Once we’ve committed to looking at what makes us who we are, what we want to change in ourselves, and who we want to be, we begin to experience life with a new awareness of ourselves. At this point we can use our daily interactions, particularly the challenging ones, to deepen our self-awareness and start making the necessary changes to become a better self.
In the last chapter, we discussed how we unknowingly hold onto distorted perceptions, most often from childhood, and then reinforce the distortion when we act on it consciously and unconsciously in related situations. I used my Lens of Perception concept not only to illustrate how the distortion manipulates our thoughts, feelings, and actions in many areas of our lives, but also to show that these distorted perceptions are not a permanent part of us and can be removed—they don’t have to continue to influence who we are. In this chapter, I provide practical ways to do this—that is, to start recognizing these distorted perceptions and change the subsequent discordant behaviors. I’ll show you how challenging daily interactions become opportunities to see what makes us tick and to make the changes in ourselves that bring about a more peaceful experience in all aspects of our lives.
Most of us would find it difficult to deliberately throw garbage or anything at another person no matter how angry or provoked we feel. And yet, that is exactly what we do when our reactions toward others don’t come from a place of compassion and discernment, which I call our heart center. When we behave in a manner that either overtly or covertly dumps bad energy through words or actions on another person, we are metaphorically throwing waste at them. We always have a choice to use our Meditative Feeling and speak and act from there in any situation. But how do we do that in negative situations, especially in the heat of an emotional moment?
We begin by becoming consciously aware of how we behave in certain situations. Most often, the time span between a thought and an action when in an emotionally charged situation is so short that it seems almost synchronous. There are some situations in which this can work positively; for example, if you were to see someone in danger of drowning in a river, and you reacted by jumping in to save the person without considering any danger to yourself. In these types of cases, most people simply say, “I just jumped in without thinking.” However, more often than most of us would like to admit, our spur-of-the-moment actions are hurtful to ourselves and others.
There is always a space between a thought and an action no matter how quickly you spring into action. This space can be so small that we are often unaware of it. The size of the space depends on the amount of discordant energy behind the thoughts and subsequently associated feelings. When there is a lot of discordant energy behind the thoughts and feelings, the subsequent action seems almost synchronous. For example, take a moment to reflect on your reaction when someone unexpectedly confronts you in an angry outburst. In the moment that it happens, do you immediately shut down, retreating inside yourself and becoming quiet, or do you push back instantly with a matching outburst? Now, think about how you would react if someone simply asked you a non-confrontational question on a work project during a meeting; you most likely would think for a moment and then respond. Because there isn’t any discordant energy in the latter situation, you are able to use that short space to respond unemotionally.
It’s always important to reflect on our reactions that were hurtful to someone else, and be conscientious not to repeat that reaction in a similar situation. Many of us do this—hence the saying that hindsight is 20/20. This is also necessary in examining behavior patterns. However, to bring about lasting change, we need to do more than reflect on our discordant behaviors and vow not to act them out again. If it were that easy, most of us would have accomplished this years ago. For this reason, I prefer to work with my clients on using the moment just before we act to change the discordant energy fueling the thoughts and feelings.
Finding the Space between
Thoughts/Feelings and Actions
We need to identify what happens in that moment, and then learn how to pay attention to that space no matter how small it is. Into that space that separates thought and feeling from action, we need to insert a wedge. I use the word wedge because it not only represents the small narrow space that initially exists, but also illustrates the action required to widen this space between our thoughts/feelings and reactions. I call this concept the Wedge of Awareness and it forms the second way of how we can use the Meditative Feeling for change. We use our strength of focus to drive in the wedge to widen the space between our thoughts/feelings and subsequent actions to give us the time and space needed to choose a different behavior (action).
As mentioned in the previous chapter, before we can effect change in ourselves, we need to become aware of our thoughts and feelings that are provoking unenlightened behaviors. Once we create this awareness, we can take the appropriate action to effect change. To do this, you need to exert your strength of focus to create the space. In that moment, visualize a wedge separating your discordant thoughts and feelings from your impulse to react, at the same time recreating the peace, calmness, and stillness that you feel when you are meditating. The Meditative Feeling forms the wedge, and without this feeling all you will be doing is mentally battling a discordant behavior with a more enlightened one. The Meditative Feeling is the key component that will tip the scale in your favor.
