Meditation—What Do I Do with all the Stuff I’m Welcoming???

I’ve been teaching a course in meditation that is building skills for the times when something challenging arises.  I’m encouraging students to see that this is a natural and ultimately beautiful thing, AND I’m acknowledging that sometimes it can be hard and unpleasant in the moment. AND there are skills that make it all more workable. Our systems have developed this amazing ability to allow all parts of us to be healed and cared for—especially the seemingly broken ones and the ones we judge harshly.  And when meditation brings some ease and joy, it is often the case that some part of us that wants healing shows up; not to derail us, but to rest in the ease too.  This is a hugely important distinction that took me many years to internalize.  Let me say this again in different words: Not only is it NOT a mistake to have difficult thoughts and emotions during meditation, this is what happens when your meditation is working!!!!

And, as I continue my own practice and am thinking about the skills I want to offer, I’m having my own challenges arise to practice the techniques I’m offering right alongside you. Sometimes it feels as though the universe is saying to me—“Good idea on that one Marcia, now let’s see if it really works!” I’m taking the course too.  

It’s been a very interesting few weeks, and this week I had a meditation where something very unpleasant showed up.  I had been avoiding meditation all day because I felt jittery with all that was in me wanting to be felt.  In the evening, I finally settled in and started with the practices of grounding and invoking a sense of security and connectedness. And immediately these uncomfortable feelings arose.  Before it even occurred to me that I could use the skills I was recommending to everyone else, I spent a lot of time wishing my experience was something different.

I wished I didn’t have the feelings that I had. 

I wanted my feelings and thoughts to be more pleasant and compassionate. Wasn’t that who I am after all?

I had a short time of harshly judging myself because I was still dealing with this old thing, yet again, and progress seemed very slow to non-existent. 

Then, after all this fighting with reality, I finally let myself feel what I was feeling. 

Really felt it.

To feel these feelings was very unpleasant, and it felt so important at that point to feel what was actually in me instead of what I wished was in me.  I allowed myself to really feel what was true in that moment.

Then the most amazing thing happened—I felt a small opening in my throat and lungs that I never knew wasn’t there before that moment. I felt as though I was breathing inside myself for the first time—that somehow I had been breathing outside my body for many many years. I don’t even know how to describe it, because if you had asked me before that moment, I would have said from decades of yogic breathing that my breathing is quite free and open. Yet in that moment, I truly felt I was feeling myself in a new way, just myself without all the other things society and I put on myself. This whole thing only took a few minutes. I stayed with this new feeling of breathing for a few more minutes, with a sense of amazement and to get to know this new feeling. Each breath felt a little constricted still, as if I was blowing into a brand-new balloon with some resistance. And yet it also felt SO GOOD.  This is MY breath, coming into ME.  Having touched the pain so deeply, I still felt a bit discombobulated for the rest of the evening, but slept well and woke up feeling much more integrated. This is the power of meditation.

In case you would like to try a meditation where you meet a challenge on purpose, I’m including a video of part of a class I recently taught. Before we got started I asked people to choose a challenge they were facing that was a 1-3 on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the biggest challenge. Consider a minor aggravation or a conversation that didn’t go quite as you had hoped, perhaps something you might otherwise ignore but will use for purposes of this meditation.  We are calling this process Dipping Your Toes into the Challenge. As you get started, if you realize this is a day that you are already overwhelmed with the challenges of life, consider staying with the comfort of the security and ease of the first part of the meditation.