A powerful trauma release guided meditation

I’m John Glanvill, author of The Calmness in Mind Process for overcoming Anxiety, OCD and Depression.

In the last video we explored how, as we become calmer, it seems that the body naturally wants to release trapped trauma, or what we might call stuck energy out of our atoms – which makes us feel lighter, raises our frequency, improves our health and slowly recalibrates our feelings of emotional wellbeing.

And how, through meditation, we can become more cognisant of where we are placing our attention – is it on the objective ego driven outer world ‘out there’ or on the inner more subjective, less solid, more non-linear world ‘in here’ where time, rules and identity are really quite irrelevant?

You can be whoever you want inside your head, you can make a whole new pleasant subjective reality within yourself, regardless of the truth of what is happening ‘out there’ – potentially, it can be heaven in your mind and body – regardless of the hell out there.

It could be crap ‘out there’ – but feel perfectly OK ‘in here.” Especially, if you have no ‘story’ about it – and no land mines being triggered within you – can you see how the metaphor is unfolding?

I am grateful to live with a naturally happy and optimistic woman – let me offer you a glimpse into how her mind works – she says things like…..

“Why do people worry about things that haven’t happened yet, surely that will make them feel bad, why would they do that?”

“I’m so lucky, even when bad things happen, there is usually something brilliant that comes out of it!”

“Plans are boring, let’s just see what happens!”

“Rules are for other people, not me.”

“Death is just a new beginning, a chance to discover new things!”

“Why don’t people like sex, that’s just crazy?”

“Why is everybody so serious?”

“If a past event was sad, just change the story of what happened or forget it, why would you keep a horrible story in your head?”

Can you see how she has a different perspective and alternative “stories” from that of an anxious person?

Remember, this course is not about being right, or even the truth, it is about finding strategies that allow you to be calm and happy within yourself – regardless of what is happening outside of you.

As the rider, (your soul, if you believe that) or (your formless twenty-year-old, the observer) if you don’t – your job is to use your horse, the body – as a tool – to ride out and experience your life, learn all you can learn, try everything, have fun – enjoy this most amazing tool, the human body.

And remember, as the rider you can only influence the horse, never fully control it, but you don’t have to be fearful, even if the conditioned little horsey is.

To enable this, you have to experiment, practice and learn, how to (as the observer, the formless aspect of yourself) be calm, even if your body is not.

It takes a while, but if you do the work it is a total game changer!

So, a quick reminder from the last video – the metaphor we are using – is like being a bomb disposal specialist, looking at plot of overgrown land – knowing there are some landmines in there – but not knowing where?

You are going to take a big stick and start prodding all over the land exploring searching everywhere, until bang, found one. Then off you go again until every square foot of the land has been tested.

And what if these landmines were nested? For example one mine was buried under another, it could be that you need to go around a second or third time prodding the land to see what buried down there.

The bomb disposal guy is your conscious mind, and the land is your unconscious mind – where these traumas are hidden.

We are seeking to unearth, untangle, then lovingly neutralise, via a controlled explosion, venting that pent up stored potential energy, out through the dissipation via kinetic energy which feels like anxiety, but it’s not – it’s just an agitation that the horse doesn’t like (yet) but, to formless rider it’s fine, you can be calm, even if your body is not.

I don’t normally do this, however, I am going to place a few sensible caveats around this meditation.

Firstly, if you are in therapy, perhaps discuss with your therapist about your intentions, it may be prudent to learn this meditation process, then ask them to be with you the first time to actually do it? Or share the process with your partner, who could calm you down if necessary.

Secondly, if your anxiety is still hugely overwhelming, you may not be ready for this, perhaps you need to go back to video number one, read the books I recommended (especially, if you haven’t yet.) Do more tapping and more exposure therapy, until you are feeling a bit better.

Or, just dive in, knowing that it may be scary – but, just embrace what happens, surrender deeply in one go, this may save you a lifetime of worry and procrastination.

Thirdly, if your OCD is about false memories and fears about whether you did or didn’t do something in the past – well, as you are beginning to see, this is really what it is like to be a human!

I think it is best to just accept it and dive in – If this step scares you, don’t do it – you’ll stay stuck, but at least you will know, that is your decision to remain stuck.

And the final group are those taking anti-psychotic drugs; I would suggest that you check with your Doctor before you embark on a meditation that goes back over your past.

Any way, watch the video, see what I am doing, then you can decide what is best for you – but I think you already know the answer.

So, let’s look at the process you’ll be learning to do as you rest or meditate at night – or in any moments during the night when you can’t sleep.

