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We explore the stories of everyday people who have had their lives changed by the blissful and therapeutic states of jhana meditation. The jhanas are profoundly altered states of meditation that are a growing trend among meditators and scientists. We believe pragmatic instruction and feedback can save you months or years of stagnant practice. We've heard from hundreds of regular people who meditate (from engineer to musician) that have had their lives transformed by these states. Now, you can hear their stories.
David Treleaven Full Pod
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[00:00:00] In this conversation, we talk with David Treleven. David is the author of Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness, and has dedicated his career to studying trauma and its relationship to intensive meditation retreats. Meditation done well can be exceedingly safe, but the retreat landscape has not yet fully integrated the modern science of trauma and emotional healing.
At Journey, we're innovating not just on accessibility, but also safety. We originally reached out to David to be the latest of a list of experts we sought to weigh in on how we're innovating on safety. Mostly behind the scenes in our retreats. David was excited by the work we had already done. In fact, in a Time Magazine article that just came out, he's quoted as saying, our plan sets a new standard for the industry.
We did this podcast to explore some of the nuances about meditation, trauma, and safety. We talk about trauma informed tactics like pendulation, the role of jhanas in emotional processing, and how overemphasizing trauma can actually make safety outcomes worse.
All right. [00:01:00] Welcome David. I've really been looking forward to our chat. Happy to be here. Yeah. Thanks for having me. So I'd love to start off by having you share with our listeners a little bit about your background. Yeah. Happy to. Well, I wrote a book. About six years ago now called Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness.
My background is in psychotherapy and also in meditation. I'm originally from Canada, you might have heard it in my about when I said that right now. And yeah, I was just in the deep dive for most of my 20s around meditation. I was in, you know, trained to be a psychotherapist, ended up having some challenging experiences on some retreats that I've been going on.
I was going on increasingly more intensive retreats, ran into some trouble on one, we could talk more about that, where I came out of it a little bit worse for wear, and I got curious about what had happened. And I started to talk to friends and colleagues, and they were pointing me towards. [00:02:00] and trauma work, which is not something I had thought about with my own history.
I hadn't associated myself as having a trauma history. And I went and did some sessions with a trauma therapist in the somatic experiencing area, which we could talk more about, but it's a kind of a particular approach and all these things clicked. It just made so much sense. I had powerful experiences that totally transformed my relationship to meditation, deepened my practice, and also explained retroactively what was happening for me inside of meditation.
So a lot of things clicked into place. Ended up doing a doctoral dissertation on the topic because I was feeling so fired up by it. That became this book. And I've been on this ride ever since then of trying to talk to Anyone who practices, but especially those who teach meditation, what are the benefits when it comes to trauma and what are the potential pitfalls inside of practice?
That's probably what I'm most known for is talking about some of the potential pitfalls, not to fear monger, but just so people are clear, [00:03:00] like, Hey, you know, more is not always better when it comes to practice. So that's a little bit about me. Yeah. It's, it's fun for me to get a chance to talk to both in the podcast capacity.
And then also as, as we think about. Operating journey, because we see our role is not just innovating on how to make these, particularly the jhana states more accessible, but how to make the experience safer as innovation on two fronts as we go and your journey, it sounds like really weaves in the meditation and the trauma informed.
The the, the therapy side, such that it, it sounded like it really enhanced and deepened your practice. It wasn't just like you needed to maybe stop the bleeding. But that there was these things ended up being a virtuous cycle. Is that right? Yeah, this is, I feel like we're already in the deep end.
That's great. It's like, that's where I'm most interested in. Sometimes people can hear my work and think, Oh boy, here we go. Like safety can become tyrannical in some ways, like just too [00:04:00] much, like, Oh, we're all walking on eggshells. And practice to me is inherently risky. Like we're, we're plumbing the depths of our psyche and our mind and, and so, yeah, things are going to come up.
It's powerful. So I was interested in how do we do that? The jhanas are a great example with what you're up to with journey is how do we do that in a way that's quote unquote safe? Or as safe as possible. But at the same time, not try to make it void of any risk and aliveness that there needs to be some edge.
So I'm interested in the synergy, like what's the sweet spot for any person in any moment that will amplify the benefits of practice while keeping them safe. And it's going to be different for everyone, which is so tricky and dynamic. Yeah. I've got a bunch of questions on this side of the thing, too.
Yeah, I know, it like explodes. Yeah, this happened quickly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Before I launch off into all those, I wanted to loop back to this. It sounded like in your [00:05:00] intro, you had this moment where it's like, oh, this all makes so much sense. in this, like, ended up deepening my practice. Say a little bit more about that.
Yeah. Thanks for asking that question. So I was in the, I was actually the first session of this trauma therapist that I was seeing. Her name's Carrie Brady. She's an amazing therapist. I don't know if she's still working. And so I get in there and she goes, I want you to start by telling me what's working for you in your life.
Like what's good for you. And I was like, what are you talking about? I don't, I'm not here to talk about what's working. I'm here to talk about what's hard and my drama and the dissociation that came up in the retreat. Cause you know, I've been trained for 10 years in this particular model of like, you just focus on what's not working.
And she goes, I forget it. She said, I know this is a little counterintuitive, but your capacity to be with What is working in your life is going to support you into being with what's [00:06:00] difficult and what's not working. And that was just a total frame breaker for me. And that opened the door to these, these interventions and practices that she would do with me, where instead of just going right to what was painful, she'd start with like, let's focus.
In the present moment on something that feels resourcing for you, meaning like something that felt grounding and supportive to connect with. And again, this was totally counter to what I had ever practiced in my life. So she had me look out the window at a tree. That I found pleasing. And she's like, what do you love about it?
And I was like, Oh, I love the light through the leaves and the movement. So we'd feel that and deepen and concentrate. Think you're talking about the jhanas. We'd really like get some stability in that more quote unquote resourceful experience, and then we'd pivot. to places that were more difficult and it totally expanded my capacity [00:07:00] to be with challenge.
I could just stay present and it just, so it just floored me. I went home. I'm like, Oh wait, if this like, what? This is such a new approach and it turned out there was a whole bunch of methodologies that kind of supported this approach. And I think it has a lot of overlap inside of mindfulness and meditation practice.
