Gwen Daverth
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Thinking of myself as a teacher has always felt a bit funny. Partly because, as a child, I lacked stability in my own education and never imagined myself at the front of a classroom. Yet, I’ve found myself there often throughout my life. There’s something uniquely empowering about being a “reluctant” teacher. Because I don’t feel like I entirely “belong” in that role, I show up authentically humble and genuinely willing to help. Students tend to respond well to that. During my time in grad school, when I formally held teaching roles, I was consistently voted one of the best lecturers in the college.
That said, I also see where I struggle. I’ve never felt like the smartest person in the room and am often in awe of those with deep “book smarts”—the ones who can cite dates and facts with ease and have that classic “professor” presence. That’s never been me. Plus, I’m notorious for talking too much! I’ve been told many times to let a question sit in silence long enough for people to gather the courage to answer it. Sitting in front of a large, silent group is my literal nightmare (insert irony about being a meditation teacher here!)
But I try, I learn, and I am always honored to support others on their learning journeys.
Kelly I love your comment. I also had a difficult time with this reading and didn’t really get it or honestly like it. Like you I found more inspiration seeing how the group responded.
There are times in life when we find ourselves needing to hold space for others’ experiences while we navigate our own, potentially conflicting feelings. One of the most powerful examples for me was leading my team through an annual planning process, fully aware that we were facing major layoffs in the new year. I knew that most of our plans would likely be discarded and that some team members would be let go. Balancing the need to keep morale, focus, and hope alive, while carrying the weight of this knowledge, required immense emotional resilience and self-awareness. It was a delicate process of maintaining engagement and motivation, even while holding back the truth of what lay ahead.
As I sat in that room with my team, I thought about what each person needed on an individual level. How could I turn this experience into something valuable for their growth and help set them up for whatever their next steps might be? Once I had this frame in mind, I could see opportunities for us all to use this time to try new things. While we maintained the structure of annual planning, the real focus shifted to personal growth. Each team member took turns proposing ideas and leading exercises, giving everyone a chance to step up and take center stage. We also created a feedback loop to provide personalized insights into each person’s contributions and leadership style.
Initially, I was worried about going through this process, knowing the outcome wouldn’t really matter—but that actually freed us. It allowed us to take risks, try new approaches, and elevate voices that hadn’t been heard before.
This is beautifully said and I can relate so much to it. Parenting was the first thing that popped to my mind and your examples capture the tension between wanting to be there for your children and managing your own emotional journey.
It’s easy to mistake calm and peacefulness for genuine healing, but sometimes what feels like peace is actually avoidance in disguise. When we’ve experienced trauma, challenging emotions or memories can feel overwhelming, so the mind often finds ways to keep them at bay. This can lead us to prioritize a sense of calm at all costs, sometimes resulting in emotional suppression or numbing. Chogyam Trungpa’s concept of “pacifying” the mistake of avoidance as peace comes to mind. Peacefulness can have a seductive quality, luring us into a false sense of resolution.
True peace, however, isn’t about hiding from discomfort; it’s about embracing it gently and with awareness. When we approach meditation or mindfulness solely with the goal of creating calm, we risk avoiding the deeper work needed to process unresolved pain. In contrast, trauma-sensitive practices encourage us to notice sensations without judgment, giving space to what arises rather than pushing it away. This distinction—between a peace that avoids and a peace that integrates—is essential in trauma healing. Real inner peace means making room for all parts of ourselves, including those that might disrupt our surface calm, while learning to meet them with compassion and care. This idea of misguided compassion, or “Idiot Compassion,” as Trungpa puts it, reflects the tendency to turn things on their head by avoiding the very discomfort that true compassion would embrace.
I enjoyed our video and discussion on being a trauma-sensitive meditation practitioner. As someone who relates to this conversation firsthand I see how important it is and how difficult it can be to approach as a teachers. It does involve creating a compassionate, inclusive space where individuals can safely explore mindfulness without feeling overwhelmed. This approach recognizes that meditation can sometimes trigger difficult memories or emotions for those with trauma histories. By gently guiding individuals to stay present and grounded, and offering choices that honor their comfort levels, like the example David in the video gave with the tokens, trauma-sensitive meditation encourages a sense of safety and autonomy. These approaches are so important because there really is a healing space in mediation for those dealing with trauma.
