Meditation Techniques - Week 11

About This Course

Learning to meditate is a gradual process. Each week, this course has tweeted new techniques and facilitated new insights. The techniques either address particular problems that may arise when you meditate, or provide progressively more advanced methods which deepen your experience. It is recommended that you start by going back to week one's techniques and begin your weekly course at that time. The earlier exercises are not mere preliminaries. They are central methods in their own right to which you will return repeatedly - no matter how advanced your practice becomes.

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Greetings

This week, and the next two, we will explore emotions in meditation.


Meditation can be relaxing – but it also reveals what is – which includes the full range of emotions. That is a sign of progress. You have penetrated superficial thoughts.

Some traditions see emotions as obstacles – and therefore provide antidotes. Others—including Aro—welcome the opportunity to embrace emotions within meditation. Strong emotions make meditation more difficult – but also more powerful. They naturally have a strong concentrating effect, so working with them accelerates progress.

Learning a better way to relate to emotions in meditation can transform our experience of everyday life. That ‘better way’ is to view emotions in the context of shi-nè.

This Week’s Meditation Method

Practice shi-nè according to whichever technique is suitable to your mind-state: counting, awareness of breath, or formlessly. When a thought arises—rather than immediately dropping it—observe for a moment the emotional texture or ‘charge’ that accompanies it. When you return to presence, maintain awareness of any continuing bodily sensations that accompanied the emotion. For example, if there was an undertone of anger in the thought, you may experience heat and pressure in the chest or forehead. Fear may be accompanied by nausea.

Shi-nè is taught as the first meditation method in Aro because others techniques depend on viewing situations from the standpoint of emptiness – the open space that shi-nè reveals. Shi-nè is also taught first because it is possible to apply it in some form in almost any situation. Other meditation methods we teach only apply under certain circumstances.

This week’s method is useful only when you have emotions strong enough to feel in the body as physical sensations. However, attempting it can also uncover buried feelings. For that reason, please avoid this method if seriously depressed, or suffering from other mental dysfunction.

Emotions

Typically, we express, repress, or dissipate strong emotions. These are the strategies of avidity, repulsion, and disregard. We may express emotions by acting on them – but that often results in trouble for ourselves or others. We may repress them by denying or burying them. Unfortunately, keeping emotions buried is unpleasant and tiring – and hidden emotions may grow monstrous in the dark. They can burst out at awkward times. We may dissipate emotions by busying ourselves with distracting activities into which we can channel the unwanted energy. Careers, hobbies, entertainments, and ‘good works’ may all be dissipations – although of course they have other functions. Dissipation is the least harmful of the three options – but it wastes our lives by diverting us from the authentic actions we would take if we were willing to face our emotions. Often inauthentic activity wastes other people’s time as well.

There is a fourth possibility: to experience our emotions fully without acting on them. Although difficult at first, this alternative spares ourselves and others the consequences of desperate, harmful actions, the psychological damage of emotional repression, and the waste and interference of dissipation.

This week’s meditation method trains us to simply be with emotions – not expressing, repressing, or dissipating them. We develop this capacity during meditation, when we do not have to act and are not constantly provoked by others’ actions. With experience, we can apply the method in difficult life situations.

Sitting with emotions can be painful. It must be approached with strength and gentleness. We do not allow our emotions to run us, or to run us off the meditation cushion – but we do not become hostile either. The method is to regard emotions with respectful interest. We neither slam the door in their face, nor invite them in for tea and a cosy chat. Whether we like or dislike them, we allow them to be as they are—at least for the duration of the meditation session.

By allowing emotions—without commentary—we see them clearly. Emotions consist of thoughts plus bodily energy. This meditation method separates the two. We let the thoughts go – but we remain aware of the physical sensation. In the gaps between thoughts then, the feeling begins—of itself—to assume its natural form.

Posture

The magician position is the same as the siddha position, except that the foot of the outer leg is drawn up onto the inner leg’s calf. This improves the balance and stability of the posture. It is more stable—and feels more symmetric—but requires greater flexibility. Once you are comfortable with the siddha position, try the magician position occasionally and gently. Gradually it will become easy.