We could talk more about that, but yeah, that's, that was the big like, Whoa, that's, that's This is really different for me. Yeah. Cool. I know that I can see, I can, I can almost imagine specific points in your book that touch upon that, this notion of. Balancing like introspective and extra perspective awareness when, when things are difficult, particularly if it seems as if the internal environment for whatever reason has grown threatening than to, to lean into the external as, and perhaps a few other places.
The, I'm also struck by how the. A lot of my experience with the jhanas is once I'm, the way we like to talk about jhanas is it's simply we can talk about it as like a [00:08:00] positive feedback loop between attention and emotion. But I think on a perhaps a somewhat more complicated, but more in my mind, more useful model is that there's a bunch of different Components to me.
And they're all like in communication in various ways and mental tension can arise when different parts of me are in conflict and the process of what we sort of call it, like awareness and love, although it's just turtles all the way down, like finding places where there's mental tension, growing more aware of those places, and then learning to embrace or open up or, or, or, or accept can to, to let go of that mental tension can, at some point you may have this like critical mass experience where you, you enter into this.
Seemingly like altered state of loving kindness or gratitude. And so this like acceptance or this awareness and acceptance process once, once there's like an inflection point shift, suddenly it becomes a whole lot easier to continue doing awareness and acceptance. Like I can grow more, I can grow more aware, or I can like accept more.
And so we've had folks. In fact, the first [00:09:00] two surprises, not surprisingly, the first two episodes of our podcast. We had folks talk about going into a job, actually their first experience. And for one, it was jhana at four. And for another, it was jhana at six. And they sort of intuitively turned to some really difficult past experiences.
One was the suicide of a close friend sort of grappled with unsuccessfully for therapy and therapy for, I think about seven years. And the other was and kind of forgiving himself for his own relationship to his own panic attacks. Both of these people were folks who you know, we, we worked with in a jhanany capacity, had no real discussions about their, like, and as surely they had done a lot of, a lot of work before they even showed up on our retreat.
But I'm, I'm curious to hear about if, if on the one hand, there's like this in the, in sort of a trauma and informed world, there's a tend to that, to, to resourcing and in some way, shape or form in order to be able to either move back into your window of tolerance. Or like gently give your, give yourself more ability to, to do some of the processing and [00:10:00] then elsewhere, there's this sort of like intuitive notion of folks who are finding like, Oh, I found some extra resource now.
Let me go turn to these things. It seems, it almost seems like we've got a virtuous cycle here. I'm curious to hear how you think about some of that. I have a thought, but let me ask you one follow up question. When you differentiate between, I heard awareness and acceptance. Is that right? That there was, I don't know if it's a clarity or how they work, but in your on a journey retreat, how would someone know when to lean into one or the other, or is that a false distinction?
Does that make sense? So if you're in practice, I assume it's, I'll answer this because I have a, I have a frame and I want to see how it maps on yours. So here's someone comes to meditation, Mostly, I'd say they're practicing awareness, being present with their experience in a moment to moment way. And then, maybe it's a false distinction about whether acceptance is just a part of that, or whether you lean into it in a more intentional way, but [00:11:00] how does it work on a retreat for you all?
Yeah. So, very loosely, we we talk a lot about this notion of, Run your own experiments. There's like a couple of basic, basic ideas of like, there's the tractor basins out there. These things called jhana is that you can sort of learn to slip into better to think about them as collectiveness rather than concentration.
I'm going to pass that distinction. Correct. I'm going to run by that distinction for a second, but we can come back. And the whole game is run your own experiments and follow gradients of curiosity, enjoyment, and relaxation, and as and then we offer some guided meditations. A few a day that point out some subtleties that are easy to miss when you're a novice meditator about maybe the relationship between curiosity and enjoyment or the like, stage nature of relaxation that like more, some, some degree of relaxation opens up further potential and, and many other sort of interesting and [00:12:00] nuanced ideas.
And so, one of the additional pieces of framing that we like to say is that. And especially with this idea that what we're doing is to, it's looking to spot and then release mental tension is this awareness and this acceptance or this embrace you can at any point in time, be asking yourself like, Oh, is there clearly something difficult in my experience, like some sort of agitation or tension that I'm like, that I'm aware of.
And like, can I change my relationship to it? It could be boredom. It could be like. Some sort of emotional discomfort. It could be some sort of physical discomfort. If it's very clear that there's something tense in your experience, then there's a lot to play with there and you can like find ways to probe at it and see if you can surrender to it, open to it, savor, turn towards it, love it in various ways.
If you're actually just like not aware of any tension, but it seems like you've stagnated, then the kinds of questions you may ask and the kinds of micro experiments you may run are much along the lines of like, what am I missing? You know, can I be, can I like zoom [00:13:00] out even further? Can I find, is there something in my experience that I didn't realize was tense, but is actually tense.
And so those are the ways in which those two things end up. So interesting. When I, there's, there's many directions we could go, but let me just talk about trauma for a second and see if I can map this of what you're saying. One of the ways that, let me back up and define trauma, you know, for anyone who's, if that's a newer topic, many people hear about it, but trauma is really the most intense form of stress that we can experience as a human.
Many of us will go through it and then there'll be a select number of people who will be experiencing post traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. And this is where there's some level of stuckness, which will relate to what you're just saying around people on retreat, kind of focusing on these little stuck nodes.
The way I think about trauma is. that a very natural process that occurred in the mind and the body got stuck or frozen for some reason and didn't have a [00:14:00] chance to move through the system. There's a really famous video that you might've heard about of a polar bear who was shot with a tranquilizer dart in the Arctic and they were filming it and And then they, what happens is they, they go down to the bear, they're, they're tagging the bear.
And so you could think of this experience, the bear, the bear is, you know, running from this helicopter. It's a very scary experience. It gets shot with this tranquilizer dart. So it's something of an imposed freeze. Listeners might've heard about this distinction of fight, flight, freeze, but we'll hold on that for a sec.
The important thing is that the bear was going through an overwhelming experience. It was capped for a moment and it wasn't able to complete. And the amazing thing, if people want to Google it, you just type in polar bear and trauma, you'll see it. And what you see is the bear discharging the activation that was happening while they were running away from the helicopter.
