Peter Winfield is an Army veteran who, after coping with PTSD, anxiety, and depression for many years, found healing through mindfulness, compassion, Reiki, and art. He is a mental health advocate, compassion ambassador, public speaker, writer, and soul retriever. Peter has a practical approach to healing through compassion, emphasizing its tougher but healing nature, especially for men. He practices compassion, meditation, Reiki, creative writing, and painting for healing and loves discussing their effectiveness in leading a meaningful life. Peter aims to share his approach to compassion and mindfulness for healing with others. MysticMag finds out more about Reiki Compassion Mindfulness.
Peter, how did your personal journey with trauma, anxiety, and depression lead you to explore practices such as compassion, Reiki, and mindfulness for healing?
I’d have to say, on reflection it was an intuitive or perhaps even a guided journey. This healing journey began while I was still a uniformed soldier, I had just returned from my first deployment to Bosnia during the height of that war. On my return I knew something was wrong and I sensed it more as a spiritual emptiness without really understanding what that meant. I only knew that modern medicine was not going to help. I studied homeopathy, Shiatsu and Reiki beginning in 1997.
After several more deployments that included Afghanistan and Libya and a diagnosis of severe depression and PTSD, I found that it was Reiki and Buddhist meditation and compassion that helped the most. Interestingly, and very closely linked, was also a passion for painting and writing.
I studied mindfulness at the University of Toronto, the 16 Guidelines from the Foundation for Developing Compassion and Wisdom, and during this time I completed my Reiki master training. I was then guided to study compassion which I did through the Compassion Institute and the Applied Compassion Training from Stanford University Medical School.
It’s been a long journey of discovery for me. I now recognize and accept that my injuries and traumas are physically real and challenging, but the healing they require comes from an inner journey. I’ve discovered that finding light in those dark places within us is possible through the energy of compassion. I understand now that energy is something tangible, something we can feel, experience, and even interact with. I’ve come to see that the energy of our inner life essentially has two shades: dark or light, heavy or light. Learning to translate that as anger and fear or love and compassion has been key for me.
Can you share how the practices of compassion, mindfulness, and creative expression have helped individuals navigate through trauma and foster post-traumatic growth?
I find that whatever practice I’m using always begins with mindfulness which is about being fully aware of the present moment experience, especially when that present moment is challenging. This begins with breathing. Then I move from there to kindness. Kindness, because compassion feels like such a big word and sometimes unavailable. Kindness is accessible and it is non-judgemental. For me, it’s a gentle way to give myself a break. To be creative, I need to ease my anxiety; otherwise, I feel totally buried in it and can’t really get my mind out of that dark place. So, being aware that I am feeling empty, lost, and dark is okay; it’s the place to start. I don’t judge that experience; I allow it to be and then move toward lightness and warmth from there.
Then kindness is a way to accept that darkness is part of my experience and to give myself a break. To remind myself that this feeling will pass and I often look at paintings I have already created to remind me of the good days I have.
When I help others through the difficult work of processing their experience of trauma, I focus less on the story of their trauma and more on the felt experience of it. For several reasons, first, I am not a psychologist, and second, people are often already consumed by their story to the point where they don’t feel what their body is trying to tell them, which is usually that it is hurting and what it needs most is to be cared for. Your body is trying to tell you what it needs. It’s not about the pain but about the absence of love and compassion.
So as humans we all want meaning and we want to know why something is happening. One of the ways I work with this is journaling with a purpose. Journaling using a map of the inner journey not unlike Joseph Campbell’s 17 step hero’s journey. I will use a short-guided practice and follow that with a prompt to write your own experience.
Post Trauma Growth (PTG) is interesting because it defines a condition of growth despite the experience of trauma but this growth is typically measured after the fact. I believe PTG can be taught and trained based on the five factors that define it; 1, Relating to Others, 2, New Possibilities 3, Personal Strength 4, Spiritual Change: 5, Appreciation of Life. PTG offers a way forward for those suffering from the experience of trauma and Mindfulness, compassion and kindness are the starting point for this inner growth.
What role does breathwork play in your approach to healing, and how does it contribute to mindfulness and emotional well-being?
Your breath only ever happens in the present moment. Any felt experience of your senses will work the same way but your breath seems to be the most accessible. Similarly energy which is subtle can only be experienced in the present moment. For me, connecting Reiki energy works the same and I use both breath and energy together to ground myself in the present moment. Grounding is a way of connecting your mind with your body in the present moment and the breath is the entry point to that experience.
This is one of the techniques I use if I am working with a client. I use a guided meditation to help them gently connect with their own breath and their own energy as I begin to bring Reiki energy in.
Could you elaborate on the concept of the “tough side” of compassion and how it differs from more traditional views of compassion?
This is an important point in my view. Compassion is not often discussed and when it is, it is confused with empathy. Compassion is much discussed but not always well understood. It is assumed to be soft, squishy and somehow related to love but the relationship isn’t clear for most people.
First, for compassion to be practiced, suffering must be present. Compassion calls us to be kind in the presence of suffering. That alone is difficult for anybody. Compassion also requires us to take some kind of action, to take action from a place of kindness while in the presence of suffering, really difficult. More difficult is that the action we must take is not always to fix the problem, but rather sit with and hold space for the suffering with a sense of kindness and non judgment. Most challenging for me is to practice this for myself, so self-compassion. When I am suffering, it feels more natural to act from a place of fear or anger rather than kindness. In terms of self-compassion, this might look like becoming aware of my anger in the moment it arises and then not acting on it but taking a step back, taking a few mindful breaths, and allowing the anger to be and then allowing it to pass before taking action. Following that, the action may take the form of me standing up for myself but now from a place of kindness, one that gives me permission to set boundaries and to say no when I need to.
As a mental health advocate and public speaker, how do you integrate your experiences and expertise in compassion, mindfulness, and Reiki into your workshops and presentations to support others in their healing journeys?
I encourage people to talk about their experiences and to embrace the idea of lived expertise. This is a way to help people step back from this need that we feel to be an expert or to sound like an expert to speak about an issue – mental health for example. The truth is you are an expert in your own experience, whatever that might be and that is the place you speak from, not what the research shows about such and such a condition but what your own personal felt experience of that condition.
That’s the starting point and often the main point I like to make: tell the story of my lived experience. The other thing I have to keep in mind is that everybody is at a different point in their healing journey, and it is important to meet them where they are. Some people aren’t ready to talk about their felt experience yet, and that is OK. Some people have done a lot of work and can talk about their experience and can move into deeper levels of that experience, what we might call spiritual experience or the deeper meaning of their experience.
If you would like to find out more about Peter Winfield, please visit https://peterwinfield.ca/
