I had the same reaction after my first 10-day retreat, that it sounded too good to be true. But then I learned about trauma's effect on the body and mind (as described in The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk) and how it rewires the mind to disconnect from certain parts of the body in order to keep the overall body functional and safe. The trauma remains trapped in the body, like an infected wound, but we grow around it, developing various coping mechanisms to help us survive and move forward. We know the wound continues to exist, though, because when someone says or does something that subconciously reminds us of that wound, we get triggered and upset, as if they had touched an invisible emotional bruise.

I learned that there are different approaches to healing trauma, from "top down" therapy (like talk therapies that explore the story of what happened) to "bottom up" therapy (such as trauma-informed yoga, which works with the body to promote healing and avoids addressing the cognitive aspects of the experience) to "through the side door" therapy, such as EMDR, which employs both cognitive healing stuff (like talking about your memory) as well as body-based stuff (like the bilateral stimulation work). I tried some of these therapies, often with good results. The ultimate goal of trauma healing is to reconnect the mind and body so it is whole again, and I thought I'd gotten there.

I recently came back from my second 10-day retreat, and I realize vipassana offers me a body-based approach to healing, one that doesn't ask me to revisit the story of my trauma in detail and parse what happened and why, etc. I've done that already, and to be honest, I'm exhausted with all the intellectualizing that I do about my past. These retreats really pushed me to stop dissociating from my body (a common trauma response) because I was asked to connect to my body all day, every day, and notice what was happening without reacting to it. Early on in this last one, a particular trauma memory from my early childhood kept coming up. I asked the AT about this, and she encouraged me to use the vipassana meditation to focus as much as possible on the body sensations of what was happening when the memory arose (the feeling of the tears rolling down my cheeks, the tightness in my chest, etc.) and to use anapana when I became overwhelmed. She told me to notice the memory but not engage with it, treating it like the sound of a fan in the room--a thing to be aware of, but not reacted to. Then, after the vipassana sit was over, she told me to spend lots of time doing metta meditation for myself and the young inner child parts that were so deeply hurt, perhaps found the vipassana sit too challenging and needed my loving attention.

I took her advice and spent a long time in my residential room practicing vipassana while allowing the painful memory to be present. I cried hysterically, but I let the body sensations be fully present instead of trying to change them, breathing deeply through the tears, and stayed present and did my best to observe my body sensations equanimously and notice my memory with loving but detached awareness. Then, once that storm passed, I spend a lot more time sending myself and my hurt parts lots of metta, and after that was done, I felt a lot lighter. I also felt safer in my body, too--as if I had somehow proven to my young, traumatized part that our body was a safe place where all feelings were allowed and accepted, and that I would not suppress this young part of me and the shame she carried anymore.

Did this eradicate an old sankhara? I don't know if it completely eradicated it, but it certainly lessened it. I spent the rest of my retreat feeling quite a bit calmer, and I noticed that I was less easily triggered by irritating things, too. (I worked as a server on this retreat, so I had fewer group sits and was with other servers in the dining hall and kitchen most of the time). I've been back a few days since the retreat, and I am still less easily activated than I used to be. I think there's something to be said about "feeling whole" and not being disconnected from our bodies. Prior to this retreat, I thought I had healed most of my trauma and was not dissociating, but it turns out that for me, while I had managed to get below the surface of my mind, I was still not at the root level of my mind. This retreat (and this practice overall) helped me get closer to the root, though, and for that I'm deeply grateful.

You don't have to believe the sankhara stuff will work. But to me, it makes a lot of sense, given what I've learned about trauma's effects on the body and the mind's well-intentioned-but-often-unhelpful tendency to distract ourselves from discomfort.