Thoughts, Emotions & Trauma | 9/29/2022 "Meditation Q & A With Wendy Nash" #01
Channel: Integrating Presence
Date: 2022-09-30

Regular, current and past visitors to Integrating Presence may recall the monthly series "Ask Us Anything" https://integratingpresence.com/category/ask-us-anything I did with Denny K Miu from August 2020 until January 2022 -- partially including and continuing on with Lydia Grace as co-host for awhile until March 2022.

For a few months thereafter I did various Insight Timer live events exploring potential new directions and/or a continuation of the Ask Us Anything format while weaving in other related teachings to these events.

Then, after chats with meditation coach Wendy Nash, it became clear to start a new collaboration similar to "Ask Us Anything" simply and clearly called "Meditation Q & A" especially due to the original intent of the Ask Us Anything's being "discussions about meditation and related topics."

I'm compromising with Wendy's request for no editing -- since so much of our media diet is contrived -- by leaving the video version untouched while doing minimal editing for the audio/podcast versions. Being unedited gives viewers a real time peek into varying skill ranges on how meditators handle technical difficulties while editing some of these moments out for the audio versions will save listeners time and better befit Insight Timer.

"Will you ever feel like you're meditating right" is the main question we addressed. Other notes and topics include:

Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?

No way to do it wrong for new meditators

Becoming curious to what's going on

What is the emotion common to all these thoughts?

Stillness and restlessness in meditation

The support of starting off a mediation center

Starting where you're at -- one to four minutes of formal sitting meditation counts!

Walking as an energy balancer

Wendy's background including loving-kindness practice, anger, and trainings

Working with thoughts in meditation:

-Writing down all thoughts occurring after meditation session

-Imagining unsettling experience as a holding and attending to a problem puppy. What does it want?

-The kind of opposite experience of being seduced by the mind

-Some cut down the mind

-Trance

-Is this the best use of my time right now?

-Planning and writing during meditation

-Prioritizing

-Allotting time outside of meditation for material surfacing during meditation

Trauma and meditation:

-Meditation is not a cure for trauma

-Rumination coming out of trauma

-While thinking it can shift dynamics to keep doing loving-kindness practice towards someone in a relationship Wendy found more and more loving-kindness can keep one traumatized especially if noticing a locked nature of repeating the same thing over and over again in the mind often with anger, shame, humiliation and guilt

-EMDR

-Trauma therapy

Psychological events during meditation

What am I not seeing about this?

Discerning the inner wisdom voice from the hyper-conversational ego-mind voice

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*There's naturally an ongoing open call for meditation (related) questions for the (roughly) monthly "Meditation Q & A" either by the various social media means listed; integratingpresence[at]protonmail.com or Wisdom App to type/ask live.*

To directly join the next live “Meditation Q & A” join here on Youtube or via downloading the free Wisdom app in your app store or via: https://wisdom.audio where I’m @integratingpresence ( or https://joinwisdom.audio/integratingpresence )

Other Meditation Q & A episodes with Wendy: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmHBy3jSQd--YeJSRRDfVJpHf5Tk2sBfu

Past chat with Wendy: https://integratingpresence.com/2022/08/10/podcast-kindly-cutting-crap-with-wendy-nash/

Original blog post with notes, images and links: https://integratingpresence.com/2022/09/15/meditation-q-a-with-wendy-nash