May 12, 2009
- Mind-body connections -
The weirdest thing happened to me at lunch last week. I was just sitting there, having a conversation about something I can’t even remember at this point, when all of a sudden it popped into my head that part of the psychological baggage I have been carrying around with me includes the belief that whatever I think or feel must be tweaked or altered before it can be shared. There was a sense of rejection as something somehow inherent within my self, an inborn sense of incompatibility between the world and my desires. Which I guess might makes another in the series of similar realizations that started before I left on that meditation retreat a few weeks back.
This time I realized that I was carrying around, at a really low level, a profound distrust of the world and my place in it. It all ties in, I think, to some early formative stuff from when I was a kid, but that’s really all I feel needs to be said on that aspect of the experience. Although I’m trying to be as open as possible about these experiences, I think those kinds of details might be the airing of too much dirty laundry in public. I’m interested in exploring and documenting the subjective feelings and experiences as they arise during these “ahah!” experiences, in the interest of shedding some light on whatever it is that these experiences are (and what it is that they’re trying to point me towards, in an attempt at a sort of spiritual triangulation), but I don’t think that such details from my personal history are necessarily relevant. Unless you had the exact same childhood I did, I don’t think those kinds of details would be as helpful as a close examination of the dynamics of the situation (a study of changes).
Anyway, once I became aware of it, I realized that this distrust of the world was a foolish thing for me to be carrying around, because distrust is by definition a conditioned thing (that is, there has to be some thing in the real world which is distrusted), and therefore the distrust itself cannot be permanent. It is something that is dictated by circumstances, and although distrust always could be a warranted response, it was not something that I had to continually keep in place. To have choosen continual defense over paying attention and defending when appropriate was just plain lazy…
That is to say, the realization was that such defensiveness comes third. First is the presentness of my being aware. Second is the reality to which I turn that awareness. And only third does that awareness respond to that reality. There is no response that must always be in place, prior to awareness of reality.
Of course, all three are constantly going on all the time; there’s no “reset” button that allows us to start the game over again. But it is a question of where you rest, where your awareness and identity begin. If your identity rests in the world, well, that’s always changing, how can there be anything permanent to identify with? And if your identity is in a certain learned reaction to the world, well, you’re trying to make a permanent house on sand that’s always shifting. The question is, what is it that knows the sand is shifting? What is it that reality is always shifting around and through? Find that and you have found a place a rest, the refreshing fountain that bubbles up inside every one of us.
Upon having that realization, I felt a twinge from my lower right ribs, an area that has been causing me some pain recently, followed by a sense of opening up and release. (I have gone to see my doctor about the pain, but he’s not sure what it could be. He put me on daily Alleve for muscle inflammation…) There was a feeling of being more present, of having let go of something physically, of a chronic tension having left the body. I’m a big fan of the ideas behind Willhelm Reich’s work and always believed that mind and body are two expressions of one underlying whole, but this was an instance where I felt a particularly strong awareness of the connection between the two, when a shift in one happened almost immediately following a shift in the other. It felt like a call-and-response or an echo…
That’s the end of the story, but I still have to wonder: where does this stuff come from? Why all of a sudden like that? The quick and easy answer is “the grace of god”, or as the abbot at my zen temple put it last week, “the spring doesn’t happen and the sun doesn’t shine because we think about them.”
However, while I don’t disagree with those answers, I think it’s also more than just a one way street. That is, I think we are sometimes (and not as often as we would like) lucky enough to be able to put ourselves into places, situations, and states of mind where we are more likely to receive that grace. For me, I think the meditation practice has had something to do with it. There are times that nothing much happens during meditation itself, but then insights / changes of view / moments of bliss, will pop-up throughout the day. Does this happen to anyone else? Most of what I’ve read seems to take for granted that such experiences usually happen during the meditation itself. For me though, they sometimes seem to catch up afterwords, away from the cushion.
Who knows? Maybe it’s a reminder that nothing needs to be done, that simply being in and of that awareness is enough, and that the spring will come on it’s own, in it’s own time…
Hey that’s Awesome, man!
I have been having revelations like that too. It does change how your body feels.
Comment by Ted — May 13, 2009 @ 8:35 am
Thanks Ted. Glad to hear you’re having similar things happen. Do you mean more mind/body stuff, or more a sense of unidentifying with things previously thought as permanent parts of the self?
I kind of touch on both here, so I’m just curious which you’re talking about (or is it both?)
