by Matt Licata
Sensation. After you’ve identified the global mood or overall emotional quality—and touched and named any associated core beliefs—move more deeply into your body. The level of raw sensation is unfamiliar to many. Although most of us are clear as to how to identify a thought, feeling, or impulse to act, the sensations alive in our bodies are not quite as accessible or obvious, at least not at first. It can take some practice to connect with sensations—to feel the heat, pressure, constriction, flow, light, dark, cold, tension, speed, holes, expansion, contraction, space, and pulsation in various parts of our bodies. So much information in our bodies is profoundly relevant to our journeys of healing and transformation, but many of us must train ourselves to attune to this layer of experience. As a mode of focus, for some it can be helpful to pay particular attention to what is happening in their bellies, hearts, and throats because much of our emotional and psychic material is stored in these three areas. But this is only a guideline. It is important to scan through your entire body to discover and attune to what is most wanting and needing attention.
Take a moment and sweep your awareness (and kindness) through your body, becoming curious and open to whatever raw sensations are coursing through. Allow your awareness to focus on an area where your attention is drawn, and just practice staying with the sensation, observing its qualities and how it moves and expresses itself. Infuse the sensation with breath, awareness, compassion, and warmth. No need to try to understand, transform, shift, or heal any of the sensations but only to befriend yourself at deeper and deeper levels.
Impulse. Often, when we are triggered or the nervous system is aroused, we will experience a variety of impulses to take some sort of action, usually with the intention of getting us out of feelings and states of vulnerability, which feel unsafe or otherwise unmanageable. We want to discharge the intense, disturbing, and claustrophobic energy, usually as quickly as possible. As a simple example, we might notice an impulse to run to the refrigerator to find some food, even though we are not actually hungry, but we feel drawn to fill a certain emptiness in the belly or heart. Or we might notice an urgent impulse to send our partner or friend a text during an argument when we are upset, or to send an email to a colleague not out of a sense of grounded presence but to avoid some emotional experience that feels unworkable and potentially overwhelming. Or we might have the impulse to turn on the television, have a drink, or scroll through Facebook. We each have our characteristic ways of cutting into an uncomfortable or uncertain moment with a particular set of activities.
When we feel sad, jealous, hopeless, or enraged—aware of a flood of ruminative thoughts, beliefs, and sensations in the body—we’re invited to pay careful attention to the habitual and addictive behaviors in which we engage (or are drawn to engage, but maybe haven’t yet initiated) to bring immediate relief to ourselves. It is natural to want to soothe ourselves during stressful and challenging times; however, addictive and automatic actions, although perhaps helpful for a few moments, tend to generate more struggle and suffering over time, a reality most of us have learned the hard way.
In a moment of activation, what is your go-to behavior? What do you feel drawn to do? In what ways do you abandon yourself and your immediate experience in the face of powerful, difficult emotions? What would it be like to notice the impulse to take action and, instead of following it right away, to bring awareness, compassion, and kindness to yourself, to care for yourself in a new way, to first see what wants to be met in this charged moment? Even for only a few seconds, open to sitting in this challenging, hot, sticky, claustrophobic middle territory, where you might be burning to take action, to somehow escape the intensity and vulnerability of the moment.
Integration. Finally, let go of tending to any individual layer of experience, open your awareness, and allow yourself to connect with all the layers at once—mood, sensation, belief, impulse. Don’t think about the layers, just relax into the alive field of energy that you are. Feel how the layers dance and interpenetrate with each other, with mood triggering core beliefs, generating sensations in the body, leading to impulses to move into action, constellating more thinking, leading to more emotion, and so forth. At times, a mood might most get your attention, so you start there; at other times, a sensation in the body, an image, a memory, or repetitive thinking around a particular theme. It’s important to note that any session of inquiry will always be unique and might never conform to any particular set of instructions, including these. Like the alchemist in search of the ever-elusive prima materia, allow the “primary material” of your own experience in the moment to guide you. For example, you might notice the mood leading to an awareness of a limiting belief, a sensation in the body that reveals a core emotional vulnerability, an image underlying the various thoughts and feelings that wants to be tended to. The embodied experience of one emotion might lead to another, previously hidden feeling. Trust your psyche to reveal to you what is most alive and relevant in the miracle of the here and now, knowing that the unfolding of the material in the vessel has its own intelligence and order.
Allow the separated layers to link, play off and with each other, and rest in attunement with the true miracle of the human experience—all the subtlety, nuance, and magic, really, of what it means to be alive. Pay careful attention to how the layers of experience that have been differentiated and separated come together in union, integrating in the spontaneous flow of life.
You can practice this meditation during times of stress and activation or when nothing in particular is going on, which can also be interesting and revealing. As you become more familiar with the practice, you might discover that it takes only a minute or two to go through it, or you could take thirty or forty-five minutes to tend to the different levels if you have extra time and inclination. Even if you are busy, you can usually find three to five minutes to check in with yourself and start to build the neural foundation and resources that will support whatever inner work you are most drawn to.