Creating the Meditative Feeling inside you is vital. With daily meditation, as little as ten minutes on a morning and night, not only will you recognize when you are truly in the meditative space as opposed to thinking you are there, but you will be able to hold onto into it when and as you need it. The more regularly you meditate, the more enduring the Meditative Feeling will be.
This is how to use the Wedge of Awareness. It is not easy to do; if it were, most of us would just do this to affect a better outcome in all situations. However, it is also not impossible, and with practice, it becomes second nature. Think of it as reclaiming your right to choose your actions by becoming more aware of what lies behind them—your thoughts and feelings. After all, for all of these years you have relinquished control of your actions, and as a result have created hurtful, negative situations for yourself and others.
Nose-Breathing Meditation—Try It for Yourself
I have talked about the Meditative Feeling, now let’s create it. As we know, everybody is different and what works for one person does not work for another. I have found the same with meditation techniques. Over the years I have found that the three techniques covered in this book—nose, hands, candle—cover just about everybody. That is, I have not found anybody who did not resonate with one of them. Of course, people can struggle in the beginning but, generally speaking, one of the techniques will work better for you than the others. This is the one that you should practice with. You can of course practice with the others to expand your repertoire but you should always use the technique that is easiest for you as your main one for creating the Meditative Feeling.
How to do this meditation
• Find a comfortable place to sit or lie down. The posture does not matter as long as you do not fidget or fall asleep.
• Close your eyes and immediately take your awareness to the feeling of your breath on the skin on the inside of your nose.
• As you breathe in, feel the cold air from the room on the skin on the inside of your nose moving inward through your nasal passage. Then, as you breathe out, feel the warm air from your lungs on the skin on the inside of your nose as the breath moves through your nose.
Considerations during the meditation
• Do not force your breath on the inhale or exhale. It doesn’t have to be slow or fast, deep or shallow. Just breathe in a very relaxed and easy way.
• If your mind wanders off, gently bring your attention back to the physical sensations. By focusing on the physical sensation, we are giving the mind one single thing to focus on.
• If you’re having a difficult time staying focused on the sensation of the breath, explore other sensations of the breath moving through your nose, such as observing the slight flare in your nostrils, feeling the air on the top of your lip, visualizing the air flowing in and out like a gentle mist.
Tips to get the most out of the meditation
Notice how you feel after the meditation. Creating the Meditative Feeling inside yourself during the meditation is essential to bringing about other changes in your life. Whether it takes five or fifteen minutes, once you’ve created this feeling, appreciate it and hold it for as long as you can. The main goal is to create this feeling on a regular basis—think of it as rebuilding a new foundation inside yourself.
Lastly, but most importantly, create a discipline to meditate. Practice this at least three days a week, at the same time each day. Do not underestimate how difficult it is in the beginning to add a new routine to your weekly activities. Persistence is the key.
Holding the Space
An effective way to begin creating a Wedge of Awareness is to add an easy meditation practice to our daily routine. Once we are able to create a meditative energy—that calm feeling—in ourselves, we can connect to (or recreate) that energy in any situation. We can then gain distance from the discordant feelings by filling with this meditative energy the space that separates the discordant thoughts/feelings from the subsequent reactions. This meditative energy also enables us to create the internal space to step back and look at the big picture of ourselves.
The simple nose-breathing meditation above works well with the Wedge of Awareness technique. I like this meditation because it can be done anywhere and for any length of time—it doesn’t require preparation or getting into a specific posture. With a little practice, you can learn to do this meditation to create an inner calmness and stillness on the go! You may even do it with your eyes open, and the people around you will not even realize it, though they too may benefit from the calmness you cultivate.
