VIDEO: The Impact of Mindfulness Meditation on Female Soldiers
In her interview with PsychAlive Senior Editor Lisa Firestone, Dr. Donna Rockwell talks about the impact of mindfulness meditation on female soldiers dealing with being assaulted by fellow soldiers.
Lisa Firestone: One of the groups that they brought on stage at this conference was soldiers with PTSD from various things. This woman soldier had been assaulted by a fellow soldier, which is very common, unfortunately the most common injury for women in the military at the moment.
But they’re all talking about how mindfulness got their life back. They’d been given medications, or they were self-medicating with alcohol prior to that. And it wasn’t working. The nightmares were getting worse. And it seemed like when they each got involved with different mindfulness programs, they really had a big impact.
Donna Rockwell: Because it creates space. You know, our minds are so cluttered with thought after thought after thought after thought, there’s no way. And this capacity that we can develop to come back to the here and now, when nothing’s actually happening. We create so much more space.
And if you think about it, if you spend every moment of every day saying, “What should I do? What should I do? What should I do?” you’re never going to figure out what to do. But when you can have this sort of stillness, coming back from, and being with the breath, there’s actually a chance of figuring out what to do.
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