As we go through our daily life we are pulled by one demand after another, one possibility after another, so that we rarely find ourselves simply being. As a consequence, we also find that we do not know what we feel at other than a superficial level. In the midst of so much activity, we may fail to appreciate the degree to which we are distracted from attending to our inner experience. But when we sit down quietly, we may begin to notice how the wheels keep turning, our thoughts race on, and our bodies prepare themselves for actions that are not being called for in the present moment.
It is only when we sit, inviting stillness, that we notice just how much the horses inside us are tugging at the harness. Sharpening mindsight, or awareness of our inner experience, begins with getting the horses to ease off. This relaxation of the default level of striving is the first step in a sequence that ends with discovering just what is driving the fixation of our neuroses, locating and feeling that which we have been unable to accommodate.
The sequence goes something like this. First we must relax the ongoing effort with which we live our lives. This is preparatory to finding that present moment of the intolerable. If we can glance at the intolerable feeling, we can stabilize it. We can hold it still, or freeze it, rather than continuing to at best touch it briefly before bouncing off it. Holding still, or freezing, is not to be misunderstood as creating a static experience. Rather, it is one of staying in the fullness of a moment. The difference would be much like comparing a conventional postcard, which is a still picture of a place in time, to a Harry Potter postcard, in which the figures move and talk, fleshing out the fullness of a moment in place and time.
If and only if the present moment of the intolerable can be located and stabilized, we can move around in that moment and explore it. Through this process we might not only touch the experience of fear, for example, but more precisely could begin to see that what we are afraid of is being rejected. Staying with the fear of rejection, openly feeling it in an experiential examination, we might realize that rejection carries with it the pain of social isolation. The actual intolerable feeling might then be one not of fear, rejection, or of social isolation, but the feeling that one will be eternally alone in a cold and even hostile world.
Strengthening our mindsight can be summarized as the following four-step process:
- ease off the struggle
- find the present moment of the intolerable feeling
- hold still, stabilize, or freeze that moment
- inspect, explore, examine that moment experientially.
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