Three Steps To Disintegrate Dread

The weight of relentless dread can be crippling. In this talk and guided meditation recorded live at the Boston Mindfulness and Insight Meditation Meetup, we examine and practice a three-step approach to unravel this nasty knot.

Transcript

Good morning,

Everyone.

Thanks for joining me.

For those who do not know me yet,

My name is Ron Levine from Mindfulness in Blue Jeans.

And I fell ass-backwards into mindfulness and insight meditation 24 years ago this month.

It's April now.

So 24 years ago this month,

I was going through a period where I was dealing with clinical anxiety and depression and an out-of-control panic disorder that had resulted in full-blown agoraphobia.

I was unable to leave the house.

I was on short-term disability.

Couldn't go past my front door without a meltdown of panic.

Happened to get paired up with a psychologist who even back at that time was already several decades deep into practicing and teaching mindfulness and insight meditation.

And he offered me these tools and techniques as a way of dealing with what I was going through.

And I was not thrilled with what he offered me.

My feeling was,

Dude,

I can't work.

I can't go past the front door.

I can't be social.

I can't do anything.

My life is stopped.

And here's this guy saying,

Let's sit and watch the breathing for a while.

Awesome.

Thanks.

Get right on that.

I didn't have anything else to work with at the time.

I was sitting at home panicking all day anyway.

I figured,

Alright,

I'm going to try this just long enough I can honestly go back to the guy and say,

Look,

Dude,

This didn't work.

Can I have the real treatment now?

And as I say,

That was 24 years ago this month.

And I never did have that conversation with him.

And I'm still practicing.

I'm still doing this.

I'm doing these kinds of sessions here.

I'm ready to admit there might be something to it all.

And so here we are.

And today's talk is about dread.

And this one really gets to the core of what I was going through during that time that I was trapped at home.

What I was diagnosed with was clinical depression,

Clinical anxiety,

Panic disorder.

What I was feeling more than anything else at the time was dread.

It was this powerful,

Powerful dread.

So I want to get into that a little bit.

But the first thing I want to say is you don't have to be experiencing dread right now necessarily to get something out of what we're going to be talking about and practicing today.

Because this applies to any emotional state really.

So if you're going through a period of dread right now,

We can work with that.

If you're not,

You don't have to try to create dread in order to get something out of this.

In my logic-based,

Type A personality,

Very organizational,

Very analytical,

I always find it helpful to start off by defining what it is that I'm dealing with.

Kind of helps with that black cloud effect where there's this vagueness,

This haziness about what we're trying to deal with.

And that in itself is not very helpful.

I find that putting some definition around,

Some parameters around,

What the issue is,

Is a good first step.

That's always been a good first step for me.

So what do I mean by dread?

In my experience of dread,

This is how I ultimately defined it.

It's this anticipation of an experience,

Of an unpleasant feeling that is overwhelming and feels unstoppable and maybe permanent.

An anticipation of an experience of a feeling that is overwhelmingly unpleasant and feels unstoppable and maybe permanent.

And the anticipation itself can start to feel overwhelming and unstoppable.

So it kind of piles on top of itself.

And the image that I always got was that of a suffocating blanket.

You ever get under one of those,

Like those weighted blankets?

That's what it felt like just trying to move.

I felt like I was under a weighted blanket that was made of lead.

Just trying to move felt like trying to lift a mountain.

Just this crushing sense of doom.

As I started working with this,

I had three insights.

That really changed the way I approached dread.

And the first one was this noticing that I felt stuck when dealing with dread.

It was this feeling of being stuck.

But then I noticed that wasn't entirely accurate.

I didn't just feel stuck.

Yes,

I felt like I couldn't move under this suffocating blanket of lead,

But there was something else going on.

That suffocating blanket felt like it was weighing me down from the outside.

Something different was happening inside.

Inside,

There was this racing urgency.

There was this tremendous energy happening.

