Mindful Grounding and Trauma (Doctoral Dissertation)

Dr. Garbis J. Bartanian, LMFT earned his Doctorate in Buddhist Ministry from the University of the West in 2019. His dissertation, titled “Mindful Grounding and Trauma,” offers a refreshingly candid and critical look at how mindfulness is taught today in secular settings, including the world of therapy.

His dissertation (link provided above) sheds light on the benefits of teaching mindfulness in its fuller capacity, as it appears in the Buddhist Pali Canon, while showing us the damage that is caused when mindfulness is removed from its original context of the three-fold Trainings of ethics, meditation, and discernment (sīla, samādhi, paññā).

He explains how teaching or using mindfulness by removing it from the rest of the Buddha’s Teachings is like trying to follow a complex recipe by only including one ingredient, while ignoring the other crucial ones. Hence, what is offered to modern audiences today as “mindfulness,” without its ethical backbone for example, is doomed to failure, presenting us with a version that is at best impoverished if not misrepresented.

Dr. Bartanian's research puts these insights into actual practice where, in addition to being a seasoned meditator and a meditation teacher (at the time of writing his thesis functioning as a mental health practitioner), seeing the lack of success in treating his patients while using traditional mindfulness techniques as taught in current therapeutic settings and MFT programs, he designed a mindfulness-based intervention called Mindful Grounding (MG). The technique incorporates core principles of the Dhamma in order to help patients achieve not only lasting relief from mental/emotional distress, as they face a life strewn with trauma, but also gain a deeper understanding and wisdom because of, and through the trauma itself.

Thus, the MG was developed to address the unique symptoms of those patients, who had not responded to other interventions such as mindfulness of breath and body-sensation, belly-breathing, sand tray, art activities, and play therapy, to name a few. However, using this intervention does not necessitate one to have gone through trauma, given that it has shown its effectiveness within clinical settings, in addressing numerous other behavioral, cognitive, and emotional challenges faced by individual patients, as well as their families.