Emotional Healing through Mindfulness Meditation

How Tanya Found Her Song

There should have been some warning, some way of preparing for what was about to happen when I climbed out of bed that day, but there wasn’t, so I simply stared out the window at the skeleton of a new building going up across the street. Rob, my lover of about two years, slept quietly behind me. Even the thought of him made me feel irritated; he was a medical machine, no heart. But we were planning to get married. Everybody thought it was time for me to settle down.

It had been an awful night. We had tried to make love, even though neither of us was very interested, so it was flat, dry. Of course we didn’t talk about it; we rarely talked about anything. Yet we looked like a successful couple. Here I was, just on the edge of thirty, the music student with a great contralto voice who would someday be an opera star but who temporarily worked as a waitress. Meanwhile Rob, the newly graduated dermatologist, was a good doctor and on his way to making a lot of money.

As the sun rose, the hard hats began scampering over the girders. The one who wore a red neckerchief attracted me because he moved with such abandon even though burdened by heavy tools. I wasn’t able to watch him for long because Rob woke up and began to get ready for work, so I withdrew to the kitchen. He appeared a half hour later dressed in his customary sport jacket and tie, and without so much as a nod of recognition, he poured himself a cup of coffee and left. The muscles in my neck loosened as he walked out the door.

Returning to the window, I caught another glimpse of the man in the red neckerchief and imagined I was up there with him, straddling a girder, legs dangling in space, hard hat securely on. Inspired, I put on the most beautiful dress in my closet and studied myself in the mirror. I must admit to liking the way the tight bodice enhanced the swelling of my breasts and the folds of sky blue silk exposed my sandaled feet. Placing a wide-brimmed straw hat on top of my long, dark brown hair, I blew a kiss toward the mirror and left the apartment.

I hope you won’t judge me reckless, but the truth is, I walked ever so slowly in front of that construction site and relished the whistles and catcalls showering down upon me. I liked breaking the rules of proper behavior my mother had insisted on. It was my father who was the earthy one. I understood myself enough to know that I was caught between the two; I spent years dressing for my mother but behaving like my father. Walking down the street by the construction site on that day, I liked the attention I got, though I thought I shouldn’t.

Looking up, I saw the man in the red neckerchief. He was watching me, so I waved up at him whimsically and then walked directly over to a local diner for breakfast. Sure enough, by the time I was seated, he arrived. That wasn’t really surprising—I knew I could attract men. His name was Chuck, and he came on with that Marlboro Man kind of energy. I allowed a small smile to play over my lips. By the time breakfast was over we had a date to see each other the next night.

Much to my surprise, this game of mine became serious—and at a speed that left us breathless. True, when we kissed I felt guilty about being disloyal to Rob. And when I daydreamed about Chuck, my mother’s disapproval boomed in my head. But every time I looked into his bottomless brown eyes or caught his muscles rippling underneath his shirt, I surrendered.

“Let’s go for a spin on the motorcycle,” he said one day. Of course I said yes. I knew it would be a blast. Careening around curves, we went at a speed that deserved to be illegal but felt like pure freedom. We both liked the special thrill we got by taking the risk of being caught. So we stole kisses on busy city streets and made love in the shadows of buildings late at night.

Neither of us was satisfied with the other parts of our lives. Chuck had broken up with his long-term lover, Sarah, two years before but still felt guilty about it and burdened by her constant demands. I desperately wanted to leave the music school I’d been going to for years; operatic singing was my mother’s dream, not mine. Besides, Chuck and I hated city life; it was the natural world we wanted, a place where we could be ourselves.

Meanwhile, my relationship with Rob fell apart. Not that he fought for me; that wasn’t his style. He didn’t even ask where I spent my nights now that I wasn’t sleeping at home. My family, however, was furious.

“Why can’t you be satisfied with Rob?” my twin sister, Dawn, asked more than once. “Don’t you know you’re throwing your life away by hooking up with Chuck?”

Even my father disapproved. “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you know there’s a difference between playing around and real life? Play with Chuck all you want, but marry Rob.”

My mother stopped talking to me.