One of the things that I talk about a lot in this practice and why we engage in mindfulness and insight meditation is so that we can begin to clearly see how we are blindly doing the bidding of those unskillful states of mind.

The ones that say,

I want that and I don't want that.

I need to do whatever is necessary to get that and anything that I have to do to avoid that is worth it.

And we do this blind bidding of those fear-based parts of our mind.

What was interesting was when I was experiencing this dread,

There was no event,

Say,

Coming up that I was dreading in particular.

It was just this feeling of general dread.

Something horrible was going to happen,

But I didn't know what.

So my fear-based mind,

Of course,

Was going hog wild with this,

Right?

So yes,

I did feel stuck in one sense,

But in another sense,

I was like,

Wait a minute,

There's a shit ton of energy around this.

It's not just stuckness.

There's this tidal wave of energy rushing around and crashing down,

Urging me to do something,

But I didn't know what because there was no actual problem other than the feeling of dread in itself.

So that was the first thing that I noticed was,

Okay,

There's a lot of movement here,

And where there's movement,

There's malleability.

So if there's an actual dreaded event that we're worried about,

What happens after the event?

Well,

The dread usually goes away,

Right?

But even in this case where I wasn't dealing with an event I was worried about,

It was just this feeling of dread,

Period,

About nothing in particular,

Certain things still affected it.

If I happened to get a good night's sleep,

Okay,

The dread eased up a little bit.

After eating,

After taking a shower,

These things had an effect on the level of dread I was experiencing in the moment,

Which means that dread was subject to cause and effect.

And those of you who have been with me long enough know that when I start talking about cause and effect,

I'm talking about karma,

Not karma in the way we think of it in Western society with its bastardized version of,

Okay,

Revenge,

And what comes around goes around,

He's gonna get his.

Buddhist karma,

Cause and effect.

So if dread and my experience of dread is subject to cause and effect,

That led me to my first main insight about dread,

Which is like pretty much anything else,

Dread is not a static fixed thing.

Dread is a process.

Dread is a process.

Sometimes I talk about when I first started working with physical pain and I was so surprised when,

Okay,

When I stop pushing against some physical pain or discomfort,

Even just something like an itch,

It doesn't have to be some crazy pain,

Just some kind of minor discomfort.

When you stop trying to push it away and have this mental image of it as this stuck thing in this part of your body,

And you start to inquire,

Say,

Well,

No,

What is this actually like?

After spending decades of saying,

No,

Get the fuck out of here.

No,

Turn around.

What's actually here?

What is this actually like?

And I started to realize,

Oh,

Wait a minute,

This sensation isn't some monolithic stuck block in me,

It's moving.

There's pulsation.

There's increasing and decreasing intensity.

There's energy,

Movement.

Sometimes I would try to really pin down exactly where the sensation was,

And as soon as I thought I spotted it and got it nailed down,

Oh,

It moved.

Huh?

Wow.

That's because it's a process.

Dread is a process.

So the question becomes,

What causes or conditions can we set into motion to manage or alleviate the dread at a deeper level?

Because if it's a process,

Something has to be perpetuating it.

Has to be.

And what I started to see was,

Like I was saying a few moments ago,

The way that the anticipation itself starts to become dreadful,

What I noticed was,

The process feels unstoppable because it's feeding on its own momentum.

Funny thing about emotions,

They have a way of perpetuating themselves.

They beget themselves.

For example,

I've noticed when I feel sad,

I won't just feel sad.

I'll feel sad about feeling sad.

Sometimes when we experience anger,

We're not just angry at whatever it is that we think we're angry at.

We start getting angry just about the fact that we feel angry.

I shouldn't have to feel this way.

Why do you make me feel like that?

We feel happy about feeling happy,

Right?

And I have found for myself,

And this may resonate with some of you,

I feel dread about feeling dread.

So there's this cycle that feeds upon itself.

That was my second insight into this.

And that led me to my third one was,

All right,

Well,

How do we stop this damn thing then?

And that's why I call this talk Disintegrating Dread.

