In my recent Buddhadharma article, Why Meditation Alone Can’t Heal Every Wound, I explored a question many long-term practitioners quietly carry:
How can authentic awakening coexist with unresolved harm — to oneself and to others?
In a more personal way, I took this question further in a recent sixteen-minute talk, where I shared parts of my own story: twenty-eight years as a Buddhist nun, decades of intensive meditation, and long stretches of life where, for months at a time, I’d lost the will to live.
Not because meditation failed. But because meditation alone was not designed to heal everything that was asking for care.
What emerged from that inquiry — and from lived necessity — was what I have dubbed the Integrated Meditation Program (IMP).
IMP works. Here’s how, and why it matters.
Awakening Is Not the Same as Wholeness
Meditation cultivates awareness, insight, and freedom from identification. These capacities are real and precious.
But meditation does not automatically resolve:
- trauma held in the nervous system
- attachment patterns formed in early relationship
- narcissistic wounding—the painful sense of deficiency that arises when we lose contact with our essential being
In my own life, meditation brought genuine realization. And still, something essential remained unhealed.
This is not due to a failure of the dharma, but a mismatch of tools.
We often assume that if we practice deeply enough, that which hurts will eventually dissolve. For many people, that assumption leads not to freedom, but to quiet despair, self-blame, or prolonged suffering.
What Actually Needed Healing
Looking back at my own experience, I see that three domains required different kinds of support:
Trauma
When shock or overwhelm flooded my system, meditation was not accessible. I would go into freeze, becoming numb and immobile, as if life itself had suddenly pulled back. Awareness alone could not regulate a nervous system caught in survival.
Attachment wounding
When community fractured and belonging was lost, I felt as though I had been cast out into outer space, with no mothership to return to. I could not reliably locate myself internally. Insight did not replace the need for safety, attunement, and being met where I was — in relationship.
A deeper emptiness
Beneath both trauma and attachment wounding was something more subtle and more frightening: an excruciating sense of deficiency — not because something was wrong with me, but because something essential had been left behind.
As A.H. Almaas describes, ordinary narcissism is not a disorder. It arises from an impossible early choice. To survive, we must maintain connection with those who care for us. When that connection requires abandoning our deeper source — our own immediacy of being — we comply. We survive. And in doing so, we leave something fundamental behind.
What remains is a painful deficient emptiness — the feeling that something essential is missing. Many meditators know this feeling intimately, even if they have never named it.
For years, I tried to let awakening resolve all of these forms of pain. I could touch vastness, clarity, even freedom, and still wake up in the morning with my jaw and my pelvic floor clenched, my body bracing against life while my soul felt hollow and alone.
What changed everything was not facing this emptiness directly, but shifting my attachment baseline first.
As relational safety stabilized — as I internalized safety, attunement, comfort, delight, and encouragement — something fundamental shifted. I had known long stretches when the belief that something was wrong with me fell away. But it always returned. Now, for the first time, it stopped coming back. I could locate myself inside myself rather than only through connection, approval, or belonging. For the first time, I could feel fear, grief, or longing without hardening against it.
From that new ground, it became possible to turn toward that deficient emptiness without collapsing, dissociating, distracting, or reaching for compensatory strategies.
And when it was finally met — not resisted, transcended, or analyzed — it transformed.
What had felt like a terrifying absence revealed itself as spacious awareness itself. The immediacy of my own being. Not something to fix, but something to recognize.
That was the profound homecoming. It was not the end of all pain, but it was the return of my own being as a place I could stand.
What the Integrated Meditation Program Actually Does
The Integrated Meditation Program does not treat trauma or narcissistic wounding directly.
What it does is foundational.
IMP restores the relational ground required for deeper healing — and for meditation itself — to function.
IMP focuses on shifting the attachment baseline by front-loading experiences rich in five qualities:
- safety
- attunement
- comfort
- delight
- encouragement
These qualities matter because their absence — or inconsistency — is how insecure attachment patterns form in the first place.
The structure of the Integrated Meditation Program is informed by attachment research and clinical models of secure functioning, particularly the work of Daniel P. Brown and David S. Elliott as presented in Attachment Disturbances in Adults: Treatment for Comprehensive Repair (2016). This material is now taught through the Integrated Attachment Therapy Institute, which trains clinicians internationally in attachment repair. Those five qualities that IMP emphasizes — safety, attunement, comfort, delight, and encouragement — are drawn directly from this body of work, as are the “three interlocking pillars” of the IMP program:.
- Collaboration
Authority is shared rather than centralized. Participants are invited into choice, voice, and agency.
This directly counteracts compliance-based survival strategies and restores a sense of internal authorship. People begin to feel with the process rather than under it.
- Mentalization
Mentalization is the capacity to think about thinking — to reflect on one’s own inner states and the inner states of others with curiosity rather than certainty or self-blame.
As mentalization capacity grows:
- rigid interpretations soften
- more choices become visible
- people can distinguish past conditioning from present reality
This alone reduces reactivity and increases resilience.
- Ideal Parent Figure
IMP uses imagination skillfully to enhance access to relational experience.
Through Ideal Parent Figure or Ideal Support Figure imagery, participants cultivate felt experiences of being:
- safe
- met where they are
- comforted
- delighted in
- encouraged
Over time, these experiences become richer, more accessible, and more reliable.
