At one of our recent Sundays Together gatherings, a participant’s reflection on rumination opened into a thoughtful teaching from Pablo Das on how mindfulness can help us navigate the full spectrum of human experience — from pleasure and comfort to pain, trauma, and loss. We share their exchange below.
Participant: “As someone who has experienced trauma and survived dangerous situations, I find myself prone to rumination—thinking about what I could have done differently to prevent harm or trouble. I’m curious if this practice [of mindfulness] helps neutralize that discomfort, letting us anchor and feel it in the body, or perhaps even diffuse it. Could it give us skills to handle these experiences more skillfully? In life, there are events and situations that make us want to figure everything out to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe. I’m wondering how mindfulness practice can help in these moments.”
Pablo: You’re touching into something very potent there, right? I share your experience. I have a trauma history, and one of the challenges with trauma is that we become hypervigilant. We get fixated on scenarios — for example, let’s say you get hit by a red car. You then start paying attention to red cars for the rest of your life, and projecting a sense of being threatened onto every metaphorical “red car” that you ever encounter.
In the Buddhist realm, what we might say is that we can bring mindfulness to that. I define mindfulness partly as an objective awareness: it’s an ability to step back from an experience so that we can have some perspective. We can step back and go, oh, interesting, that’s an impulse, that’s a belief, that’s a view. We can begin to evaluate if what we’re believing is actually true, or if we’re just projecting because of our history.
Part of the liberation from the trauma experience is breaking that identification. Even if an impulse stays with us as a knee jerk reaction, we no longer see it gospel. We’re able to see that, oh, I’m having this conflict with somebody, and my experience of this is way bigger than this moment asks it to be. So my whole history of wounding is present here, and I’m bringing that into this experience with this person who has nothing to do with this. They’re just triggering something that lives in me.
And so, I think the value of Buddhist practice when it comes to trauma is this kind of objective awareness. I would say when we have awareness of our hypervigilance, that non-reactive presence can begin to precede our response. It is the pause that allows us to evaluate how it is we’re going to respond in a given situation. And what is a response? It’s a thought, speech, or action.
So, what we’re interested in is how does that thought, that speech, that action support us to be more well than we were? Should we choose a different response that will self-generate less suffering or harm? Buddhist practice is, broadly speaking, also an ethical system. We’re very interested in the mitigation of suffering, whether that’s the suffering we generate for ourselves, or the suffering or harm that we cause externally because of whatever’s happening within us.
Speaking just for myself, I’ve come to feel that whatever happens to us, it ultimately becomes our responsibility. That is, we are the only people who can manage how we react, and how we feel. One of my favorite sayings from Buddhism around this is, you’re not your fault, but you are your responsibility. The things that condition you, the things that happen in your life, are not your fault. Often, things do happen to us, and some of them are really terrible. That’s our measure of suffering for this life, and we work to manage it with as much grace and dignity as we can. We work to minimize the generation of suffering for ourselves, and harm that we cause others as a justification by saying, look what happened to me. No, no, it ends with us. That’s the spirit, I think.
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