Meditation Is Not Concentrating or subduing the mind

Meditation Is not Concentration

Meditation is usually taught as concentrating our awareness on one thing to subdue the mind. For me this is of no use and not what meditation is about. Tiger Woods has put as many hours as anyone into this kind of practice, and he is still trapped in his mind.

Rather than concentrating on one thing, we need to learn to develop a more spacious, softer awareness, that allows more than one thing to be here. This is the beginning of learning kindness.

Meditation Is Not Subduing the Mind

Also, meditation is not about subduing the mind. We dont want to subdue the mind. We actually want to expand our awareness to include the mind This is the beginning of learning to listen.

I Sit Eyes Open, Heart Open

When I sit in Meditation, I have my eyes open. Because I want to learn to see. I have my ears open, because I want to learn to listen. I am open to all bodily sensations, beause I want to learn to connect. I am open to all thoughts, because I want to learn the truth. I am open to all emotions, because I want to learn compassion

Vision

With my eyes I let my focus fall on one spot. Then without moving my eyes I allow another spot to be here too. Then another, until I get a 3D type awareness, where everything I see is equally here.

Hearing

With hearing, I open in the same way to sound, letting them all in. This becomes a sea of sound explosions I feel right through me.

Bodily Sensations

With body sensations I do the same. This has been a great teacher for me. If I sit for long periods, I can experience a lot of physical pain. I have found that if I focus on the pain, or try and focus on another spot that isn’t in pain, I end up being a battle, & the pain becomes unbearable. If, however, I soften my physical awareness out, & let all bodily sensations to be here at once, something strange can happen.The pain in an instant becomes just one of many sensations, & reduces by 80%. I have sat for days on long meditation retreats, having relaxed into this place, & sat comfortably and spaciously with my pain, aware that other people around me were writhing in theirs.

Thoughts

If I find myself caught up in thoughts, I just come back to being aware. No concentration or fuss. I sometimes will remember as many thoughts as I can at this point. I developed this until I could easily go back over 20 or 30 minutes of thoughts. What I discovered was that my trains of thought were very repetitive, & generally a load of meandering rubbish. This really helped in my mind losing its power & authority, slowing down & stopping. Then I began to discover what happens when the mind loses its power, slows down & stops. Which led me to learn why my mind was constantly chattering on in the first place..to keep my subconscious emotions buried.

Emotions

Which leads to emotion I let them all here too. This means they are allowed to express themselves. Becoming overwhelmed by your emotions is natural & fine. Its the nature of emotions. In doing this for 30 years I have learnt a startling fact. Distressing emotions are nothing to be scared of. In fact they are allowable and lovable

Meditation Is Being Overwhelmed By Emotions

Meditation Is Not Concentrating or Subduing The mindOne is usually taught by meditation teachers to learn to view emotions dispassionately, to just let them be here without clinging, acting from them or pushing them away. To develop the “observer”. I actually find this teaches suppression.The nature of emotions is to be uncontrolled, to express, to overwhelm me. To feel like they are who I am at the core of my being. Allowing myself to be an emotional child, to be totally overwhelmed by hugely painful emotions 1000`s of times, has been how I leaned kindness & compassion. After all, who wants controlled laughter?

Beginners Compassion Class

For me there is no way round our inner emotions in finding these emotions we find an inner child. A child we have locked up,, thrown away the key & forgotten about. Learning to love & let out the child we have locked inside is beginners compassion class. Isn’t it time we opened our hearts to ourselves.

Mindfulness & the Emotions – a 30 year journey on the road less travelled

The Traditional Way Doesn’t Work for Me

From what I’ve seen the  way of mindfulness tends to not deal with our subconscious emotions, with our childhoods, with childhood conditioning & trauma.

Spiritual  teachers mostly don’t talk about it much, if at all. They are mostly not trained in the emotional world, unless they have studied psychotherapy or clinical psychology. Even then their personal experience seems on the whole to be very limited. Strange, in the light of what happened to me…

mindfulness & emotionsMy Way That Worked For Me

In my mindfulness practice my emotions have come out in a total and uncontrolled way as my unconditional awareness has grown. As of course they will if one’s unconditional awareness grows.

So my practice is/was very different from the Buddhists etc. How? By making my practice the unconditional allowing into awareness of everything that’s there, without control. For real. What does this mean though in real life?

