5 | Getting Unstuck, Total Meditation

Getting Unstuck

Getting unstuck takes place entirely in consciousness, because that is the location of all experiences. Total meditation takes advantage of this fact in a way that nothing else can. If you cannot forget something or forgive someone in your past, there is no physical remedy. Consciousness alone can alter consciousness. Memory-erasing drugs don’t exist, and if they did, it’s hard to see how a drug could target one bad memory while leaving the good ones intact.

In English, the word impression evokes images of physical marks, like the impression of a fingerprint left at a crime scene or footprints in the snow. But in reality consciousness imprints itself. Seeking for answers in the memory centers of the brain isn’t fruitful. You need a brain in order to remember things, the way you need a television to turn electronic signals into pictures on a screen. If you drop the television from a two-story window, there will be no more pictures, yet the signals are unaffected.

The acclaimed English neurologist Oliver Sacks was seven in the autumn of 1940 when the London Blitz began. His family lived in the zone where German airplanes dropped incendiary bombs. These were bombs filled not with explosives, but with highly combustible chemicals such as magnesium, phosphorus, or flammable petroleum (napalm). Their purpose was to create widespread fires and spread terror. Sacks remembers his father running into the backyard with buckets of water after an incendiary bomb fell, only to discover that when water is poured on a magnesium or phosphorus fire, the flames suddenly expand, making the fire worse.

Only decades later, when Sacks came to write about memory, did he find out from his older brother that none of these vivid memories was true. Like all very young children, Sacks was sent to the countryside during the Blitz. He wasn’t present when incendiary bombs fell in the backyard. Those memories belonged to his older brother, who had been present, and Sacks had absorbed them from stories he had been told. In this case, the real memory, of being away from home in the country, was erased, and a false memory replaced it.

At bottom, since we have no idea how thoughts are created in the first place, our understanding of how they are remembered or forgotten lies shrouded in darkness. It would be more helpful if we had an English equivalent for the Sanskrit term samskara, which refers to the impressions in consciousness that shape our actions. Samskaras can be good, such as musical or artistic talent, or undesirable, like a tendency toward violence.

Because a samskara is laid down in the past, memory comes into play, but no one knows why one memory makes an indelible impression while another doesn’t. One clue is emotion. If a strong emotion is associated with an experience, the resulting memory is also likely to be stronger and more vivid. That’s why you probably remember your first kiss, but not the color of your neighbor’s car that same year. Yet this knowledge is quite basic. It is fairly obvious that strong emotions make memories more indelible than neutral experiences that do not elicit strong feelings. Around the world, a whole generation remembers hearing the news that President Kennedy had been shot. It became the kind of memory in which millions of people can still see where they were when the shocking news arrived. Smaller, more personal memories are much more elusive.

Researchers into memory are far from knowing why memory is selective, imperfect, and personal. It isn’t even known how much of the past anyone remembers. There are a handful of exceptional people who can recall every moment of the past, including the pattern on the wallpaper of their bedroom when they were five, the songs they heard, and the TV shows they watched on any specific date, or what the score was in the third inning of the World Series—in short, their recollection is flawless.

This condition, known as superior autobiographical memory, affects a minuscule number of people, and no one knows whether the average person has their entire past stored away or not. Perhaps the problem isn’t memory, but recall. We need to be humble enough in the modern West to concede that genetics offers no better explanation than simple everyday experience. When a child resembles their parents in some way, the saying “It runs in the family” is nearly as accurate as identifying a specific gene. In both cases, mere probability is being expressed, and sometimes not even that. Your height, for example, is influenced by more than twenty separate genes, along with diet and other factors in your childhood.

Innate tendencies like talent and genius defy genes entirely. On YouTube, for example, you can see a seven-year-old child, Himari Yoshimura of Japan, playing the Paganini Violin Concerto No. 1. The piece requires dazzling virtuosity, and the fact that Yoshimura won first prize at a prestigious violin competition in 2019, at an age when some children are still learning to tie their shoes, utterly overturns current knowledge about the capacity of the early development of the brain.

Whether we have the right name for imprinted memories, shared family traits, innate tendencies, genius, prodigious talent, or everyday experiences that prove to be sticky, the question is, How do we get past these samskaras when they limit us? It takes the intervention of consciousness. Here we’re talking about psychological limitations, since physical samskaras such as an inherited disorder or birth defect are another matter. Let me illustrate what is meant by a psychological limitation rooted in the past.

A child struggling in school needs support and help from teachers and parents. If it isn’t forthcoming, a small voice inside the child begins to say, “No one is ever going to help you.” Worse still, if the child is made to feel stupid or damaged, the small voice starts saying, “You aren’t good enough.”

Recently, I met a middle-aged man—let’s call him Randy—who was a skilled software programmer, but he had so little self-confidence that he found it very hard to find or hold a job. When we spoke, he brought up a traumatic experience from his childhood. In first and second grades, he couldn’t absorb even simple lessons the teacher was imparting, which caused him to shrink inside himself and rarely speak. The school determined that he had learning disabilities, and his parents agreed to have him put in a special needs class. He continued to perform poorly there, and being around children who had been dumped into the class because of behavioral problems frightened him.

