Many people view meditation as a peaceful practice where we take a break from our external life and minds and have a moment of calm and clarity. But when I started meditating, my experience was not like that.

I had recently experienced trauma when I first started meditating about 16 years ago, and my inner world was everything else than calm and peaceful.

Every time I sat down to meditate, the dread, pain, and fear from the trauma began to rise to the surface, and it really scared me.

The fear didn’t come alone; it came with all kinds of scary thoughts about what was happening or what would happen if I kept sitting there. It was intense.

I had learned to stay with anxiety and face my fears through Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in my daily life, but this was another level of fear hidden deeper inside me. And it all came up during meditation.

There was no way for me to sit down and watch my thoughts or emotions.Or feel the sensations in the body. There was way too much fear for that. All that happened when I tried was that it triggered the fear even more.

So, many of the usual practices didn’t work for me. I had to go slowly and find my way.

What did work, even though it was a gradual process, was to start with body scans, where I focused intensely on parts of the body.

It took some practice, but it stopped the mind, and after a while, I could finally experience some inner peace and experience being in my body.

Later, I also learned to focus directly on the intense emotions I was experiencing. When I concentrated entirely on them, the mind couldn’t come in and make up stories about the emotions or try to explain them.

So, I was experiencing the fear directly instead of becoming lost in thoughts about the fear. When I did that, I became intensely present. The emotion was still there, but I was feeling inner peace.

However, I had to focus intensely on the emotion because if I let go even for a second, the mind returned, and I was terrified again.But I gradually learned to stay.

In time, the fear disappeared. When I experienced what I felt fully, the emotions began to leave the body because they got what they needed: their full outlet and completion.