Together, the three pillars and five qualities support neuroplasticity in the nervous system. This allows attachment patterns to reorganize around the presence of safety, attunement, comfort, delight, and encouragement rather than their absence. From that new ground, meditation can deepen — not through effort, but because the system finally releases what was preventing it from accurately tracking what is happening and staying present.
When this happens, something crucial shifts. People stop trying to meditate through insecurity and begin practicing from internal support.
According to research by Kathy Kain and Stephen Terrell in Nurturing Resilience: Helping Clients Move Forward from Developmental Trauma (North Atlantic Books, 2018), dysregulated attachment patterns impact interoception—our ability to accurately feel and interpret what’s happening in our bodies. When nervous systems are organized around threat detection, people become extra alert to signals of danger while missing neutral or positive feelings, and may appear calm while actually being anxious (what Kain and Terrell call a “faux window of tolerance”).
Emerging evidence from our own program evaluation supports this pattern. In our Cohort 1 evaluation — a mixed quantitative and qualitative assessment of the first IMP cohort — 73% of participants showed a significant increase in mindfulness scores, including many people who had decades of meditation experience. This suggests that when attachment patterns begin to repair, moment-to-moment tracking becomes more accurate and stable. In other words, meditation doesn’t deepen because the technique changes — it deepens because the foundation from which people practice has shifted. (For more detail on the design, methods, and findings of the IMP evaluation, see awakeningtruth.org/blog/imp-research-blog/.)
Attachment repair does not resolve trauma or this deeper existential wound directly — but it provides the relational and nervous system capacity required for that doorway to be faced and crossed.
IMP is not designed to replace psychotherapy, and it does not provide trauma treatment. Participants are asked to work with a therapist or other qualified clinical support to manage trauma activation or states outside the window of tolerance should these arise, so the relational and contemplative work of the program can remain safe and appropriate.
Just as important, IMP is held in a relational structure that does not end when formal sessions end. Alongside guided teaching, participants practice being in mutual, non-hierarchical relationship with one another — learning how to stay present, speak honestly, and receive attuned, non-judgmental witness without collapse, self-erasure, or dominance.
For many, this experience of being seen and held in awareness — without fixing, interpreting, or being managed — opens forms of insight that are not available in isolation. It creates a lived sense of safety and recognition from which belonging naturally arises. In many cases, these peer relationships continue well beyond the formal container of the program, becoming ongoing sources of support and clarity.
Why This Matters Now
As Lion’s Roar and others have reported, spiritual abuse and institutional harm are not rare exceptions. They are systemic patterns.
What is less often addressed is what comes after people leave.
At survivor gatherings, I repeatedly hear the same story: loss of community, loss of identity, loss of meaning — and months or years where life feels unlivable.
Understanding what happened helps. But understanding does not heal the nervous system or restore a sense of home. And this need goes far beyond survivors of spiritual abuse.
Trauma is widespread. Large studies show that most adults have lived through at least one significant childhood adversity that left a mark on the nervous system.
Alongside trauma is another, quieter layer of suffering that A.H. Almaas describes as nearly universal: narcissistic wounding — a developmental loss of contact with our essential being that arises in early relationship. This is not a disorder. It arises from the ordinary compromises nearly all of us had to make as children to stay connected to those who cared for us, often at the cost of losing touch with something true and alive inside.
There is also attachment. While many people develop secure attachment, a significant portion of adults carry insecure attachment patterns — not because something is wrong with them, but because their early environments could not consistently provide safety, attunement, comfort, delight, and encouragement.
You can’t do contemplative practice in a vacuum separate from what you have lived through. The wounds come with you onto the cushion. They shape how you practice, what you can access, and whether awakening becomes livable ground or just glimpses you can’t sustain.
The Integrated Meditation Program was created for people whose path requires more than insight alone. When trauma, attachment patterns, or early loss shape the nervous system, meditation needs a relational and developmental foundation to become stable and livable.
By honoring meditation alongside the realities of trauma, attachment, and human development, IMP offers a way for awakening to take root in the body and in daily life — not just as glimpses, but as ground.
Coming Home
In my own life, when the attachment ground finally stabilized, something profound shifted.
The will to live returned — not through effort, but through safety and meaning, as if something inside finally exhaled.
In my own case, it was only after I had left, disrobed as a nun, and done substantial attachment work that I could fully see the extent of the harm that had taken place in the community where I had given so much of my life. Once there was enough inner stability, the need for connection, belonging, and identity within a lineage no longer obscured what was happening.
And finally, the work I had been holding myself together to complete… completed itself.
IMP was created to support others in this return.
It is not a replacement for the dharma. IMP focuses on what most contemplative paths do not explicitly address: attachment repair. By establishing relational safety and security, it creates the foundation needed to address trauma and narcissistic wounding. When attachment stabilizes, the deeper work becomes possible — and awakening can shift from glimpse to ground.
Imagine: what becomes possible when more of us can rest in that ground? When wisdom and wholeness meet not just on the cushion, but in our communities, our relationships, our world?
Awakening matters. Wholeness matters too. And when they unfold together, something shifts. What you could only glimpse becomes where you live. The meditation that once required such effort becomes refuge. That possibility isn’t just for the few — it’s available to all of us willing to do the work.
If you’re curious about the Integrated Meditation Program, you can learn more at awakeningtruth.org.
