It seems to me that a meditation practice can be a fantastic playground for breaking our own personal habits in a self compassionate way. Rather than taking the heavy-handed approach, which in my experience only works in the short-run and generally leads to a poor sense of self, we use a light but honest touch to steer ourselves in a different direction.
I recently had a difficult experience in meditation that punctuated this lesson for me. I was sitting with a group meditating- this sit was about 40 minutes- and about a third of the way in I began to feel an intense wave of emotion come through me. Now, I say "come through me" because that is how it felt in my body. My chest got tight, my heart began to race, and my whole body felt extremely heavy. And as if that was not enough, emotions of sadness and fear were washing in like tides, in and out over the course of the rest of the meditation.
After it was over, I had the thought: what the hell was that? I discussed my experience with the teacher after class and she gave me some pointers for managing this type of situation in meditation should it present itself again, and at that moment I felt more relaxed about the whole thing.
But when I got home that night the body sensations and emotions knocked again. My Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction teacher calls these moments "uninvited guests." And the wise instruction is to do as Sufi poet Rumi suggests in his poem "The Guest House."
...Meet them at the door laughing...invite them in.
Oh Rumi but that is so hard! As a more modern 21st century poet Marie Howe said, "presence is painful." I don't want painful. And so I turned away and sought refuge in my two old friends: carbs and bad tv.
It's funny though, my two go-to escape behaviors for difficult emotions didn't do their job as well as they used to this time, and I noticed that right away. I sat cross-legged on my ottoman in my living room in front of my evening soap opera, "Grey's Anatomy," and I still felt. Not so much the body sensations anymore, but the residual yuck of emotional distress was still there. This led to a combination of frustration that my escape behaviors did not work and shame that I engaged in the escape behaviors to begin with. So to sum it up, I made an already bad situation worse.
Or did I? Is there another way to view this scenario?
At my recent meditation retreat the teacher Kate talked at the end of the day about the laws of expansion and contraction. She said in a full day of meditation retreat one may practice expansion, or drawing what you want to you, and when you leave the retreat and re-enter the "real world" with families and jobs and traffic, you may notice contraction, or taking yourself away from what you want.
This instruction made so much sense to me, and it seems this dynamic may be a constant dance that we do as human beings and especially as seekers. Opening to growth or expansion. Followed by moments of shutting down, retreating or contracting.
When I think about my experience of coming face to face with difficult emotions and having the urge to run away, from this perspective of expansion and contraction being a law of the universe, I can actually shift from a self-critical position to a self-compassionate position. With this shift in perspective, or attitude, I can feel my whole body begin to soften and I actually feel lighter inside. As if my whole person let out an enormous exhale with an audible sigh of relief. "Thank god," I say to myself, "this is not another failure for me to chronicle and live through. This is just the nature of things- which means, I am no different from everybody else."
What's more, this new perspective of accepting the law of expansion and contraction highlighted by my recent meditation experience has the potential to help me (and maybe you too) with one of my most ingrained, well-versed habits: perfectionism.
One of my old behavioral patterns is to aim to learn something new very quickly and then do it perfectly every time thereafter. And when (not if) I inevitably don't do it perfect, I attempt to hide from the negative feelings that arise by engaging in distraction like food and tv like I mentioned above, but also sometimes shopping or seeking out reassurance or external validation from others like my husband. Then, I take the next step of sinking into self-loathing and shame about myself due to my poor coping style-which leads to what? More attempts at perfectionism. Thereby completing the vicious cycle to guarantee I keep going around in circles. Forever stuck on my own wheel of what Buddhists call dukkha or suffering.
This very wheel was turning this morning when I sat down for meditation. I had had a rough night due to the residual emotion from the day before, including some additional feelings like irritability and agitation, which led to a pretty strong aversion to my sitting practice this morning. But I got on the floor anyway, aka "I pushed through," and began to read a piece by Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hahn to bring my mind into focus.
However, after I read, and his words are always so generous and kind, I surprised myself by breaking my perfectionist cycle and allowed myself not to meditate. I said to myself, "you do not have to do this. This may not be what you need right now."
But then, what would I do with myself? In the past, if I didn't steam my way through a moment with force and self-aggression, I'd be retreating into my false refuges of carbs, tv, shopping, or seeking reassurance from others. And I didn't want to do that either.
At that moment my mind turned to a writer named James Finley. He had lived at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky with Thomas Merton for six years in his youth, and went on to write a book called "Christian Meditation." In this book he wrote in part about how our daily lives, whatever they may be, can be a "monastery without walls" if that is our intention. So my days filled with tasks like driving, showering, feeding the baby, talking with my spouse, sitting with a patient or cooking a meal all could be done as a contemplative practice.
With that thought, I stood up and walked out of my living room into the kitchen and I began to cook. Keep in mind this was still the before-dawn-hours of the day because that is when I usually meditate. So when my husband got up to take a shower before work he came into the kitchen and looked at me rather quizzically, but simply said: "watcha doin in here?" I merely responded with the obvious," cooking a quiche for dinner tonight." He looked at me cutting onions and slicing mushrooms, and said, "you don't usually do this at 5 in the morning, you ok?" I said I had had some difficult emotions show up in meditation so I decided to switch gears.
At that moment he asked if there was anything he could do. When he asked that I knew I could gratify my desire for reassurance and external validation right then and there, but I didn't do it. Instead I paused, thought of Buddhist teacher Sylvia Boorstein and said: "I think this one is an inside job" and I kept on cooking. With that one action, I took one step toward breaking my perfectionist habit.
What steps might you be willing to take today toward breaking habits? How might the ebb and flow of expansion and contraction present itself in your life?
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