I M Perfect lady

Tag: meditation

  • Welcome to Reality.

    “Meditation is running into reality.  It does not insulate you from the pain of life.  It allows you to delve so deeply into life and all its aspects that you pierce the pain barrier and go beyond suffering.”   Henepola Gunaratana

     

    Mediation is running into reality.  Not running from reality, but into the here and the now.

     

    In delving deeply into my life and all its aspects I have experienced pain and broken the barrier to be in the land beyond.

     

    What I used to think is that if you headed in the direction of pain, you would just get more and more pain that it would literally not end.

     

    What I learned is that beyond all the pain is a place of peace.

     

    Between you and that peace is a sea of pain that has to be acknowledged, felt and understood, it is your past coming to be reconciled.

     

    I sit in reality and deal with what is in all moments.  Even if past feelings come to the now to be dealt with, I am here now.

     

    No more tucking disturbing things into the suitcase called, later, or not now, instead I meet each new situation as it arises.

     

    I am the greeter of the present moment, like a wal-mart greeter, “Welcome to Reality.”

     

  • I know you can.

    My brother is at a ten-day silent Vipassana retreat.  This is his second time there, and this time he is a volunteer and will help with the food preparation and clean up as well as meditate for three hours a day.

     

    This meditation practice is called the ‘insight meditation.’  I hope his blog www.messyguru.typepad.com will have entries about it upon his return.

     

    His first time was almost a year ago, around Thanksgiving time he was an attendee and they meditated all day long.

    He had a wild ride; with emotions, crazy thoughts and beliefs all celebrating the fact that he stopped doing to just sit with them awhile.

     

    I applaud his courage to just sit.  He is facing full on all that is upside down and backwards, to sit in silence and encourage thoughts that most run away from. 

     

    The busyness of life can camouflage all the roots of anxiety, making it near impossible to figure out why you run.

     

    Imagine stopping everything.  Like every little thing, and have someone taking care of you, so all you have to do is be with your self awhile, ok for TEN days. 

     

    For many many months I had my own semi-vipassana here.

    I didn’t know such a fancy word, but I sat and sat and then I sat.

     

    I watched birds, and my mind was churning and cranking and spitting and sputtering, whirling around and around, trying to make sense of the nonsensical. 

     

    Just had to look up the meaning of nonsensical.

    noun: words or language having little or no sense or meaning. conduct, action, etc., that is senseless, foolish, or absurd: to have tolerated enough nonsense.

     

    Boy is that the truth.  I was trying to figure out ‘words or language having little or no sense or meaning.’  Wow.

     

    And those words held meanings such as love, family, caring, or faith of my childhood, and they now became nonsensical.

     

    I recall almost feeling the daily flush of embarassment, to be such a gulible believahead in light of reality crashing upon it.

     

    It is like you have built up your own fairytale world, but wholeheartedly believing it and walking around unknowing it is a huge mistake, yet in full confidence and even arrogance.

     

    The ‘Bliss of Ignorance of Abuse” is horrifying to realize. 

     

    I was shocked motionless, which is kinda like a ‘forced vipassana,’ and I literally just wanted to get inside my head and see what was up, where I had it so wrong.

     

    How nice to have a place that is safe and where folks will take care of you as you encounter the thoughts/beliefs of your mind.

     

    As I sat here day by day, I also had to try and maintain some semblence of normal, to cook, clean, and engage with my kids and husband.  The overlay of vipassana and normal life I would not recommend.  However, I do know you can do it.

     

    I also was Blessed with a caring husband, a working caring husband, and my children were old enough to take care of their needs, as long as I still took part in some of the mothering.  But even that I was replused from, for what kind of a mother was I, if I believed in nonsensical things? 

     

    My job was one day a week.  So I literally had all day long to vipassana, and then to quickly put together a meal, straighten up the house, and put on my ‘volunteer’ sticker and after that fall into bed.

     

    It was such a juxtaposition to do the vipassana all day and then be a normal mother/wife when they popped back in.

     

    But I do now believe that the ‘normal’ life added with vipassana kept me from going insane.

     

    My husband always always believed that I was strong enough to handle all of this, he never wavered not once.

     

    My life was perfectly set up to do this at home vipassana insight meditation, and it didn’t matter how I breathed or sat, but that I was intent on not being distracted.  In fact my daily distractions were what kept me with one hand on reality.

     

    I know that as he sits with nonsensical things floating around in his head, nonsensical things that terrorize his body, bring up huge amounts of anxiety, he is one brave soul.  And I am so grateful that he too will have the opportunity to be distracted taking care of somebody.  It gives you a purpose, it helps you begin to build up a new image, a new you.

     

    His heart is open wide, his intent is beyond reapproach, and is willingness of spirit brings admiration. 

     

    I am cheering you on….I know you can!

  • Energy Leaks and Memory Maturation.

    Energy Leaks and Memory Maturation.

    (Awakening Intuition – Mona Lisa Schulz)

     

    Imagine that every one of us is a set of encyclopedias.  In the present perhaps your life has reached volume 17. But something back in volume 2, in the past, is still affecting you, causing you ulcers or some other disease.  You have to go back and figure out what this ulcer is all about.  Its cause could be five volumes back or four volumes, or it could be in the current volume.  The stomachache you have today may be due to your boss yelling at you this morning, but it may also be due to the fact that your mother yelled at you every morning in volume 2.

     

    Trauma in the form of experiences such as child abuse, military combat, man-made or natural disasters, witnessing violence, or even lesser emotional and mental traumas increase levels of disassociation.  This means that certain emotions and memories are split off; they lie in the body tissue or areas of the brain we can’t talk about.  If not dealt with properly, they can create disease in the body.

