(From Handbook For Humans)
Most of our internal stored pain is hidden away from our consciousness. It is kept away precisely because it is painful; unconscious mechanisms are trying to protect us. Thus our inner pain is not normally felt in its true intensity, but rather as a kind of chronic background disjointedness.
Mindfulness, discussed also in chapter 1, is a process of being willing to sit down in silence and truly take a look at the disjointedness inside, truly feel it, truly experience it. When we just sit there in silence, without distracting ourselves in any way, but just allowing our attention to carefully and calmly observe our own inner process, that is when the pain slowly starts revealing itself.
Mindfulness is mentioned first among ways to heal our pain because, in my experience, it is the most powerful and profound game in town. I’ve never come across anything that can match the power of mindful awareness, long-term, to bring about beneficial changes at the deepest level.
Its real power is processional, that is, its effects slowly cumulate if we keep it up. It has immediate benefits, of course, such as more equanimity, more sense of humor, more ability to respond instead of react. However, its long-term effect is even greater and involves our self-identity—but it’s subtle, like changes in our face in the mirror over time.
Because its deepest effects take place very gradually, it is easy to feel that we’re not making much progress and that our mindfulness practice is not working. For that reason, we’ll be tempted many times to give it up.
Another giving-up factor occurs also. After we’ve been practicing mindfulness for a time, life will start going more smoothly, we’ll seem to be more lucky, things will flow more. We may begin to feel that we possess a natural gift for handling the events of life. Who needs daily mindfulness sitting? This thought too will tempt us to give up the practice.
A third giving-up factor, ironically, is that things may seem to get worse for awhile. The pain that’s been suppressed will start surfacing into consciousness. In fact, we’re no more distressed than before, but it may seem as if we are for a time because we’ll be more aware of it when our over-reactions and distress patterns act out.
For these reasons, it’s helpful to make a commitment that we’re going to practice mindfulness for a certain period of time and not try to evaluate the results right away.
What is mindfulness? Basically, it’s being willing to sit down and be still for a while. No activity, no goal in mind; just a willingness to sit there and witness our own inner process for a period of time. And it’s desirable if we can do this without getting caught up in comparisons—“Yesterday went well but today not well,” or “I’m not sure if I’m making any progress,” etc. Such comparisons obscure the pure witnessing that we’re trying to do.
Let’s say we were to spend some time each day, say 45 minutes or so, sitting in pure mindfulness meditation. Let’s see briefly what would be involved:
The first thing would be to pick some physical position where we can let our body be still for awhile. Frequent shifts in position, frequent scratching, writing down thoughts, even trips to the bathroom can become an occupation. Anything at all can be used as a means of supplying distractions to our consciousness and keeping us busy.
So we want to find a position where we can let our body be still for awhile, and yet stay attentive. As a practical matter, this usually means a form of sitting. We can sit on a cushion in one of the classic meditation postures, or we can sit in a chair. We can even lie down, though we’re much more likely to become drowsy that way.
The next thing is either to close our eyes, or to gaze slightly out-of-focus at some nearby surface, such as the floor or a wall. The idea is to reduce visual stimulation, to reduce the amount of visual input coming in. Since we want to pay attention to our inner process, minimal outer distractions are desirable. Nevertheless, any outer distractions that do occur are watched just like any other phenomena going on.
The last preparatory thing is ensuring that there’s no particular thing that we’re concentrating on, such as a quote or a mantra or an image or even a teacher. It’s not a time for dwelling on sublime ideas or visions or mantras, as valuable as they may be, but rather to have truly no occupation.
The idea is to allow a kind of let-go—to let whatever wants to go on in the mind go on, without trying to control it. But then, to be very attentive to what’s going on, without getting identified with it. These are the basic conditions.
When this practice is deepened, what happens is quite fascinating. As mentioned, various psychic wounds lie hidden and incomplete in the unconscious. Like all other entities in the universe, including us, what they are basically seeking is attention and appreciation.
When we sit silently in mindfulness, suddenly a great spaciousness is made available. We’re no longer distracting our consciousness with the myriads of things that we distract ourselves with. Our consciousness, our attention, is available. In that spaciousness, our unconscious mind begins to send up things to consciousness to be noticed—hidden-away things, normally suppressed out of awareness:
Memories, feelings, thoughts of old losses, frustrations, fears, griefs. Fantasies of various kinds, which can be either positive or negative, rapturous or terrifying, or anything in between. Sexual fantasies. Incredible rages, unbearable griefs, tremendous guilts, terrifying fears, and so on.
Inside each one of us are some very, very intense things which will come up and be healed if we persist long enough in creating a safe, non-distracting, non-reactive, loving space for them to appear.
What those pains want is simply our loving attention. They want to be able to come up into consciousness and be noticed, accepted, loved—just like what we would want. When we provide that accepting and non-reactive attention, it’s exactly like the attention that the baby needed from the mother in order to discharge distress. We provide that loving, relaxed attention to ourselves now.
The situation can be compared to a dog kept down in a dark basement. The dog barks and howls fiercely. Of course it does; it wants to get out, it wants to experience the sun, it wants to be free. If we let it up, give it a good bath and some loving attention, it will run around for awhile and then will probably curl up at our feet and go to sleep.
Our wounds are like that. A particular chain of wounds may need to come up many times, each time at a little deeper level. Each time it completes a little more of what it was unable to complete in the past, and a little more energy rejoins consciousness. So our consciousness grows a little bit larger and more spacious, and our unconsciousness grows a little bit smaller and less influential.
Most of the time, however, it’s not a matter of high drama. Initially at least, much time will be spent watching the mind wondering why in the world it’s doing this, fantasizing about the next meal, things like that.
The real pain doesn’t come up for awhile, until practice deepens. A mindfulness meditation retreat can be useful for bringing up deeper material. Or perhaps more time spent with each day’s sitting. But one way or another, if we keep on, everything does come up to be attended to. Eventually, every old conditioning surfaces if we persist long enough.
Gradually healing our wounds like this is not dramatic, but it can do more for our life and our relationships than just about anything else we can do. Therapy can help, relationship skills can help, many things in this chapter can help, but the sword that cuts the deepest is mindfulness.
It’s so powerful that eventually we can see even the whole clinging and grasping of our mind-mechanism, even the whole mistaken identity about who we are as a separate entity—everything.
By increasing our ability to step back and look at our own unconscious material, mindfulness helps us to become more conscious. And that profoundly affects every aspect of our experience of our life.
© 1997 by James Sloman
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