And what I'm talking about here is literally disintegration.

Often when we think of disintegration,

We think something disappears.

Sometimes I talk about disillusionment and I always say,

I'm talking literally about disillusionment,

Actually stripping away our delusion,

Our unclear seeing.

So that's the same thing here.

I'm talking about disintegration,

Actually separating out the individual components,

Making up what's effectively a system that comprises this process.

And those components,

Typically physical,

Felt sense,

And the mind.

Which not coincidentally,

If you look at the Buddha's four frames of reference,

When he talks about the foundations of mindfulness,

These are the first three.

The fourth one being mental qualities,

Which is a talk for another day.

So why would we break these things apart?

What does that buy us?

It gives us the chance to examine each part by itself.

This redirects our focus from the content of the dread to the process of the dread.

Because when dread is happening,

There's usually a lot of fear and anxiety wrapped up in that.

And fear and anxiety require imagination.

We don't fear something that we're feeling now because we're in the middle of feeling it.

Fear,

This anticipation,

This requires imagination.

And we start creating these storylines around what we fear we might feel.

Usually in a well-intentioned attempt to try to be prepared for it,

Right?

But does it really work?

No,

Not really.

It just kind of makes us more miserable.

And this is exactly the kind of pattern that the Buddha was talking about when he said,

This is how we create suffering for ourselves.

So we're diverting our attention from the content that we are generating in the form of these storylines about the dread and perhaps the event that we're dreading,

If there is one.

I mean,

I didn't have one.

And we're shifting our attention and our focus to the process of the dread itself.

What are the causes and effects?

How is this system actually working?

And one of the most powerful aspects of disintegrating this process of dread into its individual components is that it starts to short circuit the feedback loops that play out among those components.

When we start telling ourselves storylines that are based in fear and dread,

Our subconscious mind and body,

They don't know that that's not really happening.

It doesn't know the difference between something we are actually perceiving and reacting to versus a storyline that we are creating and reacting to.

So the body reacts the same way either way.

The body says,

Oh,

There's an emergency.

Okay,

Let's get that fight or flight going.

And then that just serves as more fuel for the mind to say,

Okay,

There's a real emergency here and look what we've just created for ourselves.

Big emergency out of nothing.

When we break down the components into individual manageable pieces,

That helps stop those feedback loops.

Another advantage of this is the same way emotions have a way of begetting themselves,

Feel sad about being sad,

Angry about being angry,

Happy about being happy,

Feeling dread about feeling dread.

We feel uncomfortable with discomfort.

And one of the things that makes us feel uncomfortable is something that is unfamiliar because there could be danger there,

Right?

As I was saying at the beginning,

We usually spend most of our lives trying to push away feelings of pain.

When I was talking about the physical pain,

Like it seems so solid and fixed until we start to open up to it and say,

Oh,

Wait a minute,

This isn't at all what I thought it was like.

We don't get familiar with these processes and if we're not familiar with them,

That's uncomfortable and we're uncomfortable about that discomfort.

So again,

It's another cycle that feeds on itself.

The more uncomfortable we feel,

The more we try to get away from it and the less familiar we continue to be with it and it just perpetuates.

This disintegration into individual components gives us a smaller chunk that we can work with at a time to gain a little bit of familiarity.

Oh,

Here's just the physical sensation and then we can notice,

Oh,

Look,

The mind is starting to pick up on that and run away with it.

Okay,

Let's come back to the physical sensation.

Oh,

Look,

The mind just tried to do the thinking.

Oh,

Let's come back.

Oh,

Look,

It just did it again and we start to see,

Oh,

Holy shit,

Okay.

Oh,

This is the process.

This is the process and we gain some familiarity and as I was saying a few moments ago,

Some disillusionment because the illusion is we're just caught in this whirlwind,

Right?

And it's like,

Well,

No,

It feels like a whirlwind,

But hey,

Look at how this is.

Oh,

This is how the sausage is made.

And we start to see,

Well,

Geez,

This is fucking stupid.

