11-22-18

MEDITATION NOTES 6

COLLOQUY FOR CLASS 6

In Class 5, I offered some ideas about what the inner life might look like once we sit down to meditate and attempt to quiet our minds. I wanted to emphasize that the noisy activity that often (always?) characterizes what we encounter is perfectly normal and provides the basis upon which we can build resilience through the mechanics of dealing with reactivity and supporting responsivity. It is important to remember that flaming insights into the nature of being human can so easily flame out, leaving us disappointed and somewhat empty. The important point here is that building resilience and a greater sense of well-being ask of us some discipline, some energy, some intention, some accountability. The “practice” of meditation is just that—showing up for meditation on a regular basis.

It is useful to remind ourselves that the process of experimentation involves not just trial, but also re-trial. “Error” and “failure” are only words we attach as judgments to falling short of personal expectations of “success.” They are good words with useful connections but, like all useful words, they invite judgment and then we have more unclaimed baggage. When we consider personal experiences and those we label successes or failures, we sometimes feel we have arrived somewhere. My experience has been that both are good teachers and, like all good teachers, allow me to continue the process of learning and integration. Can any one of us say that we are where we are in the present context of our life only because of personal successes? And aren't we where we are today because of the experiments in living we have experienced?

Yes, meditation carries the taints of exclusivity, of retreat, of withdrawal, passivity, complacency, indifference, uncaring, and disconnection. These states of mind or attitudes are the opposite of what we saw as contributors to self care. These states remove us from the world and, more importantly, connections with our own emotional lives. All of this can be true of meditation if it exists as a thing in itself, as an object and an end and not a means to something more creative and useful on a larger scale. This is especially the case when we consider what is happening outside the meditative space, the space we create for ourselves in our bedrooms or other places in our homes. These are places of practice and habit, but they do remain removed from the spaces in which we spend most of our waking hours—the office cubicle, the automobile, the grocery store, the day care center. At first, our meditative space will feel like a strange place in which we encounter strange forces that are more easily overlooked or ignored outright. The last class suggested that within those forces and within that space there is creativity and an opportunity to understand our lives more fully.

There is nothing wrong with escaping the anger and outrages of the “outer” world. Sometimes it is necessary to turn off the news or walk away from a confrontational conversation. The reactivity that results from feeling angered or outraged is protective but it is also useful. If we remain in a state of reactivity, then it is easy to be overwhelmed by it and this leads to greater outrage and conflict. I have sometimes found myself promoting meditation as a way of dealing with the troubling discontinuities in our society and culture and offering meditation as a panacea of sorts. However, in my own mind I have found that that leads to an exaggerated passivity and acceptance of what happens around me. I chalk everything up to “that is just the way things are” or “it is what it is” and move back into a state of mental blandness. My meditation cushion has been something of a hiding place and an escape in the past.

But, if we can be creative about how we deal with the inner monkeys, then we can be equally creative about how we deal with outer life gorillas. You know, the 800 pound gorilla everyone tries to ignore but whose weight buries us all. I believe most people can recognize an 800 pound gorilla when they see one. It is in the act of looking and really seeing that we confront it. When we know our own fear (and isn't that the basis of most angers and outrages?) then we are able to act in ways that can curtail it. Our lives today are full of gorillas. They are huge and threatening and their presence and surprising masks keep us unmoored and ungrounded. Having said that, feeling ungrounded can remind us of our own useful grounding, the act of creating space and becoming physically present to ourselves. Then, we can call upon our personal resources to remind us that joy and hope are possible, no matter the wild animals inside us and outside in the world. Meditation and all the possible entry points into its space are only means to another end.

In Class 5, I made mention of how we can work with some of the perceptions and realities of being human that apply to all aspects of the wholeness axis. I suggested that a rounded notion of self included the qualities of imperfection, impermanence, interdependence, insecurity, unpredictability, uncertainty, and mortality. These same characteristics are mirrored in the wider world and infuse society and culture. In essence, they are part of the context of our lives and have manifestations in our relationships with self and other. Poetry as it is written, meditation as it is practiced, are just vehicles to some larger and more creative end. The same is true for anger, outrage, joy, hope, and all the other feelings we humans can generate. If they remain as stand-alone acts and don't generate ripples into our interactions with one another, then of what use are they but as isolated objects of mental activity? For instance, how important might it be to work with the idea of unpredictability? How much of our lives can we predict or control? If we agree that unpredictability is integral to our lives, then how are we to work with it in ways that keep us from becoming paralyzed or outright crazy? I think we ground and resource ourselves in ways that are personal and true. We understand that life on earth has always been unpredictable and, even with the assurances of science and technology to the contrary, we continue to experiment with the elements of life that are common to all of us. By experimenting, we craft our own coping mechanisms and we make it through a day full of unpredictability. The same is true for our feelings of imperfection, impermanence, insecurity, uncertainty, and mortality.

We depend on the hope that pleasure and happiness are permanent and pains and sorrows are impermanent but the truth is that everything is impermanent. Impermanence and mortality are kissing cousins in the gorilla family. These gorillas are in the room and in our lives every day. The media draw their outlines for us with every report of a natural disaster, a mass shooting, political instability, economic collapse somewhere, or nuclear catastrophe. We know them more locally when we receive a cancer diagnosis or someone near and dear to us dies. The meditative space receives and contains all of this.

But we are familiar with the shapes of the gorilla and we know that we can ground and resource in spite of them. We may face them initially with our reactive selves, a very normal survival instinct. However, we know now that we can calm ourselves into the resilient zone by our simple habits of pausing, grounding, and resourcing. Then we can choose with greater clarity how we will respond. We return to basics, to what we can only truly know in our sensing life, and those are the physiologic certainties of our own bodies, minds, and spirits. If meditation offers a space for that vital experience, then it has become useful beyond being an escape. It has become useful as a means to the end of greater resilience in doing the work we do every day.

If you acknowledge that all the feelings you have that tend to make you feel unbalanced, divided, and imperfect, and that these feelings are universally human, then maybe it is easier to perceive that interdependence is also a vital factor in self care, the wholeness axis and personal integration, and in nurturing responsivity and resilience. Does any one of us really stand alone? If we often experience a divided self, don't we also recognize how we are separated from one another? There is a tendency for each of us to think that what we are experiencing of the monkeys and gorillas is unique to our lives and that to describe them to someone else exposes us as vulnerable and weak and incapable. My own experiences with depression taught me that deflating the ego that had some investment in my illness opened my life to others and that made it easier for them to describe their own versions of the gorilla. I think this is true for all monkeys and gorillas. After all, how many species of anger, fear, or outrage are there? We may be surprised that they intrude in our lives at any given time, but they are not mysterious creatures outside our imaginations. Tribal members since the dawn of time have known that banding together against the woolly mammoth was the only real hope of survival. But survival in our times looks very different. Survival for us implies cooperation on a grander scale with much more at stake. Yet, the need to belong can manifest in the smallest group or any context that includes others. We nourish a sense of community when we offer loving kindness and compassion to others as well as to ourselves. When we do this, we have begun to integrate inner and outer lives and we open up the meditative space to a caring heart.

As we develop greater confidence in ourselves, in grounding in our bodies, finding and using our resources, acknowledging monkeys and gorillas, we move beyond context and relationships with all of these things and into versions of community where self and other are vitally important. We will look at the interactions of self and other in Class 7 and explore how meditation helps make that possible.