By first differentiating the various layers and then bringing them together, we foster integration. We separate, then synthesize—solve et coagula—differentiate, then link. Over time, as you practice this meditation, you might discover a natural spaciousness in your experience, even during difficult times. It is a practice of lovingkindness, self-discovery, and wisdom and provides a simple foundation of insight and nourishing self-care.
The Only Way Out Is Through
Although there might be a certain excitement about this opening to a new world, it is important that we create a home for the visitors of trepidation, fear, and ambivalence—to offer a great feast where all the figures can come. If we deny these entry out of some belief in their invalidity, they will find other ways to emerge, leaking into and out of our bodies, relationships, work, and dreams. The unwanted ones are not enemies, obstacles, or obfuscations but come as light in disguise.
It is not always easy to access thoughts, feelings, images, and sensations, especially those previously disavowed or otherwise dwelling outside conscious awareness. Tending to material that has found its way into the shadow—charged psychic states such as fear, vulnerability, and shame—is essential on any path of healing, for by way of access and articulation we can make sense of and integrate the material.
Despite the cliché, it does seem the only way out is through, if we are interested in aliveness rather than mere symptom reduction (which of course is also a valid and honorable outcome and goal). The relational context, for some, provides an environment in which we can access, articulate, and make sense of our experience with another.8 Therapeutically as well as through the practice of mindful inquiry, it is possible, over time, to transform early organizations of experience that arose from developmental trauma, consistent empathic failure, and insecure attachment. The point here is that solo work and relational work are both important and offer different portals and passageways into the mystery.
The basic idea is that the more profound and deeply embedded the trauma, t
he more helpful relationship will be to bring forth and embody lasting transformation and healing. Although there are always exceptions, in my experience this is a general rule that almost always bears out in practice. Most of us cannot meditate our trauma away. This doesn’t mean there is something problematic or lacking in our meditative practices but that for many, meditation is not capable of working with the entire spectrum because no singular method or approach can do that.
When I speak about the importance of relationship and making the journey with another, I am not referring only to a formal therapeutic relationship but to any relationship emotionally significant to us—a friend, a lover, a family member, a coworker, or even a stranger or inspiring figure from literature, myth, film, or spiritual tradition. Also, an animal-friend or personified aspect of the natural world can be the other. Even God himself or herself can be an attachment figure—most important is the quality of otherness that we touch in relationship with a being whom we can feel, who cares about us and joins us in the relational field, where we can be together.
Be a Friend to Yourself
The next time you find yourself cycling in self-attack—disconnected and spinning in shame, blame, and complaint—notice what is happening, and slow down. Feel your feet on the earth. Breathe deeply from your lower belly. Return to your senses in the here and now. The sounds. The sights. The smells. The tastes. Touch something. Allow yourself to be touched by what has arrived.
Come out of the sticky, seductive story line for just a moment and send awareness into the center of the vulnerable, tender, raw life surging to be held. Go slowly, pushing yourself a bit, testing your window of tolerance but taking care not to spiral outside it into overwhelm. Cut through the momentum of self-abandonment and descend into the core. Make the journey out of self-aggression and into the slower circuitry of curiosity, attunement, and space.
Stay close. Be a friend to yourself. Provide sanctuary and safe passage for the visitors to be illuminated and held, for in a moment of activation you need yourself more than ever. Although the temptation is to turn from the shaky center, it is an act of love to step off the battlefield and tend to the fire with the cooling waters of lovingkindness. Your torso is aglow with important data required for the way ahead and is a portal of life and creativity.
As you give yourself this gift of radical self-compassion, presence, and slow spacious awareness, you can ask: What is it that I need right now? What is most needing to be met and held? What have I abandoned in myself? What is being asked to be touched, to be heard, to be felt? Can I breathe into what has come, not as an obstacle to transcend but as an ally of the depths? How can I truly listen in a new way?
As you slow down and turn back home, seeds of empathy are planted in your nervous system, watered with new forms of self-care as compassion pathways find their grooves and are brought alive. Suddenly there is so much space. Breath where none was to be found. You are already held by something vast.
Through this aspiration to no longer abandon yourself, you come back into your power, grounded and embodied in the reality and perception of the warrior, a warrior of love who has come here not only to heal yourself but as a vessel of presence and transmutation for all beings.
Take a moment before moving on to the next chapter to rest and allow yourself to open to your immediate experience. Listen to the sounds around you, feel your feelings, sense your sensations, and see what is in front of and inside of you. Remember that you can return to this chapter’s meditation at any time, even if you have only a few minutes while on the train, in line at the grocery store, on a break at work, or waiting for an appointment.
As we learn to tend to and infuse each layer of our experience with newfound attention, awareness, and warmth, trust in the workability of our lives naturally arises as well as the courage and curiosity to go deeper, confident that we can meet ourselves and our world in a new way.
