The core intention of meditation is the release of thoughts and feelings that keep us stuck in our self-absorption. Repression is a way to avoid thoughts and feelings that are uncomfortable for us. If in releasing our thoughts and feelings we fail to be totally honest with ourselves, our practice of meditation can easily become a vehicle of avoidance.
We do not think ourselves into pain. We do not feel ourselves into pain. Underlying the thoughts and feelings that lead to our various levels of immediate psychosocial discomfort and dysfunction - our pain -- is a hook; a preverbal sensibility that can set us into a spin of self-absorption and ego. This seed of self-absorption, preceding our thoughts and feelings, is the very thing that lands us in the middle of our daily mental mess.
We can often see this when we talk with someone and we say or do something seemingly inconsequential that throws them off. A veil comes across their eyes, or their body language changes. There is a change in their delivery, or tone of voice. However it's expressed, if our core sensibility underlying thought and emotion is somehow exposed, we tend to withdraw into a spin fed by self-talk, self-doubt and even self-loathing that, in turn, feeds those more immediate thoughts and feelings. We're hooked.
Getting unhooked means peeling away the layers of thought and feeling that keep us stuck and examining the larger, underlying motivation -- the seed or root of our discomfort. But without clarity and self-honesty, we can do all sorts of things to try and evolve, yet remain forever teetering on the edge of our self-absorption, potentially stuck in our spin, because we aren't getting to the essential root of our discomfort. We're stuffing or, more formally, repressing.
Meditation can provide a vehicle away from this habit pattern. It gives us the opportunity to simply be with our thoughts and feelings, allowing us to let them pass by without getting hooked into them. When we sit, we focus on the breath. As thoughts and feelings arise, we release them. We do this by labeling them, "Thinking..." and coming back to the breath.
Labeling something allows us to contain it and dismiss it -- and there's the trap. If we dismiss the immediate thought or emotion that comes up, but fail to stay with the underlying momentum of the hook that provokes that thought or the emotion in the first place, we aren't meditating -- we're repressing, and stuffing the very thing we should be staying with.
To get out of our own way around this we need to become comfortable with our discomfort, sitting with the momentum of the hook and holding space for the underlying experience or seed that manifests our immediate thoughts and feelings. Ram Dass, in a teaching on conscious aging, remarks that he is no less neurotic than he was 50 years ago, but now, instead of allowing his neuroses to keep him up at night he invites them over for tea.
When thoughts and feelings arise, we may dismiss them, but, staying with and revealing the seed of those thoughts and emotions robs them of their emotional charge, allowing us to see clearly to the root of our discomfort.
© 2011 Michael J. Formica, All Rights Reserved
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