I was lucky enough to do mindfulness in a very open pure way, & with no spiritual ‘teachers’ or anyone else ‘spiritual’ around. I practiced hard alone. So I didn’t get any of the “teaching” that spiritual teachers spout forth. So off I went, hours a day.. sitting, movement practice, trying to be kind…

Me falling to Bits for  Over 4 Years

After just a few months of intense practice, aged just 19, I experienced a shocking intensification of the senses. Most people would call it a ‘nervous breakdown’. Psychiatrists may have diagnosed it as Schizophrenia. Luckily I was stupid enough not to see any link with doing intense meditation practice. The Buddhist mindfulness gurus all said makes you peaceful. Yes there was the rare vague mention of a dark night of the soul & difficulties. But none of them talked about emotions much. They just said over and over the way to deal with them is to observe and not act out of them.

Me, I fell to bits, and for the next 4.5 years definitely ‘acted out of’. And no longer knew who I was, as my “self” became fractured in true “psychotic-like” style. I ‘knew’ I was becoming schizophrenic. And I did not relate this to sitting and opening. So I obviously thought I’m not doing it right and I need to sit more. so I did, which opened my awareness some more. And coincidentally went more and more “schizophrenic” & emotionally out of control. For 4 and a half years!

Finally age 24 I hit the core of my emotional terror. A 1-month old baby being totally emotionally abandoned by his mother, never to return. I screamed & screamed and had no choice but to let go. I fell out the bottom of my world into space and waited for death.

My Opening

5 days later I woke up, & knew I was unconditionally loved by the Universe. This experience has stayed with me and never left me. realized some pretty cool stuff. That strangely hardly anyone that I can find in the spirituality game talks about.

What my Opening Clearly Showed Me

Like what is this 4 years worth of intensified sensory world that I acutely experienced? Is it this terrible place that can destroy you, that damages you? That you have to observe or “repair from”? No not really. It’s just how an infant experiences its world.

And this fracturing of “self”, the place of ‘schizophrenia’, this terrifying loss of any sense of who I am, for over 4 years. Is it something to get away from, is a bad thing, to heal out of, to rebuild self from? No it’s just the power of parental indoctrination and the reasoning mind dropping away.

Is it a good practice to observe the emotions and not act on them. I would say that to separate from them in this way is moving away from experiencing oneness and love. As well as being mission impossible when we start to increase our awareness.

And this 4 years of screaming, crying, intense sensations, inability to work, or function at any kind of “normal” level? Of despair, terror, seeing things, frequent weird powerful “psychotic” “episodes”? The shadow side? Something gone wrong? Enlightenment’s evil twin? No. Just me letting out the held-in emotions, the totally appropriate responses of an infant/small child to its world and its parent’s behavior.

And what’s a good way to deal with all this “stuff”, these childhood emotions and experiences coming out? To label them as schizophrenia, disassociative disorder etc? To stick pills in to make them go away, to shut them up, to label them as “evil”, “wrong”, to be “healed”, or “observed and not acted on” etc. etc? Thank goodness I did none of these things. I found kindness, a bit of caring, listening & touch to be far more useful.

Also, the reasoning mind is not of much use here. What I learned very clearly in fact, is the reasoning mind is what we are taught as children to use to STOP THE EMOTIONS being expressed. At the threat of death, as the child experiences it. We so identify with the reasoning mind that when it begins to lose its power and hold, we feel like we are losing our-self, we feel in a way schizophrenic, going insane

And here’s another thing. My childhood was finite. So the emotions inside are finite. So once I’ve cried and screamed them all out, & said its ok to them 1000’s of times, in my own curled u in a corner hugging myself kind of way, they went. Totally. And I found myself floating in a space I had never realised was there. A spacious consciousness full of love, compassion and wisdom. That sees things as they are.

And I realized something else… Emotions are totally safe. Lovable. Unconditionally. For real.

And it’s ok to let go of control. Totally.

How My Way Is Different

So my practice is/was different. How? By making it unconditional allowing into awareness of everything that’s there, without control. For real. Yikes. What does this mean though in real life?

Well, if opening/mindfulness is about increasing awareness of the here and now, we are going to see the here and now more aren’t we. And this includes what we see and hear and smell and touch. And what we think. AND WHAT WE FEEL. And it doesn’t to take long, if you really are sitting allowing it all into awareness, before this rather large elephant floats into view… called the subconscious. Full of out of control emotions that we were taught to stuff inside, control and intentionally forget about.

Then we have a straight choice, don’t we? To let them out or to push them back in and give reasonable reasons why, or the time honoured trick that every child knows of putting our attention somewhere else, and making that more important. It could be something really obvious (I use Ebay) or it could be something a bit more subtle like “observe the feelings and don’t act on them”.

