For Dharma Practitioners

Trauma and spiritual life

Trauma does not remain outside spiritual practice. It shapes the body and nervous system through which practitioners encounter the dharma, affecting how they hear, interpret, and apply the teachings.

I offer individual Somatic Experiencing® sessions for Buddhist and other contemplative practitioners who want to explore how trauma may be influencing their practice and spiritual life.

How trauma can shape spiritual practice

Protective patterns shaped by trauma do not disappear when someone begins a spiritual path. Vigilance, striving, dissociation, self-criticism, or difficulty recognizing personal needs and boundaries can become woven into practice. Because these patterns may resemble qualities valued in spiritual life—such as discipline, detachment, equanimity, or surrender—they can be difficult to recognize.

You may find yourself:

Understanding teachings intellectually but struggling to embody them
Becoming overwhelmed, activated, numb, or disconnected during meditation or retreat
Using spiritual practice to move away from painful emotions, bodily needs, or unresolved trauma
Bringing perfectionism, striving, or self-criticism into practice
Struggling with authority, trust, belonging, or boundaries within a spiritual community
Feeling divided between spiritual practice and ordinary life
Wanting contemplative practice and trauma healing to support rather than work against one another

My path to this work

My understanding of this terrain grows out of more than thirty-five years of Vajrayana Buddhist study and practice, including more than a year cumulatively in intensive retreat. I also spent several years living in Tibetan refugee communities and dharma centers in India and Nepal. Over time, I came to see that spiritual practice does not stand apart from trauma—and that profound insight does not necessarily transform patterns held in the body.

For more than a decade, my journalism and scholarship examined Buddhism’s transmission to the West and the cultural and philosophical assumptions that shape how Western practitioners understand the teachings. My work with trauma expanded that inquiry from the conditions that shape interpretation to the embodied conditions that shape how the dharma is received and lived.

That inquiry eventually led me to complete Somatic Experiencing International’s three-year professional training and become a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner. I have also studied for several years with Thomas Hübl, whose teaching explores the relationship between trauma healing and spiritual awakening.

Making room for the whole of your experience

Our sessions can include experiences arising in meditation or retreat, your relationship to teachings and spiritual ideals, and difficulties involving teachers, communities, authority, trust, or belonging. I do not offer dharma instruction, meditation guidance, or judgments about the validity of a teaching or practice. Our focus is on how trauma may be shaping your spiritual life.

The purpose is not to psychologize the dharma or reduce spiritual practice to nervous-system regulation. It is to make room for trauma to be addressed so that it does not silently determine how the teachings are understood and lived.

Learn more about the Somatic Experiencing method →

I offer a free 30-minute consultation to explore whether this work is a good fit.