation for Trauma Healing
I often “prescribe” meditation to my clients when we start therapy together. Why? It strengthens the “noticing” muscle, as well as the ability to stay with and tolerate some difficult emotional or sensory content. Meditation helps clients with their ability to observe their experience in session more easily.
Aside from boosting the effectiveness of somatic therapy, a mindfulness and/or meditation practice outside of session has many benefits.
Benefits of Mindfulness and Meditation:
Increased body awareness
Improved emotional regulation
Reduced anxiety and stress
Enhanced resilience to trauma triggers
Regulation of nervous system (lowered heart rate, breath rate)
Mental clarity
Increased ability to focus on tasks
Ability to externalize thoughts in order to evaluate them objectively
Mindfulness and Meditation Practices to Try at Home
One of the beauties of mindfulness and meditation practices is their accessibility. They don’t require money, a bunch of time, or a special space. I understand as a mom that getting some of this in every day can be challenging, because kids are anything but quiet or willing to let parents sit on a mat or pillow for extended periods of time.
I tell my clients this all of the time – the minute you start to make it complicated is the minute you lose. Mindfulness can be done in the car on the way to work or while rocking your baby to sleep. You can practice it on your lunch break. It does not have to be fancy and the origins of meditation have never been anything but cultivating discipline and peace within oneself.
Body Scan Meditation for Increased Body Awareness
Body scan exercises are a great way for clients to start exploring their ability to identify how things feel within their body. If you start to feel confused when you “go inside” of your body and start peeking around and finding out how things feel, great! You’re human. Keep going, it will get easier.
Breathwork for Focus
Breath awareness meditations are becoming more popular and are a great way to develop the ability to control where your focus is. Here is a great one to try by yourself at home.
Grounding Exercises for Stress Relief
Grounding exercises are also wonderful for when you are feeling overwhelmed, particularly anxious. When the nervous system is elevated, or “hyperaroused,” grounding techniques are a really useful tool to get the nervous system to come back down. After doing an exercise like this, you can use your developing interoceptive awareness skills to evaluate how effective the exercise was.
The most important thing to keep in mind when starting any sort of practice like this is self-compassion, patience, and curiosity. This is not something you have to be perfect at, and the goal is not enlightenment. We are simply developing the ability to get quiet and notice on purpose.
How Mindfulness and Meditation Facilitate Trauma Healing in Therapy
While I don’t often meditate with clients, I will certainly incorporate some small bits of it in session. If a client comes in extremely overwhelmed and has a hard time even knowing where to start, I like to utilize a body scan, some orientation exercises, or facilitate checking in with the body in order to regulate them. The beauty of this is that I will practice with them so that our nervous systems can co-regulate, increasing the ability for us to connect and prioritize the content of the session.
Because trauma creates disconnection (at times from reality, but most often from oneself and others), I find that coming back to the present moment using some of the aforementioned techniques is incredibly helpful. Using the observational mind helps clients to bridge the gap between mind and body so that the whole person can show up to the therapy space that day.
Therapists Incorporate Mindfulness into Somatic Work to Enhance Feelings of Safety
One way that mindfulness can facilitate safety in sessions is by paying attention to when positive (calming, peaceful, restful, energized) states are present in the body. By doing that, we can increase the client’s capacity to tolerate more difficult sensations and emotional content in the session. If we know we can feel good in our body, then we know that feeling bad isn’t a permanent state of being, rather something that we flow through as we heal the trauma. Without mindfulness, it is hard to really feel that and trust that.
Here’s a scenario that I find often happens with my clients who are just starting out on their somatic therapy journey and feels overwhelmed by the thought of having to identify somatic sensations:
Amy comes in for a first session in order to work on a specific medical trauma she has had. Due to the nature of the trauma, she is terrified of paying attention to body sensations, because the last time she was so aware of her body it was because she was in immense pain. She has tried talk therapy to no avail and is ready to try something new but is feeling hesitant. She reports having almost no connection to her body now and couldn’t report how her physiology reacts when talking about nearly anything. Her therapist gives her the homework of starting a free week trial of Headspace in order to grow her “noticing” muscle. Her therapist also directs her in session to try to notice what is happening in her body when she recalls something good that happened the past week, or the things that bring her joy or peace in general. As Amy learns that she is able to start to observe some body sensations, made more capable with her meditation practice and feeling safe in her body, she feels ready to start to work on very small, manageable parts of her medical trauma. With each passing session, she has more and more confidence that she can truly heal.
There are so many Amy’s out there right now and it is totally okay to feel nervous about trying something new. Know that there are so many techniques and skills to get you to the point of doing trauma healing in a safe and gentle way.
Ready to start a mindfulness practice?
If you are feeling ready to start a mindfulness practice as part of your journey to heal from trauma, I recommend starting with any of the exercises above. To further facilitate your trauma healing, a Somatic Therapist can help you regulate your nervous system and heal from the physical symptoms of trauma.
Contact me to get started with Somatic Therapy and begin your healing journey.
Stevie Spiegel is a Licensed Therapist and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner located in Kansas City. She uses Somatic Experiencing as her main body-based trauma healing modality, as well as EMDR. As an Intuitive Eating Counselor, she uses these principles to help her clients challenge their relationship with their cultural misconceptions about their body and food.
