The Zen of Trauma

 
     
     
     
     
    The Zen of Trauma
    a Practice for Life

    Harvey Daiho Hilbert-roshi
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    © 2012 Order of Clear Mind Zen,
    A New Mexico Non-Profit Religious Organization
     
    If you want to become whole, let yourself be partial.
     Dao de Jing
 
     
     
     
     
     
     

    Putting words like Zen, trauma, and spiritual together in the same title seems at first glance to be a stretch, yet the experience of trauma survivors is often singularly spiritual. Moreover, the experience of recovery from a traumatic experience has a darkside and a lightside. Trauma recovery is cyclical, often a lifelong process, much as the yin and yang of Dao. A traumatic experience both touches and invites our essential, true nature.
    Life is revealed more deeply by the challenges we face --- our opportunity lies in entering the recovery cycle with the willingness to experience our essential nature and to recognize our ability to actively engage in transforming our lives. It is up to us to see our essential nature in the moment and to use that vision to transform our lives. Join me as we walked along the Way.
     
     
     
     

    Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a name given to a set of feelings, thoughts, and behaviors that may occur in anyone who experiences a life-threatening event that is outside the realm of ordinary human experience. Life threatening can mean, in addition to its obvious connotation, a threat to the moral, philosophical, and spiritual fabric of an individual.
    "Outside the realm of ordinary human experience" refers to something we do not commonly experience, something that we would not, as a matter of course, expect to encounter in daily life. In short, PTSD is a label given to a cluster of normal responses arising from an extraordinary and dangerous experience that happens in a sudden and/or unpredictable way. Anyone can develop the symptoms of PTSD and the perception of trauma is highly subjective.
    Finally, I consider “disorder” to be an offensive term bearing no use-value whatever to understanding or living with post-traumatic stress. It is a label and little else. I use it only because it is a part of the common clinical community ’s language .

 
    In the discussion that follows I will explore my understanding and ways of dealing with PTSD from a Zen Buddhist perspective. I will discuss its potential spiritual aspects and impact, and explore ways of assisting people as they struggle to come to terms with what life has offered them. While there is an enormous amount of information covered in this booklet, my hope is that you will, at minimum, gain a basic sense of the spiritual implications of traumatic stress and how it may so deeply affect us. In addition, I will offer you a set of tools you may use to form effective helping strategies in your quest to heal yourself and be of service to others.

    A word about Zen, Mindfulness, and the Spirit.
Zen is not easily defined and, like the Dao, as soon as we think we have it, we have lost it. There is a danger, then, in attempting to define or discuss Zen. The danger comes from any attempt to make concrete statements about something that resides in the state of  constant change we call emptiness.
    Spirit, especially, the human spirit, is something like Zen or Dao. It is elusive, untouchable, non-concrete, and ever-changing: like breath, it flows through its host and has no independent reality. To see the Dao, the human spirit, or the human soul, for that matter, we must look indirectly, see it in the sand, as it were, rather than trying to find the feet that left the prints.
    Zen, then, is a way of perceiving which teaches us to let things present themselves as they are and in so doing, allows them to be what they are. Mindfulness is its foremost tool, a tool used by us to “see” without “looking.” It is a tool used to open oneself to oneself, others, and the world around us. For now, the best thing to do is be mindful.
     

    Practice.
    What are you doing right now? What are you experiencing?  Do you notice that as soon as you ask such questions an awareness of self arises, on the one hand, and a n awareness of separation between yourself and what you are doing, on the other hand? Our mind generates this separation and we refer to it as dualism. Paradoxically, mindful practice allows this mind to relax and let go so that what we do and what we experience become one.
    We cannot truly get to mindful