6
The Great Dance of Being and Becoming
Many people have experienced the power of the present moment; accepting what is; calling off the war with reality; and meeting immediate experience with mindful, nonjudgmental presence and compassion. One of the most common spiritual adages of the past few decades has encouraged us to spend more time being and less time doing, approaching life in a way oriented in freedom from unnecessary suffering and struggle. There is a lot of wisdom in living our lives in the here and now and not losing contact with the essential beingness eternally present. As always, though, it is important to inquire as deeply as possible into these matters to mine the complexity, nuance, and creativity in the contradictions and multiple perspectives. As profound as the teaching to “live in the present moment” might be, we cannot reduce the entirety of the human journey to a catchphrase or one particular method or approach. The heart is just too vast, too majestic, too unique, too precious.
When a challenging core belief, emotion, or life situation arrives, do we accept it and flood it with present-centered, compassionate awareness? Do we allow it to be what it is, to dance and play and spin and twirl, only to dissolve yet again back into the great natural perfection? Or do we engage with the material more actively and enter into relationship—get messy, burn with it, ask it why it has come, and explore its meaning and purpose?
Do we return to the present moment, disidentifying with the passing thoughts, feelings, and sensations, or do we dive into them, following the psychic thread to access the wisdom buried in the content itself, not just in its essential nature? Being asks that we apprehend and attune to the context (or spacious background field) in which all our experience arises, whereas becoming wants us to know the content itself with more and more intimacy, engaging in a journey with the material in an unfolding process in time.
From the perspective of the meditator or yogi, you might imagine that she or he rests in pure consciousness, in unconditioned awareness, not caught up in the infinite forms that appear but rather dwelling in the natural perfection of the moment. Here, they return over and over to this background field, not becoming tangled in the endless stream of experience. In contrast, from the perspective of the alchemist, you might imagine that he or she delves into the mess of the material, fully hands on with senses open and engaged, entering the imaginal world with a longing for communion and exploration, wanting to know everything possible about the material—its color, fragrance, and essence—even its “mood,” the way it perceives and all of its qualities, contours, and textures. Remember, for the alchemist—and for each of us as we engage our lives alchemically—the “material” of our lives is intelligent, alive, and has its own integrity, voice, and even subjectivity. We must enter into our experience in a curious, imaginal way to unlock these mysteries and mine the wisdom within us. This is something each of us can do, and it is my primary purpose in this book to offer pathways, portals, and varied invitations into the richness of this inner discovery.
Generally speaking, tending to the context or ground of our experience but not explicitly exploring the content, its qualities, and meanings is the invitation from the meditative traditions, whereas unpacking, unfolding, and embracing the content itself and the potential wisdom it contains is that of the alchemical or depth psychological approaches. How these two lenses and streams intersect, interact, contradict, and support each other are among the topics we’ll explore together in this chapter, with the underlying idea that including both perspectives will allow us to befriend ourselves at the deepest levels and reveal a healing space that is creative, transformative, and even beautiful in its landscape.
How will we ever come to terms with the teachings on acceptance when there is a part of us that genuinely wishes for things to change? It can seem like such a contradiction at times: “I hear that I’m supposed to just accept what arises, and that is the key to lasting freedom, happiness, and peace. But the truth is that I don’t accept it. If I’m being fully honest with myself, I want some things in my life to change. I want to transform and heal and grow and
improve certain parts of myself and my life.” It’s such an honest and human confession and deserves not judgment and shame but validation. The art of facilitating a dialogue between these two voices and their associated images, feelings, impulses, and behaviors is rich terrain for us to include as part of our inquiry, without any fantasy that the goal is to achieve some sort of resolution. The creative, quantum flow of aliveness we long for will never be found in some project of sorting it all out but only in turning toward the intelligence of the contradiction itself, which is saturated with life.
Being and becoming. Acceptance and change. Transformation and rest. Yin and yang. These are the great archetypal energies we meet when we do this work. As with all psychic opposites, they will never be wrapped up into some neat, tidy package in which we can find resolution, for they are too alive. We can’t resolve an archetype. We just can’t pin them down into some preprogrammed philosophy of life, even if doing so might (temporarily) alleviate some of the uncertainty and anxiety. In tending to the apparent contradictions, we face a conundrum: “Oh, I see, I should just accept everything exactly the way it is. That is the way to peace. Any urge to improve my sense of self or life situation is clear evidence I have fallen off the path. I should return to presence and call off the search.” The other extreme is to spend nearly all our precious life energy trying to grow and expand who we are and to change the circumstances of our lives, relationships, and inner experience. We engage in what can appear to be an unending project and become utterly exhausted over time. How to navigate this?
The invitation, as with all contradictory energies, is into the rich, unknown middle territory, alive with information and potentiality. Although we will never be able to resolve the mystery of yin and yang, we can begin to facilitate a dialogue between them, to cultivate an attitude of play and dance as we weave in and out of the poles, allowing a new, “third” position to emerge.1 This new emergent is not some homogenized or watered-down compromise but saturated with the intelligence and creativity of multiple perspectives, bringing conscious attitudes and unconscious content together in the immediacy of now, revealing a way forward that transcends previous ways of thinking, perceiving, and being.