“Let’s go to Canada,” Chuck suggested soon after the day I moved into my own apartment. “This is our chance to make a new life. With my skills, I can get a job anywhere. And between us we have enough to put a down payment on a house somewhere in the mountains.”

It was a great idea. We imagined ourselves horseback riding out in the wilderness. We thought about buying some chickens and a goat or two. And I always wanted to grow my own vegetables. Besides, I wouldn’t have to set foot in that music school ever again.

Chuck wrote to a friend who was a construction worker in Vancouver, asking if he knew of any jobs in his part of the country. “Yes,” came the answer booming through the mail. “Come on out! The pay is good.” We decided to move on the one-year anniversary of our first meeting, which gave us four months to pack up and say good-bye.

My family was upset about the move and complained loudly. But Sarah, Chuck’s former lover, was devastated. It meant he would never return to her. I could hear her scream hysterically when they tried to talk on the phone. “You can’t do this to me,” she cried. “You promised to move back home this summer. Please, I need you. Your mother needs you. Don’t do it.”

As the moving date approached, we gave notice at our jobs, sold whatever furniture we had, and bought a camper with a rack on the back for Chuck’s motorcycle. I packed up my city clothes and stored them in my sister’s attic. Friends gave us a great farewell party. Life couldn’t have been better.

And then, two days before we were to leave, Sarah called in the middle of the night to say that her mother had just had a heart attack and was at death’s door. She pleaded with Chuck to visit once more before her mother died.

“Please don’t go,” I cried. “That woman will do anything to get you back, even say that her mother’s deathly ill.”

“Don’t worry,” Chuck insisted. “Remember, Sarah doesn’t mean anything to me anymore. It’s you I love. We’re going to spend the rest of our lives together. Anyway, I owe it to Sarah’s mother to say good-bye before she dies. No matter what I think about Sarah, her mother was always good to me. Besides, my friend Dave just came back into town, so I’ll be able to see him before we leave. I’ll drive up early this afternoon and be back tomorrow morning.”

Still, I pleaded with him to stay away from Sarah. “I don’t trust her. Promise me you won’t go over to her house or ask for anything you left behind, not even the guitar.”

“I promise, I promise,” he said repeatedly as he prepared to leave, but I knew he didn’t mean it. When Chuck had the impulse to do something, he did it. He was being drawn to Sarah like a moth to a flame.

I was still asleep very early the next morning when the phone rang. It was Dave. There were tears in his voice: “I hate to be the one who has to tell you this, but somebody has to. Please forgive me. Don’t blame me.”

Choking on his words, he finally blurted out his awful message: “Tanya, Chuck’s dead. Sarah killed him.”

“What? What did you say?” I thought I hadn’t heard right. nurtured those seeds. Healing couldn’t have taken place without compassion for themselves and others.

A few went further on the path to wholeness and used meditation to develop a spiritual life. Trouble might have been the reason they began, but they continued in order to know the buoyancy, the humility, and the uncanny insight that come with states of stillness. After long practice, they learned how to experience life holistically and so touch the larger whole or feel held in the hands of God. At first this seemed extraordinary. But after much effort, when they finally did catch a glimpse of that state in themselves, it actually turned out to be rather ordinary, something that just was. The same can be said for the stars and the Milky Way. They are truly miraculous, and they just are.

ON MEDITATION

The meditation at the end of this chapter is about finding stillness. Especially in a culture like ours, in which people are addicted to ever changing sensations and constant activity, stillness is a special gift. So addicted are we to busyness that we forget the experience of having nothing to do. We forget that this state can offer many riches: the sound of the wind, the touch of the air as it brushes our skin, the sight of a hawk soaring through the sky, the experience of being. And the meditative instruction is: Just be aware.

What does just be aware mean? It means being continuously mindful. For example, in a few moments I will ask you to make the body the object of your meditation—two arms, two legs, a torso, and a head. Doing this may make you more aware of the vibrancy, the aliveness of it. In this case, being aware means being continuously in touch with whatever sensations arise in the body. The challenge is to sustain that awareness matter-of-factly, with curiosity. Being matter-of-fact is a skill. It’s the stance of the scientist while he or she watches the paths of subatomic particles in a cloud chamber or the eating habits of the great ape in the jungle. It takes curiosity, patience, and a calm mind.

