All the techniques that really work are simple. The difficulty comes in getting past the resistance needed to actually apply them. Meditation can take a million forms, but the essence is to engage an observer to watch what takes place in the experimental field of you. I’ve been meditating for years and often lack the discipline to disengage from my thoughts, let them go and observe them. I have the discipline needed to sit, that I do every day, but WHAT I do while I’m sitting there meditating is another story. I’m the one that comes out of a meditation retreat with a detailed game plan for the next three years that “came to me” while I was “meditating”.
It’s true that some benefit does come from just the sitting, from the showing up, but it is not the same as letting go of the story and letting it just move by. Apparently, I love the movies in my head, although most of the time they are nightmares, and all of the time they control me rather than the other way around. I am unwillingly thinking and dreaming and plotting and planning. It’s happening not because I am choosing or creating it, but simply because I am not really stopping it. It’s like breathing, I can change the rhythm, I can make mild adjustments, but the breathing is being done, it will happen no matter where or how I am, even if I am unconscious.
Once time during a silent meditation retreat, I managed for one blissful forty-minute period to let every single thought pass by, to stay empty and not get embroiled in plotlines. It was weirdly effortless; I just didn’t go into the thoughts, I stayed where I was, aware of being the observer. It was magical, joyful and I thought that it was the new world order. Until the next session started, and I realized that I was right back in the same place as usual, getting lost, realizing I was lost, coming back to the witness briefly, and getting lost again, seemingly into eternity. I have no idea where the grace for that one thoughtless period came from – likely the gods were sick of my shit and wanted to give me a taste of what it would be like if I were able to cut it out and stop giving in as incentive. Sorry. Not today, gods.
So, I’m not telling you all of this to depress you. I know that my compulsive thinking has everything to do with some unresolved traumas in my system, which have created endlessly repeating loops in my hardware. I know that I think so that I don’t have to feel. All of us do. All of us have a mass of unresolved emotional content that has congealed in the core of our being. That content feels dangerous, it makes us feel out of control, overwhelmed, and incapable of dealing. We believe that if we were to feel THAT set of feelings (whatever they may be – shame, fear, abandonment…) that we would literally get swallowed up and annihilated by them. So, it’s a kind of self-preservation that we don’t.
Thinking is one of the many mechanisms that ensure that we don’t go anywhere near that particular Pandora’s Box. There are many more of these little beauties whose sole role is to bring energy right out of the vicinity of that locked box and focus everything on something OUT THERE; eating is a big one (you know how when you start to feel the nagging of some foggy negative emotion beckoning from the depths and suddenly chips are the only thing that matters. You must have chips and chocolate and NOW please) as is the internet (feeling bad? Start scrolling Facebook – cute kitties! Funny videos! The possibility to compare your life with so many others and either feel morbidly defeated or unrealistically victorious!) but there are many, many more - compulsive doing (Who has time for feeling? Tick off that to-do list!) shopping (oooh, but look, I felt bad before, but now I got this skirt!) TV, sex, smoking, drinking…
The deal is that all of these compulsions have power because they take you away from what, to your subconscious, feels like it will kill you. That is why they exist, and that is why you give in to them.
And the energy that is lost in this constant, compulsive movement away from these cores is considerable. It is considerable and it would undoubtedly be better used almost anywhere else.
There is another way to meditate that for me works much more efficiently than the trying-to-stop-thinking-for-sixty-minutes-per-day method, a way which both strengthens the alliance with this observer in me, and which allows me to strengthen my capacity to face whatever-it-might-be in that locked box that is holding my life hostage and causing so much compulsion. It’s simple, yet deep, and completely revolutionary.
It is to allot time in the day to feel.
To do this when you think that you aren’t feeling much, as well as when you think you are feeling way too much.
Let’s imagine my Achille’s heel is jealousy, that when I become jealous, I lose control and it feels unbearable, I lash out, do things I regret, and create suffering for myself and others. Instead of focusing on detaching myself from jealousy, as seeing it as not real, a transitory emotion that I should let go of (also, good luck with that when you’ve just seen your lover flirting with someone else) there is no way to ignore it, the only options that exist are – distract yourself, or feel it.
The reason that these cores of feeling are so threatening to us is because they are the putrefied residue of childhood panic. Children don’t have the structure to be able to process and assimilate strong negative emotions without support and in order to survive, create an elaborate vault in which to lock these feelings and a whole set of booby traps to ensure no one ever comes near their hiding place again. These emotions were experienced by a being who was in development, who had not yet acquired the cognitive capacity to frame and organize the events that caused their suffering and had virtually no defenses. The feeling that we cannot handle a certain emotion is an ancient and untrue one. We couldn’t. Not then. But we can now.
The thing is; bearing feeling is a skill. It is something that we as adults have the ability to cultivate in the same way that we can cultivate the silent witness. And the trick is that the two are intertwined. The witness can get washed away by the threat of these too-much feelings; the set trap springs, the alarm goes off and our hero, the silent observer of the wonderous field that is you, gets tripped up in the wires and listens to the alarm, believing in its urgency. When we can, in parallel, and with the observer’s supervision, crack the box open and let loose its content, both observer and nervous system start to understand that the content is manageable. It will not end us. It’s not pleasant, but we are stronger than we knew, and we can deal with it.
So, what does this look like in practice?
In an act of total rebellion, I could meditate on my jealousy. I could feel it and all the echoes it creates in my system, all the feelings and sensations it generates. I could observe it like a curious onlooker trying to understand a rare beast. I could breathe it in, let it fill me up and learn about what it is.
The same way that you would sit and cultivate the witness, you would sit (ooooh, or even lay down) and focus on feeling. The body is full of mysteries. We are aware of a small fraction of what is happening with us in terms of sensation, in terms of feeling, and the idea would be for us to turn the eye inward and focus on what is alive there. We can do this with all kinds of feelings; with emotions and with sensations. As we learn the link between both (fear, for example, creates a specific set of sensations in the body, maybe the chest tightens, the stomach churns, the breath shortens) whatever it is that you are feeling, you would just remain fascinated by it, watching it, feeling it, and allowing it to change. We deepen our capacity to feel as well as to remain present for the feeling.
Not only this, but we open ourselves to the possibility of learning something about ourselves. Something primal and essential, something about the way we work, the way our bodies process information and about the way we are made. There are fossils in our depths, imprints in our emotional landscape that act, that hold energy, that create contraction, but which are un-thought. It is almost better to say that they are pre-thought, and no amount of analysis or talking will bring them to the surface. The only way to access them and the precious content they hold is through feeling them. The only way to allow the content to thaw out, to change, and the energy locked in it to become available again is by feeling it.
Thinking is always temporal; either re-hashing something that happened in the past or imagining something that you can do in the future – feeling, on the other hand anchors you here and now, which is the ultimate aim of meditation.