Consider this real-life situation that one of my clients shared with me after he had been practicing the Wedge of Awareness for a short time. He had taken a vacation day to get some things done at home, and at the end of the day, his wife returned from work in a bad mood (she had obviously had a bad day). She was only home for a few minutes when she began to get grumpy with him for something that had not been done. His immediate thought was, “I have been busy all day, so why are you upset with me over this one thing? Are you taking your bad day out on me?” But instead of actually saying this in reaction to her angry attitude toward him, he thought, “This is how she is behaving but not who she is.” In that moment, he could feel the discordant energy that was building up inside him begin to subside. When he did not react to his wife’s grumpy comments and attitude, she asked, “Well?” to which he replied, “I know this is how you are behaving, but it’s not who you are.” She looked at him almost in shock; after all, this was not how a similar interaction would have taken place in the past. He told me that just moments after saying this, her negativity seemed to dissipate, like a plug was pulled and the bad energy of the day drained out of her, leaving her in a better mood.
I’m sharing his experience with you as an example of how the Wedge of Awareness works, but I am not recommending that you try his exact response when in a similar situation—you may not experience the same outcome by repeating his words. However, once you are able to create a space between the discordant thoughts/feelings that arise in negative situations and your impulsive reaction based on them, you will find that your own enlightened thoughts come to mind in that space, and you will be able to choose an enlightened response.
At the end of any meditation, take a moment to savor the feeling of peace that you have created inside yourself. Don’t move on from it like you’ve just brushed your teeth or finished another activity in your daily routine and are now ready to do the next thing. Even though you are adding meditation to your daily routine, you want to bring the inner peace and stillness that you’ve created with you as you move on to the next activity in your day. I call this holding the energy.
To do this, sit for a few moments at the end of the meditation focusing on that inner calmness as if to memorize the feeling (but without thinking). Then, as you are doing other activities during the day, take a few moments to see if you can recreate that calm feeling from your earlier meditation. When you first start meditating, you may only be able to hold the energy for a few minutes after your meditation, but with practice, you will be able to feel the inner calmness for hours afterward and easily recreate it anytime during the day at will.
The stillness that you create during the nose-breathing meditation is the feeling you want to bring into that space between your thoughts/feelings and actions. This technique requires a commitment to use it every time you know that you will be in a situation that could provoke you to act discordantly. For example, if you are walking into a meeting that could be challenging or if you are going to speak with someone who always pushes your buttons, bring your attention to the warm and cold air flowing in and out of your nose to reduce the discordant energy.
Replacing nervous or any other type of discordant energy with inner calmness prior to a potentially negative situation enables the calmness to dominate your state of being. It is then somewhat easier to use the calmness to prevail over any discordant feelings that arise when you’re in the challenging situation. In a calm state, you can stay present in that space between your thoughts/feelings and your action, giving more time for enlightened thoughts to come to mind on how to respond. I call this holding the space.
In stressful situations that unexpectedly arise, it is important that you start your meditation exercise to create inner calmness in that moment. As you’re doing this, look for the space between the thoughts/feelings that have started stirring in you and the impulse to react. You can do this in the moment, especially with practice. By practicing your meditation regularly, you will be able to bring to mind (and body) in the moment of any situation the calm feeling that becomes familiar from the meditation. At some point, inner calmness will always be just a moment away no matter how tense the situation.
The goal is to feel calm energy and then hold it; otherwise, the discordant energy may still kick in as you engage with the situation at hand. We can engage with any situation while holding the calm energy in our being. Let’s look at a few examples of people in different situations holding their calm energy to improve an interaction with someone:
Work situation
One of my meditation students came to me for advice on a tense situation at work. He was constantly irritated by a coworker in a neighboring cubicle. The coworker’s righteous attitude pushed every button in him—everything the coworker said or did thoroughly annoyed my meditation student, and he would respond accordingly.
I explained how to use his meditative energy and create the Wedge of Awareness. The student followed my advice and later told me that it took a few attempts to consistently use this technique in the reactive situation. At first, he became increasingly aware of the stronghold that this tension had on him. Then, one day, he found himself in a moment thinking, “I am obviously pushing her buttons as well, and I don’t enjoy it,” and he followed that thought with a professional and measured response to one of her attempts to interact with him in an annoying manner. He said that it seemed like they were both surprised by his calm, professional reaction.
He recognized that with every attempt to create a Wedge of Awareness, he was cultivating calmness in the moment to the point that his attitude toward this person just changed. From that day forward, he was able to take a friendlier approach in responding to this coworker.