     

    The important point – and this gets a little complicated – is that it’s not the memory itself, not the actual trauma of the past, that causes our problems in the present.  What the memory means to us is what is important – as is the way we react to what that memory evokes.  In other words, it’s not the boarding school that caused your problems, it’s that you perceive college as being the same as being in the boarding school.  You could have an absolute angel of a professor, the class your taking could be wonderful, you can go out to lunch any time you want, but your body is perceiving the current experience as being just as traumatizing and stressful as the former experience.

     

    This has been demonstrated scientifically.  In one study woman who were to have mammograms were questioned about events in their lives over the previous five to eight years.  Researchers discovered that they were able to predict which women would be found to have cancer based on the answers they gave to those questions.  Those women who had experienced a severe life event – living through a natural disaster, perhaps, or the loss of a loved one or the loss of a job in the last five to eight years were consistently more likely to be diagnosed with cancer.  Even if the woman had had a trauma in her early life, it was not that even that triggered her problem.  She did not come down with cancer because she had been a victim of incest and had never had the capacity for love.  It was because of the way she reacted to the more current events.

     

    The researchers looked at the difference between the women who approached their crisis actively and those who disengaged from them.  Disengaging is a minor form of dissociating, separating conscious reality from our feelings about it.  They compared women who had formed an action list, a series of steps for dealing with the problem, with those who didn’t, and they compared women who got support from others in dealing with their problems with those who didn’t.  Which strategies do you think increased the woman’s chance of getting breast cancer?  Amazingly, it was the activist strategies.

     

    You might think that the activist approach is really grappling with your problem is what I’ve been advocating.  But these women were faced with severe and unavoidable life events – death, permanent loss, inescapable stress.  There was no changing what had happened to them.  Their strategies might have been acceptable in other settings, but not here.  They had to face the question of when to hold them and when to fold them.  In the act of trying to fight something unavoidable, the activist women were actually reliving this inescapable event over and over, making the trauma grove deeper and deeper.  You can’t bring dead people back; you can’t relive your childhood.  Some things are simply irreversible.  It may not seem fair, but no one said that life has to be fair.  Look at the birds at the feeder sometime and watch the big, powerful bluejay with his long beak and cap swoop in and elbow out the little sparrows.  The birds don’t start squawking, “Hey, hey, hey!  You better get in line bubba!”  They just go back in there.  This is the way of nature, and the best thing to do is accept it.  In fact, this is called radical acceptance.  Without this capacity, the activist women were using up physical and emotional resources that could have protected or healed their bodies instead.  The researchers actually concluded that the women’s behavior caused their breast cancer.

     

    We want to pay attention to body memories and figure out the emotions related to the body symptoms we’re experiencing. You want to focus on those memories, however, so that you can transform them, acknowledge them, deal with them, and then release them and move forward.  If you’re forever focused mentally on some trauma or emotion that occurred in the past, you’re losing energy to the past and sapping healing energy from the present.  Your lightbulb in the present will be operating on a level of 60 or 70 watts instead of 100.  In medicine this is called the steal syndrome.  Cancer cells have been shown to ‘steal’ energy from adjacent normal tissue.  So if you’re repetitively reliving and reexperiencing a traumatizing memory, two things happen: you begin to see the pattern of that memory every where and recreate it in the present, and it causes the area in your body that carries the metaphor for the trauma to steal energy from areas that are normal and to reinforce the disease in that area.

     

    In psychiatry we no longer focus exclusively on the past; we teach our patients how to deal with the present.  We teach memory maturation.  This consists of four steps: (1) locating the traumatic experience in the past and differentiating it from current reality; (2) focusing on living in the present without feeling or behaving according to irrelevant demands belonging to the past; (3) decreasing hyperarousal by means of meditation, relaxation response, and exercise; and (4) decreasing intrusive reliving and stopping black hole cycles.

     

    The brain has its own mechanism for decreasing the influence of painful memories.  As you lay down new memories that contradict the old one and help you reframe it, the neuroconnection to the old painful memory weaken.  It becomes the credit card you stop using.  In the meantime you use the other, new credit cards more frequently.  Think of the story of the pianist David Helgott in the movie Shine.  His father tyrannized and abused him while professing to love him, forming a traumatic childhood memory and helping set the scene for a mental breakdown.  But after the boy left home, he had a lot of other experiences of people being loving to him, including various teachers and mentors and eventually his wife.  Their love was expressed differently, and had a healing affect.  David never lost the memory of his father, but he was perhaps able to change the way he interpreted that memory, because it was replaced by memories of other people showing him love in a different way.  As the neuroconnections to those memories strengthened, the old ones weakened.

     

    An illustration of how this works can be found in an eye study performed on monkeys.  Researchers put patches over the monkey’s right eye to force the left eye to do all the work.  Over the period that the right eyes were patched, the neuroconnections that helped those eyes function became retracted or pulled back.  When the patches were removed, the monkeys were functionally blind in their right eyes, unable to see clearly.  The neuroconnectionss to their left eye were strong, but the right ones had been weakened simply due to the lack of use.

     

    Memories work the same way.  There’s no reason to believe that you are ruined or trapped for life if you have a bad memory.  If you don’t constantly reinforce the trauma, it will weaken.  WE all know people who go around talking, almost with pride, about their terrible allergies, for instance, and telling the story over and over of how they ate something that made them swell up so badly that they nearly died.  They keep looking out the same eye and reinforcing it.  Consequently, they’re not using the other eye, the one that can see all those times that they didn’t swell up and were absolutely healthy.

     

    We can learn, forget, and change our behavior.  We can all put aside and learn to live in the present.  Our brains and memories can help us do that.