What the hell am I doing?

Yeah.

Some of you have heard me tell my story about the very first time I ever practiced meditation in a dream.

I'd been practicing for about seven or eight years and at this point,

The practice had finally seeped into my subconscious enough.

I had this nightmare one night that I was on this roller coaster just by myself in the front car.

I couldn't see behind me,

This impossibly high roller coaster.

And with my anxiety issues,

I've never been on a roller coaster,

Okay?

I am impossibly high up in the sky and I can see I'm coming to the top and it's about to go over and I'm freaking out and I'm looking any which way to get out of here and I'm panicking and suddenly I remembered my mindfulness practice in this dream.

And it wasn't a lucid dream.

I didn't know I was dreaming.

It had finally seeped in enough that it came to me subconsciously.

Hey,

Mindfulness.

I realized I can't do anything about this.

I am stuck here.

But I do have the option to observe whatever happens.

And right in the dream,

I came to my breathing and opened to the experience as it was.

And the dream stopped immediately.

And why did the dream stop?

Because I had stopped perpetuating the storyline out of the fear that the storyline itself was creating.

There was nothing there but what I was creating.

And when I stopped giving it the fuel,

I had nothing left to run on.

It was a really profound experience for me.

I was able to really see,

Oh,

Holy shit.

There was no clearer indication of not just cause and effect,

But how I was creating my own suffering.

And stopped.

So the openness,

The familiarity that we can develop with the parts of the system and how they interact or integrate with each other,

Seeing the effect of changing causes and conditions,

Seeing how we have a say in how this process plays out.

This led me to see how dread and fear are like a cloud.

It's like at the beginning of the talk when I said,

I created this definition around what I was dealing with so that it wouldn't have this black cloud effect.

It really is like a cloud.

It seems solid when you look at it from the outside.

But then when you start to walk what you perceive as being the inside and you look around,

It's just like,

There's nothing here.

And you go to grab it and there's just,

I mean,

There's just not,

It's vapor.

We're creating this cloud.

We don't necessarily have a say in an initial feeling of say dread that may come up.

But the extent to which it becomes a cloud,

We have a big say in that depending on how we deal with a feeling of dread or fear that may arise.

And I'll wrap up by saying this and we'll get to some sitting.

One of the best things and one of the most powerful things for turning this around for me in my practice was after getting over that initial hump of trying to open to some of these feelings for the first time,

Which is scary as hell.

I'm not going to sugar coat it.

Of course it is.

That's why we're here to work on it.

So we can stop suffering,

Creating our own horseshit.

Once I started to do that and gain some familiarity with that process,

I started to notice another cause and effect scenario which was that simply moving into discomfort,

Simply opening to these difficult states not only lessened or eased the difficulty of experiencing them,

But it even started to become a rewarding experience because I started to associate,

Oh,

When I move into something uncomfortable,

It feels really good afterwards.

I started to realize comfort doesn't happen in a vacuum.

Comfort isn't really a thing.

Again,

Comfort,

Discomfort,

These are processes,

Just like dread.

Comfort is just the thing that you feel after you've experienced discomfort.

So I started to notice,

Oh,

Okay,

When I move into this discomfort,

When I examine this discomfort,

When I start to tease apart the components,

It may not feel pleasant.

Like I always say,

I call my practice Mindfulness in Blue Jeans.

It's a blue collar practice.

Going to get a little dirty sometimes.

Meditation can be beautiful,

But it ain't always pretty.

We're going to be dealing with some muck,

Right?

But I started to notice,

Every time I do this,

Oh,

God damn,

It feels pretty good afterwards when I come out the other side.

And then I feel a little more open to moving through the next thing that comes up.

And we start to replace this cycle of dread where we shrink in upon ourselves.

We start to turn that around and it becomes a cycle of growth.

And just like everything else,

That then feeds on itself,

Perpetuates itself.

So we're still engaging in this cycle,

Or you might say it's a spiral because now we're growing upward instead of being stuck going in the same loop,

Right?