Personal relationship
A client who had attended one of my meditation courses later shared one of his experiences with creating the Wedge of Awareness. He worked for a high-tech company and his workdays were unrealistically demanding and stressful. After attending my course, he began creating a Wedge of Awareness in the most stressful aspects of his everyday life. He became aware of how difficult it was not to bring home the discordant energy from his workdays, and the adverse effects this had on his relationship with his wife. It became routine for them to exchange cross words with each other when he arrived home from work.
After a few weeks of practicing the Wedge of Awareness technique and bringing in the meditative energy on his drive home, he found himself starting to dread the tension between himself and his wife as he approached the door. Then, one day, he arrived home and spontaneously went into another room to unwind. When his wife followed him, he calmly said that he had had a stressful day and needed to meditate for a few minutes.
This was the beginning of a new routine for him, which has alleviated the tenseness of his first interaction with his wife every evening after the workday.
Parent/child
One of my clients was the teenage son of a single parent who had arranged private meditation classes with me to help the son overcome his anxieties. Like many single parents, the father always had an overwhelming to-do list in mind. More often than not, the father would come home frazzled after a long day at work, and he and the son would inevitably end up in some form of conflict. After several weeks of practicing meditation techniques to hold the meditative energy and create a Wedge of Awareness, my client came to one of our sessions beaming with the pride of accomplishment—he immediately said that an amazing thing happened.
It was one of those days that his father seemed to be dissatisfied with everything upon arriving home from work, and he started asking the son why certain things hadn’t been done yet—the son could feel his father’s irritation. Normally, this provoked matching feelings in the son, but on this particular day, the son maintained feelings of peace and stillness that he had been practicing during the day. In this state, the son found himself thinking, “Dad has probably just had a bad day; let it go.” Consequently, instead of engaging in an argument, he got up to do what his father asked, and as he was doing it, he didn’t feel frustrated or angry, but he instead remained calm.
In the beginning, we all find that the space is narrow and difficult to widen enough to bring about an inner calmness in the moment. As a result, we may still react in an unenlightened way even though we’ve created an awareness of the space and have been practicing meditation. This is where our newfound awareness seems like a double-edged sword. It is one thing to behave in an unenlightened way without awareness, but it’s even more frustrating when we know that we should have behaved better. It is at this point that we have to think of the middle way, as the Buddha called it—the balance between not caring and over-caring. It can be just as detrimental to beat yourself up emotionally for failing as it is to not care about how you acted in the first place. As I tell my meditation group, until you look over your shoulder and see a pair of wings on your back, you have to assume that you are still human, so do not beat yourself up.
My advice is to reflect briefly on the event, but do not create new emotions, like disappointment, or criticize yourself for not doing better; just objectively tell yourself that next time you will try harder to do better—remember, fortitude and tenacity will lead to lasting change. Acknowledge that this is a new process, and even if you create and hold a level of calm energy, the discordant energy may arise during difficult situations the first few times you practice this new process.
As soon as you can create an inner calmness in that space and hold the calm energy as you interact in the situation, you are ready to start widening the space. It doesn’t take long to get to this point if you commit to this new practice. You know that you are ready to widen the space when you have been able to create the calm energy and can feel the discordant emotion begin to dissipate (and maybe even bring one of the Wisdom Insights in the last chapter into your awareness). The ability to do this also enables you to come up with different choices on how to react in the situation at hand. If we think about the work system of Awareness, Action, Change, this is the point at which we are starting to act on the awareness that we’ve created.
As the insights that resonate with you become intuitive, you will not have to widen the space between your thoughts/feelings and subsequent actions as much, if at all. You will find that your reaction to the intense situation begins to change, and you start to act in an enlightened way. However, as with any change we attempt in our lives, we progress through many levels of growth before reaching a point of lasting change.
Hands Meditation—Try It for Yourself
Find a comfortable place to sit or lie down. The posture does not matter as long as you do not fidget or fall asleep. Place your hands on your lap with the palms upturned. Take your awareness to the palms of your hands and without moving them ask yourself this question: “What can I feel in the palms of my hands that proves to me my palms are there?”
Once you can feel something (it can be anything, a tingling, a warmth, a slight pressure or something else) focus on that feeling with your mind and see how intense you can make it by really focusing on the physical sensation. Once you have a sensation in the palms of your hands, take your awareness to your thumbs.