The first concept is to imagine that within you are two types of stuck trauma, trapped energy, held down frustrations – what ever you want to call them.

The first type are ones that you know about, things that happened to you in your life, that time you were bullied, or somebody passed away, a pet died, you lost your job.

Then the second type are the ones that we don’t know are there – like when a person pushes your button, you fire off – and they say “why do you get all angry like that?” – And you really don’t know.

These are the land mines we are going looking for. Hunting for.

To find these we need to prod every memory and every experience we ever had, no matter how seemingly miniscule or inoffensive they appear. For example in my last video I talked about nearly getting killed by bull stampede when I was on a camping holiday in my childhood.

Consciously, I would never have though to look there for a landmine, because my conscious story was, “that was a fun holiday”, nothing bad happened. However, I was wrong, my unconscious was hiding a trauma.

In addition, there are events from the past that you might think you have dealt with, but there may still be landmines – emotional pain, buried deeper down, needing to be dug up or revealed – behind your cover stories of denial, guilt, blame, unfairness, self-worth or repression.

What I am saying is we need to slowly, lovingly and repetitively – over a long period of time, each night as we do this meditation – keep going back to the events of our lives and prod around trying to discover and release trapped trauma.

However, we are not looking for answers, we are not asking “why they did this” or “why I did that?” We are separating the story from the emotion.

We will be using the story to access the emotion, then as the emotion arises, we are detaching from the story and just placing our awareness on the feelings and stuck energy as it arises out of us.

As this happens our atomic energy battery is being discharged – remember the stuck energy is just stuck energy, once it is stored, it is no longer attached to the memory, it is just energy held in your atoms, that serves your health better by not being there.

For me the best way to visualise this is a bottle of soda, with the lid on, all you can see is a liquid, no real bubbles anywhere, but when you crack the lid open and the pressure is released – all those repressed pressurised bubbles appear out of nowhere and rise up to the top, fizzing and exploding.

Stored potential energy, escaping as kinetic energy, through the agitation of matter.

If we keep shaking it up, the releasing the lid, then shaking it up, and releasing the pressure, eventually all that trapped energy is gone, the drink is flat, calm, non-

volatile – even if you shake it, it stays calm. You might say, “It’s atomic energy battery has been discharged!”

This is what we are going to do to ourselves – by finding and safely detonating those landmines, the legacy trauma of past events, hidden within us.

So, let me detail how the meditation works.

You get yourself settled down somewhere, if you fall asleep easily, I would recommend you sit up in a straight-backed chair – if you don’t, you can lie down or sit comfortably.

I used to do this laying in bed, before I went to sleep or if I woke up in the night and couldn’t get back to sleep, so it was a good use of my time.

If you know how to relax yourself, then spend 5 minutes relaxing, if not, listen to the first five minutes of a recording you like – or the first five minutes of my relaxation audio.

Once you are relaxed – you apply the process I am about to teach you in any way that works for you, you’ll need to play around with it and experiment with what works for you.

So, you imagine a clear plastic bottle of soda with the lid cracked open, only a tiny bit – so all that pressure is not rushing out, but if some energy wanted to escape it could.

You then, in your imagination – divide the bottle into three equal sections. We label the middle section as Number One, “The Now” And this represents what issues and stresses are you facing in your life now?

This period of now, kind of, stretches back for six months and perhaps forward for six months – and encompasses the challenges you are currently facing. Employment, health, relationships, parents, neighbours, money, children, moving house, resolving issues, accepting change, letting go of anxiety, whatever you are facing.

See each of these challenges as a bubble of pressure in that section, representing (metaphorically) trapped energy in your atoms – pressurised and naturally wanting to discharge.

This is the natural human way – E-Motions, energy in motion, stress release, letting go, crying it out, venting your frustrations – all the very things that are natural, but that school and society try to stop us doing.

We now label the top part as Section Two, “The Future” – Here we place our deepest fears for the future. Our death, the death of those we love, our house being repossessed, a partner leaving us, being made redundant, financial difficulties, future illness or pain.

I know this is ugly, scary, and will bring up deep emotions – But, GOOD, because that is what we are trying to do here, vent trapped emotions!

In a way we are doing exposure therapy on our fears, our thoughts and any pain that may come up – logically it makes complete sense, however, emotionally there will be some pain.

We are learning to accept, to surrender, because people will die, jobs will be lost, some people will become ill – denial is rarely a sensible strategy, especially if calmness and happiness are your goals.