The thing is emotions by definition are not controlled. Who wants controlled laughter? Interesting isn’t it

I learned something else. You can’t go around, or outside of where you hold to let go of where you hold. So the only way is straight in. To the core. With a diamond drill called mindfulness-done-right.

Im Still A Mess

My life feels like a real mess. Don’t let anyone tell you that you get through one whole load, one big opening & it’s over. Not in my case. And don’t let anyone tell you that you can find yourself floating in spaciousness, with the real-me-being-the-spaciousness, and that solves everything. Not in my case. I tried that for at 10 years. There will be great big lumps of karma to drill into. And no amount of playing  around the edges observing is going to do much.

Drilling In To the Core

So here I am happily (?) drilling hum ha. When you’re at the pit-head there ain’t much light. Yes, now you know how to come out whenever for air, but then you’re back in the dark, drilling for the core. Blind. Screwing up regularly. In a totally dysfunctionally neurotic/psychotic very-average-Joe kind of way. Not even sure you’re drilling in the right direction. Not even sure if you’re drilling actually.

This is some of my 30 years experience of mindfulness & the emotions, for what its worth….

Now, back to ebay….

When We Put Our Intense Feelings Into Another Person – and Relationships Go Terribly Wrong

Can we transfer feelings from one person to another?

I was just with someone who was being very nice and relaxed. Yet i felt intensely under pressure, that if I didn’t do what they were organising for me, it would be terrible. I felt awfully responsible and at the same time very hurt. When I listened to my hurt for a few seconds I realised i felt hurt because I felt steamrollered, & that I was not being listened to at all. I then realised my feeling was appropriate, as I wasn’t being listened to at all. It wasn’t ‘our plan’, it was ‘their plan’. Then i listened to my feeling of impending doom if we didn’t do what was organised, and something felt ‘not me’ about it it.

So I asked the other person how they were feeling, and they started by saying fine, then that they were anxious to get going. So I asked them to say more about their anxiousness, and after some chat, they realised that they were very anxious to follow the plan we agreed. When I pointed out that we had discussed doing a few things, and that had changed. They said ‘that’s why I was anxious to get on with the plan.’ So I said ‘but this isn’t the plan, this is just part of a plan that has changed totally. What you are trying to force me to do is not really an important part of what we had planned at all.’ Then I told them what the most important thing was. They still struggled to see that ‘The Plan’ that they were trying to force me to do was taking me away from the most important thing in ‘the plan’.

They did not see at all at the time that sticking to a linear simplistic plan is very small child behaviour, maybe 3-4 years old. It is only as we get older that little Jimmy can see that basic plans are part of a more complex and changeable world. And the intense anxiety around ‘the plan’ suggests a 3-4 year old that is under intense pressure to get ‘the plan’ right, or something terrible will happen. And if that person’s parents were in some way involved with the 2nd World War, as most middle aged people’s parent were, then the intensity of the feelings in me come sharply in to focus.

Interestingly, hours later when that same person, with help, realised that the feelings fit their extremely pressurising feelings in relationship with a father who saw horrific things in World War 2, did I feel a sense of relief, that those feelings were taken out of me.

So how did the feelings that actually belonged to the other person, and their parents before them, get into me? Only one way this can happen. If the person puts the feelings into me. And why would they do that? For the same reason everyone does it. To make the other person know how it feels.

Why do we want the other person to know how it feels? So that they maybe will hear our story and help us resolve it. Very clever in one way as this is the only way we can ever resolve internal trauma from our childhoods. Every 3-4 year old child needs someone to hear and understand them. Not very clever at all though, if we do it by pretending its not there in how we talk and behave, and stick it in sneakily and silently underneath.

So what that person needed to do was become more aware of the layers of inappropriate behaviour, and what the real issue is. And to do that they needed to become aware of a 3-4 year old child inside, who was dominated their relationship with me (and I’m sure other people too). So we need to become more aware, or we will keep sticking into other people intense feelings that are really about terrible things done or passed on by our parents in our childhood.

A huge part of mindfulness practice is just this. Working with the intense feelings of a child inside, and the havoc it reaps on our relationships if we do not allow it into awareness as it really is.

Let the 3-4 year old child be here and talk, and the pain we inflict on others decreases dramatically.

All it takes is a willingness to be mindful, to see, to hear, what’s really here. who’s really here.

The only way to do this is to stop and ask ourselves the right questions. To be willing to ‘hang’ with the feelings like intense anxiety, and to ask them why they are so anxious about whats happening now, and by being willing to hear the answers that they will give if we are listening. And then to ask the feelings about the answers they give, maybe 4-5 times, until we drop into the young child inside.