It's really remarkable. The bear is actually mimicking [00:15:00] the motion of running. With these little movements and at the end of this process, it takes this very deep breath or two and basically comes back into regulation and in many ways, the bear is not worse for wear, so to speak. Humans, things get a little more tricky.
We'll go through an overwhelming thing. An overwhelming experience of trauma. We get stuck in the work of therapy. is often to help someone move through that, to metabolize it, to integrate it. And the most beautiful thing as a therapist is when someone goes, it's over. The thing that I've been rehashing over and over through nightmares and through sensations is now complete and I'm So that to me is the power of It's also the framing that I use is there's a certain amount of stuck energy.
So what I heard you talk about on retreat is, you know, we're inviting people to [00:16:00] pay attention to their experience in a sustained way. And then we're going to bump into what feel like stuck places or contractions or, I mean, we could unpack this if you want. And then I think the remedy to work with that is, is there's just a whole multitude there.
Sometimes it's just bare awareness. Sometimes it might be more like work on compassion, movement. There's, everyone's going to be different. And the beauty of trauma and mindfulness work to me is we have this multiplicity of tools that we can work with. And as you said, people can run experiments and find out legitimately what works.
And that to me is super exciting. Yeah. Yeah. This notion that these, these things almost get like buffered. And then there's like stored in the system and there's some, some value in like uncorking the buffer. And, and then also wanting to do so in a way that feels very
it's succeeding to make progress as opposed to [00:17:00] reinforcing. And I know that this is something that can happen when you're like, quote, outside your window of tolerance. And it's something you talk about in your book. I actually, yeah, I would love, could you share a little bit about what is the window of tolerance and how do you know if you're in a situation where you may be processing something that's stored in the system and valuable to process and able to process versus something that you may be inadvertently reinforcing?
It's a great question. This is a core question. So often, as I said, I'm working with meditation teachers and the question comes up, well, how would I know when someone should back off of practice and when should they lean in? Because it's not just about being comfortable. The window of tolerance is a frame that's been helpful for me and kind of answers this question in a somewhat general way, but I think it's helpful.
So we all have. This comes from Dan Siegel, a neuroscientist that was applied in particular to nervous systems and psychobiology. Now, this could be for other systems, but we all have a window where we are most effective. We're able to connect [00:18:00] to ourselves and other people. Our heart is beating. It's not racing.
It's like, it's kind of like that Goldilocks principle or that band. We're most effective there. And on either side of this. We have what's known as hypo arousal, which is like too much physiological arousal, or hypo arousal at the bottom, which is almost like not enough. So on the top, it's more like fight flight.
Our heart is racing. We're feeling agitated. On the bottom, we're more numb, shut down, sleepy, checked out. So even you and I could do this, or anyone listening, you could notice right now, okay, where am I in my window? Am I more in the middle? Like, do I feel somewhat Regulated meaning like, you know, more steady, even keel.
Maybe you're more hypo aroused. It could be in that direction, a little more foggy. Sleepy, or are you agitated and trending more upwards? So we're all experiencing a window all the time. Mindfulness [00:19:00] helps us actually notice where we are in a moment. And your question about like, okay, how would we know what to do?
Just a really quick story. When I got to California, I was doing something known as holotropic breathwork. Some people might know this, but it's a, it's a. It's a type of, it's a methodology where you breathe in a very rapid way and with often with a group and it's really transformative and people cry and they have big releases and I was like, I'm in California.
This is awesome. You know, I'm like, I must be doing something. And I think what was happening for me is I was going into hyper arousal. I was really whipping up my system and I was having huge cathartic moments. The thing I noticed was it wasn't changing anything. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Like I'd have a big cry or I'd have, you know, spray.
Oh, wow. A lot of feeling, but then the next day I'm like, I don't know if anything's actually [00:20:00] that different. I released some of the steam, but I didn't actually change. And so this became this question. I'm trying to get back to what you were asking is what is the practices that actually create lasting transformation?
And in my experience with trauma, it's often a lot slower and we could talk about this, but there's a whole methodology here where if you imagine a shaken up bottle of soda, if you open it. Crack it open. What happens? It floods, which is literally like a term that we use. Oh, someone got flooded. It's too much.
But what you can learn to do is actually help people to just release it in little bits at a time, like just that gas and do what's known as called pendulation or sometimes titration, which is just a little bit of releasing and. Yeah. So anyway, there's lots we could say, but I think it's actually often a lot slower than we think in order to create lasting transformation and change when we hit those spots.
What do you think though? Tell me what you think from your experience on Retreat or leading them or. [00:21:00] Yeah. Well.
It's always hard to say because no doubt folks who, when they, when they hit a spot, there's like a rich prehistory there. No doubt that it, it. So, so maybe, maybe a spot is actually something that like, oh, that coworker said something gnarly to me, seven, like, you know, two days ago and it's been stuck in there and it's pretty fresh.
But then that even raises the question of like, okay, why was that so challenging? You know, what was already in the system that interacted with? And so, it's an, I, you know, I, I've not quite thought about speed in in this way before you sort of poses this question. One frame, though, that I have, uh, used in, in sort of, I think seeing a number of things play out this way in Retreat is this idea of my, my colleague Katie Devaney you know, Katie, I've heard of her.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So she's a neuroscientist at Berkeley at the moment. And she was sharing with me that one way of she sent me a paper in which there was a, [00:22:00] they took a number of mice and they induced depression in them. And then via some sort of clever machinery that I think used sort of optogenetics neuroscientist.
They looked at certain neural pathways, and then if they held these pathways firing at certain rates, when they re exposed the mice to the trauma stimulus, then, or to the, to the, to the thing that induced depression in the first place it would cure the mice of depression seemingly in a one, in a single instance.
And this is, this is really like a fascinating paper piece. It suggests, okay, if all the conditions, you know, replicating this kind of thing for a number of reasons is difficult, if not impossible to do with humans, not to mention the fact that inducing depression in some sort of human experiment would be not good, but the, it's an interesting idea that, Oh, interesting.
If you have sort of re exposure, if you sort of have that, like, Depression inducing stimuli reactivated while also having some sort of really well calibrated resource resourcing [00:23:00] activated at the same time that this can be a powerful release or a powerful rewrite. This may be the mechanism behind something like memory reconsolidation.