Once again without moving them see if you can feel the tips of your thumbs. If you can feel the tips, then another level would be try and feel your thumbnail. Yes, it does feel different from the flesh around it.
Another level after that would be to try and feel your knuckle in your thumb. This might take a bit more practice but it is fun trying to focus your mind to the extent that you can feel it.
Consideration during the meditation
• Do not be tempted to move your hands. Just relax and use your mind to explore your hands.
• If your mind wanders off, gently bring your attention back to the physical sensations. By focusing on the physical sensation, we are giving the mind one single thing to focus on.
Tips to get the most out of the meditation
• Notice how you feel after the meditation. Creating that feeling of peace, calmness, and stillness—the Meditative Feeling
—inside yourself during the meditation is essential to bringing about other changes in your life.
• Whether it takes five or fifteen minutes, once you’ve created this feeling, hold it and enjoy it for as long as you can. The main goal is to create this feeling on a regular basis—think of it as rebuilding a new foundation inside yourself.
• Lastly, but most importantly, create a discipline to meditate.
• Practice this at least three days a week, at the same time each day.
• Do not underestimate how difficult it is in the beginning to add a new routine to your weekly activities. Persistence is the key.
Finding the Space between
Thoughts and Feelings
Think of how many people you know who almost always appear calm and do not seem affected by negative situations. Many of them suppress their discordant feelings even though as a society, there’s general agreement that pushing down discordant emotions is not good for us. Some of us even believe that suppressing these emotions can lead to physical illness. However, expressing our discordant feelings in an unenlightened way is also detrimental to ourselves and others. So, what is the solution? Think about what life would be like if we all learned how to become self-aware and practiced transforming our discordant behaviors into enlightened interactions.
Most of us are aware of our feelings on some level. We may even be aware of the thought that seems to lead to a specific feeling. For example, when asked why we are upset, we may say, “I am angry because she said this to me.” In that situation, we are aware of what seemed to provoke the anger. Or, we may wake up one morning feeling down, and when asked why we are feeling that way, we may reply that we do not know. In this situation, we are aware of the feeling, but not the thought that’s creating the feeling.
There is almost always a thought associated with a feeling. Based on my work with people from very different backgrounds, I have found that we all basically form our expressions in the same pattern: thought, feeling, action. The only exception to this is when we are in tune with an instinctive feeling, like being able to sense something is going to happen. In that case, there may not have been a thought that created the feeling.
Let’s continue to use anger as an example to look at different levels of our awareness of feelings. In many cases, when an upsetting event occurs, one or more of the five senses detects something about the situation, and a thought is created that is accompanied by feelings of anger. First, we need to keep in mind that, in most situations, anger may not be the root feeling provoking the thought. We touched on this in CHAPTER 1 when I explained how the Lens of Perception works. There are often surface feelings that mask the actual feeling behind our discordant thoughts and actions; anger is a common surface feeling. The example I gave previously was the car cutting you off and the surface feeling being anger but the deeper feeling could be helplessness.
If you think about this in terms of the Lens of Perception, the dense flaws in our lens that represent deeply buried distorted perceptions also represent the discordant feelings associated with the distorted perceptions. Sometimes these distorted perceptions and feelings are hidden from our consciousness because it is painful and disturbing to accept that we are capable of thinking or feeling about a situation in a particular way. This is especially true when it is something that in our conscious mind that seems wrong—an unacceptable way to think, feel, or behave in reaction to someone or something. It’s important to understand that like the distorted perceptions, none of these discordant feelings are a permanent part of us, and the discordant feelings can be permanently removed. This is the end goal of finding the space between thoughts and feelings. We begin working toward this goal by knowing that we have to look deeper within ourselves when anger arises.
Suppose the details of the situation provoking this angry response in you are that a work project you have been spending all of your time on was changed or abandoned, and no one consulted you. If you were to look closer at the situation than just “the project manager said something to me and I felt angry,” you may realize that your first feeling was despondency. In situations like this, there are usually two possible reactions. You may continue to feel despondent and move from there to self-reproach and the desire to give up. Or, because the feeling of despondency is anathema to you, you may immediately move to anger at whoever provoked the feeling of despondency.