Pema Chodron’s book Welcoming the Unwelcome helped me center and work with strong emotions in my practice. There is one meditation she leads you through in the book when you find a big emotion that helped me – she tells you to hold your emotion whatever it is in the center of your practice and make that feeling as big as you can. Think of all the times someone really wronged you or whatever brings that emotion alive for you. Make it so big it becomes heavy – so heavy you can grab it in your hand. Then hold it. Physically hold out your hands and really feel this big emotion. Look at it and feel what it feels like. Then imagine yourself letting it go. Letting it float up into the sky and float away. This practice has really helped build my capacity to sit with emotions I naturally pushed away and avoided. By being able to sit longer and really see and understand them I’ve been able to see them for what they are and understand when and how they may serve us and when we need to put them in perspective.
Katie Byron ‘The Work’ is what comes to mind when I think of letting go of the ego to find a path to happiness. Such a deep challenge to think about how our ego’s make solid that which is fluid and dynamic.
I attended one of Katie’s live sessions this week and she worked with someone struggling with cancer and it was like every part of their conversation was from my head. Yes, cancer is scary, your children watching you die is horrible – but are either of those things true in this moment and what happens when we make those things true. She pointed out that if you believe that’s true you exercise a little less, are less compliant with your doctors recommendations and you sit in despair and cry when your children walk into the room.
I have to admit I’ve done all of those things this past year when I was told I likely had an aggressive form of Rheumatoid Arthritis and Lymphoma. I see pictures of my body crippling up and withering away like my cousin’s who passed from the same thing a few years ago. Deep swells of emotions as I think of my kids having to carry the emotional burden of losing their mother. Seeing this as pure ego is a very hard gap to cross.
And then the world shifted. Lymphoma was ruled out. Now they think Autoimmune Long Covid. Long covid – wait, people don’t die from that, the wheel chair and painful death evaporate. My kids get their mom – a perfect reminder that all the things we make solid are not, all the energy we put toward feeling sorry for yourselves and imagining horrible scenes in our heads they shift in a moment.
And if you open to what that brings – it’s hope. And I’m reminded of the beautiful passage in the Five Invitations.
“Chapter 3 – Hope is a subtle sometimes unconscious attitude of heart and mind that is an essential resource in this life. It’s the ingredient that supplies the motivation for us to get up in the morning and look forward to the possibilities of a new day. It is an anticipation of a future that is good….Hope is an orientation of the spirit….An innate quality of being, an open active trust in life that refuses to quit.
What we know for certain is that hope takes us beyond the rational. At times this can be invaluable to our survival, yet at other times when hope is misunderstood it can plunge us into delusion and become a hindrance to facing the facts of life. To discern the real value of hope, we must draw a line between hope and expectation. Hope is an optimizing force that moves us and all of life toward harmony. It doesn’t arrive from the outside, rather it is an abiding state of being, a hidden well spring within us and when the mind is still and awake, we can see reality more clearly and recognize it as a living dynamic process. Hope that is active has an imaginative daring to it. Which helps us to realize our unity with all life and find the resourcefulness required to act on it’s behalf.” Frank Ostaseski
I guess I’m taking the dare.
me, you, us. Individually standing together, facing apart, fighting the wave of prehistoric suffering.
I bear down. Again. Reminded of my three pregnancies, connecting to the collective power of ancient childbirth – primal and exhilarating. Feeling like the goddess here to deliver life.
Yet I give in to suffering, again.
Alone, worthless, crippled, a failure this time collapsing on the path as a mere mortal.
Shattered by the pain my parents couldn’t shoulder.
Who was I to think I could hold back the wave from reaching my children.
So I journey through the mist, alone and broken, like all of you.
