Trauma shows up where it wants to…

Sometimes meditation, grounding, mindfulness… feels a little bit traumatic.

Not because I don’t want peace, I do.

But because I’ve usually turned to meditation in moments of fear.

When I was trying to stop a panic spiral. When I needed calm like it was a lifeline.

So now, even when I’m okay, sitting still with my breath doesn’t always feel soothing. Sometimes it feels like bracing. It’s hard to find calm when calm has always meant crisis.

When you’ve only ever meditated through fear, the practice itself feels like a trigger. It’s like when I sit down to breathe, instead of softening… my body remembers.

I’m learning what it means to be still, just to be still, not because I’m afraid, but because I want to feel grounded.

Maybe my kind of calm isn’t found sitting with my breath, but in the warmth of the sun, the grass beneath my feet, or the ebb and flow of the ocean.

It doesn’t matter how you find your peace, only that you do.

That was a little piece I wrote for my page today.

It just really occured to me lately that my association with finding calmness felt based in trauma. Often before sleep, I wind down with a guided meditation. But I’ve found myself trying to force calm. Because of my health issues, I experience a lot of odd body sensations that can feel like anxiety, so stillness sometimes feels like a losing battle.

Meditation has always felt a bit rigid to me, unrelenting in its pursuit of a clear mind. But with the rise of mindfulness, it feels like the target has shifted. The goalposts have moved. Now, it’s more about grounding yourself in the midst of what’s going on, not eliminating the discomfort, but finding steadiness while it’s still there.

There’s a kind of permission in that. Permission to anchor yourself in the eye of the storm.

I think this shift in how I approach meditation comes from the fact that recently I have been listening to a lot of the principles and teachings of Buddhism . Buddhism doesn’t ask for a blank mind. Instead, it invites thoughts and feelings with kindness and acceptance, without judgment or struggle. That feels so much more realistic and comfortable to me. Peace doesn’t have to be about pushing thoughts away or waiting for the perfect moment of silence. It’s about gently noticing when they come, setting them aside, and returning to the present moment again and again. And that’s kind of how it’s always been, but I just saw it as failing at the task.

Now I’m learning peace, doesn’t always come from pushing thoughts away, and it took accepting that for me to find a quiet space inside. To understand that two things can be true at once, discomfort and calm, struggle and stillness.

I’m still learning, still finding my way. But this softer, kinder approach feels like a quiet gift, one I want to keep unwrapping.