There can be many layers to our feelings in a situation like this, just as there are many layers to distorted perceptions. The best way to create awareness in ourselves when faced with situations like the one in this example is to ask questions, such as: “Why did the situation make me feel despondent in the first place?” It is also important to observe another person’s reaction to the same situation—did this person see the situation as just a bump in the road, or perhaps an opportunity for a new, exciting challenge? This is how we begin to recognize the space between our thoughts and feelings about a situation, and create another Wedge of Awareness in ourselves.
In the last section, we discussed bringing in meditative energy—the calm feeling from your meditation—to prevail over the discordant feeling accompanying the discordant thought. By doing this, you are able to create the space between your thought/feeling and action, and focus on this to change your discordant behavior in that moment. The next level is to create and focus on the space between the discordant thought and the discordant feeling with the intent to change both (which also means removing a distorted perception).
So, the first Wedge of Awareness (between thought/feeling and subsequent action) focuses on changing discordant behaviors that are negatively affecting your life—you are using the technique to change how you behave in a particular situation. Taking the next step, the second Wedge of Awareness (between the thought and the feeling) focuses on changing the discordant feelings that arise in a particular set of related situations, so that these situations no longer provoke discordant feelings in you.
If we were to examine all occurrences of our discordant thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, we would find that though the situations were on the surface completely different, many of these different situations provoked similar discordant thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
We therefore create a space between our thoughts and discordant feelings with the intention to reduce and ultimately stop them—unless we choose to create these thoughts and feelings; after all, it is all about choice. In the moment, it can seem like we are not choosing to think and feel a certain way. However, we can choose how we think, feel, and behave in any situation. As you practice creating this wedge between your discordant thoughts and feelings, it becomes clear that we are in control of all of these aspects of ourselves and therefore our world.
It was into this space between thoughts and feelings that I used my Wisdom Insights. By recalling one that was appropriate to the situation in my mind, I went in a less discordant mental direction and as a consequence the associated discordant feeling that would have been related to the initial thought did not happen. A more enlightened feeling arose and that enabled me to act rather than react to the situation happening in front of me.
The process of creating the space between discordant thoughts and feelings is the same as creating the space between thoughts/feelings and actions. Start by creating the space while recreating meditative energy within yourself. It is essential to bring in your meditative energy; otherwise, you will just have one part of your mind competing with another part. The calm feeling from the meditation enables us to be objective and compassionate when analyzing why particular situations provoke specific discordant feelings within us.
When asking probing questions to examine the layers of your thoughts and feelings, be careful not to be self-reprimanding or judgmental—no pointing fingers at yourself to find answers. Remember, when you use the Scalpel of Objectivity, you must practice complete self-compassion. It can be detrimental and counterproductive to browbeat yourself. We want to approach this with self-reflection and the calm Meditative Feeling.
Imagine that—behaving conscientiously—whatever you did, you thought, “I did good!” If you took that heavy weight of self-judgment off your shoulders, how would your body feel? I say your body because your body does not lie. If you think fewer self-critical thoughts, then you will feel more relaxed, and that will show in your physical structure and health. Reflect on a time when you were congratulated for doing something really great and everyone noticed, that is the feeling you want to arise after you have done something conscientiously. I choose the word conscientious very carefully. Other phrasing, such as “the best that you can do,” can open us up to self-judgment. Of course we have to be careful not to swing to the other extreme and believe that we can do no wrong and we are perfect—once again, it comes down to balance.
Once you recognize the thought associated with the discordant feeling, you begin to create the second Wedge of Awareness. In this widened space, enlightened thoughts will come to mind to guide you and reveal underlying perceptions. It is not uncommon to succeed in creating a wedge between your discordant thought and feeling and dissolving both in a particular situation, but then the same discordant thought and feeling arise in a similar situation at a later date. When this happens, it simply means you have to dig deeper, looking back at your life history to discover and work through a discordant perception buried in your subconscious. I have you create the Wedge of Awareness between thoughts/feelings and actions first, so that you can draw on that experience to create the wedge between the discordant thought and the discordant feeling. The latter is a more sophisticated process of self-examination.