It may be the mechanism behind something like why MDMA seems to have like twice the size effects for treating PTSD and psilocybin for depression in certain, like, Psycho psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. And so, you know, it's all speculation. I think it's a neat theory, but one of the things that that does seem to resonate with is how we see folks turn this virtuous cycle on retreat where, and we actually, we, we talk about the virtuous cycle in a bit more of an abstract sense, and then I think we say, see it play out in a, in a, in a concrete sense where sometimes we like to even say that the Jhanas are in service of forgiveness.
In fact, like the things that are so interesting about the jhanas is they're striking because of the, like the, the, the profound levels of bliss and peace that you may experience, but they're exciting. They're genuinely exciting and inspiring because of how you may use these altered states to start to alter some of your [00:24:00] traits.
And specifically, it's this notion that like, you may be able to drop into a Jhana and then engage in some sort of forgiveness, like where, or you could use insight meditation and some other tools that might also have like, lasting sort of changes and how you relate to certain classes of stimuli.
And so like the folks who we had on the podcast earlier, I think sort of spoke to this. I myself love to actually go into a Janna and then come up with the most difficult psychological thing I can come up with. And then there's always a question of like, am I clearly still in the window of tolerance while doing this?
But it's like, Oh, I just, one of my most beautiful memories maybe like just dropping into something like a Janna and then pulling up like the excruciating pain of a death of a loved one. And then like in sitting with it and sitting with it and eventually just like explodes. Into this wide open, like, like love and grief are two sides of the same coin is like something difficult, so difficult to unsee.
And I never would want to like so I, on the one hand, I would, I want to be very clear that like, you know, dropping [00:25:00] into a Janna doesn't suddenly give you superpowers, I think by any stretch to just suddenly cure all of your trauma. On the other hand, I think this sort of both deeply relaxed.
sometimes somewhat also aroused, wide open, collected space can be some of the most powerful places to engage in changing my relationship to things that have been difficult for me, to engaging in forgiveness like practices. And similarly, sometimes engaging in forgiveness like practices will help me get back into drama.
And so this is what I mean by a little bit of a wheel. Here's a question for you about it. This is something I think about it is, Do you, and this gets back to that story I told with the therapist who said, I want you to focus on the tree, the this tree for example, or something more quote unquote positive.
Or do you think that, in doing that, in the context of the retreats that journey's up to, or it's happening with the genre retreats, do you think that, do you think that people would organically move towards. [00:26:00] integrating difficulty when they're experiencing pleasurable jhana states. Is that something that you're doing?
Like when you describe that story right now about like, Oh, I brought in the death of a loved one, which so, so what could be more intense and painful? Did you purposely do that? Or did it more organically come up?
I'd say both. It, like, it, it was just, it was just an Right on. Yeah. Like, yeah, this is the place from which to really Like lean into this. And then there have been other times where I think I sort of. I, I actually, I think I can probably say it was organic at first and then it became intentional. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this is I mean, this is a live conversation I feel like you and I are in around, well, what does it mean to be safe in a contemplative space? And in my clinical experience and then what I've [00:27:00] seen in research as well, I think people who are experiencing. It's clinical trauma who, who are, who are stuck on some deep level in the mind and body.
They need one, they often need one to one support of someone who is guiding them, really taking their hand in a metaphorical way and saying, okay, I want you to look at the tree or, you know, fill in the blank. And now we're going to come back and there's going to be some exposure to this. difficult loss that you had, traumatic loss.
And now I want you to come back and let's be with the tree again. And so there's often, at least in some approaches, somatic experiencing being a big one, there's this pendulation between difficulty or trauma and resource. And, and I think, so my experience, I think a lot of people can go on a retreat and have the experience you're having, which is that they're naturally, intuitively flowing between these different states.
They're being in the experiment. And what I was a fight for and have been with my work is there's going to be a select, percent of the [00:28:00] population, not huge. That's they're just going to need a little bit more that they're not going to know how to look away from the trauma that they're struggling with.
And I mean, I know that's something that you've already said that you, you know, and agree with, but that's for the meditation teachers who aren't thinking about that. And they're like, just keep being mindful, people get stuck there. And that's where I've been concerned. And I imagine if. You know, depending on the nature and the size of what you're working with, like there, I, I I've been in a heck of a rumination loop before, and I don't, I, you know, that's not a proper ACE.
That's not a proper adverse childhood experience. I think there's like, you know, the, the magnitude of this stuff, I think totally makes a difference. You can be playing entirely different games. I will say actually though, this is anecdotal, but I, I, I think I thought the same thing that someone who's experienced a massive trauma who, well, we could give a number of examples, but someone who experienced something that I would have thought, well, that's way up the list.
And then others who experienced [00:29:00] something that would qualify as traumatic, but we could say maybe like, a certain kind of neglect when they were growing up that created a lot of difficulty in one's nervous system. I'm always surprised that I never know. Who's going to actually have the most difficulty on a retreat.
You never know. Everyone's system is so different. So the people when you, that's why when you taking intake forms, like if someone says, well, I lived through, you know, this kind of mass genocide and you assume, okay, well you shouldn't be on retreat. It's actually just not true. Some people are like, no, no, I actually have a lot of support, whereas others don't.
And so anyway, I just want to complexify that. I've always been surprised at. I love that. And I hear what you're saying. It's just like, you were caught in something that. Yeah. I wouldn't necessarily consider traumatic maybe, but yeah. Yeah. And I, I have such I would really, I, I, you know, I, I, I always feel a little uncomfortable extrapolating from my end of one, like my, my experience and that's the sort of the big thing that I I think I'm most afraid of doing like less, I trivialize somebody else's [00:30:00] experience.
That could absolutely be night and day different. And even if we, you know, happen to be using similar language to describe our, like our different landscapes. Absolutely. Yeah. The current, the thing that I'm on. Right now has to do with when do we encourage someone to stay with and lean in and say, no, you're strong here.
Because I think as we've talked about in other conversations, there has been an over focus. I'd say on trauma in recent years has become a very popular term, which there's benefits to that. But I think there's some drawbacks to when we front load, Hey, you know, letting concerning people about you might encounter trauma in your practice.
I think there can be actually some pitfalls to that too. So I'm interested actually in trying to tilt the boat back towards. We're strong enough. People often have the resources to stick with difficult things and it's okay to be with pain and discomfort and we don't need to back off of it immediately, but that's not to just say to dismiss someone's [00:31:00] pain on some level.
