Building Resilience, Healing Trauma, October 22 – 24, 2021

Building Resilience, Healing Trauma

With Lynn Fraser

October 22 – 24, 2021

Lynn Fraser conducted this three-part workshop from her home in Nova Scotia via Zoom. She had been connected with the Krishnamurti Centre through her assistance in Scott Kiloby’s workshops prior to the pandemic and she brought back some of his mindfulness skills and practices in working with our conditionings. She added her own refinements with a lovely style and presence while teaching us resources effective in being with challenging feelings and mental states in ourselves.

Each session was about 1 ½ hours in length and was attended by between twenty and twenty-five people. Each presentation began with the sharing of a number of concepts essential to the understanding of healing Lynn wanted to communicate to us. We then moved into some experiential exercises designed to ground us in the resilience and embodiment of our basic goodness and well-being. From this groundedness we can care for ourselves in a kind and compassionate way that has the capacity to heal our wounds from the past and to bring us to a fuller living in the present moment. The exercises involved consciously working with our breathing, body scanning, and a mindful listening and sharing of experiences. The intended effect of this inner focus and inquiry was to create a sense of safety and connection with ourselves and others along with a sensitive awareness of our inner life and our relationships.

We were invited to notice our varying states of anxiety or ease as the weekend progressed and we explored the reactions of our nervous systems to the questions and meditations we were engaged with by Lynn and by the sharings from the group members. We were in a process of learning about ourselves and trusting ourselves more deeply. And Lynn shared a number of “emergency” techniques for being present with intense experiences that might arise during our journey towards a more and more consistently stable sense of Being and inner peace. Some of the techniques served as a review of those taught by Scott in his times with us.

The three sessions were a rich journey through our inner worlds and our ways of interacting with the world around us. It seemed that most of us felt nourished and supported by such a time of looking into ourselves, listening to the “truths” of our inner life, and sharing with a group of seekers committed to the same journey of self-knowledge.