“Stay in the moment. The practice of staying present will heal you. Obsessing about how the future will turn out creates anxiety. Replaying broken scenarios from the past causes anger and sadness. Stay here, in this moment.” ~Sylvester McNutt
For two years, I studied and practiced meditation. I listened to podcasts, chanted mantras each morning, sat quietly while exploring my default mode network, and traversed Eastern mysticism under the guidance of a licensed clinical psychologist who taught me how to use deep diaphragmatic breathing to stimulate my vagus nerve and lower my resting heart rate. This helped me recover from panic attacks, which I started having as a result of existential dread.
After a series of nights with intrusive thoughts about death and dying, and painful memories related to my childhood, I decided to learn how to meditate so my thoughts would bother me less.
It’s important to examine our feelings and emotions in order to determine what to do with them. While meditating, as you nonjudgmentally observe your thoughts, the goal is to let the thought pass and then go back to the present moment with a mantra. However, after your meditation session is over, it’s also important to catalog for yourself if a thought or memory keeps surfacing, and what feelings or emotions might be present with that experience, so that you know what to work on in your personal development.
For myself, I found that many of the childhood memories that kept surfacing during meditation were related to my mother. Not surprisingly, much of my early writing as a poet includes themes and ideas related to my mother and other family issues. It was only once I started to really tackle these memories that I realized that they were attached to painful emotions directly linked to my childhood.
Once I gave myself the space I needed to examine my memories as artifacts from my life—ones to be accepted and not ones that I wanted to give power to—I was able to work through them and come out on the other side.
In order to do this, I started journaling, speaking about my experiences more with trusted advisors and through my creative work, and keeping up with meditation practices, which I did judiciously for three to four hours every morning.
One childhood memory that used to bother me a lot before I worked through it was from a time when I was about seven or eight years old. I remembered it vividly, as the memory would keep resurfacing each day.
A friend of mine and I were sitting on the floor of my bedroom, talking, when my mother came into the room. She commented sternly about how my clothes weren’t put away yet, since she’d told me having my friend over was contingent on that.
She then, without saying another word, picked up every article of clothing and proceeded to throw each of them at me while I was on the floor. My friend and I were speechless. Afterwards, when my mother left the room, my friend helped me pick them up.
What I realized by nonjudgmentally accepting my memory is that this experience had become a trauma point for me, one that I carried with me into my adult life until I started dealing with the emotions that were hardwired into my brain related to the event.
Only once I started meditating and kept seeing this memory resurface again and again—thereby noticing that I even had the memory and emotions in the first place—was I able to deal with the fact that this instance caused me to feel wronged because of how unfair it was. I felt humiliated. I felt ashamed. How could she have done something like this, I wondered?
However, once I began naming my feelings one by one, I found that the bodily sensations and experiences of the emotions surrounding the memory began to fade. I even found the courage to speak with my mother about my childhood using nonviolent communication strategies as discussed in the book Nonviolent Communication, written by Marshall B. Rosenberg, PhD with a foreword by Deepak Chopra.
The most rudimentary format of nonviolent communication entails communicating about conflict by saying, “When I hear you say X, I feel Y, because I need Z,” which makes the other person more likely to be able to receive your communication without being reactive or defensive.
I found great success with this approach, and while my mother and I are not close by any means, this communication approach strengthened our relationship and my relationship with myself. Now, most, if not all, of my painful childhood memories are no longer traumatic for me, including the one about my clothing.
This memory and the emotions that used to be attached to it are literally nonissues for me now, years later. And yet, the most important form of communication that I found for myself is the communication with the self, all brought on by a healthy meditation regimen.
So, how does one meditate with the goal of nonjudgmentally observing one’s thoughts, letting them go, and returning to the present moment in order to be successful with processing painful childhood memories and to gain more self-awareness overall?
The technique that my psychologist taught me is that, at the same time as doing deep diaphragmic breathing to stimulate the vagus nerve and promote inner calmness (eight seconds in, pause, then eight seconds out), it’s good to have an intention in mind that you can chant in your head as inner dialogue.
He also suggested audiating for stronger results, or putting the mantra to music in your mind, which I found was even more intellectually stimulating and led to greater mental clarity.
The idea is to try to clear your mind of all thoughts except the mantra, which you have going on repeat. I chose the mantra “Hamsa” for each breath, which means “I am that which I will become,” representing personal development.
When my thoughts wandered while I was chanting “Hamsa,” as soon as I noticed this happening, I acknowledged the stray thought, gave it permission to exist in a nonjudgmental environment, and then consciously turned my focus again to my mantra while letting the thought go.
Each time I went back to the original mantra, I was using the mental muscle of intentional focus to do that, which got stronger each time, just as a physical muscle would.
Eventually, by using this technique of observing thoughts nonjudgmentally, letting them go, and returning to the present moment, you begin to master more control over your thoughts as you increase your self-awareness of those thoughts in the first place.
Meditating this way gives you more mental and emotional clarity, which improves self-awareness, helps you get in touch with disempowering narratives and emotions, and gives you new pathways forward to reinvigorate experiences that can be dissolved or renewed in ways that work for you.
In other words, when you give yourself permission to exist within yourself, to notice your own being nonjudgmentally, and to work through painful memories and feelings, even the very act of noticing your own patterns of thinking improves self-awareness in all areas of your life. This can help you move toward better ways of thinking and existing—a critical component for personal development. You can then begin to notice painful or traumatic memories in order to face them head-on, process them, and let them go.
I found that after I was able to successfully process this childhood memory fully, I was healthier, stronger, and sturdier as an adult. I understood myself better and why I am the way that I am. I became more refined, had better inner clarity, and was able to tackle even worse memories and trauma points after that. I was able to have difficult discussions that I never thought possible with many people, using nonviolent communication techniques, spearheading me into a stable sense of self and personal discovery.
While meditating and practicing deep breathing, if you notice uncomfortable thoughts and memories, it’s likely that those thoughts represent something from your past that’s worth working on so that you can process your life and let those things go. As you relieve yourself of those burdens, you’ll open yourself up to more pleasant thoughts about better things on the other side of those hills.
About Rebecca O’Bern
Rebecca O’Bern is an award-winning writer and educator with 10 years of experience. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Southern Connecticut State University, has numerous poems published in literary journals such as Notre Dame Review, Buddhist Poetry Review, and Whale Road Review, and has received honors from Arts Café Mystic and UCONN. Learn more about her and view her work on rebeccaobern.com and follow her on Twitter @rebeccaobern.