So anyway, it's tension. It's just like one of the tension points we've been kind of circling around. Yeah. It's some sort of sweet spot in that creative tension. What are some of the downsides of overemphasizing trauma
or adverse effects? Yeah, there's a book that just came out that. You might know, and some listeners might know, called Bad Therapy by Abigail Washington. And I think I have her last name right. And basically she is Putting out some of the research now with adolescents saying that there's a high degree of suggestibility around adolescents when you tell them, like, if you keep talking about trauma and how difficult things are, people are going to talk about how traumatized they are and that she, the main thesis is, as I understand it, that the focus on quote unquote mental health.
The last 15 years for young people to try to do work around what's it called? Social emotional learning in schools, [00:32:00] talking about our traumas in different ways. And really like having people come out of the woodwork and talk about their difficult experiences actually might not have had the beneficial effects that we would have hoped.
And it might've had unintended consequences because a lot of young people are more anxious, depressed, suicidal than they've ever been. And we can chalk that up also to social media and changing state of the world. But that's all to say, I do think that focusing too intently on where people were hurt can pull us away from where people are strong and, and actually their resilience that they've already lived through the hard thing, the traumatic thing, and to lift up people's resilience as opposed to just saying you're traumatized, you're fragile and you're broken.
So it's a, it's a tension. So like you said, a creative tension, a psychological tension that you need to work with. And, but I think we've maybe gone a little bit too far. And I think people are suggestible if you tell people, maybe you can bring in your, I think you talked about a [00:33:00] study, wasn't it? That if you talk about trauma at the beginning of a retreat and you put that flag up, maybe more people end up spinning out.
Yeah, this is, this is one of the things that I think has been most It seems like just it just it brings up so many tricky judgment calls for us is we we want to it's it feels so important to us to innovate, both on accessibility and on safety and on safety. We have this we've pulled together.
a list of experts and gotten an opinion from folks, including folks like you to think about what are the different parts of a plan that we can put together from pre screening to developing like a pre retreat response plan to monitoring folks on to getting them in touch with experts should they need.
And this whole, this whole plan, obviously behind the scenes, We then think, okay, well, if we know that folks are, are suggestible, then does it create a self fulfilling prophecy if we talk about the like some, some of the risks and [00:34:00] like, no doubt, we want to be transparent about the risks, but we don't want to be creating that, which is that, which is like behind the risk.
And so suddenly it's this gnarly conundrum. And so one thing that we found to be pretty shocking is it wasn't, it wasn't a study. Actually, it was in our own experience. We have seen about 1 percent of folks on our retreats particularly in the later Jhanas have a jarring experience that leaves some, what I would call like a persistent negative experience after their, their sit.
So they ended up having this jarring experience and they come out and they're still feeling a little like, Uncertain or uncertain or unsettled. And there's like a few flavors of this. And some of it is just sort of like being some of these later states, you can end up feeling like a sense of space is dissolved or a sense of like self and other is dissolved.
And and it can, a couple of people sort of come out and been like, you know, nervous about suddenly being in a void. And for all of them, the solution has been to go much slower, like slip into that [00:35:00] kind of experience as if they were slipping into a hot tub, as opposed to jumping off a cliff, lean a lot more into certain loving kindness meditation.
And it's actually been a really positive experience for almost everybody. They've sort of looked back on that as like a catalytic and have been deeply like and referring that they're recommending the experience to a lot of friends. So we told folks on one retreat, Hey, about one, exactly what I just told you.
About 1 percent of our participants when they hit these later jhanas, see this like have this drawing effect and it's okay. Like, you know, the solution is pull back. And I think on that retreat, we had 8%. What is that? On that retreat alone. And it was like, what? So, so we want to be you know, we should probably replicate that and we don't want to like over extrapolate from a single, from a single data point.
But like an eight X increase from a, a warning that was actually like, it's all good, like, don't worry about it. Like, you know, I didn't want to, You know, I didn't down, down play it, but I also wanted to let everybody know that it worked out really well for, for everybody. And so, that creates this really interesting dynamic of how, how do you [00:36:00] orient people towards anti fragility as opposed to fragility while also leaning into transparency.
And there's some tricky things, I think. If you figure this out, Let's do another podcast or let's, or like that's just call me text because I, I am very hungry right now for a third way or an iterative spiral dynamics next turn of the spiral way where how do I around trauma, for example, we've come a long way.
This is awesome. I mean, the fact that trauma blew up. as a term, especially around COVID and especially the last 10 years, I think is a really good thing. We, people are much more aware of some of the pitfalls around mental health that, you know, often I hear people say, you know, grandpa who came back from the war, who was drinking so heavily, all of a sudden there's just an actual context of an empathy to understand like, oh gosh, okay, he might've been, [00:37:00] or struggling and let's, what are the ways we can actually support him?
And at the same time, how do we, it's just a question that I've been in so much, how do we deeply affirm some of the pain that we will all live through and at the same time, not embellish it to the point that it's disempowering. And I'm really looking for models right now, especially around parenting.
It's, it's a really, to me, parenting is a huge, huge laboratory of A lot of my friends who have young kids, they've caught them, they found themselves really overextending, wanting to be liked, not wanting to punish, not wanting to be punitive. And they ended up to their own, I mean, some of them, what they've said is that they're creating these tyrants who are just, there's no boundaries.
There's just, there's no structure in place. So they're trying to find this third way of like, how do you empathize with a child and still have a boundary [00:38:00] and, and not be disconnected, but be connected in the limits anyway. So I just, I'm really, I think we're working this out collectively and here you are, I think in journey, what I really support what you're up to and what you're trying to do.
I think the needle, I don't think there's an answer. I think it's a way it's getting answered as we go, you know, right, right. And so given, given some of these. Tricky dynamics ranging from suggestibility and self fulfilling prophecies or nocebo effects to the importance of giving people all the tools to navigate the landscape with all the right information in order to carve their own path effectively, that includes what the risks are.
I, I'd love to like kind of co create what is the What is a way that we might spin up a sort of an answer that right now? And one thing that I, that I was struck earlier is we were we sort of painting this image that you could think of meditation as this process of like recursive like, awareness and acceptance or awareness and [00:39:00] love.
