.Melanie Weidner, M.Div., is an artist, spiritual director, and workshop leader shaped by years of Quaker, contemplative, and mindfulness practice. Her work celebrates beauty, presence, self-reflection, compassion, and joy. –
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I was not a good candidate for meditating, my friends believed an anxious, high strung Marty could never sit still, meditate.
My mind always raced, worried a lot and felt unworthy at his core from childhood abuse.
Meditating meant sitting still and facing my mind one on one.
PTSD was the only reason I found meditation, the reason I would never give up trying to heal.
Most people who try to meditate face similar challenges.
My developed willpower from surviving my dad, allowed me to fail over and over without quitting.
Meditation was the last option I had left for healing my Childhood PTSD.
So I created a visual model and realized, we always get lost during the pauses.
Thoughts entered my pauses, not when I was focused inside my nostrils with the inhales and exhales.
I focused intently on the pauses, exploring my inner world while my body was at rest.
Our bodies are calmest during the pauses.
Inhales and exhales take energy and make noises.
The pauses suspend inhales and exhales and the body is still, no movement, a perfect time to sense inside your body, your inner world.
We spend all our time on the external world, external stimulus, external desires.
Our inner world gets little or no attention.
We can fix this discrepancy while meditating.
Transitions are the pauses.
Start at lower right hand corner, inhale up the blue arrows.
To the first pause (green arrows)
Then exhale is followed by a pause, the same duration as the first pause
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PTSD - A Way Out.com 