Hello! Welcome. Pull up a chair, the kettle is on...

We all desire to have the time for living.  

Drinking tea can teach us to take the time to live, to breathe, to share with others and to stop and sit still long enough to feel our hearts and our aliveness. Tea is our bodhisattva  - Tea Here Now: Rituals, Remedies and Meditations (Fellman and Tizer, 2005) 

Come Drink Tea with Me!

Welcome to Operation Teacosy, a simple campaign to raise awareness and invite conversation about adverse experiences of meditation-related difficulty.

I hope it will be particularly helpful for those who may not have clinical training as mental health care professionals and are learning to offer mindfulness based interventions to members of the public, and those training them.

The Gift of Mindfulness: My Story

I discovered mindfulness practices not long after becoming a new mum. For me, this was a gift that came just when I needed it, offering me a way to spend time exploring and appreciating  just this. 

Life as a human being, not just a human doing.

It was wonderful. I learned a whole new way of being in the world - of giving myself permission to feel my feet on the floor, to hear the birds in the trees, to pay fresh and sweet attention to every little detail of my new son's unfolding life and all around it - dirty nappies and screaming fits included!

It was a practice that saw me through many challenging times in the following years,  so I was delighted and excited to be accepted onto training to deliver MBIs to others and give something back.

So beautiful.

Until it wasn't.

On a silent retreat in 2016, I found myself catapulted, severely and suddenly, into extreme re-experiencing of past sexual violence.

Over five days, I relived every second of the worst night of my life, and every strategy I had ever used to avoid it. Flipping between fog and confusion and extreme, existential panic, I found myself treated to a free ringside seat, as the circus of my mind treated me to a live replay of the good, the bad and the ugly of what it is to live as a survivor of sexual violence.

I couldn't make sense of it. I had healed from this! I had had extensive therapy, I had done the work on what had happened to me, my life was good! Why on earth was this so relentless and extreme? Why was my there and then now palpable, here and now?

I hoped it would simply go, if I sat with it - but when I got home, everything was undeniably.. wrong. Frozen. Unreal. Like I was in glue, or a  dense fog. I didn't have the resources or capacity to manage my mind in this state alone, and it didn't take long to work out functioning like this as a mum of three wasn't going to happen. 

Luckily, I got help, and I got good help, fast.

Yet... if you had told me then the work it would take to feel simply ordinary again on a regular, relatively reliable basis, I don't know how I would have managed.

Dr. Lynette Monteiro summarises the shock that comes with unexpected resurfacing trauma beautifully here:

The challenge is when we are so functional that we, ourselves, no longer view our history as “traumatic”. We may well have rebounded from it in healthy ways and feel it is something in our past.

But the body knows the trauma differently.

Two and a half years later, I've had 75+ sessions of Art Therapy, plus courses of EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, Prolonged Exposure and therapy and support from my local Sexual Violence Centres. Things are stabilising, but are still more up and down than I had ever experienced previously in life.


So, why Operation Teacosy?

Most people have experiences of sharing a cup of tea or coffee with colleagues, friends and family. We offer people tea when they visit our homes, are in shock, after labour, at funerals, at meetings.

It's a simple ritual of shared humanity and warmth - even at times of great difficulty.

It can also be pleasurable, and fun. For people meeting histories of trauma, learning to take in the good and orient to what it is pleasurable and enjoyable is an important part of the road to healing and full recovery.

Communication matters a lot to me, personally and professionally. Before choosing to train to offer Mindfulness Based Interventions, I had been a Highly Specialist Speech and Language Therapist in the UK National Health Service. I worked mainly with children and young people with the most severe and complex of communication disorders. Many of these kids had experienced past trauma or were in care.

When I got sucked into my own trauma so suddenly and dramatically while training to be a mindfulness teacher, I found myself in a situation I recognised from my past clients. I saw that it was impossible to communicate what I was experiencing in a way other people were able to hear. I experienced how challenging and frightening this could be


The impact of not being able to talk to anyone about what was happening was really profound.  If all of this was true for me,  used to being able to express myself and used to being taken seriously, what then, might it be like for the clients I had known over so many years? I was haunted by this then, and I still am now.

Connection is Our Cure

I have had so much support towards recovery in my own journey with meditation-related difficulty.

One thing that has stayed with me is the power of human connection.

Talking about mental distress, or hard histories of sexual or domestic violence, remains challenging in our culture. This can be particularly true among professional peers and colleagues. Yet, I feel it is essential we break a culture of silence around what are very common human experiences, if we are to avoid perpetuating cultural practices of harmful non-responding to pain and suffering. 


When it comes to traumatic stress, there are times that responding to someone's need to tell the story of what is happening to them with silence or punishing stories of the past can be deeply damaging.  For people who do not have sustained, supervised training in responding to traumatic stress, it is important to commit to developing trauma sensitive practices and pathways to prevent harm.

What now?

Over the coming weeks and months, it's my intention to develop and share very simple "bite size" resources on mindful communication around trauma-sensitive mindfulness, drawing on what I've learned on my own path to recovery and what I know and have learned about language and communication.

To this end, I am inviting anyone who has an interest to contact me for a chat and a cuppa, to explore how we can combine what we know across disciplines and experiences for find a way to better meet the challenge of meeting difficult experiences that can come up in Mindfulness Based Interventions.  I believe in the power of shared conversations to bring change.

Biscuits optional!

Get in touch!



Starter List of Professional Resources:

- Start exploring trauma sensitive mindfulness by reading this blog by Dr. Lynette Monteiro:
https://ottawamindfulnessclinic.com/2018/04/15/is-your-mindfulness-program-trauma-sensitive-5-reasons-you-need-to-know/


- All clinicians offering mindfulness trainings should read this:
Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for safe and transformative healing by David Treleaven, W.W. Norton & Company


- Willoughby Britton and Jared Lindahl conduct research into meditation related difficulty. You will find a range of podcasts, lectures, clinical resources and academic research here.
https://www.brown.edu/research/labs/britton/home

- You can also follow Cheetah House on Facebook for further relevant information and links to articles. If you can read, you are also invited to donate your voice to audiorecord readings for meditators unable to read due to their experiences.


Stay tuned for much more!