Working With Painful Experiences In Meditation

A 15 minute teaching with Singhashri on how to meet painful aspects that come up while meditating. Sometimes when we're practicing we become aware of a part of ourself needing some extra attention. How can we turn towards and meet that part with curiosity and love? What insights might be gained from doing this?

Transcript

I'll just give a little bit of input around this whole area of working with things that maybe come into the space of meditation that are a bit stronger than maybe just like the more mundane kind of what am I going to make for dinner kind of thoughts or just like a fleeting sense of excitement.

So things that are a bit heavier maybe or that we sense or we intuit actually need or want or require our attention.

So when we first come along to meditation practice what we get told is turn your awareness to the breath and try and keep your awareness with the breath and if you get distracted by anything,

A thought,

An emotion or a physical sensation just notice you've been distracted and come back.

So that's a specific instruction to support the creation of a new habit.

So the habit up until that point in our lives has been to just be caught up in the thoughts,

Sort of highly identify with the thoughts and emotions and really live in them sort of seeing the world from them,

Really believing those stories.

So that instruction is specifically about inviting us to begin to form a different habit which is one of awareness and choice.

So okay I could stay fantasizing about what I'm going to do with my week but actually I've set this intention to cultivate awareness and do that through bringing my attention to the breath and so I'm going to remember that intention and come back to the breath.

And in traditional meditation that's referred to as shamatha practice and the effects of that is that it supports us to become more and more absorbed,

More and more sort of gathered up you could say.

It's an integrative practice of kind of gathering our energies around one intention,

One activity and going deeper in that.

So another metaphor that I really enjoy when we talk about working in shamatha or calming practices is that it's almost like our mind is like this very very ripply ocean,

Lots of waves,

Lots of froth,

Lots of kind of blowing about and as we go deeper in the practice all of that sort of surface level calms and then we're able to begin to see into the depths,

We're able to kind of get a better sense of what's actually going on with us.

So all of that has an integrity in and of itself and is important skill to have but it doesn't,

Where the edges in that way of working is,

Those things that keep coming back.

That no matter how many times you let it go,

You come back to the breath,

It keeps coming back.

That person that really pissed you off earlier or that thing you've forgotten to do or it could be bigger than that.

It could be that as we're sitting in meditation,

As we're getting more absorbed in the breath,

An old childhood memory comes up,

Something quite painful or we remember something we said to someone and oh I can't believe I said that and actually if we hadn't been meditating we never would have remembered that thing we said because we wouldn't have ever stopped long enough to remember.

So insights emerge that,

Well it's not an insight actually in the emergence,

It's what we do with it.

It's when we start to turn towards that and get curious about it then there's the potential,

There's a potential for insight in that moment.

So these moments,

Even though they could be painful or confusing or exciting,

If we relate to them just as painful,

Confusing or exciting,

We'll miss the opportunity to kind of see what more is there that we could learn about ourselves,

Others in the world.

So there's something about recognizing it and then there's a choice,

Okay,

So that thought's come in,

I'm gonna come back to the breath,

Oh it's come back again,

Come back again,

Come back to the breath,

Hang on a minute,

There's something here that wants my attention.

So what we might do differently is we might actually decide to turn towards what I like to refer to as the part of ourselves that's showing up in that moment.

So often it's like for me it's like the worky singistry,

Like the one who's productive and gets stuff done and knows what she's doing or I have a you know seven-year-old that shows up sometimes and like wants to throw a tantrum about something.

So these different parts of ourselves that pop in and just need a little bit of attention and it could be that just a few minutes of breathing alongside that part of ourselves is enough,

It could be that you spend the rest of the meditation just staying with that really contracted sensation in the heart.

So that's sort of an overview and then I'm just gonna say a little bit about the actual technical way that we can work with this because I know that that's a bit broad the way I was talking,

Lots of sort of metaphor and maybe it's a bit too conceptual.

So the approach that I use is very somatic,

So it's an embodied approach to how to meet these different parts of ourselves.

So okay so let's just say you're taking meditation,

You remember that thing you said to that friend and you cringe,

Oh I can't believe I said that.

So what the habit might be is to then start planning,

I'm gonna email her,

Actually maybe I'll call her because if I email her and I don't hear back that'll be really devastating so I'm gonna call her and I'm gonna apologize,

I'm gonna ask to meet up and then what I'm gonna say when we meet up is blah blah blah blah,

We plan everything out and then she's gonna say this in response and then you know like we just kind of like get all caught up in some fantasy but actually what about that,

You know what about the part of ourselves that cringes around something we've done that we're not proud of,

That's not aligned with our values,

That doesn't make us feel good about ourselves.

So that's what's wanting attention.

The story,

Yeah it's important,

We probably do need to apologize to our friend but in the meditation the work is to just come back and attend to what's here now that's arrived and the way we do that is by coming into the felt sense.

So that contraction,

That cringing,

That'll show up somewhere,

For me it's usually kind of in the heart center,

There's like an oh but it could be you know it could be anywhere in the felt sense,

It might not be contraction,

It could be heat rising,

It could be tingling,

It could be a sense of expansion actually like maybe noticing something we've done wrong actually makes our heart soften and open.