Comment by Ian — May 13, 2009 @ 10:44 am
Well, I was doing a Drug study in a labratory, with a bunch of college students, and it just hit me that the fact that I never finished college is actually pretty random. Its a source of insecurity on my part. But looking at these guys, they didn’t seem any smarter or hard working or disciplined than I they just had a more stable situation. Initially, I didn’t go to college right out of high school because I had poor grades, but that was partly do to moving so much and going to a new school every year. So I joined the Army and then got “born again” and went to Bible college. That was working out OK, but I was 21 and couldn’t have sex because I was a fundamentalist, so I married too soon and married the wrong person and dropped out because of that. Then when I went back I was working full time and going to school full time and having marriage problems and I dropped out because of that.
Had I had a somewhat stable childhood, with two parents that got along and had not gotten hooked up with fundamentalism and gotten married halfway through college, I would have graduated no problem.
So anyway, after this struck me my body felt different. I just realized the randomness of the whole thing. My life just started out different possibly more interesting than these guys.
I mean I believe in personal responsibility but its not good to carry too much guilt around either.
I think I had a lot of Karma from my parents to work through. I am coming to think of Karma as something that is not so personal. I have relationship Karma because of my parents who have it from their parents. If your parents have messed up relationships that effects you.
But otherwise they are normal middle class intelligent people.
Comment by Ted — May 13, 2009 @ 11:29 am
I think I let go of an identity as being kind of a fuck up. Which is needed to be let go of in order to be successful in the future. its not about rationalization or excuse making or blame but just about being neutral as opposed to having so much baggage and having positive expectations of the future, instead.
Comment by Ted — May 13, 2009 @ 11:39 am
I’ve had a few other revelations along similar lines before this. Like realizing as I lay in bed just before I wake up, that I am “bracing myself” for the day ahead. Kind of like I am tightening up and constricting my energy. Like I am ready for some type of assault.
Something related to my last comment about the college thing, is that these college students are in a higher socio-economic class and that means less dysfunctional in general. I think its mostly that they are less traumatized.
The farther down you go the more traumatized and dysfunctional people are. So realizing that it was more or less random events beyond my control rather than any real short coming on my part, that had seperated me from this class, helped me to kind of reset my energy.
Because if you are hanging out with people that are more ghetto its smart to be on your guard. Because you can get assaulted.
Comment by Ted — May 13, 2009 @ 11:57 am
Yeah, definitely sounds like something similar to what I’ve been going through.
“I mean I believe in personal responsibility but its not good to carry too much guilt around either.” and “its not about rationalization or excuse making or blame but just about being neutral as opposed to having so much baggage and having positive expectations of the future, instead.” are great descriptions, kind of a middle path sort of thing.
And in regards to inheriting karma from your parents, and socio-economic status, here’s a few science article from today:
- Trauma Experienced By A Mother Even Before Pregnancy Will Influence Her Offspring’s Behavior
- Enriched environment improves wound healing in rats
Both of these conclusions apply to chronic stress and tension as well, I would bet, of both the more physical and the more mental varieties…
Comment by Ian — May 13, 2009 @ 1:33 pm
Hi, good to see you back.
The top half of the post sounds like a kind of Jungian encounter with the shadow, or something like that.
> a sense of rejection as something somehow inherent within my self
I guess I can kind of relate to that, sounds like a kind of classic introversion, which they say is established very early in life. Sometimes I find beer helps (sometimes not!) – maybe it’s a liver thing? ;-D
As for:
> to be able to put ourselves into places, situations, and states of mind …
Yes, I think we can. But it ain’t a simple process. Been thinking about this a lot since your post, which again doesn’t help. Sometimes I seek this in certain places, or works of art, sometimes in a bottle of wine with friends (in vino veritas?) But these things are not the same as the insight. (It’s a kind of magic.) It’s separate from the feeling of ‘flow’ when you’re absorbed in a task, more a sort of constructive mind-wandering, a complement to ‘flow’. As a scientist I believe that seeking insight in this way is part of my job…
Comment by speedbird — May 14, 2009 @ 3:31 am
That is interesting, I hadn’t thought about it from that angle, I was taking a more buddhist reversal of subject and object (in that something I’d taken as permanent identity was seen as impermanent and not really mine). But it could definitely be described as an integration of shadow content as well, due to the fact that I wasn’t aware of it before, that I would have been afraid to face had I been asked about it in advance, and that it was negatively affecting my behavior…
As for vino veritas, I’m in total agreement. Rumi’s poetry is a good example of this, as is a lot of Chinese poetry.
And hey, more power to you if you’ve managed to make a decent living at something that allows you occasions to be in the Flow having insights. Those two definitely go hand in hand, something I think I was trying to figure out with that Lotus effect post. It’s a washing of the soul, so to speak…
Comment by Ian — May 14, 2009 @ 8:49 am