So, I’m back from my whirlwind driving/family/food weekend – I managed to continue with my meditation practice while I was out of town for Thanksgiving. I brought my cushion and just sat in the guest bedroom. Fortunately I am always the first one awake at any gathering – so I always have some time to myself in the morning to kill off.
I can’t tell if things are clicking fully back into place again or not – but they are feeling a bit more on track by a matter of degrees. We’ve moved into compassion practice in morning meditation – and I’ve found that it’s one of the most amazing tools I’ve been introduced to so far.
The big component for this is the investigation of self generated emotion brought on by thinking, in particular those looping “sticky” thoughts that really trip us up.
So, the process is to wait and see if a thought comes up, and to identify if it’s a one off thought “I need to remember to pay rent” versus a repeating thought “I can’t believe I screwed that up, I’m such an idiot”
If it’s a repeating thought you sit with it until you can get feel for the emotion behind the content of the thought. Once you have a grasp on the emotion behind the thought you allow the content to fall away and just focus on the emotion. Bring that emotion down into the body and really feel where it’s located and get a sense for it. If it’s a self-generated emotion at this point the emotional aspect will dissolve a bit into something else – into another deeper emotion or mind-state. This is the actual emotion that exists that exists in the body that triggered the thought.
If the self generated emotion is really sticky and won’t go away, the instruction is to blast it with some nice strong metta for a while to dissolve it. If the underlying emotion or feeling state is too strong to face, the instruction is likewise.
The gist of this is that we often have big feelings that we carry around with us that we aren’t necessarily always able to process or deal with. We just dont have the tools. So we get stuck in thought patterns that generate another emotion that we can relate to – even if negatively. For many people it’s easier to deal with anger than a fear of abandonment for example – so they self generate anger instead.
The anger/fear example is a classic – but there are lots of others, and often these sticky thoughts are just tools for dealing with environmental triggers of deeper stuff that hasn’t been worked through. It’s great to have a tool to really work with this type of destructive thinking.
I had an experience with an ex on Monday that spun me out into this type of thinking all night and through the morning on Tuesday – and in meditation I blasted that thinking and it’s associated generated emotions away with Metta. Throughout the day as the thinking would creep back in I would continually blast that self generated feeling state of not being good enough back with metta over and over….. and it totally worked. By the end of the day I felt so good, and so clear about the situation in a way I never would have been if I had allowed those thoughts to run rampant through my day.
What a lifesaver, this technique is!
the Good Heretic 