Now, an interesting thing will probably happen as you try to be mindful of the body: thoughts will interrupt. Soon you will find yourself thinking about something that must be done, something you forgot to do, something you didn’t do well. You might even create a fantasy, and before you know it you’re on a beach in Hawaii. The mind keeps us busy. It cuts us off us from the experience of being. When this happens—and it will happen repeatedly—the meditative instruction is once again: Just be aware.

Don’t try to ignore your inner voice, or stop it, or in anyway control it. Simply accept its presence. Here’s the key: Make it background to your meditation. When you’re focusing on the breath moving through the body, expect thoughts to come and go, and as soon as you recognize their presence, return to the focus of the meditation. This sounds easy. But it isn’t. You will repeatedly get caught by the power of the next thought and so lose the focus on your body. Time will pass before you realize what’s happening. That’s okay. Simply return to the body.

Alternatively, feelings can arise. You might feel irritable, antsy, resentful, controlled. You are asking the mind/body process to slow down, to follow an instruction, and it resists. Again, the instruction is to return to the object of your meditation. Eventually you will be able to do so.

The goal of meditation isn’t simply to concentrate on the body. We learn to stay with the body so we can understand what it has to teach. What is the nature of the body sensation that comes with fear? Is it clear or subtle? How does it change? How long does it last? What do we have to learn from it, or from any other experience of life? The purpose of meditation is to penetrate experience, to see things as they are. We don’t avoid, run away from, or argue with a sensation or a feeling. We slow down and learn to live in stillness so that we can watch a thought or a sensation with curiosity, matter-of-factly, without trying to control it or change it. And then we see that it changes by itself. Over time, this practice can be applied to the rest of life.

Before we begin this first meditation, let’s take a few moments to consider certain basics. For instance, holding the right posture is important. When you meditate, keep your spine straight and your ears in line with the shoulders. Relax those shoulders, tilt your head slightly forward, and tuck in your chin. Try not to tilt sideways, backward, or forward. Sit as if there were a string between the sky and the top of your head. Keep your hands on your thighs or in your lap, palms up in a cupped position, with the left cup in the right cup. This gives your posture strength. It’s your body at its best, strong and relaxed, expressive of its own nature. The posture is symbolic. You don’t mold yourself into the chair or shape yourself for others; instead, you exist as you are, hanging on your own spine. At first the posture may be hard to maintain, but eventually you will find it comfortable.2

It’s traditional to sit cross-legged on a cushion; however, you can also hold the posture in a straight-backed chair by sitting slightly forward, perhaps with a pillow under your feet. You can even hold it standing up. Often it helps to change positions, especially when you’re a beginner, so please feel free to shift while you’re doing the meditations that follow. But do so slowly, and stay aware of the subtle changes in your body as you move.

Soon you will see that sitting isn’t always easy. You might hear yourself think, I’m uncomfortable; I’m getting hungry, I have to go to the bathroom, I’m annoyed with the constraints of the posture. That the body craves so much attention is an important insight.

You might also hear yourself think, I’m not doing it well. I’m not cut out for this. What’s wrong with me? Of course, it can go the other way: I’m a natural-born meditator. I’m fantastic. Others will soon see how good I am.

Both kinds of judgment present the same problem. They separate you from the experience. When you finally have moments that aren’t filled with the constant haranguing of the I, you will actually have a sense of peace. And if, at the end of the following meditation, you don’t think you’ve been able to keep the focus, remember that even just a few brief moments of stillness are important. They massage the spiritual substance of your being and deepen your sense of life as it is.

It’s important to say that Mindfulness Meditation isn’t a magic potion. Rather, it’s a precise inquiry into the mind/body process—a method that, fortunately, has been laid out by generations upon generations of meditators who came before. Because of them, the path is more accessible.

