Since I began a formal mindfulness meditation practice 8 years ago, I've found that the prospect of profound
psychological healing is a very real possibility for me as a result of my efforts.
I know for some, this slightly bold statement may rub you the wrong way, and rightly so, because in many styles of meditation practice there is a core value of:
non-striving.
Western mindfulness meditation pioneer,
Jon Kabat-Zinn, defines "
Non-striving" like this in his classic book
Full Catastrophe Living:
Almost everything we do we do for a purpose, to get something or somewhere. But in meditation this attitude can be a real obstacle. Although it takes a lot of work and energy of a certain kind, ultimately meditation is a non-doing. It has no goal other than for you to be yourself...
[And], in the meditative domain, the best way to achieve your goals is to back off from striving for results and instead to start focusing carefully on seeing and accepting things as they are, moment by moment. [My italics.]
Here's the irony: I agree with this statement
wholeheartedly.
But I would add that, I did not start out on this path of practicing formal meditation with any particular goal in mind regarding psychological healing, it has simply been a felt outcome that I've noticed, and now welcome.
I know this opportunity for psychological healing as a by-product of formal meditation does
not make me unique either.
Take Western Buddhist teacher, author, and co-founder of
The Insight Meditation Society Sharon Salzberg.
In her book
Faith and in various biographical articles in the magazine
Lion's Roar, Sharon Salzberg has candidly shared about how her very
painful and traumatic childhood experiences, including her mother's death when Ms. Salzberg was nine years-old and her father being institutionalized for severe mental illness when she was eleven, was embedded in much of her early years in formal meditation.
Of her first years practicing meditation in India in 1971 at the age of 19, Sharon Salzberg writes in
Faith:
(Sharon Salzberg on far left in early life photo taken from
Lion's Roar)
I sensed deep within me the possibility of rising above the circumstances of my childhood, of defining myself by something other than my family's painful struggles and its hardened tone of defeat.
I recalled the resignation in my father's eyes at the constraints that governed his life. The boundary of his autonomy was the decision about where to have lunch if someone took him out of the hospital on a pass.
With a surge of conviction, I thought, 'But I am here, and I can learn to be truly free.' I felt as if nothing and no one could take away the joy of that prospect.
I am enormously grateful for meditation teachers like Sharon Salzberg to be so
vulnerable and generous in order to share such private thoughts for the benefit of meditation students throughout the world. As a relative newcomer to meditation, it gives me a sense of connection and understanding.
And this is true even when my experience was slightly nuanced from hers, in that, as I said, I did not start out with any sort of intention to have a deeper, unconscious, psychological healing.
No, when I first sat down to meditate regularly in 2011, I just knew I wanted to experiment with a practice that may yield
greater inner and outer ease, and another way to manage anxious feelings- which largely consisted in my
conscious mind.
And in the beginning,
that is what happened.
I remember one of the first distinct moments, a little over 2 years into my practice, when I really felt like I was beginning to receive some of
the fruits of my practice.
At the time, I was lying in the hospital after having my daughter prematurely, and I was receiving both a treatment protocol for
severely high blood pressure so that I didn't have a stroke, while at the same time getting treatment for a
spinal leak that was giving me the
worst headache I have ever had in my life. And all the while, trying to bond and
breastfeed my new baby and
support my then 4 year-old son.
To say the least, there was
a lot going on.
But the thing was, I still kind of felt okay. Like I was thinking: "
This sucks, but it won't last, and I can handle this."
In other words,
I consciously chose not to panic or sink into other negative emotions, and it felt amazing. It felt liberating.
It reminded me of a book I had read a couple of years earlier called
Learning to Breathe (2008) by Alison Wright.
This book is a memoir of the author's recovery from a horrific bus accident in southeast Asia in which she very nearly died, but in part through
the skill set of her meditation practice (and an incredible amount of
grit and
tenacity) she was able to survive and then thrive by mountain climbing again.
Similarly, in the medically complicated birth of my daughter, I was able to
consciously use my own meditation practice and its benefits to act as a sort of
psychological buffer that protected me, in part, from some of the quite understandable mental difficulty of that type of birthing experience.
Or, as the Tibetan spiritual and political leader his Holiness, the 14th
Dalai Lama wrote about in
The Book of Joy (2016) with South African
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in my formal practice of meditation I had built up my "
mental immunity," which is to say, my
psychological immune system (as opposed to my physical immune system) that I believe created greater
resilience.
But, my healing journey did
not end there.
