Flowers in the Dark:Reclaiming Your Power to Heal from Trauma with Mindfulness

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And when the bodhisattva energy is in you, the suffering of being a victim of sexual abuse will begin to dissolve. In Flowers in the Dark, she brings together her lived experience as a survivor, certified MD, and ordained Buddhist teacher to offer a body-based, practical approach to healing from life’s most difficult and painful experiences.

It’s not that she was offended—I think she was genuinely touched—she just had really strong feelings about flowers in vases. On a busy afternoon three pumps can be beeping in the same room at once, like a chorus of robotic babies who all need their diapers changed. More importantly, when we start to get symptoms, we tend to inadvertently accelerate the process until we are so sick we can stop dealing with all of the anxious decision-making and instead just be a patient. From their perspective, of course, flowers are nothing more than advertisements for bees and other pollinators. Poet Anthony Joseph lends eloquent righteousness to By Now (Accused of Magic), a percussive broadside in which Alex Hawkins’s piano trades off against Ross Harris’s flute.

Seeing these delicate yellow evening flowers spring open in the darkness awoke in me the realization that healing from trauma—the recovery from painful experiences so that we can flourish and grow—is both simple and miraculous, a process that will unfold naturally, when enough of the right conditions are there. Sister Dang Nghiem’s words make so much sense and she really does show that Buddhist concepts are relevant to the modern broken world.

It begins with the simple awareness of our breathing, and progresses through guided meditations into fully-grounded transformation and self-love. At eight o’clock, about ten of us gathered in the church garden around the long stems of a tall, slender plant, covered in drying, wilted yellow flowers. It’s probably safe to assume that Hutchings (who also records mononymously as Shabaka) is a key conduit of this expansive, collaborative record, a jazz-adjacent work with elements of improvisation featuring many Hutchings associates. I take a moment to look at the picture: A large ceramic vase, overflowing with white and pink flowers. I created Flowers In The Dark in part because when I first got sick, I couldn’t find any resources that could convince me I wasn’t going crazy.While the pain itself is unchanged, for a moment I’ve broken the conclusion that my whole body is engulfed. When you need them, blood transfusions are a kind of instant strength you can feel only because you’ve been so weak. At a deep level, we can always tap into our own embodied wisdom through practicing mindfulness in our daily lives, which brings about the deepest transformation and healing. As you develop the Five Strengths, even moderately, your mind begins to be freed from the negative energies, and compassion and understanding can flourish.

A bodhisattva is an ideal of a person who not only becomes enlightened for themselves, but also for others; they are an embodiment of compassion.Admittedly, I was not enthusiastic at the prospect since I was already quite tired after a long day at the retreat, but out of a sense of gratitude to our hosts, I still showed up.

When I woke from sleeping, there was that brief moment of re-remembering my shitty situation: Still in a hospital gown, still can’t eat. Everyone suffering from trauma has the capacity to heal within them, but they may not know it, and they may have obstacles to accessing their inner wisdom.One of the ways she healed was noting that in Vietnamese, the term 'soulmate' means to remember, to know, to take care of, to master one's own self. D speaks from a Buddhist perspective, none of these practices needs one to be Buddhist, or anything, one of the real strengths of the book. Sister Dang Nghiem, MD, ("Sister D") was born in 1968 in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive, the daughter of a Vietnamese mother and an American soldier. When it matters most—when someone we love needs our support—it seems most of us don’t know what to say.