The meditation that follows offers an experience of stillness. I’m grateful to my teacher, Shinzen, for teaching it to me. Please be aware that the experience of stillness shifts in quality and intensity as you become more experienced. Perhaps at this point in your practice you will be able to find the quiet and the relaxation that are often the first taste of this state of being. With years of practice you may be able to find a stillness that is both exquisitely quiet and deeply sustaining.

To begin, find a quiet space, choose a cushion or a chair with a straight back, and to the degree you can, protect yourself from external sound. And please have patience with yourself.

Try listening to this meditation by using the compact disc that comes with this book; hearing the guidance can make the meditation more alive. If you choose to follow the printed instructions, begin by reading the entire meditation first, noting how each paragraph contains new instructions. If you like, use the memory prompt in the summary at the end of the meditation.

Because this meditation is designed to calm the mind, I will ask you to repeat it before many of the other meditations in this book. For this reason, you might want to memorize it.

At appropriate times, I’ll cue you to put down the book so you can take more time to soak in that particular experience. Place a timer by your side so you can measure the length of time you meditate by yourself. And if it helps you keep track of your progress, take some notes.

“It takes a long time to become you.”

—PABLO PICASSO

A Meditation on Finding the Stillness

Close your eyes and take a moment to let the body settle. Allow your shoulders to drop an inch or two.

Now make the object of your awareness the body . . . specifically the right side of the body . . . just the right side. Scan the length of it . . . the width of it . . . the breadth of it. Cover as much of it as possible. As best you can, be aware of the right side of the body.

Note the difference between the right side and the left side.

Then let go of the right side and make the object of your awareness the left side of the body . . . just the left side. Be aware of how it stretches out into space along its length and along its width. Sense its depth.

When you’re ready, bring the two sides together, right and left, into one unified whole. Cover that whole volume of feeling space with awareness . . . experience it all . . . the length . . . the width . . . the depth of that body space. Sit with an awareness of the whole body.

Let go of that, and make the object of awareness the front of the body . . . just the front. Soak its length with awareness. Soak its width with awareness.

Now bring your awareness to the back of the body . . . just the back. Soak that with awareness . . . both its length and its width.

Finally, bring the two together, front and back, into an entire whole. Feel how the whole body becomes more alive when it receives this attention.

Let go of that, and make the object of awareness the upper half of the body, both back and front. Feel it as a volume that has a back and a front and a depth. Be aware. Two arms . . . half of the torso . . . a neck . . . a head.

Now, shift your awareness to the lower half of your body. Scan its length . . . its width . . . its depth. Half a torso . . . two legs . . . two feet . . . ten toes. Be aware.

Now include both the upper and the lower halves of the body in the same awareness. Feel the volume of feeling space . . . a head . . . two arms . . . two legs . . . and a torso. An integrated . . . fully functioning . . . whole. Sense the vibrancy of it.

Please put down the book at this point and use this meditation strategy by yourself. Set your timer for five minutes.

After five minutes have passed, slowly open your eyes and sit quietly . . . preserving the stillness even as you let everyday life in through your eyes. Feel the slowness of your breathing, the relaxation of the body. These few moments are important. They give you a glimpse of how it’s possible to preserve the stillness in the midst of everyday life.

Take a moment to think of a trouble that you have, perhaps an unhappy marriage or the illness of a child. In the stillness, name it. Try to accept the is-ness of it, the reality that this trouble exists. And sit quietly for a while.

Then slowly stand up, once again feeling the stillness in your body. As you go about the rest of your day, remember that stillness from time to time . . . and be aware that you can return to it whenever you want.

May all beings know stillness.

Training for Awareness

1. Bring your awareness to the right side of the body and scan for sensations. Do the same for the left side. Do the same for the whole body.

Repeat this sequence for the front half of the body, the back half, and the whole body.

Repeat this sequence for the top half of the body, the bottom half, and the whole body.

2. Give a name to something that is troubling you. Accept the is-ness of it.

singing I understood! Something I instinctively knew how to do. Why hadn’t I ever paid attention to the blues before? It isn’t that I had never listened to Billie Holiday sing. I had, many times.

I felt Chuck encouraging me to sing along with her on the radio. Long after the music stopped, he continued singing, urging me on. I would hear him singing the blues as I showered or catch a few lines while sitting in a bus. I finally got the message.