In 2014 I began to go on
silent mindfulness meditation retreats, and after 3 years of a growing sense of psychological healing and increased
well-being in my
conscious mind, it was really only when I began periods of longer mindfulness meditation practice on one-day or overnight retreats that I began to experience what I believe to be psychological healing of my
unconscious mind.
Prior to these experiences of deeper levels of psychological healing I had heard the term "
purification" in the
contemplative literature, but I don't think I really grasped it in any sort of
sensory way (as opposed to a purely intellectual understanding) until I began to experience it for myself, and this is the way I described it to my partner after one such occasion:
It felt like I had been living and moving through the world with shards of glass inside of me that occasionally caused me pain and discomfort of varying degrees. But on this silent retreat, all of the sudden--somewhere around the 3rd day of intensive meditation practice--one of the shards of glass felt like it was being carefully and safely (yet painfully) removed from my heart-mind-body.
It was almost like a surgeon making the choice to slowly remove shrapnel from her patient one piece at a time because: a. it would be far healthier for the patient in the long run, and b. it might be the only way to have the pain of removal be tolerable for the patient.
At the moment of sharing this experience with my partner, I also experienced active grieving that included buckets of tears, when in my everyday life I am someone who can barely only squeeze out 1 or 2 tears at most.
In Eckart Tolle's 1997 book
The Power of Now, he wrote:
The pain-body is an energy field, almost like an entity, that has become temporarily lodged in
your inner space. It is life energy that has become trapped, energy that is no longer flowing. Of
course the pain-body is there because of certain things that happened in the past. It is the living
past in you, and if you identify with it, you identify with the past…
This passage really summarizes what I have experienced in these retreats that has felt like "purification" in the sense that afterward I feel somewhat unburdened from the historical load that I have carried.
And of course Eckart Tolle's whole argument in The Power of Now is that it is the practice of presence that can create the conditions for these changes to occur. He writes:
The past cannot prevail against the power of the Now.
From another perspective, that of the
Christian mystical contemplative practice of Centering Prayer, the same phenomenon has also been written about through different means (i.e. different contemplative practices) to the same end- a phenomenon referred to as an "
unloading" of the unconscious.
Of this tradition,
American Catholic monk and priest Thomas Keating, wrote in
Invitation to Love that he believed it was:
The level of deep rest accessed during the prayer period [that] loosen[ed] up the hardpan around the
emotional weeds stored in the unconscious, of which the body seems to be the warehouse.
[Then,] the psyche begins to evacuate spontaneously the undigested emotional material of a lifetime, opening up new space for self-knowledge, freedom of choice, and the discovery of the divine presence within.
Of Father Keating's perspective as the main pioneer of the re-emergence of Centering Prayer in modern times, another author, Cynthia Bourgeault, wrote in her book
Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening:
Keating’s teaching begins by a fundamental reposition of the pace of meditation in a spiritual
praxis. Rather than seeing it as a tool for developing concentration, relaxing stress, or
accessing higher states of consciousness, he sees it primarily as a catalyst for the purification
and healing of the unconscious…
As one sits in centering prayer with the intent to rest in and trust in God, the unconscious begins to unload ‘the emotional junk of a lifetime.’ Repressed memories, pain, accumulated dull hurt rise to the surface and are, through the attitude of gentle consent, allowed to depart.
Yes...
What I've found in my own experience, is that when I sit for longer periods in mindfulness meditation, my own unconscious is able to become so relaxed and undefended, that
I'm able to access and release that which no longer serves me from the storage unit that is my unconscious.
And what's interesting for me, as a Type A personality in many areas of my life, is this process seems to happen through
no striving, efforting or forcing of my own because, metaphorically, it seems my unconscious psychological healing can only emerge
like a deer courageously and cautiously walking out into a field when the conditions (e.g. safety, compassion, presence) are just so.
(An actual deer I would see each night I'd take a walk on one of my silent meditation retreats.)
To come full circle, I want to just say again that I know, and do not suggest, that I or anyone else "seek out" these types of experiences; I don't even believe this type of psychological healing works that way.
As Western Buddhist teacher and author Jack Kornfield writes in his 1995 book
A Path With Heart:
Because each of us as a human flower will open in our own unique way in our own particular
cycles, we need not direct the specific energies of our body and heart. Our path is neither to
desire them nor fear them. The true path is one of letting go.
But
without striving, what we can do is:
Show up and choose to be present.
Pay attention to what has heart and meaning.
Tell the truth without judgment or blame.
Be open to outcomes.
-Angeles Arrien (1940-2014, Spanish-American Cultural Anthropologist)
May it be so.