The lotus position is the ‘iconic’ symbol for meditation. However, is not the only ‘proper’ position, or even the best. For certain meditation methods it is essential. For shi-nè, all the positions I have described are equal. The lotus position does have one practical advantage. You can sit comfortably in the position on a flat surface—if you can be comfortable in it at all—which means that you do not need a support. You can therefore meditate anywhere at any time.

The lotus position requires great flexibility in the hips. If you are not sufficiently flexible, it can lead to serious injury. Forcing yourself into the position may be only slightly painful – but maintaining it against resistance for a long meditation session leads to knee surgery. You can approach the lotus position safely using a specific series of stretching exercises. Consult a yoga teacher if you want to learn them.

Obstacles & Antidotes

Feeling tired or sleepy when meditating is common. That may be because you are, in fact, tired or sleepy – but not always. Notice how you feel ten minutes after the end of your meditation session. If you remain tired or sleepy – the feeling was genuine. Meditation has simply revealed what was there.

You may discover, however, that you feel energetic again. In that case, it may seem that meditation has been making you tired and sleepy. In reality, this damping of energy is an ‘escape clause’ that enables you to avoid unpleasant or frightening emotions that might arise in meditation. That could be a feeling or thought. It could also be the threatening state of no-thought.

If you are genuinely tired, rest. If you find you are dulling yourself as an avoidance mechanism, rouse your energy and silently confront what you have been avoiding.

Restless energy can also be avoidance. Obsessive planning or fantasies can hold off unwanted feelings – or emptiness. Stirring up one emotion may be a way to avoid feeling another. In such cases, redirect the energy into the meditation technique. Employ the energy to nourish precision and diligence. Turn your ambition to returning more often to the presence of awareness – and to remaining longer.

The Insane Ape

When emotions are separated into thought and sensation, they simplify and clarify. The sensation may remain intense, but it feels clear. What was a boiling cauldron of bile, transforms into a cool, clear, free-flowing waterfall—still volatile but no longer toxic. With practice, that energy may be positively harnessed.

Emotions become problematic when they are driven into complexity and conflict with one another through thinking. In the Tibetan tradition, it is said that to be at the mercy of conflicting emotions is like being a horse ridden by an insane ape. The ape demands you turn left, raking your flanks with its spurs – whilst also forcing you right, jerking the metal bit in your bleeding mouth.

We become our own insane riders when we judge emotions: ‘I shouldn’t want to hurt my spouse whom I love’ or ‘I shouldn’t feel miserable because I am well-off’ or ‘I ought to want to see him more often’ or ‘I am a spiritual person so I should not want so many things – so much’. In mediation, we lessen inner conflict by dropping such thoughts and returning to simple awareness. We allow chaos and confusion – but we do not add to it by trying to fix it.

Obstacles & Antidotes

Coming face-to-face with emotions is difficult—although, as with all else in meditation, it becomes easier with practice. It calls for a balance of determination and kindness toward yourself. If you turn away as soon as the going gets rough, you will make no progress. If you force yourself ahead when fear or pain seems intolerable, you will revolt and refuse to meditate. You can find your own balance point only by experimentation.

When feelings are just too strong to continue with this method – first, try returning to shi-nè. As soon as you feel the emotion – drop it and return to your breath. Allow your mind to calm in the quiet space of shi-nè.

If you cannot maintain shi-nè, try something different rather than cursing and gritting it out. I particularly recommend vigorous physical exercise, which—like shi-nè—cuts through obsessive thinking and releases excess energy in a constructive way.

If you cannot help acting on a destructive emotion, try to maintain some memory of meditative awareness – as you do so. Try to allow a gap between being provoked and your next action. In that empty space you may find clarity – and thus the possibility of choice.

Recommended Resources

This week’s meditation technique is a simplified approximation to one from the Tibetan tradition, called trèk-chod. Trèk-chod is taught in Aro in the evening class series entitled Spectrum of Being. It is also taught on weekend-long retreats: Embracing Emotions as the Path and Reality – The Vivid, Vivacious, and Volatile Vision.


Find upcoming Aro events near you.

See our meditation resources page for a range of learning methods.