I sometimes describe this meditation as the opposite of mindfulness.  In mindfulness meditation, the goal is to focus on something (breath, sensations, thoughts) to put yourself in the present moment.  This can be life-changing, but focusing is difficult for many people so it is easy to feel like you are failing at it.  People who have experienced childhood trauma often have serious issues with self-worth, so failing at something can activate their harsh inner critic.

In this type of meditation you learn to basically put your mind on autopilot, so there is no goal to focus.  In fact there is no goal at all.  When there is no goal, you cannot fail.   This often disengages the vicious inner critic that is common in trauma survivors. 

I'm glad you asked.  I give out surveys one month after people take my class at the CPTSD Foundation.  Pretty much everyone who agrees to do the survey lists “healing from trauma” as one of the reasons they are taking the class.  About a quarter of people who start don’t return after the first (or sometimes second) day.  As of the writing of this, among the 75% of people who do three or more classes I have 84% survey compliance. Over 80% of people who do the survey report positive effects on their lives one month after learning this meditation.  Click here to see up-to-date data along with every single answer to the survey question that asks respondents to describe the effects they have seen in their life.  The survey also asks the magnitude of the effects on people’s lives.  Of those it helped, about 30% experienced large effects in their lives; 50% had medium and 20% had small effects.

With me on Zoom

Since 2022 I have taught this meditation on zoom as a volunteer for the CPTSD Foundation, an organization that helps people who have experienced childhood and other relational trauma.  If you are struggling with symptoms of Complex PTSD, you can enroll in my monthly class and learn on zoom with other trauma survivors.

On this Website     

To bring this to more people, I made videos from the class to see if people could learn this through a website.  I've only finished videos for the first three classes.  I didn't plan to put just three days of videos on a website, but I did put the links to the videos on a google doc to share with people in the class who missed one of the sessions.  I then got an email from someone who hadn’t taken my class but had a friend who did and shared the google doc with him.  The email said, “Meditation has been something that has eluded me for many years, as it's just been too traumatic to sit there with my thoughts, but somehow with the technique you teach, it's been possible to go back into my body.  I wanted to let you know what a difference this is making to me – thank you so much”  After reading that, I thought that it could take months to finish the videos, but I could help some people now if I threw up a google site and posted a link to the google doc.  I've updated the site a bit so instead of just linking to the google doc, I turned the doc into a series of webpages that you can access from the link at the end of the next paragraph. 

After the first three days it’s mostly review, so you should understand the technique at that point.  On average, it takes a little more than 35 minutes to view the videos/Q&A each day.   Use this form to contact me with questions or comments if you take the course this way.  If you decide to take the course, I really hope to hear from you - even if you didn’t like the course (actually, especially if you didn’t like the course as that might help me improve it.)  If you want to get together on zoom to meditate together and discuss your meditation, I’d be psyched to do that also.  To take the course, click HERE.  I hope it helps. - Adam