And what this means is you're going to encounter pockets of tension and in the game is like, how can you run experiments to sort of like open up like maybe like, how can you ask yourself? How can I enjoy this even more? How can I embrace or love in this? And in the process, like it will often change on you and dissolve or teach you something.
And then at times you'll hit a, you'll hit a pocket that like, It's just some gnarly stuff in there. And, and it can, instead of taking, instead of dissolving on you you can, it can knock you out of your window of tolerance and now you can be headed in the opposite direction of almost like cycling and creating more of these, these, these aspects of tension.
And so I'm starting to almost have this. Idea emerged. Like you could, you could play that game of, of looking for these pockets. And then if you find yourself moving out of your window of tolerance, you know that you've, you gotta back off. It's, it's not about going directly at that thing, it's about getting more resources or grounding.
It's about really like learning from the intuition of your own system. And if you're still in your window of tolerance, you can continue playing with like a broader swath [00:40:00] of experiments. How would you think about that sort of approach? You probably know the Buddhist story about the the sitar teacher who's instructing his student.
I think the Buddha's on the river Ganges and cures the sitar player with his student. And like, how do I play? And the, the, the line is something like, have the strings not too tight, not too loose. Cause then, then you can play there. And in like so many things, I think this is the answer is that it's, it's a middle ground and it's a light touch.
So, How I instruct teachers who ask a similar question is, basically, should I give a warning at the beginning of retreats? What should I do? I, I suggest something like, Hey, everyone, we're going to be doing what we're up to is a very powerful practice, which is great. And if at any point you find yourself overwhelmed, it's okay.
You can just let me know and and we'll talk about it. [00:41:00] And then that opens a whole bunch of doors from that point on and ideally the teacher would know this is why this has been My work is okay. Great. So then someone comes to you and they say I'm having flashbacks, etc Then what do you do? But you can give them a bunch of tools to work with it.
So I, so, I think it's about a middle ground. Having said that, one of the issues with the window is that people can start constraining themselves and feeling that, that if they're out of their window, it's a bad thing. And I think actually where trauma work gets very interesting is, no, the window is brilliant, all of it.
When you're in hyperarousal, there's something deeply intelligent about that. Your body's responding to stress. Now, it might be maladaptive because you're responding to something that happened five years ago, and that's where things get a little tricky. Yeah. But ideally, you want to stay mindful. While you're actually out of your window because when that happens [00:42:00] magic happens like the essence of trauma work The essence of trauma work mindfulness online To stay with a deep seated survival response.
So what does that look like? Someone's in my office. We're doing work They're connecting with an experience where they wish they could have run and they weren't able to, and they can stay present with some exposure to the intense sensations in their legs or in their body. They can stay with their heart racing.
They can stay with the images and memories of that time, but they don't get flooded and lost in it. They can stay with the. The experience and with me, like a client will go, I can feel the fear and terror, and I know I'm here with you. And when they're mindful enough to do that, that's when things start to integrate.
That's when it starts to run. Interesting. So it is about, you got to get enough [00:43:00] resources to have that happen, but then it's like, you can fly. It's amazing. Whoa. So, so there's. Some of the transformation happens when you're outside, when you've, when you broke, when you kind of breach, you go outside the window of tolerance.
If you're in a place at the right resourcing and the right mindfulness and. A hundred percent. And ideally. You're playing those edges with a therapist. I've seen now sometimes you could be on a retreat and someone's really either dissociated or hyper, hyper vigilant, hyper aroused, and they could move through it on their own more often.
I'd say from what I've seen, kind of nine or 10 times, you just need someone there with you who becomes a bit of a psychobiological regulator for you. Like it helps expand the window. So that's where I was just trying to put up the flag and say, look, don't double down, don't. Right. Right. Right. Because that's what they want.
Just keep meditating. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which is it. Yeah. And in some circles, that was the move for a long time. And it still is in some circles. It's like, cause it is the answer. And in many ways it often [00:44:00] is just be with it. But for trauma, there's just, there's some people on their edge cases often where it's like, that's not going to help.
Right. And stakes are high. The stakes are high. Yeah. Cause I mean, someone, this is, that might be their one chance. They got daycare for their kid. They're on this retreat or they got their kid looked after. Like this is the moment. And if, if, if you lose that chance by just telling them to go back to their cushion, it just might not, it just might not be what they need.
Yeah. So it's, yeah. It's as much a strategy. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, so the, the strategy or the algorithm that I'm imagining is like, if you're starting from a place of sort of growing collectiveness, looking, looking to find, find those things that you may gently pull into your awareness. And the, and the, and, and lovingly so, and you find some things that are sticky and you're kind of playing the game where you're embracing them and, and then, and then you hit something.
Yeah. And that that's big and you hit this, something that's big and you stay inside your window of tolerance, you can, you can still run some of your, your, your experiments and kind of [00:45:00] continue playing the game. If you get thrown out of your window of tolerance. Then this is like, don't continue the journey alone.
Like this is, this is time to like be with somebody who can be that psycho biological regulator, I think is the term that you've used. I'd say keep with the experiments. I mean, for people that are going on a journey retreat, it's like, just keep trying. And if at some point, You find yourself blown out and you're like, I can't do this alone.
I'm, I'm, I'm making things worse by staying with that becomes the information. And ideally you take it to a trained teacher, which, and you know, from everything we've talked about, do you just put your hand up and say, look, I'm, I'm flailing here a little bit. I don't know whether to stick with it or not.
And you get some, someone else's eyes on it. Yeah, quick, quick metaphor. You know Tarabrock. I know of her. Yeah. I don't know her personally. Yeah. She and Rick Hansen came up with, so Rick Hansen came up with this thing called a differentiation between being with and working with. And he said meditation is mostly about being with.
That's what we're teaching people to do. I'm [00:46:00] curious where you think about the Jhanas inside of that, but it's like a deep, we can come back to that if you want, but a deep being with practices, mindfulness meditation. Then, then, then there's working with practices where you're going to do something different.
Go for a walk, do loving kindness, just, I mean, loving kindness has some, you know, being with elements, but just, you know, look at the tree, do something different. And I asked Tara, I said, how do you think about this? And she goes, look, as a Buddhist teacher, I'm always centering being with. That is what I know.
