The alternative is Black Buddhist Meditation---Only the praxis of dharma offers a path to heal racialized trauma that transcends generations, transforming stored physical and psychological pain into resilience and liberation

Trauma Stored in the Body: Black Radical thinkers, as ancestors and elders who promoted psychological Practices Psychotherapist Resmaa Menakem, in his book My Grandmother’s Hands, notes the wide array of physical illnesses that result from racialized intergenerational trauma: As many researchers now believe, the ongoing violations of the Black body and heart have resulted in widespread trauma. This racialized trauma shows up as an array of adaptive but dysfunctional behaviors, including hypervigilance, heightened anxiety and suspicion, ADD/ADHD, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and addiction. It can also appear as dysfunctional and non-adaptive behavior such as disordered thinking, difficulty concentrating, panic attacks, learned helplessness, self-hatred, hopelessness, depression, and a survival reflex that tends to involve violence. As Joy DeGruy and others have noted, all of these are common symptoms of a pervasive and persistent stress disorder. In many African American bodies, this trauma has led to a variety of physical problems, the most common of which are high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, compromised immune systems, heart problems, digestive disorders, chronic inflammation, and musculoskeletal disorders. . . . For anyone to genuinely address these health issues, the person needs to address the trauma that fuels them. Without that foundational healing, all other healing becomes difficult or impossible, because the body is still stuck in the trauma. 90

A plethora of research illuminates how trauma becomes stored in the body. Several influential studies detailed by psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk in his book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma demonstrate that after traumatic experiences, bodies reexperience terror, rage, helplessness, and the urge to fight or take flight. 91 Van der Kolk notes that all trauma is preverbal and therefore is akin to the experience of a stroke when it is difficult to speak. He notes that the brain captures images that return as nightmares and flashbacks. Unprocessed sense fragments from the traumatic experience—such as sounds, smells, physical sensations— register separately from the story itself. Time, then, does not matter: the trauma can be experienced one day as if it had happened the prior day, even if the actual experience took place in the previous decade.

Van der Kolk’s research shows that images of past trauma activate the right side of the brain and deactivate the left. The right side of the brain, colloquially known as the “emotional brain,” develops first in the womb: it carries memories of touch, sound, smell, and even intuition. It is associated with art, visual images, spatial understanding, and tactile movements, what van der Kolk refers to as “the music of experience.”92 The left side of the brain, conversely, is associated with remembering facts, statistics, vocabulary, sequencing, and executive functioning. It is denoted as the “rational brain,” logical, analytical, able to name, compare, understand, communicate subjective experience. 93 When the left brain is deactivated and the right brain is activated, the right brain acts as if the traumatic event were happening in the moment. Van der Kolk’s research demonstrates that trauma causes the left, rational brain to deactivate and the right, emotional brain to become highly activated.

When the right brain is activated by trauma and relives traumatic experiences as if they were happening in the moment, the body responds by increasing its production of adrenaline—“fight or flight” stress hormones that are present in the body to help individuals respond to danger and threat. This increase in adrenaline results in attention problems, irritability, sleep disorders, and long-term health issues that are sometimes called “underlying conditions.” Much of the body’s energy focuses on suppressing inner chaos in the aftermath of trauma.

Not only do individuals store trauma in their bodies, thus resulting in physical ailments and suppressed capacity for joy, but biological studies show that trauma is passed on to subsequent generations through changes in the brain, the maternal egg, and the paternal sperm. This passing of intergenerational trauma, known as “transgenerational epigenetic inheritance,” is seen in both biological changes as well as behavioral shifts of offspring.

Increasingly, publications by Black Buddhist teachers are identifying the impact of intergenerational trauma on Black people’s nervous systems. Gyozan Royce Andrew Johnson writes, “I learned that healing through meditation was as much about the central nervous system as it was about the mind. I understand now that the two are not separate.”94 Cheryl Giles, coeditor of the 2020 volume Black and Buddhist: What Buddhism Can Teach Us about Race, Resilience, Transformation, and Freedom, writes of the experiences of sexual violence enacted against Black women and the practice of taking refuge, particularly in meditating and calling on ancestors: We know trauma lives in the body. We carry it every day. Trauma cannot be buried, ignored, pushed aside, or denied. As long as we breathe, trauma reminds us it is with us and rises to the surface. Transforming trauma means being willing to address it in our lives. Developing a daily practice helps us to be with whatever comes up and not shut down. . . . By learning to sit with discomfort, you develop an ability to be with whatever feelings, sensations, and thoughts arise within the body with presence and the courage to be with yourself just as you are in each moment. 95

