I don't know for sure, really, how meditation works, since I learned from brain surgeons directly as a hospital chaplain on a neurosurgical unit that the brain's still largely a mystery, like the unmapped Pacific Ocean floor.  But the same week I got diagnosed with PTSD my therapist enrolled me in weekly meditation classes and they worked for me.

Just as the brain surgeons who asked me to bless their hands before operating said, trauma rewires the brain negatively, but so does meditation positively somehow.  Repeating good things in meditation reinforces the truth that in the brain "repetition brings mastery."  As the my meditation teachers put it, meditation brings peace to "monkey mind."  In my case "monkey mind" was that chattering mess of flashbacks that got wired into my brain as a missionary kid who survived that car bombing overseas at age 9.

I wasn't a natural at meditation, because as a hospital chaplain I'm an ordained Christian minister and the meditation classes my therapist put me in came from a Buddhist tradition.  I didn't have to convert, though, to get what I needed out of them for my PTSD recovery.

The main thing was called "tonglen," which actually describes what we do here at DS PTSD supporting each other.  Check it out. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonglen#:~:text=Tonglen%20(Tibetan%3A%20%E0%BD%82%E0%BD%8F%E0%BD%BC%E0%BD%84%E0%BC%8B%E0%BD%A3%E0%BD%BA%E0%BD%93,practice%20found%20in%20Tibetan%20Buddhism.&text=Tonglen%20is%20also%20known%20as,under%20Relative%20Bodhichitta%2C%20in%20Lojong.

"In the practice, one exchanges the self with other, sending and taking should be practiced alternately. These two should ride the breath. As such it is a training in altruism.^[6]

The function of the practice is to:

• reduce selfish attachment


• increase a sense of renunciation^[2]


• purify karma by giving and helping^[2]


• develop and expand loving-kindness^[2][6]

The practice of Tonglen involves all of the Six Perfections;^[2] giving, ethics, patience, joyous effort, concentration and wisdom."

I especially like that "expand loving-kindness" part.  I'd never heard of love and kindness combined into one word like that before.  In my meditation class they actually taught me that was the kind of meditation their tradition was all about.  They taught me this meditation I used later 20 times a day between hospital chaplain visits to my 20 patients in beds on my unit.

"May I be filled with lovindkindness, may I be well, may I be peaceful and at ease, may I be happy."

Then after starting with that mindful sentence as self care, I 'd go on to substitute the name of someone else where I'd said "I" before.  

Like I said above, I don't know how it really worked, but it did.  Thought I'd share it with anybody else here who got a meditation recommendation from their pdoc for their PTSD recovery like I did.  I didn't know how to get started until I was given this lovingkindess meditation for this "tonglen" work, so I thought I'd pass it along.

May you be filled with lovingkindness today, amigos.