But now it's sustainable.

It's healthy.

It's skillful.

Let's practice for a little bit.

Do a little sitting,

Okay?

As always,

Let's begin by imagining that we are suspended from the ceiling by a string attached to the top of our head as a nice cue to sit up straight without adding any extra tension to do so.

Any tension we may be experiencing mentally,

Physically,

Emotionally,

That's fine.

We don't need to try to get rid of it.

Attempting to force tension away is just adding more tension to tension.

It doesn't make sense.

So if there is some tension here,

It's welcome to be here.

And it's welcome to leave in its own time,

Which may be today and may not.

And let's also notice what is supporting us.

The chair,

The floor.

Something is underneath us holding us up.

Even if we don't feel particularly supported right now,

It's still there.

So let's take a moment to notice what is supporting us at the bottom and have this gentle lift at the top and simply notice whatever is in between that we are starting with in our practice today.

And if you haven't already,

You may begin to bring your attention to your breathing.

You may notice that you have started to shape the breathing as soon as bringing attention to it,

Which is usually what we do.

It's usually what happens.

In this practice,

There's no need to do that.

Our meditative breath is simply the breathing that we are noticing as we are meditating,

As we are paying attention to it.

Like dread,

Like all of the emotions I mentioned,

Breathing is a process.

One of the reasons that we pay attention to the breathing is so that we can examine that process.

If we can develop the skill of observing the process of breathing as well as the processes around the breathing,

Like how we feel about it,

That's a powerful skill because what's more central to our survival than our breathing?

And sometimes we feel like we have to control it to make sure we're getting enough air or achieving a proper mindfulness mind state.

If we can simply observe the process of breathing,

That's a skill that translates to being able to observe a lot of other things.

So let's start with just the raw energy of the breathing.

Just that.

You might notice a particular body part where the breathing is passing through.

The nostrils,

The back of the throat,

The chest.

Or you might watch the entire trajectory of an entire in-breath and out-breath.

But notice what happens if we simply watch just the raw energy of the breathing.

Exactly as it is.

Coming and going.

Can we keep it just that simple?

For a minute or so.

So you may notice that a lot of things are coming up.

It's usually pretty challenging to stay wholly with the breathing.

Even just for a minute.

Mental images arising,

Thoughts,

Feelings.

If those are happening for you,

They are not taking away from your practice.

They are not distractions from your practice.

They are not a sign that you are failing at your practice.

Noticing that they are happening is the practice.

We are observing cause and effect.

Oh,

When I try to focus here,

Look at all this other stuff that happens.

And look at the cycles that perpetuate from there.

We could spin off into a daydream.

We could spin off into a worst case scenario storyline.

We could notice all the thoughts coming up and start condemning ourselves for not doing the practice right because all these things are coming up.

That's a storyline too.

That's a process too.

That's what we're here to see.

We don't have to condemn the system for being a system.

We're here to see what the system is.

Now we may not like what we see.

But isn't that all the more reason to check it out and see what the hell it's doing.

Because otherwise how are we going to make a change?

So let's take another minute.

Just the raw energy of the breathing.

Exactly as it is.

Now while still remaining anchored on the breathing,

You may start to bring some attention to another part of the body where it's not immediately obvious that the breathing is happening.

Perhaps an area where you're feeling physical discomfort.

Perhaps an area that is feeling particularly energized because of an emotional state.

What happens?

What do you find?

When simply opening up to that raw energy,

That sensation,

Perhaps sending the breathing to it.

Not necessarily by shaping the breathing physically,

But just understanding that all of the breath energy is of course ultimately reaching every cell of the body.

So it is getting there.

We stay just with the physical experience.

And if feelings or thoughts come up,

Okay,

We notice that.

But right now,

We put them aside.

We'll get to them.

Right now our attention is on the breathing and the physical sensation.

And you may choose to stick with the physical sensation or the raw energy of just the breathing itself.