Order of Interbeing teacher Larry Ward also acknowledges the importance of healing embodied trauma. He writes in his 2020 book America’s Racial Karma, “Our bodies hold the retribution energies of America’s racial karma. No one escapes this fear and trembling deep in our bones. Whether we were or are victims, perpetrators, or witnesses, we are unavoidably biologically destabilized and dysregulated by our sensory experience or the memories of America’s racial karma.”96

Indeed, a plethora of research illuminates how traumatic experiences change the hormones and cells in the body and are subsequently passed down through cells—the maternal egg and the paternal sperm—to future generations. A body of scientific research that originated in cell biology and is now known as “epigenetics” illuminates that stress inherited from fathers and mothers through DNA is still present in the hormonal reactions of descendants three generations later. 97 Psychologist Mark Wollyn explains, “When your grandmother was five months pregnant with your mother, the precursor cell of the egg you developed from was already present in your mother’s ovaries. This means that before your mother was even born, your mother, your grandmother, and the earliest traces of you were all in the same body—three generations sharing the same biological environment.”98

While the mother’s placenta nourishes the fetus, she also releases hormones and information signals generated by her feelings. These chemicals activate cells that, in turn, change not only the mother’s body but also her fetus’s. Wollyn writes that chronic responses to the environment, such as repeated anger and fear, can imprint her child, essentially preparing or “preprogramming” how the child will adapt to its environment. Stress hormones experienced by the mother can also trigger “fight or flight” mode in the fetus. Thus a child who has experienced a stressful in utero environment can become reactive in a similarly stressful situation. 99

Of each person’s DNA, 98 percent is called “noncoding DNA.” The emotional, behavioral, and personality traits that human beings inherit from their parents and grandparents as well as responses to environmental toxins and poor nutrition are found in noncoding DNA. Scientists note that the cellular-level changes passed through generations help people to meet challenges and copy with traumas. However, the changes to DNA also impact a child’s sensitive reaction to seemingly innocuous events and could predispose a child to stress-related diseases. In short, the external environment impacts the internal environment, leading to gene changes and varying reactions to stress over generations.

Studies on gene changes in mice have been particularly informative: newborn mice who are separated from their mothers encode DNA changes that are apparent in their offspring three generations later: the egg and sperm cells, as well as the brains, were impacted by the stress of being separated.100 Similar stress patterns were observed with rats who received low levels of maternal care: they were anxious and more reactive to stress in adulthood than rats who received high levels of maternal care. Other studies have shown that even when DNA changes—such as high sensitivity to stress or sound—are not present, offspring exhibit the same behavioral challenges are their parents. Changes in DNA as well as behavior are, together, known as “transgenerational epigenetic inheritance.”

Practicing dharma teachings facilitates healing neural pathways that are ingrained as a result of intergenerational trauma. Ward illustrates how a ramped-up nervous system leads to debilitating illnesses and proposes that Black people cultivate awareness of their bodies. Notice in yourself how the racial hierarchy has affected you and your nervous system. Observe not only your thoughts, but also, how your body has been responding. Have you noticed your own hypervigilance? Have you noticed your own fatigue? Have you noticed your own sense of overwhelm, or panic, or even hopelessness? All these issues, feelings, and sensations rise in us, but shame also rises in us. It’s the shame of not being valued as a human being. It’s the shame of the experience of not being worthy of love. This is our work, this is my work as an elder in my community, to witness and transform our collective experience of the pain of the last five hundred years, so that it will no longer continue to be transmitted.101

Indeed, the impact of intergenerational trauma is multifold. And yet psychologists, psychiatrists, and Black dharma teachers—including those who are particularly attuned to the intergenerational traumas experienced by people of African descent whose ancestors were enslaved—remain hopeful. Ward states directly, “We are blessed with a brain and nervous system that possess qualities of neuroplasticity: the ability for the brain’s neurons to learn, adapt, and change, and we thus always have an opportunity to nourish the aspects of our consciousness that are joyful, wise, and free.”102 Ward and other scholars point to various studies that have shown that trauma symptoms can be reversed. For example, mice who live in low-stress environments as adults can experience a reverse in childhood traumatized symptoms. 103 In short, studies show that it is possible to change the patterns in the brain—to cultivate new pathways for healing. Buddhist and secular practitioners of mindfulness agree that the dharma offers a roadmap for understanding the roots of suffering and working mindfully with the body to calm the “emotional brain,” also known as “the limbic system.”104

Van der Kolk writes that the body is the seat of pleasure, purpose, and direction. 105 Indeed, Ward and other Black Buddhist teachers identify embodied practices—including ancestral devotions, connecting with nature, practicing yoga, walking, and dancing—as helpful for moving trauma through the body. Not least, Black Buddhist teachers practice the dharma as a method for healing intergenerational trauma and living into liberation.