That's not what I know how to teach. There's the power in that. And that's, we need that often as a society and individually is just learning how to just stick with it. And then she'll say, I'll help people be with it until they can't. And then I'll help them work with it. And that made a lot of sense to me.
It's like, no, no, no. Let people keep experimenting. You could giving them tons of tools. And once they put up their hand and they're like, I'm overwhelmed. I can't do it. Cool. Give them working with practices, but being with stays at the center. It's not trying to make a Buddhist retreat, a trauma therapy retreat.[00:47:00]
It's just keeping those tools on the side, but the jhana is so I'm curious what you think about the jhana is like, would you say the jhana is there a being with practice or how do you think about that? Yeah. It's interesting. I even, as you were saying that, I was going back and forth a little bit. On the one hand there's nothing terribly like, you know, it's, it's not, ah, actually, I, I was gonna say, there's, there's, there's something like, not that proactive about it, but sometimes there is something proactive about it.
Like, I know, right? I know. I, I know like when I get Jona blocked, I call it uhhuh . It's like it, in fact, for a little while there, I would do this in a, in sort of a caricature of my engineering mind. I'd be like. I'm Jonablock. What's happened? Like, I I, I don't even know what happens. Like I knew, I, I, I know I could do the jhana is two days ago.
Like during my morning sit is, and, and I would like binary search what, you know, from, okay, so midday yesterday, do I think I could have done? It's like, no, things are a little tight. Okay, let's go before that. And I would start trying to be like, ah, that thing, somebody said to me, [00:48:00] I didn't realize it slid underneath my radar and I'm afraid we're going to fail next week.
And, and then, and I'll go and I'll sit down and I'll just be like, where's the thing that I'm not feeling? Like, where, like, can I feel the fear or can I like, and find a way to, to look at that? Like you finally like look it in the eye and then you embrace it or like surrender yourself to it or something like that.
And then eventually the release happens and I feel like the jhana has come back online. And so on that hand, it's like, it seems quite proactive. There's actually a degree of working through it. On the other hand, sometimes there's like sort of things floating around it. Awareness, maybe this like. Difficult relationship that I have with a family member or something.
And I'll just, it's okay. Like they can just all be there. I can go cultivate the jhanas. I can then go turn to it and do some working through, or I can just let it be there. And so, I find myself. Thinking, I don't really know the answer. It might be more complex than I've fully mapped. Love this. I, this to me is healing.
This is what I, how I think about healing these days is about proximity and angles [00:49:00] to said experience. So your example of the hurtful thing that someone said, or the thing that God underneath and is in that lives in your psyche or your consciousness in some way is that the work is, it's ultimately to, to be, I think, just to be with it.
on some level, and yet to find the way of like, literally, do I turn and face it directly head on? Or often it's more 45 degrees. It's like, all right, maybe I can, I can be with this. Okay. I turn a little bit more. It's so dynamic and we're playing with it. All the time, I think, and that's, that's to me where healing really happens is in that listening.
And I think a lot of people need to learn what are the signals that has me know it's time to turn towards or turn away. Yeah, I think that's something that people develop through practice and over time. Totally, totally. And sometimes I still, [00:50:00] Sometimes I still feel like there's just a lot of like feeling around that, that needs to happen.
Like I maybe for each new problem or each new tension it's like, I have to, sometimes I feel like I have to learn the same damn lesson over and over again. And I actually just, I actually am just like a little slow, a little sick, like, okay, it's about like some version of surrender. And I can put the, I can put the weapons down.
And, and that's, it's the same thing that I learned, you know, a thousand times this year alone. Other times it's like. It just have to do the, like the feeling, the moving around there's yeah, it's almost like, like undoing a knot. You just have to, you have to like gently pull at it in a bunch of ways.
And eventually the whole thing dissolves, but like without actually all the different pulling and threading, the whole thing may have been, sometimes I think about depth first search versus breadth first search and sometimes I know it's like, okay, I'm going straight at this thing. And other times it's like, nope I'm headed it out to like loosen up the latticework elsewhere.
Yeah. Yeah. And then I'm going to swing back into it with more slack in the system. Oh, that's, that's a great metaphor with the line tangled. My grandma was the [00:51:00] best person. She, she was the one when my fishing line got tangled. And I think about it, I was just thinking about getting older. I do know. I do have just more data points and more time in, in my mid forties of knowing like when to tighten, when to loosen.
And, and somehow she just had the patience to know how to work these knots. I mean it quite literally, but I think it also came with her age, like literally time, like she just knew how to stay with it. I hadn't thought about that until now, but I do think there's something with age as well. You just know yourself and like you said about the tools and the weapons and yeah.
Yeah. I bet she would have been an amazing meditator. You know what? She's turning 100 in in two months. I'm heading back to Toronto at 100. She, yeah, she would have been, she was more of a tennis player. She would have been, that would have been a great practice for her for sure. Yeah, that's fun. And so.
I'm curious [00:52:00] now, we sort of talked a little bit about like the almost like the, the user activity or the meditator activity from okay, hit this thing now play with it like a knot. If you get outside the window of tolerance look for someone to, to work, to help work, like work you through it, keep you grounded.
I think a lot of that makes a ton of sense. Let's take, I'd love to take a different lens for a second and things like structurally. So we're, you're, we're like designing a retreat now. And what do you, what do you think are some of the big differences between we can either do good and bad safety work or like good and great safety work, whichever sort of thing that you think would be most interesting.
Hmm. That's great. Yeah. I've been thinking about it for a while. I, the, when I think of a great safety. Retreat experience. It's a bit of a wave that there's an arc to it, like a story. And there's a good entry point in terms of prescreening and that there's some, there's some touch points that help the leaders of a retreat get some information that would be useful.
It doesn't need to be too intrusive. [00:53:00] Just, just some basics. We can talk more about that if you want during that, there's some kind of form of monitoring that's happening and that the participants are aware that there's It's okay to ask for help. We don't shame people if they're, if they're running into trouble, just some, just some basic ground rules.
And then there's an end of a story where there's the possibility of followup. We check it, we check back in, in two weeks, we give people a good off ramp and it's a light touch throughout. And it's just that the trauma informed practice was functioning in the background, like a computer program. And it's just running in the back in case, because for the most part.
