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In my experience, both cold immersion and meditation practices have helped. Cold immersion helps more quickly and viscerally. Short of paying someone to hold a
by mindgam3 8y ago
In my experience, both cold immersion and meditation practices have helped. Cold immersion helps more quickly and viscerally. Short of paying someone to hold a loaded gun to my head or jumping in to an MMA cage match, the cold is by far the quickest and safest way I have found to trigger my lizard brain into panic mode. Going to that place and then training myself to breathe through it is my form of exposure therapy for PTSD.
Re meditation specifically, 1) breath awareness helps me with general relaxation + increased awareness of triggers, 2) metta meditation helps to shift towards compassionate mindset to self and others, and 3) advanced tibetan insight practices (emptiness of self) as taught by Dr. Daniel Brown of https://pointingoutway.org/ https://pointingoutway.org/ helps me shift from my normal sense of ego-centric self to an outside Observer perspective, which is impervious to triggers. I cannot recommend Daniel Brown's programs enough for any serious student of meditation. I took a Level 1 retreat at Esalen about 10 years ago and it proved to me that meditation isn't totally BS.
My strong recommendation based on what I learned there is to not engage in any deep form of meditative practice without first strengthening the physical body. This is what yoga was designed to do originally, to prepare the body and mind so that you could go to advanced meditative states with a strong enough structure to handle whatever psychic energy was released.
- arethuza 8y agoPart of me always thinks it is odd that as someone who is prone to anxiety/stress my main coping mechanism is to put myself into potentially tricky situations in mountains where you would expect anyone sensible would be anxious and stressed but rather the trickier the situation (bad weather, navigation) the calmer I feel.
- mindgam3 8y agoI have wondered the same thing about myself. I came to two realizations, the first is exactly what you say about gravitating towards flow-inducing states (chess, esp bullet chess, mountain biking, motorcycling, etc) as a coping mechanism/reset button for processing difficult emotions. This is a healthy way of dealing with trauma. The second is that in some more extreme cases of obviously-in-hindsight dangerous or self-harming behavior, I realized that I was doing these things “unconsciously” as a way of echoing my original trauma, ie my psyche was still not strong enough to directly confront or even become aware of the root injury, so in my infinite wisdom I acted out these behaviors which were so stupid in hindsight that I was forced to look deeper to understand what my self was trying to tell me about my self. After processing some really heavy shit, I feel like I can get my “fix” of flow in safe(r) ways consistently. “Accident-free for [6] months”, as they say...