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

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.

My path to this work

For more than thirty-five years, Buddhist practice has been central to my life. I spent years living in Tibetan refugee communities in India and Nepal and more than a year cumulatively in intensive retreat. Later, as a writer and journalist, I became increasingly interested in what happens when Buddhist teachings meet the modern West—what allows us to recognize and embody what the teachings are pointing to, and what can get in our way.

My work with trauma opened another dimension of that question. I began to see more clearly how personal history and nervous-system patterns can shape what we hear in a teaching, what happens in meditation, and what we are able to integrate and live. Somatic Experiencing® gave me a way to work directly with this embodied layer.

This work grows out of the meeting of those two strands of my life: long-term contemplative practice and a somatic understanding of trauma.

Learn more about somatic work →

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