Also, by imagining the death of a person you love now, standing in the church delivering their epitaph, will bring up your emotions, it will also release the energy from all the other times you didn’t grieve fully – all from the safety of your bed. So, I say sob your heart out, it’s OK.

Now, for those of you whose first response back to me is “I can’t do that because the Law of Attraction will make that happen – the collapsing of the sea of potentiality into reality, based on my thoughts.

Then I respectfully say, then you don’t really understand the principles and the physics – plus, surely this is what you are doing running endless anxious and OCD catastrophic stories in your mind? None of which happen, but do exhaust you!

That’s a whole other video for the future, but let me give you a simple metaphor, as is my way. As you discharge your atomic battery, you become lighter, your frequency rises, more energy is available to you, from inside and outside of you.

An underlying mandate is that we attract to us, that which resonates at our frequency or lower, like magnets – depressed people don’t attract happy people, they attract other depressed people. “Birds of a feather flock together.”

As you release the stored energy, your frequency rises – so, happy people do attract other happy people at their energetic level – as well as depressed people being pulled up from their lower energetic level – (who they need to protect their energy from – else it will be leached out.)

So, one of the most powerful things you can do, is to discharge your atomic battery, let go of the karma you have been unknowingly dragging around with you – you become lighter and wonderful things start to happen, not least of all, health.

OK, back to the meditation – we label the bottom compartment, “Section Three and we call it The Past.” And here is where we visually place little bubbles of trauma from all the negative things that ever happened to us.

That first day at school, that embarrassing moment, that rejection, that horrific thing that happened, that film that scared us, the separation of our parents, that jealousy moment, that scary time in hospital, that stupid thing we said, the recital that went wrong, the passing of Granddad.

See all these past events as potential experiences that could have pushed emotions down into your atoms, where they became stored as stuck energy.

Of course, our goal, over time, will be to release the trauma attached to these events.

Then I’d like you to add a few more bubbles of a different colour, three or four, with a question mark in the middle. These represent those repressed traumas that our unconscious mind has hidden from us, or where the story has been changed.

Here, the meditation is about creating a calm and safe environment for these to be released – as we prod around in our past, looking at events that we thought were OK, but may have some trauma attached.

So, there’s our model, section one, the now, section two the future and section three the past – and our meditation starts with our focus on section one, in the middle, the now.

In your mind, you pick one of your bubbles of stress in the now – a current topic of worry, let’s say, you fear you might lose your job or some other difficulty at work.

Now, you use your imagination to actually picture that event happening, you try to bring on an emotion within your body. Now, some people are quite visual and find this task quite simple, others have more of a thinking type thought process than a visual one, which ever one you use is fine.

Just do your best to run the “story” about the perceived stressor, that is worrying you in the now – to try and get an emotion within your body.

Stay out of looking for solutions – we are just trying to use the story of that recently past or soon to be happening event, to bring up any emotion, be that sadness, frustration, grief, loss, regret, anger, jealousy, embarrassment, rage – or whatever.

We are NOT trying to solve the problem, or figure out why it happened or what to do about it – we are just using the rerunning of that event in your mind to kick off emotions within your body.

I know this goes against what we have been doing so far in the course, but that is OK, we are learning that thoughts don’t really mean anything – but they do kick off feelings – and it is possible to let feelings just move through you – E-motions, energy in motion.

Through this practice it is possible to become comfortable feeling discomfort.

Remember, we are not looking to find solutions or solve the problems, just to use the story of the event to trick your body into releasing an emotion, and for you to not inhibit that emotion from rising within your body – regardless of the discomfort or fear they may invoke within you.

There is no right or wrong way to do this, you need to experiment with what works for you.

Now, when an emotion arises – one of three things is likely to happen.

Firstly, the emotion will arise, and as it does, I want you (as the observer) to take your attention off of the story and place it on the emotion you are experiencing – and try to just be with, and accept that emotion, with no story about the emotion.

We are learning to just allow emotions to move through us, to not resist them, to not fear them – this is the skill you will learning to master.

Often as the emotions come up – old anxiety or OCD stories in your mind may grab your attention, hook the observer away from watching the emotions and back into a “story” in your mind, that’s OK.

Just realise your attention has been ‘hooked’ and place your awareness back onto observing and accepting the emotion – just being with it, let it do what ever it does, become intrigued by it, where does it move to? Where can you feel it? Is it intensifying or diminishing?

If it becomes a little overwhelming or if the stories in your mind become too loud – start a soft, slow and gentle mantra, silently in your conscious mind (or out loud) “I accept this emotion, I accept this emotion” and bring your observer, your attention back to the emotion.