The numbers tell us that there won't be many people who will run into difficulty on a retreat, a genre retreat, et cetera. And that doesn't mean we want to be, we don't want to be aware of the edge cases. We want to be aware of basically, I don't say a double negative. We just want to have that background functioning so that if someone needs help, great, we can provide it and people don't fall through [00:54:00] the cracks.
Versus the people I had met with who just said, wow, they just left the retreat and never came back. Yeah. Guess they didn't like it. And so it's just, it's just being, turning up our rigor a little bit more to me, that would be the basic arc of safety and we could go into the details of it, but what do you think?
What would you want to add? Yeah. That'll, so
yeah, that, that'll makes a lot of sense to me. There's, this is the, the initial touch beforehand and the gentle monitoring, the follow up afterwards. I think one of the things I, I heard you say earlier was this, This sort of just like light of, Hey, let us know if, if, if you feel like uncomfortable. And then you're sort of, and that's sort of like all that you say up front to some extent, but then you're, you're ready to roll if someone walks through that door.
And so this is, I think, this is, I think, an elegant solution to the, the self fulfilling prophecy effect. If you like, you can sort of gate the info. In a way where you're like, okay, [00:55:00] like, something came up now we can, like, now here's sort of the next stage of how we may respond to it. And here's the next stage.
And so the infrastructure is sort of in place. And yet the information isn't, isn't off creating the nocebo effect or create, you know, orienting people to fragility. I think that's really interesting. So if that's the case, what are some of the what are some of the examples of like the ground rules that you may want to lay?
Well, I'm happy to name a couple. Let me start back even back even one step further, which is what would it mean? What's the embodiment of someone who's leading a retreat and that it's being done well? Because often, I mean, we can get into the weeds and talk about case examples and how that works, but often it's just about some basic.
I wanna say embodiment, how someone is their beingness that informs the whole space. And the key ingredient, or characteristic to me is that if nothing is ever a problem, it's not a problem that someone could be having a psychotic [00:56:00] break on a meditation retreat. It's not a problem. It's totally okay. It's totally workable and we're going to get you the help that you need and we're going to make sure that you're safe, but it's not a problem.
Does that make sense? Like if I could just give you one, here's, here's a case example around the embodiment. I was dissociating for years in meditation practice. I could sit for three hours at a time. I was amazing. Amazing. Amazing. I was actually just checking out and, and at some point I realized it. In this trauma work.
I'm like, I got to get back. I got to get back. And eventually the trauma therapist said something like, do you know where you go? And that changed everything for me because it wasn't about making dissociation a problem, meaning I was disconnecting from my physical and emotional experience. And she wasn't like, God damn it, we got to get you back.
It was like, Do you want to just bring mindfulness to it and notice? And it was so [00:57:00] fundamentally not a problem for her. She's like, cool. Why don't you just pay attention to that? That's the approach in general. It's like whatever people are doing on retreat, acting out anything, it's all for a good reason.
It's not a problem. And you're trying to hold some safety. So some, just to answer your question, some ground rules would be. If someone's not coming to two sessions in a row, we have an agreement that we might check in with them. If we have a, if someone's had is on medication, we have access and their permission to contact a psychiatrist just to know a little bit more about how things are going.
Just certain, like. Really rigorous and grounded touch points with people that is just keeping a container safe. But at the, at the end of the day, to me, it's about having this, this feeling of like, it's all good. We can work with everything here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. There's something that makes intuitive sense about how [00:58:00] it's all good allows isn't, isn't like, some sort of lip.
No, no, no, no, there's a goal, right? It's actually a very intentional like The move here actually, just like the move in meditation and my internal conflict, my move and my interpersonal presence is like, let me embrace, let me accept. And like, let me, let me sort of support and, and, and how I relate to you in the same way meditation object is like the object and how you relate to the object.
And those two things, it's like, like they're always you almost like nothing, nothing arises in experience without how you relate to it. The, and so then the game ends up becoming, you know, toggling and finding new ways to relate to something. Let's love it. Yeah, I love it. I love it. I hadn't thought about that.
The internal matches the external in many ways, like if we don't start with at least some basic acknowledgement and acceptance of what's happening, it creates tension. I've seen it happen on retreats where a teacher gets tight. And they're like, Oh, geez, here comes some [00:59:00] trauma. I don't know how to work with it.
I'm afraid the student or the participant gets all tightened up. They feel shamed. It gets polarized. And, and I think you're so right. It's not pithy. It's not just a, Oh, just everything's all good. It's not that at all. It's a, for people that have come through a training around trauma, they can say that from experience.
They're like, I know that whatever we encounter here, we're going to be okay. And sometimes I guess we fake it till we make it, but I just think. It's, it's coming from a grounded place, that kind of, there's some, there's some training behind that as opposed to some Pollyanna, just like it's all good. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, David, this has been really fun. Is there, is there anything that you think might be interesting to, to wrap up with either in thinking about how to instruct someone setting off into meditation territory or? Think about retreat design or anything in between. I just encourage, [01:00:00] I love that we're having this conversation and I've been thinking a lot about the attention economy recently, and in particular about curating our lives in a little bit more way.
Like I get home and I realize. Like, what am I watching YouTube for? And what am I doing? What am I doing? How did I get down suddenly watching this soccer highlight just? And so I think there's there, the algorithms are becoming only more powerful right now in terms of trying to grab our attention. And I think it's a moment for people to actually really claim like, what is the life that they want to lead?
Do they want to pay attention? Do they want to go deep into the Jhanas? Do they, or do they want to do some form of psychological healing or both? Or how would they do that versus just mindlessly kind of following the thread of what we're being fed. And so I'm, I'm just, I am really encouraging people to get out there and practice.
I think we need it more now than ever. [01:01:00] And I think there's so much possible with it. And I will say this, my trauma work and my trauma healing work happened because I had done practice. Contemplative practice that came in, I needed both. So the practice to me, a Jhana practice or any, it's just, it's, it's overtly healing.
You just, you're, you're, you're, you're gaining tools that you'll have either, either in that moment or later that come in so handy around the inevitably hard things that we encounter as humans. So, yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's a, That's an inspiring, it's an inspiring note to end on. Great. Great. Let's just end there then.
Let's not say anything more.