If you'd like to move on to using the feelings as our frame of reference for our mindfulness.

In this case,

When we talk about feelings,

We don't mean emotions like we think of them.

In the Buddhist terminology,

Feelings refer to noticing things as being pleasant,

Unpleasant,

Or neutral.

While remaining anchored on the breathing,

If and when things come up physically,

Mentally,

Emotionally,

We simply notice,

Is this pleasant,

Unpleasant,

Or neutral?

And it's not about how many of each kind we see.

We're not maintaining a tally and then making an assessment of.

.

.

No,

No.

Our intention here is to see the feelings,

But separating them from the storylines that we so quickly generate based on them.

I want more of this pleasant thing.

I don't want this unpleasant.

I'm bored with this neutral thing.

No,

We're noticing just the felt sense itself.

Separating the feelings from all those focal points.

If the mind runs away with us,

Or we run away with the mind,

We simply notice and come back to whatever it is we're working with.

The breathing,

Bodily sensation,

Feelings of pleasant,

Unpleasant,

Neutral.

Perhaps even including feelings about working with the feelings of pleasant,

Unpleasant,

And neutral.

Those are just feelings too,

Right?

Again,

These things beget themselves.

They're cycles.

That's what we're here to see.

How do these things perpetuate?

And what's our role in it?

So we can take the negative cycles and turn them around.

Now you may continue working with whichever component of the system that you prefer.

I'll briefly mention the next frame of reference,

Which will be our last one for today,

Which is the mind.

And there are many techniques that we have for working with the mind.

The one I have typically found most effective for myself when dealing with things like dread has been the labeling technique.

When a certain thought comes up,

We simply label it.

And we might label it very specifically,

Like,

This thing I have to do tomorrow that I'm freaking out about.

Or very generally,

Like,

Oh,

There's dread again.

There's fear again.

There's hope again.

And this is another way of gaining that familiarity again.

Slapping a label onto whatever that is that's coming up,

That mental construct,

Not only buys us some familiarity with it,

Creates a little breathing room,

A little space.

It also has a way of creating some familiarity with how damn often the same things just come up over and over again.

That's part of seeing this process.

Seeing what it's doing.

How relentless it can be sometimes.

How ridiculous it can be sometimes.

Developing that clear seeing of what's really happening here.

Because once we see it clearly enough,

We don't have to talk ourselves out of doing it.

We don't have to talk ourselves into dropping a hot potato,

Right?

We just freaking do it.

Once we see these things clearly enough,

The changes just seem to happen automatically.

We don't have to convince ourselves of anything.

The last thing that I'll mention for the sitting is when I'm working with something very energized,

When there's this volatility and this feeling of not being in control,

Those are the times when I visualize the practice as surfing.

I imagine I'm in these whitewater rapids.

Not with a boat,

Mind you.

I'm in the whitewater rapids.

I'm getting swept away and pulled under.

Going down for the third time the whole bit.

I'm fighting and I'm struggling.

The harder I fight and I struggle,

The more I get pulled down.

Then at some point I realize,

If I stop fighting and struggling,

Which don't seem to be buying me much,

If I change the causes and conditions here,

If I change what I'm doing,

If I stop that because it ain't working,

Well,

Geez,

The energy of the rapids,

The waves,

They actually pull me up and you almost kind of start riding on top of them.

Riding the momentum instead of fighting the momentum.

Then at some point you can kind of start to surf on them.

Still not really in control.

You're going wherever they're taking you,

But at least now you're not drowning,

Right?

Then at some point,

You gain enough balance,

Enough familiarity,

Enough skill with that process that,

Oh,

You can jump off onto the side,

Onto a riverbank,

And maybe even then climb up onto a ledge and look down at the whitewater rapids that had been pulling you under.

And it's not that they're no longer there.

It's not that they're no longer rushing,

But you've gained a little space,

A little breathing room,

The ability to observe that energy instead of getting both in its way and by extension your way.

That all begins by breaking down the process into these manageable parts.