Mindfulness and Trauma: Some Striking Similarities

The traumatic experience and the meditative experience differ in many respects. For instance, it is possible to suggest that while a sense of helplessness is the most important feature of the traumatic experience, meditation does not involve a similar sense of helplessness. Furthermore, while trauma...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Anthropology of consciousness 2018-03, Vol.29 (1), p.44-56
Main Author: Ataria, Yochai
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Anthropology
Meditation
Mindfulness
sense of agency
sense of ownership
sense of self
sense of time
Trauma
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The traumatic experience and the meditative experience differ in many respects. For instance, it is possible to suggest that while a sense of helplessness is the most important feature of the traumatic experience, meditation does not involve a similar sense of helplessness. Furthermore, while trauma is shocking and horrifying, meditation is considered to be constructive and efficient in reducing stress and improving welfare. Yet, with this in mind, by comparing interviews with twelve senior meditators on the one hand and interviews with survivors of traumatic experiences from other qualitative studies of mine on the other, this paper suggests that essentially both phenomena are rooted in the same mechanism: the collapse of the intentional structure. More precisely, in both cases, the intentional structure collapses and, as a result, the gap between Me versus Not–Me diminishes: in that case, one loses the first‐personal bodily egocentric perceptive upon the world.
ISSN:1053-4202
1556-3537
DOI:10.1111/anoc.12086