But there is wisdom in fully touching even the most negative or painful aspects of experience. We do not need to be afraid of those parts of life; everything can be included.

Don’t Get Stuck In Your Life Notes from Group - Part 2

Somatic Inquiry meditation uses an approach that has been described by the meditation master Chögyam Trungpa as “touch and go”. The previous post, Get into your Life is about touching aspects of experience we have not wanted to acknowledge, or that we wanted to “observe” from a safe distance. But there is wisdom in fully touching even the most negative or painful aspects of experience. We do not need to be afraid of those parts of life; epverything can be included.

At the same time, it would be a mistake to “touch and stick”. How do we step in the manure of our life without getting bogged down and trapped in it, as we sometimes fear we might?

There are several approaches to this concern. One response that is helpful can be summarized by William Blake’s observation that “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise”. We deprive ourselves of learning opportunities when we shield ourselves from what it is like to step in our own shit. Simply by touching on the horror of our lives our wisdom is automatically activated. As long as we deny, distort, delete, rationalize, blame and defend, we do not have access to the flavor, fragrance and texture of our negativity. Our wisdom is dulled.
Another approach, one that we specifically incorporated into our meditation today, is to provide a method to disengage when the act of touching in to experience loses its freshness and degenerates into movies and stories about what was touched. When we do that, we have lost the object of meditation, which is in this case the difficult experience, and have become distracted in story lines. Even if these stories are thematically related to the difficult experience, they are not the experience itself, but an interruption from it. When our session is filled with stories, into which we become lost and absorbed, we need to interrupt the interruption.

In order to do this, we could introduce the feeling of the breathing as the object of meditation, precisely for the purpose of interrupting the movie, so that we can instead relate to the raw feeling of being ourselves as we are. It could be helpful to clarify how this approach may differ from the presentations of more traditional “mindfulness of breathing” practices. Without claiming to be different or new, the Somatic Inquiry approach does take a particular view for a particular purpose. It utilizes our capacity for awareness, what Daniel Siegel calls mindsight, for the purpose of focusing on the somatic expression of core beliefs that by their very nature are difficult to identify. This is done to make obvious those internal factors of mind that we take with us across situations, projecting them onto the situation and having repetitive emotional experiences. Only by having access to these core beliefs, or object representations, can we hope to make fundamental change and become liberated from poisonous views about ourselves and others.

As such, the main object of meditation is the somatic representation of the core beliefs. Ultimately, it is to that which we return when we become distracted. In practice, however, maintaining attention to our somatic patterning can be difficult. When we become distracted, we might return to it, or as an alternative we might stabilize our mind by shifting our attention to our breathing.

It is an important point, given the theoretical underpinnings of the Somatic Inquiry approach, to clarify that shifting the attention to the breathing should not be done to escape from the dysphoria of experiencing our fear and dis-ease as represented in our bodies. The Somatic Inquiry approach starts out by directing our awareness precisely towards that which is naturally occurring, and which we wish to escape. Its spontaneous occurrence is taken as evidence that it runs in the background like a computer program while we tend to the tasks of our lives, which could be likened to the program we have open. In Somatic Inquiry we close all the other programs, and relate just to this one of somatic representation.

At this point in the Somatic Inquiry program, meditation on the breathing has three purposes. First, it puts us back in touch with the basic process of attending to an object of meditation, reminding us that we can direct awareness. By using a more neutral object of meditation, the breath, which also has the virtue of occurring naturally and without effort, we can connect with our capacity for paying attention.

Second, placing the attention on the breathing interrupts the interruption. If we become lost in thoughts about our core beliefs and cease experiencing them directly, we will have lost the original object of meditation. By shifting the attention to the breathing, a relatively easy object to find as compared to the somatic representations of core beliefs, we can come back to our bodies, to the present moment, and start fresh. Perhaps the same somatic representations will be there, waiting for us. If not, we can simply sit and be, enjoying the spaciousness and freshness of the present moment.

This possibility of relating to our true nature, uncontaminated by the core beliefs, points to a third purpose of introducing meditation on the breathing at this point. From the Somatic Inquiry perspective, the ossified psychological patterns which cause us to perceive, think, speak, feel and act in repetitive ways that are unsatisfactory and cause harm to ourselves and others are not fundamental to who we are. They are developments which arose in response to problems we have faced in our lives. As such, they were intelligent adaptations, serving a purpose at the time they arose. It is their perpetuation in the face of an environment that has changed that causes them to be maladaptive. When we shift our attention from the fear we have about these patterns, we realize we have a choice, and that our lives need not be a continual effort merely to survive, to make it through the next encounter.

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