When we are able to recognize and create awareness in these two spaces—the one between the thought/its associated feeling and the subsequent discordant action, and the other between the thought and its associated feeling—we are able to examine and dismiss those discordant feelings. It is hard work that takes fortitude, willingness, and tenacity, but when you achieve the ultimate goal—the ability to dismiss that discordant action through understanding and changing the perception, thoughts, and feelings that fueled the discordant action—you will experience a sense of relief that will make that hard work worth every minute. This relief is accompanied by the ability to maintain the inner peace and calmness that we all want. This is the change that we are striving for in the bigger process of Awareness, Action, Change.
In my explorations, I learned that we can manage our lives much more effectively from an improved inner experience than via the constant struggle with our outward actions only. I also discovered that our inner world is much bigger than we realize. We begin by seizing the moment in these two spaces that precede our discordant reactions to look inward to create awareness and understanding, which lead to action and change.
The Meditative Feeling Helping
to Reduce Anxiety
There can be many applications for the Meditative Feeling. I’d like to share one here with you.
A racing mind on its own is not a problem, for example, we might be involved in a situation where we have to context switch quickly to gets things organized or to keep things running smoothly. This might be tiring by the end of the day but we were in control at all times. A racing mind only becomes an issue when we have no control over it, that is when we call it anxiety, which can vary from mild to moderate to severe. Unfortunately, anxiety is rife in this day and age. We could say that it starts at school with perhaps pressure from parents for their children to perform better and better to get higher grades leading to the successful job that they want their children to have. In many cases children take this pressure on themselves and there is nothing worse than self-inflicted pressure, it is relentless and unforgiving. As an adult, the pressures from work or to provide for the family replace the school study pressure. Unfortunately, sometimes the pressure is too much and many people fall into depression or end their lives.
On a very simple level, if we consider that one component of anxiety is a racing mind then anything that can help slow it down or stop it will be a welcome relief.
The anxiety ladder
This exercise will help you face an anxiety that you might have. As I have mentioned before while the tools in this book can help you do some of your own internal healing they are not intended to replace a licensed therapist, but could act as a wonderful compliment to that work.
Take a situation you are anxious about and write it down at the top of a piece of paper, marking it with a number of 100 percent. Underneath that, write the next highest related component of that and mark it with an anxiety percentage, less than 100 percent, that you feel when doing it. Keep listing related components in an ever-decreasing level of anxiety. The goal is to get something around 10 percent or lower. Here is an example:
• Driving to work on the freeway in the morning rush hour, 100 percent
• Getting onto the freeway on-ramp, 90 percent
• Driving the urban roads to get to the on-ramp, 75 percent
• Getting into my car on a weekday, 65 percent
• Eating my breakfast knowing when I finish, I’ll have to get into my car, 45 percent
• Getting washed and ready for work, 25 percent
• The alarm going off and remembering it is a weekday and I’ll have to drive to work, 10 percent
These are all approximate figures and not meant to be absolute numbers, but are there to help you break down the many levels that lead up to you in full anxiety and to get a feel for how your level of intensity can build up over time. Here is where the magic happens. Start your meditative practice, the one you know will create a strong sense of the Meditative Feeling, and when you have a good connection to the feeling, imagine the alarm going off. Previously I have talked about Create, Hold & Build, this will be an exercise in the Build aspect of the trilogy, building the resilience of the Meditative Feeling just in case you have forgotten what the trilogy represents. Hold yourself in visualization of the moment of the alarm going off, and DO NOT let go of the Meditative Feeling for love nor money. Hold the meditative elephant and allow your new awareness and thoughts about the alarm going off to float to the surface of your mind. While you are holding the feeling and noticing you new thoughts get a sense for your anxiety level.
Do this exercise several times over several days until you are confident that in your simulation your anxiety level has dropped a bit. As you are doing this simulated exercise notice how your anxiety with the actual event is dropping. A good idea might be to start the exercise on a Friday night, do it several times over the weekend, and then notice how your anxiety is on Monday morning. Another thing to notice is how the other anxiety level percentages might be dropping as the lowest level anxiety drops. Almost literally, like you have a ladder and you cut away the bottom rung, which will then reduce the overall height of the ladder, making it shorter. So, all the other rungs are not as high as they were. Going back to our anxiety, the equivalent would be that the intensity of the higher levels would reduce a little.