For those of your who are finding more courage through this process, I would encourage you to use the words “I surrender to this emotion.” Sag your body, keep your awareness on the emotion and start the gentle breathing process we have previously discussed.

Take a long slow and deep breath in, hold it for 3 seconds, then gently release it out, with some resistance against pursed lips, until your lungs are completely empty, then let your diaphragm pull the next lung full of air automatically back in – it invokes your internal calmness systems.

You stay with the emotion until it passes, could be thirty seconds, could be three minutes; it doesn’t matter, when it ends, just sit with it, accept it.

Now, the second thing that may happen when you run a story about the event to try and kick off an emotion is – nothing!

You run the story, but nothing happens, no emotions arise – now this is perfectly fine and normal, in fact, as you get better and better at this process, this feeling of nothing is going to become what happens most of the time.

So, here’s what you do when you run the story, but no emotions arise – you stop the story and place the observers attention on your torso, from your hips to your neck and keep your attention there for about one and a half to two minutes.

This serves three purposes, for you to learn to keep your awareness off of your mind and on your body. If your mind hooks you back into a story, gently smile and pull it back to your body.

Then, it allows you to realise we have a rich internal world of sensations, we humans are so focused on the external world, that we can feel an ant walking on our skin,

but not our own heart beating or our blood pumping around our body – and I want you to begin to connect with the sensation of life within us.

The last thing is rare, but it does happen – as you run the story, but no emotion arises, you place your attention on your torso for a couple of minutes, just experiencing and accepting the body’s natural sensations.

This is the time that the unconscious mind, occasionally releases repressed memories, it seems as though, as you learn to be calmer and keep you attention away from the thoughts and on the body – there is space for these new awareness’s to arise out from your unconscious mind.

The final way an emotion may be released is via a sensation personal to you. I told you about my left hand going numb when I meditated, and about a pressure in my nose – as these were parts of my body that had experienced physical trauma.

The more you do this work; you will almost certainly find a part of your body that seems to repeatedly experience sensations. These are like twitches, quivers, numbness, tingles, shots of electricity – especially in the hands, feet, legs, arms, face, neck and chest.

As you discover these, I would like you to become intrigued by them, see them as your body’s way of, not only venting trauma, but also unconsciously communicating with your conscious. My left hand goes numb when my unconscious body is telling me something is wrong, it is like a warning signal.

Our conscious mind operates within such a narrow field of perception, that if we are consciously focusing on a task – it consumes most of our conscious awareness. However, in the background our unconscious is still scanning all around us to keep us safe.

If it senses danger – it has to alert you via a big emotion, big enough to break your conscious attention on what you are engrossed in. However, as you find and develop these subtle feedback locations and sensations, the unconscious doesn’t have to flood you with warning chemicals, it just gently sends a signal.

If my left hand goes numb, I pay attention to what is happening around me, or at least, I am aware that whatever I am consciously doing, there is some unconscious resistance to it – more about this in future videos.

So, if you run a story about the event – to get an emotion – and you get a strange sensation in your body, like my left hand going numb, you stop the story and place your awareness, your attention onto that sensation – and just let it do what ever it does, it may move around, it may intensify, it may dissipate – stay with it until it goes.

If the stories in your mind hook your attention, that’s OK, just bring your awareness back the feeling – this is what you are learning to do, to keep your awareness in one place.

Then you jump to the next bubble of pain in the now section of the soda bottle – you run the story until you get an emotion.

The emotion arises and you accept it, or there is no emotion, so you keep your attention on your torso, or if there is a unique sensation, you place your attention there on it until it stops.

That’s the process, we are not looking for answers, just to process emotions. I would suggest that you find twenty minutes a day, I think first thing in the morning is good, last thing at night or if you awake in the night – or if you already have a meditation routine – build this in.

My suggestion is that for a week or two – focus on the bubbles in section one, the now, go around a few times, pull up all the things you fear, don’t look for answers, just use the events and your fears to pull up your emotions and then surrender to them fully.

It’s like the tapping end of day decompression routine I explained in video 14 – we are just now doing it in a different way.

After a week or two, you’ll be ready for section two, the future, where we pick a bubble of fear from scary things that may happen in the future, death, illness, loss, rejection.

However, by now you will have a very different relationship with your emotions, kind of detached and accepting, just something that happens within you and you can be OK with them.

Because love, exhilaration excitement, fun, these are big emotions and you want to be OK with these too don’t you?