But I see the wounded healer, ahead of me, showing the way –’trauma-informed/C-PTSD healing.
So I take the path, slowly increasing my ‘window of tolerance’ and teaching my racing ‘fight or flight’ system to relax. To watch for that abundant moment after the out breath where if you wait. Silently. You can connect to ancestral primal screaming to power you forward before the next intake of breath.
Lineage. Those who came before. Those who created. Those who birthed.
Formed from the Collective Conscious into a wave of existence.
Life, wisdom, suffering, washing around us in time and space.
Karma moves like contractions across lifetimes – the pull and push, like childbirth.
Deep low guttural pain that grows until we cannot bear it any further. But we know, even when we cannot breathe and grow scared, that we are anchored to all the women before us that have stood in this moment trapped in time, bearing down to deliver the world. And so, we trust them – our female ancestors, that if we just rest here after the outbreath, that the next breath will happen automatically.
Noble Wisdom from My Bathroom Floor.
‘If you have a human heart, you can expect to have issues with it,’ a Buddhist friend tells Frank Ostaseski when he is worried about his life threatening heart condition in his book, The Five Invitations. Simple. Easy. Open. Let it be. Just as it is.
But the space between my shoulders tighten and my breath shallows. My thoughts harden. This can’t be.
My kids, they need me – my thoughts flash so solid. My eyes tear up, flashes of color, panic rising. I’m definitely going to throw up again.
No control of anything – my moment, my body, my future – awareness shifting back to this moment as I shuffle against the wall to the already warm spot on the bathroom floor.
This is my new reality. Here. Once again learning to let go of the vision I had for my life. My day. This moment. No one chooses this version of reality – yet if you have a human body you should expect to have issues with it.
Seems trite to explain that for forty plus years I never had problems with it. My body always there to get me out of bed, give me three beautiful children with curly hair, and support me in ways I took for granted. Isn’t that a universal human experience – not realizing what you have until it’s gone.
So my reality comes into focus as I take a deep breath and sit on the floor in anticipation waiting to understand what my body needs from me in this moment. But I already know the answer – Understanding. Patiences. Compassion. Openness.
Guess Buddha was right.
I find this question provocative – largely because it makes me deeply uncomfortable. Even the concept of lineage makes me uncomfortable. Images of my childhood religious experiences and corrupt clergy spring to mind – particularly how bad deeds were hidden in religious wordings or swept under the ‘religious rug’.
So my first thought was – what did I get myself involved in? Then spending a few mins googling Buddhist figures you quickly see concerning messages about a prominent US male-character who seemed to hide behind his faith to perpetrate harm.
So here I sit – concerns confirmed, ready to reject the concept of devotion to a teacher and connection to a lineage. Yet I recall my Buddhist friends who speak that their teachers warned them not to trust a word they said and for them to question everything. That’s a powerful challenge and one not typical offered by organized religions.
So I make a little more room. Ready to not see this all as solid.
What if I sat open to these concepts? What would they provide me if I didn’t so quickly reject them? So I wonder who I’m devoted too and could that help me on my journey. And what does lineage mean to me, why do Buddhist hold that of importance?
I see two beautiful images – one Pema Chodron. Her voice was a powerful hand to pull me up out of a dark place. I can see how she loves the ceremony and history of this wisdom and how she feels stronger and impowered by it’s lineage. That does help me soften and create more space. Maybe I need to have more curiosity about why these are powerful for her. I’m ready to listen.
Two – what am I devoted to? That’s easy, my support group of women survivors of childhood sexual assault, the group of women who have held my hand when I need it and cried on my shoulder when they do. They give me courage when I don’t have any. The older ones holding their hands out to support those of us in the depth of our struggle. The younger ones still close to the abuse and trying to put their lives back together. How much I feel devotion to this group – to the scientist and therapist and practicians who build understanding of our brains and trauma and CPTSD, the leaders of this movement who created safe spaces for us to come heal. Yes, if I need something to focus around my practice there is a lot of powerful energy in doing this for them.
