Meditation Techniques - Week 13

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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Desire, Appreciation, & Generosity


Ravenous neediness is indiscriminate. We try to grab and consume everything to which we feel attracted. We view the world as defective in failing to provide what we want. We cannot be satisfied. We do not appreciate simple, subtle, tranquil pleasures. We want more of everything – all of the time. We try to fill emptiness by cramming in everything we can reach. Since emptiness is infinitely vast, this will never work.

In the radical aloneness of meditation, we discover our adequacy. We begin to find complete satisfaction in the enjoyment of the colour of a rug, the sound of a door closing, or the sensation of the floor against a foot. At such times, nothing seems missing or wrong. Gradually we can extend this feeling of sufficiency throughout life.

‘Avidity, repulsion, and disregard’ are often translated ‘attraction, aversion, and indifference’. However, to feel attracted is not itself a problem. Inevitably we like some things far more than others. In meditation, we separate the energy of appreciation from the accompanying thoughts. When this occurs we do not have to act on the mental advertising slogans that command us to acquire everything they claim is desirable. Freed from compulsion to consume – we can simply enjoy sensory pleasure and beauty. We can choose intelligently whether or not we act on impulses. We can select on the basis of what benefits ourselves and others, rather than how strongly we happen to feel in the moment.

Having seen our own neediness clearly, we see it in others. Naturally, we then wish to share enjoyment with them. This is ‘active compassion’ or ‘generosity’.

Depression

Although it may seem otherwise, depression generally does not just happen – it is something we do. Depression is a way of attenuating emotions we are unwilling to face. Rage, fear, and sadness are the most common targets. We clamp down on them and squeeze the energy out of them.

Unfortunately it is not possible to suppress negative feelings without also suppressing those that are positive. When we armour our hearts against pain, we also defend them from enjoyment. Killing anger or sorrow also turns us into emotional zombies.

In the downward spiral of depression, we try to use thought to address emotional pain – but this can never work. Thinking only addresses the circumstances that brought about the pain – it does not confront the pain itself. We just find thoughts running around in circles—slower and slower—as we deplete our energy. We fuzz into a state of bewilderment and—eventually—oblivious torpor.

We attempt to avoid pain by avoiding life. To shut down the bodily sensations of emotions, we must also shut down our other senses. In depression, colours wash out – everything turns grey. Music becomes mere sound. Everything tastes like cardboard.

Perversely, we may cherish some forms of pain because they confirm our identity and provide meaning. ‘I hurt, therefore I am.’ We may seek our pain to be validated and wear it proudly as a mark of worth.

Meditating with depression is difficult. We seem to have too little energy to sit and apply the technique. Shi-nè may be counter-productive: the quiet space it reveals is superficially similar to the lobotomised quiet of depression, and we may confuse the two. The method of separating thoughts from feelings does not directly apply: depression does not feel like anything—unless you count cold grey fog as ‘something’.

Depression seems endless as we approach paralysis. To address depression you must be willing to allow change; to let go of your identity as a depressed person; and to let in a little of the pain you are holding at bay. It is helpful to recognise that depression is not intrinsically a condition of too little energy but of too much. The energy of suppressed emotions is never actually destroyed – merely distanced.

The only way out of depression is to reawaken the ability to feel. The best method is to open to the senses. Be receptive to sights, sounds, textures, fragrances, and tastes. Allow yourself to uncoil gradually in sensory enjoyment. This involves overcoming inertia and the depressive damping of sensation. Physical exercise is especially useful. It breaks the slow, weak loops of depressive thought and opens you outward – thereby replenishing energy.

The value of meditation for depression is in helping uncover what is suppressed. Meditative alertness cuts the fog. It then enables you to apply the technique of separating the painful emotions that arise from their accompanying thoughts. To do this requires courage. If you have previously used the technique to transform anger or desire, you know that the pain will abate. If not, opening to pain requires a leap of faith.

Meditation allows us to strip off layers of armour – gently. Only by facing negative emotions can we relate to them intelligently – by releasing them from the straightjacket of conceptuality.

Greater willingness to feel emotionally negative gives us greater capacity to feel positivity.

Enormous creative energy is freed when we cease to employ energy against ourselves in the suppression of natural feelings.

Sadness

Sadness may be confused with depression – but they are different. Sadness is the natural response to loss – our own or others’. Unlike depression, sadness is a distinct sensation—an ache just below the ribcage—but this does not sap your energy.

Sadness is the slowest and often quietest of emotions—making it superficially similar to depression. To relate intelligently to sadness you must take the time to open to it. Depression results from refusing to experience sadness and going about your life as though it were not there. Failure to experience sadness accurately—skipping over details—can also result in its becoming a habit or solidified pattern. Just knowing that you are sad—and resigning yourself to it—is not the same as allowing it.

To be willing to experience sadness is a radical act. It is an expression of caring for loss – either our own, or others’. Voluntary vulnerability betokens an open heart. Openness to sadness—and recognition that it is as conceptually impersonal as all emotions—opens us to the suffering of others. Naturally we desire others to be free of it. This is active compassion.

Joy

Surprisingly, we are as unwilling—or more unwilling—to experience joy as we are to experience emotional negativity. We may allow ourselves to feel joy only when external conditions are exceptionally positive. To feel joy for no reason could seem precarious – as if it could lead to irresponsibility.

Meditation often uncovers joy hidden beneath other feelings. They may emerge together. It is not usual to feel sadness and joy simultaneously – but this becomes more common with experience of meditation. You may find yourself crying and laughing at the same time.

Sourceless joy is so rarely allowed that seeing it in you, may make others uncomfortable. Do not rush to squelch it for their convenience. That will do them no favours. Your joy—on the other hand—might wake them up.

Ordinary Heroism

With sufficient practice of allowing feelings, we become fully familiar with our habitual emotional patterns. They lose their power. Our illusions about ourselves die of hunger – because we stop feeding them with the energy of our emotional involvement. Gradually we unmask. We strip off the armour of identity we girded on in fear of revealing and experiencing what we are. Freed from emotional conflicts, our motivations simplify and our communication and activity become straightforward and direct.

Allowing feelings allows them to deepen. Eventually we experience all human qualities within ourselves. Then we know what it is simply to be – without reference to the personal history we once used to define ourselves.

At this point we discover ordinary heroism. We come to live with courage, gentleness, dignity, curiosity, humour, grace, honesty, spontaneity, commitment, appreciation, and authenticity.

Recommended Resources

Our web page on the purpose of meditation expands on many of the topics of this week’s email.

Aro is a not-for-profit charity dedicated to teaching meditation and a way of life that grows out from it. The Aro Friends programme is a way to support this work with a small financial contribution.

The Friends programme is also a way to learn more about the Aro path and see if it is a good ‘fit’ for you. It incorporates a variety of resources for coming to a deeper understanding of meditation in the Aro style. It also provides opportunities to experience the Aro community—and, if you choose, to participate in it—with minimal effort and no commitment.

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