So, when you are ready, you move to section two, the future and you imagine an emotional event in the future, a loved ones death, your own death.

You run the story in your mind and do your best to generate an emotion in your body – as it arises you stop the story and be with the emotion.

As before, there will be an emotion, or nothing, or your unique sensation, deal with them as previously described, if you need to breathe or use the “I surrender” mantra to keep you engaged, that’s fine.

Once you get more comfortable with your emotions coming up, as they fade away, you may wish to jump back to the story in your mind to reignite those emotions and bring them back up again – see if you can’t maximise pulling up those emotions.

Then you jump to the next fear bubble about the future, imagine yourself being made redundant – and off you go around the process again.

We are not looking for answers, just venting trapped emotions, learning how to control where we place our awareness, becoming cognisant of our inner body sensations – and offering our unconscious the space to release repressed memories and trauma. We are decompressing our biology.

After a week or so of working on the future, you may be ready for section three, the past.

I call this final process growing your self up.

Here we are going to release the trauma linked to events from your past, and importantly go hunting for any hidden traumas, by prodding around looking for landmines in places that you might not expect.

I spent twenty minutes at night working on this section for two years, it became my night time routine before sleep, it became how I decompressed my day, it became something I really enjoyed doing – and it always surprised me when I found and released traumas that were deeply nested down.

I think the best way to do this is to go back to your earliest memories, for some that is two or three, others eight or nine, it doesn’t matter.

Let’s say your earliest memories are five years old – begin by running in your mind the negative or fearful stories, that happened at that time, first day at school, being lost in a crowd, a person shouting at you, being reprimanded, being sick.

Just like in section 1 and section 2 – you run the story, to try and get the emotion, don’t worry if the memory is clear or not, just try to get an emotion.
Stay out of asking why it happened, just run the story to invoke an emotion.

If an emotion arises, stop the story, place you awareness on the emotion, let it run it’s course, if you are uncomfortable, sag your body, don’t resist it, start the breathing or gently repeat “I surrender to this emotion.” Until it passes.

If there is no emotion, stop the story and place your awareness on your torso, your inner sensations of being alive.

Or if your unique sensation fires of, keep your attention on that until it passes.

Very, very occasionally an abreaction may occur, this is where a huge emotion comes up, or you may experience uncontrollable shaking or an arm is really twitching. You must bravely see these as wonderful events, even though initially they may feel scary, it is in these times we are making the most progress – and in these moments we just surrender even more deeply.

Then you jump to the next bubble in that age range – so one night you may work on events that happened when you were 5 and 6 and the next night 7 and 8 and so on, right up to now.

Include relationships ending, car crashes, pet deaths – all negative events. You can even use this letting go process on world events that might scare you.

After a week or two you will be up to the present time, don’t rush this process.

You then go around again, back to 4 and 5, 6 and 7 – this time you drill down deeper, pick a friend you had at school, run the story – sit with the emotion, if no

emotion comes up focus on your torso – what you may find happens, is suddenly a memory jumps into your mind “Oh, that was embarrassing when she was caught doing xyz” – “Oh, I forgot about his sister!” – “Oh, she bullied me!”

Go through your teachers, holidays, college, first jobs, managers and so on.

Perhaps even look through old photo albums from your past to remember people and events you have forgotten – then run them through the process, we are prodding for landmines.

We are reminiscing to invoke our unconscious mind to trigger the release of repressed memories, but more importantly trapped emotional pain.

And each time we go around, we slowly access more people, more memories, don’t ask why things happened, don’t get into the blame game, just let the emotions arise and surrender to them fully.

Every now and then, new realisations will just arise out of nowhere –

“It was me who was being controlling, not them!”
“Oh,I didn’t see the pain they were going through!”
“My expectation from them, was greater than their ability!” “Oh, that’s not what really happened!”
“Oh, how could I have forgot about that?”

These are the landmines hidden under you cover stories – and as you bravely uncover them and release the stuck energy, you can step out of believing your old stories about yourself – and become who you want to be.

So, when you are ready this is the meditation I would like you to explore, it will change your relationship with your emotions, it will enhance your ability to place your awareness in one place and keep it there.

It will also allow you to move forward and make big changes in your life, because, what’s the worst that will happen? A big emotion will come up, but you will be able to just sit with it and let it move through your body.

You will be able to stay out of the stories of doubt and negativity – because you have learned to keep your awareness elsewhere.

In the next video we are going to explore strategies for understanding yourself better, to minimise internal conflicts and give you more useful tools to find calmness.

Until then, lets get hunting for landmines and letting go of those emotions!