So I decided to learn more about the blues. I went to live performances, got myself a singing coach, and practiced. I even found an accompanist, and together we honed an act. The blues became my way out of grieving. I didn’t know where it would take me, but that didn’t matter. I had a new life.

People liked my singing. I think they were captivated by the intensity they could feel behind the words. They probably also sensed I was singing to someone who wasn’t there, and they were right. That someone was Chuck. I cried to him, laughed with him, grieved for him, all in front of an audience. In response, Chuck whispered soft words of support. I was baring my love in public, and it gave many of the souls in front of me the freedom to do the same, in private.

After years had passed and my music had grown strong, the pain of Chuck’s death actually began to fade. Even his visits became less frequent. And I didn’t feel lonely anymore. Strangely enough, neither did I want another man. Singing had become my life, as important as breathing. I was living a miracle.

I began to write my own music. Getting up early in the morning, I would try out a new tune. Going to work, snatches of songs would bubble up. When I climbed into bed at night, arrangements swirled through my mind. To my amazement, the music was joyful as well as melancholy. It told of loss and survival, of death and rebirth.

Without any agent or public relations effort, almost without my awareness, more and more people came to hear me sing. The room was often full. My childhood dream had come true; I was a star! What really made life sweet, though, were those times when I reached out to someone in the audience and sensed a kindred soul.

I found my song, and it bonded me with a world of others.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen: reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.

This is how we are going to live for a long time, not always, for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting, after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

—MARGE PIERCY

FINDING THE STILLNESS

I’ll never forget the first time I met Tanya. She seemed so forlorn that I couldn’t help but fear she would kill herself. As she told her story, however, my fear subsided. Tanya was searching for something in all her grieving, and I sensed that the search itself would keep her alive.

Women throughout the ages have grieved as intensely as Tanya did, sometimes even more so. They have wailed and howled, torn their clothes and pulled out their hair—all to make peace with death. However, this is not how we grieve in our time. We are more contained. So contained that we often lose the opportunity to find our way through such terrible loss. As a people, whenever trouble arises we tend to short-circuit our feelings and move quickly toward solutions that offer immediate comfort. Many of us might think that a more acceptable response to Tanya’s terrible loss would be for her to take some medication, be sad for a couple of months, and then go out and buy herself a brand new red convertible.

I often wonder what it is that makes us think that we can use things to erase trouble from our lives, that we can take a pill or buy a new car and all will be well. What a powerful spell our culture casts to convince so many of us that material comfort is the answer to human suffering. It doesn’t make sense! How can a new car or a diamond ring heal the terrible loneliness that comes with the loss of a loved one? How can alcohol or a pill be anything more than a temporary answer to abuse? This belief in comfort doesn’t reflect the truth that trouble is part of life and can’t be wished away. It also obscures the truth that trouble exists not only in the outside world but also inside, in emotions that persist even after we get the new car or the diamond ring. Most important, this belief in comfort obscures the truth that trouble contains the germ of its own resolution as well as the potential for personal transformation.

Tanya’s story is important because she did, indeed, experience a transformation in the very process of grieving her loss. The story of her healing began as she and I created what has been called by Donald Winnicott a holding environment, a safe place to pursue grieving and the search that is embedded within it. It is a place designed to be fully accepting, respectful, and dependable.1 In this context, Tanya found the courage to grieve for as long as she needed, and she found the determination, the stick-to-it-ness, that leads to healing. It happened through Mindfulness Psychotherapy.

Naming the trouble was our first challenge. It wasn’t as easy for Tanya as one might think, because naming and accepting the is-ness of Chuck’s death were wrapped together inside her mind. From the very beginning, on the day he died, she had trouble acknowledging his death, partly because it was sudden, but also because it destroyed the future they had created. Certainly going through the steps of identifying the body, speaking to the police, and going to the funeral helped make it real, but the words Chuck is dead still didn’t feel right inside. Even months after he died, she kept trying to keep him alive, because she needed him. Indeed, he helped her learn how to sing the blues—but that came later, after she was more able to let him go.