Having tackled the lowest level on the ladder we can now do the same exercise with the next level up. By tackling the lower levels, we are taking baby steps and are setting goals for ourselves that are obtainable and realistic. We could almost say we are setting SMART goals for ourselves. I talk more about SMART goals in the next chapter.
Nipping anxiety in the bud
Notice with the exercise above, as we broke down a particular anxiety event, there were preceding events at lower levels of anxiety. Generally, anxiety will increase from a lower, perhaps manageable level, to a higher one as we go toward the main anxiety causing event. It is much easier to reduce our level of anxiety if we can reduce it down as soon as we feel it arising. The further up our anxiety ladder we allow ourselves to go, then the more challenging it can be to pull it down to a tolerable level. So, as we become aware of any increase in anxiety, if we quickly pull in our Wedge of Awareness, we can stop it before it gets too high. Having said that, it is not impossible to reduce our anxiety level if suddenly something unexpected arises and we are very anxious before we realize it. What can we do in situations like that? If we have an effective daily meditative practice, then if something unexpected comes along suddenly increasing our anxiety to a higher level, the practice will help to reduce the anxiety level to either an inconsequential level or a level that is unpleasant but manageable. In other words, our ability to pull in the Wedge of Awareness will be more effective having a daily practice.
Your body will never lie to you
There will always be people who will lie to us. Sometimes it will be a white lie, others times a more harmful lie, but there is one thing in your life that will never lie to you and that is your body.
The truthfulness of your body can be an annoying quality or a useful quality. Let me explain. When I was young, I always knew when I was getting stressed about school work, particularly around exam time, as I would get a small patch of eczema on the side of my nose. It took me quite a while to realize the connection between the two and then of course I had no idea what I could do about it, as exams were exams, so how was I supposed to not get stressed? It never occurred to me why a physical manifestation would happen for something that was just mental, and why it would express itself that way. I accepted that was what happened to me when I got stressed. Working in the corporate environment, I would find that at times it would come back again, particularly when a deadline was approaching, and I knew it would be a struggle to meet it, if I met it at all. It wasn’t until I discovered meditation that I found that I could control the outbreak. What I mean by that is by having a regular meditation practice, it stopped showing up because I never got stressed enough. If it did show up in a particularly intense time, then I’d put in extra meditation time above and beyond my regular practice and it would go. So rather than find it an annoying feature of my body, I suddenly found that if I was stressed but did not notice because I was too focused on getting done what needed to be done, I would thank it for showing up and reminding me to take the time to meditate more.
Isn’t it wonderful to think if we meditate regularly that not only will we feel emotionally better and behave in a more enlightened way but that our bodies will also physically be more at peace and healthier?
There was never a more obvious example of this than with a story I’ll share with you now. There was this person who was attending a stress relief course I was teaching. I never oversell the physical benefits of meditation as I do not want to set people up to be disappointed—I only ever mention it in passing. At the beginning of each week I would check in with people to see how well they were doing with reducing their stress and particularly how well they had created a meditation routine for themselves. At the beginning of the second week, nobody really said anything. Introducing people to meditation can be a bit of a hard sell. However, at the beginning of the third week I was in for quite a surprise.
All I am really hoping for is for people to say they are doing it three or four times a week and they feel some benefit. This one person suddenly told us that the pain medication he had been on for his back he did not need any more and that the sleeping pills he had also been on he did not need any more. The pain had gone and he had found that he was sleeping through the night. Of course, I was delighted but stunned. I asked him how many times he had been meditating and he told me what I had asked everyone to do and that was ten minutes in the morning and ten minutes at night. I was doubly surprised because nobody ever listens to me and does what I suggest. I try to make the meditating practice goal very achievable. People can even see some results if the routine is three times a week for fifteen minutes each.
I have seen other results where a physical manifestation has gone completely or has been reduced dramatically but nothing quite as fast or dramatic as that.
In conclusion, stress and anxiety can manifest in our bodies as a physical symptom. This is great as it gives us an objective way to validate that our practice is helping reduce our symptoms. It is a bit like having an independent metric telling us just how well we are doing with keeping our stress and anxiety levels down. Having said that, common sense says not everything that happens in our bodies can be healed by meditation. We need to listen to our bodies and see what they are telling us as we go through the various experiences and events in our lives.