We're all wired differently,

We're all conditioned in different ways so it'll be different for each of us.

So it's not so important what the actual sensation is,

What's important is that we get curious about okay what's happening in the somatic field that has something to teach us actually.

So for me coming into and staying with a contracted heart is still a very very challenging practice.

There's so many other things I'd rather be doing,

Fantasizing about what I'm going to do about it,

Binge watching TV,

Having a drink,

Eating too much,

You know there's so many ways that we can kind of reach out for or up into the head for reassurance and blocking and resisting just a part of us that's hurting and wants to be in that meditation.

So that's the invitation to just see what's happening and then sometimes that can be too much.

So I was on the phone with a friend last night and she was sharing something difficult with me and I was sort of helping her to kind of edge into it and see what's there and at one point she said,

Oh Singetry it's so overwhelming I don't want to do it anymore you need to stop.

And she just,

It was good,

She just said we need to stop I don't want to go there anymore.

So we also need to acknowledge the parts of us that actually know to have to take care of ourselves and that maybe sometimes we do need to back off and that's when again shamatha can be so helpful just coming back to a sense of soothing.

So no matter what's happening I'm a being who suffers and I can have kindness and compassion towards myself.

I'm totally confused,

I don't know what I'm doing,

I'm imperfect and that's okay I'm here and just meeting ourselves with a lot of love and compassion and not needing to solve anything and not needing to pry anything open and try and figure out what happened when we were three that made us this person today.

All of that kind of analytical work is very very important and can be helpful particularly in the therapeutic process but again in meditation the main thing is really just trying to be with things as they are and working creatively within the space of that.

And sometimes even changing your posture so I've had meditations particularly on retreat where for example anger might come and it's just moving through me it's like burning me up from the inside really strong energy moving and I might just have to lay down actually I might just have to you know give up on sitting and breathing with it and just lay down and just focus on the sensations of the body against the earth and that's the best I can do in that moment and just really let the earth hold me and feel held and just keep telling myself it's okay you're all right it's okay right now you know self-soothing.

And then maybe the next time I go to sit there's a little I feel a bit more robust I feel a bit more positive and I'm able to edge in a bit closer now what was that whole thing that was happening a few meditations ago oh god I'm really angry about that thing what's here now and often it's changed it's shifted it's sometimes it can have completely moved through by then so that's quite interesting as well to notice how how things when we don't grasp onto them and make a whole thing out of them or when we're not pushing them away can actually just move through quite quickly sometimes.

So it's like where before I might have been focusing my awareness on the breath and being with the breath I just it's a very slight shift to bringing awareness to those sensations and staying with those sensations.

So the breath is an aid for sure so the breath in fact sometimes we don't know where we're feeling something in the body so I might invite my breath to show me where the contraction is so on the next in breath I might just do a quick kind of scan through I was like oh god my legs are really tense and then just go into the legs and just feel what that's like so yeah so the you could say one way I've heard this described doesn't really work for me but it might work for you it's like if you imagine when you're doing the mindfulness of breathing as a shamatha practice you're really bringing 100% of your awareness to the breath yeah so we're trying to like be fully absorbed in this way of working what we're starting to do is turn towards other aspects of our experience so that maybe 80% of our awareness is on those sensations and also maybe aware of the thoughts and emotions that are arising in response to those sensations and then maybe about 20% is with the breath so we always keep the breath as a thread and a support in fact the breath can help to open places of contraction in the body sometimes just breathing into somewhere releases something yeah sometimes Larry Rosenberg who's an American teacher in the Insight Meditation Society tradition he refers to it as breathing with sensations or breathing with feelings or breathing with thoughts or alongside is quite a nice way of thinking about it the emotion arrives and then we're just curious about how that's being felt in the body so if we're aware of sadness it's like okay I call this sadness but what is that is actually what where is that felt how is it felt oh there's a real heaviness like right down the lower abdomen and then going there and exploring that and then it could be that there's other sensations going on as well and so in a way it doesn't really matter like are they also sadness or are they just a sensation that happens to be here because we're embodied and we have sensation and in a way the Buddha wasn't actually that concerned with the distinction it's like yeah there's a fullness of experience that includes physical sensations what we call emotions and thoughts and they're all kind of like that and in a way again we're just bringing awareness to the fullness of that jumbled up experience we're not trying to unknot the whole thing in fact what we can trust is that with awareness it will in itself begin to dissolve yeah so clarity can come just through the process of bringing awareness over time okay so shall we give it a go and see I mean it may be that nothing strong comes up and then you just stay with with the breath and just continue to get absorbed so I'll guide us in as much as I can give some tips but feel free to just do what you need to do in terms of whatever's happening for you and you can lay down if you want to as well that's always an option in meditation.

Reviews

Great talk. Resonated a lot with me
And beautifully explained.

Perfect timing 💯 Thank you 🙏🏼