11-22-18

Meditation Notes 2

COLLOQUY FOR CLASS 2

Class 1 offered a view of the landscape of self care, with focus on what constitutes the “self”, how it deals with stress and trauma, and some suggestions about how one might begin the process of caring for it. This class looks at a perception of self in its wounded state and opens up how one might go about healing it. It is important to remember that my ideas are just one person's view of self and meditation. There are a myriad number of other possibilities and they are all based on unique personal experiences. I like to think of my own experiences as experiments, knowing that most experiments end without confirming the original hypotheses. That's alright, as growth is occurring with positive as well as negative experiences. In the case of these experiments, negative is not the same thing as failure. My intention with the meditation classes is to explore what meditators might encounter when they open up to the space of meditation. This includes the “full catastrophe” of living a human existence.

When someone asks the question “How are you today?”, I often think the truer question, the one with greater depth, is “Who are you today?”. Asking someone who they are implies that the answer today might be different from the one given yesterday or tomorrow. It implies that who we are is changing all the time. Certainly, we can see changes in a newborn baby occur rapidly over months, but we aren't so impressed with the changes we go through every day, in part because we aren't attuned to our bodies and in part because the changes occur in smaller increments, unless dramatic illness strikes, as it often does.

I'm not certain it is accurate to portray our general perception of “self” in society as wounded, but I know there are many who would accept this characterization. For those of us who do see ourselves in this way, it is helpful to think about how we perceive ourselves in relation to someone whom we don't necessarily know but who we see as some sort of ideal or whom we admire in some way separate from us. This is the person we want to be. When we do this, we begin to divide ourselves, slicing away by small or large cuts into who we are in an attempt to carve out the ideal we see. We begin to separate ourselves from our true and unique selves and the gap we create between our true self and the ideal is the source of great pain and suffering. The slicing away into our true selves is a traumatic experience. The entry points to self care mentioned in the last class are the extensions of compassion for self and the beginning of healing of this trauma. There is no ideal or fixed self to which we can aspire and no ideal meditation to achieve. Our meditations are reflections of our selves and our lives. We are our meditations.

We become good at the ongoing practice of self care by doing exercises that bring us back to a grounded and stabilized state of body and mind. Poems can do this and in this course they will serve as examples of how one might open up an inquiry. The inquiries for this class will begin with the four questions posed in Class 1, if only to give our meditations a focus. When we meditate on our own, we can return to these few questions to give us a direction and a form.

“Where am I right now?” “What is the CONTEXT of the “care” in self care?” The context here features the inner life and outer life all of us possess. There are many forms of meditation that address this two-fold world of ours. Vipassana meditation, for instance is a mindfulness practice and focuses on the small, even microscopic, details of our lives. I think of this as focusing on the intimate, the private. Shamata meditation is expansive and takes in the vast landscape of existence. I think of this as focusing on the expanse of public life or the scope of cosmological space and time. In truth, my own concept and practice of meditation is a combination of both and I think that is probably true for most of us in our lives. To the extent that meditation reflects our entire lives, we oscillate between the microscopic and the macroscopic, between the inner (intimate) life and the outer (ultimate) life of experience.

I think it is useful to think about the difference between healing and curing, a consideration for our biological lives as well as our emotional lives. The distinction is important in both. There are many diseases and conditions of the biological life that are treatable but not curable. The same is true for our emotional lives. Healing, however, is always possible for the wholeness axis, no matter the trauma or stress experienced. For instance, certain cancers are not curable but they are manageable with therapy, leading to a healing of tissue. In the same way, emotional traumas, such as PTSD, are often not curable or eradicable but there are modes of therapy and care that lead to healing. I think of this in the same way with depression. History is populated with individuals who have documented their spiritual traumas and wounds and the scars that resulted. The most uplifing ones also document the healing that has resulted from the experience. Scars are formed and contract and harden but never disappear altogether. But they are healed in ways that allow for continued personal growth and change.

So, the context of this meditation might include the factual details of the trauma, the therapy, the healing, and the scars. It might also include how non-linear healing can be, not following any particular format or timing once a scar has formed and before healing takes place. It might take note of how contingent and interdependent the elements of the wholeness axis are and how one's trauma flows to the others.

The next question we ask is “What is my relationship to this pain gap created in my life as I strive to become an idealized person?” Answering this question depends on a level of attending and tending that brings to light exactly the emotions we experience. Labeling and naming are important ways of knowing one's emotional state. Neuroscience has shown that people who use words to describe their internal states, such as emotions, are more flexible and capable of regulating their emotional states back into the resilient zone, once again supporting the parasympathetic nervous system. Another way of looking at this is to see that the idealized state of being we aspire to is a “top-down” perception where we are influenced by external ideas about desirable appearances through media interpretations and advertising. What meditation can do is to open us up to “bottom-up” knowledge about our true selves. This is organic, involves the entire wholeness axis, and originates in our core and autobiographical selves.

Naming our emotions includes naming the most generous as well as the most difficult and often shameful ones. Attending and tending to all of them contributes to healing. While we wish we could hang on to the most delightful and complimentary ones, the ones that shine the brightest light on us, and while we wish we could push away the darkest and most painful ones, we can only support the wholeness axis and the healing of trauma if we name and label all of them. Because all of them are only thoughts, we also have the capacity and choice to let them go. We can acknowledge them as they arise and pass away. We can choose. As we do this, we adopt the stance of the PARTICIPANT/OBSERVER, a most useful way to deal with the healing process. When we become participant/observers, we are able to see and understand ourselves better as subjects of our lives and to observe that we know how we are affected by our emotional states. It is from this place that we can make choices about how to respond.

To write about how all of this might occur is a rather ponderous process of introduction and explanation but, in fact, all of this can occur in milliseconds of consciousness and can occur in those little pauses that help us regulate ourselves in the resilient zone. The last question of inquiry is “How shall I act or interact?” This takes us over the transition from empathy into compassion. Now, we are out of our heads and into the world of action. This question, as with the others, opens up a vast world of possibilities and choices. A philosopher (Michael Foucault) said that curiosity evokes care. This is where we find ourselves now that we have engaged our curiosity. It is at this stage of inquiry that we can experiment. It began with grounding in the body. We have looked at the facts of context and have considered the emotional relationship we have to the trauma. Now, we know more about the pain and suffering and their sources. With the attitude of experimentation we can begin with a beginner's mind and choose a course of action that is consistent with our true selves (vs. that idealized self that was never attainable and thus not able to help us at all). Neuroscientists say it is possible to act one's way into a new way of thinking and that as we fire combinations of neurons together in the service of joy or love or compassionate action, we wire them together and so they remain as a new way of acting. Because we recognize and accept cheerfully that failure is as much a part of experimentation as success (validating one's initial guess about something), we continue with our bottom-up expression of self and our contribution to healing the pain gap. In this way, we continue to grow and change and we make good use of the personal resources we alone posses in just this unique combination. This is what we bring to meditation as a work in progress.

Now, this class points to a more focused look at the resources we might enlist to help us heal. We will look at this in Class 3.