Naming the emotions that come with the trouble turned out to be a fruitful therapeutic endeavor. Tanya was curious about her emotions. They interested her. She was aware, for instance, that she felt nothing right after Chuck’s death. It worried her. She even wondered if this absence of feeling meant she didn’t love him. But soon enough the horror of his death had seeped in. And that was followed by a rage that made her want to kill. And under it all was a deep despair. It took great courage not to run from such emotions. And they didn’t go away even after many months of grieving! Secretly, she thought she might be going crazy. That, indeed, is what brought her into therapy.

The extremes of human experience trigger extreme emotional reactions. Having a loved one murdered, for instance, can induce horror and rage. It can even produce the “extrasensory” perception that the murdered person is still alive. This is the mind desperately—and very creatively—trying to make sense of the experience. The problem is that we often become frightened of the very grieving we need to do and believe, instead, that we’re going crazy. Then it’s most likely we’ll force the mind back to commonplace thinking and so lose the opportunity to work our way through our trouble.

Fortunately, Tanya didn’t do that. Actually, she was one of those people who can’t stop grieving, even if they want to. She had to find her way through, and therapy offered the opportunity. During one therapy session, when she heard Chuck talking to her and thought she was going crazy, I held her closely in my gaze, slowed down my speech, and reassured her that this was part of the grieving process. As her breathing slowed, I asked her to listen to Chuck’s voice and be aware of the feeling it triggered. So she watched the feeling of panic rise and fall like a great wave inside her. To her surprise, the panic didn’t overwhelm her; in fact, it slowly dissipated.

This was the kind of work we did together many times, not only with panic, but also with rage, horror, and despair. Slowly these emotions lost their charge. Indeed, by watching her fear of going crazy over time, it eventually disappeared. And Chuck’s voice became more comfortable to live with, not as a sign of mental illness but as part of the grieving process.

Stillness was the first great gift of all this effort to heal Tanya’s emotions. It came with the slowing down of time that allowed her to sense the beating of her heart and the ebb and flow of her breath. Her mind itself quieted down—and yet it was focused. There was no fear, no guilt, just deep sadness, and then a few precious moments of peace. Once she told me she felt cradled in those moments, held in the silence. Chuck wasn’t present, and yet she felt loved.

From that stillness came her second great gift—the blues. Singing was a conduit, a funnel through which she could give voice to her grief. People who would never have such a terrible experience of loss sensed her grief. Those who had had such experiences understood. Singing became her route back to everyday life. And when someone was able to hear her songs deeply, it filled her with great joy. That joy was an affirmation of her path.

ON HEALING

As you read the following chapters, you will see that every one of the women engaged in the practice of Mindfulness Psychotherapy. Although the seven components of the process didn’t come in any particular order, each woman named her trouble and then named the accompanying emotions. Sometimes the naming was hard—especially if she had grown accustomed to living with confusion. Clarity hurt as the reality emerged. It was also difficult for those who had hidden emotions such as shame, guilt, fear, or despair for years on end. Each emotion stung painfully as it was finally felt.

Finding her way toward a complete acceptance of trouble, and the emotions that came with it, each woman understood that her emotions were sometimes causing more suffering than the trouble itself. Often, much to her surprise, a complete acceptance of the is-ness of emotions didn’t drown her in a sea of feeling. Paradoxically, she actually began to feel bigger than her emotions, more free of them. And so her suffering was reduced.

For some, this was their first taste of equanimity—the balanced mind. They developed a greater capacity for being matter-of-fact and nonjudgmental. This gave them the freedom to explore the mind/body process that gave rise to suffering. Slowly, by learning how to use awareness as a tool, most of these women understood that, because suffering is grounded in the mind/body process, it can be diminished.

As time went on and exploration became part of everyday life, every woman, at least to some degree, developed an observing self. In this way, the practice began to transform daily experiences. New people, new talent, new opportunities arose.

Finally, the search for compassion took its place in the women’s healing. They grew to recognize the seeds of it in themselves. And they nurtured those seeds. Healing couldn’t have taken place without compassion for themselves and others.