Two years passed this way, at which point his parents noticed for the first time that Randy had a hard time catching a ball. An eye examination revealed that he was extremely nearsighted. It turned out that Randy had a higher-than-average IQ but had failed in school because he couldn’t see the blackboard. It was as simple as that. He then returned to the normal school track, where he performed well now that he could see, but he was scarred by being misunderstood, judged, and considered inferior for two long years.

As an adult, early in his twenties, Randy began to meditate, and his traumatic experience began to lose its sting in two ways. He found he didn’t identify with it any longer, and when the old hurtful memories happened to resurface, they no longer made him feel so bad, indications that he was getting free of the past in general. The process of freeing oneself from the imprint of samskaras can happen naturally as the ego, which has deep roots in the past, gives way to a more expanded sense of self—in Randy’s case, through meditation.

I was reminded of a saying I first heard as a child in India: Samskaras are first written in stone, then in sand, then in water, and finally in air. The saying poetically expresses how consciousness lessens the effect of impressions from the past. But what is the process, as expressed in practical terms? To answer this question, we need to look more closely at how past experiences get stuck in the first place.

Total Meditation

Lesson 13: Stickiness

Sticky is a useful term for experiences that leave a deep impression, because they stick around and at the same time stick like glue. This image is easily understood, but it is just an image. No one can predict in advance which experience will stick and which will simply slide by without leaving an impression. Our concern is in the present, however. Getting unstuck happens here and now. Explanations from the past are intriguing but not really relevant. For example, memory studies have shown that when you seize on the memory of something traumatic in the past, such as being a three-year-old who panics in the supermarket because you can’t see your mother, the memory is untrustworthy. Often it conflates several experiences of panic that are not recalled. Moreover, the details of the memory are more dreamlike than photographic. You might have been lost in a hardware store or a parking lot.

For practical purposes, stickiness can be approached through two of its aspects: belief and emotions. Experiences stick to us when we believe that they add something true to our personal story, and they will be even stickier if a strong emotional charge lingers around them. Let’s look at belief first. Pause for a moment and think of a personal quality you believe is true about yourself, expressed as “I am _______.” Fill in the blank with one positive word like likable, attractive, or intelligent, although there is usually stronger belief attached to negative words like antisocial, dumb, clumsy, and unattractive.

Whatever quality you picked didn’t come out of the blue. It was embedded as a belief under conditions that made it stick. Rooted beliefs generally feature the following four elements:

We believe the first person who told us something.

We believe things that are repeated often.

We believe the people we trust.

We didn’t hear a contrary belief.

It would be typical, if you believe you are either attractive or unattractive, that the first person who told you so was one of your parents. With that seed implanted, you heard the same thing said over and over or else went through repeated experiences that reinforced it. You trusted your parents as a small child and believed what they told you. Finally, no one came along to contradict your belief.

Personal things our parents told us, known as normative statements, are especially potent. “You are lazy,” “You aren’t as pretty as other girls,” or “You will never amount to much” are taken to be actual facts by young children. But they are infused with subjective values, or norms. Saying “You got an A in arithmetic” lacks subjective impact compared with a normative statement like “You are so smart, you got an A in arithmetic.” The latter statement is much more likely to be sticky.

The sticky things you were told about yourself become embedded as samskaras. The impression can be deep or shallow as it gets blended into the cumulative story of your whole life. The influence of a sticky experience is entirely personal. Being told that you aren’t as pretty as other girls could lead to a range of reactions. You might grow up envying women you think of as prettier than you; you might think beautiful equals dumb; you could neglect your personal appearance or become fixated on cosmetics—any reaction is possible.

It is part of waking up to see the difference between reality and illusion. Consciousness works on everything in your life, but you can also focus on beliefs you have adopted unconsciously. Becoming conscious about sticky beliefs involves a kind of dissection—you look at the four elements behind strong beliefs, asking:

Who first told me this?

Was it repeated a lot?

Why did I trust the person who told me?

Is there reason to believe the opposite?

In other words, you turn around the experiences that made your belief sticky, and by turning them around, the belief becomes less and less sticky. If your mother told you that you aren’t pretty or your father that you are lazy, why should you automatically trust them? It doesn’t matter how often you heard their opinion. Now that you are an adult, you can separate opinion from fact. Think of experiences that indicated how attractive you are in other people’s eyes or how diligently you applied yourself to a task.

The point is to get in touch with the damaged child inside you rather than allowing it to continue to dictate what you believe. The most important areas to concentrate on are your deepest personal beliefs, known as core beliefs. Core beliefs lock in your perspective on some crucial questions:

Is life fair?

Can other people be trusted?

Is there a higher power in the universe?

Does good triumph over evil?

Should I expect the best or prepare for the worst?

Should my attitude be relaxed or vigilant?

Am I safe?

Am I loved, cared for, and supported by others, or can I count only on myself?

Am I good enough and kind enough?

You certainly have some belief one way or another about all of these things, even though some questions will be more important to you than others. There are no factual answers to guide you. “I am safe” or “I am lovable” are subjective evaluations. They are rooted in how the ego personality got constructed. As an adult, you can see that your core beliefs have a lot to do with how you were raised. Either your parents’ subjective opinions turned into your subjective opinions, or the contrary: you believe the opposite of what they believed. In this way, “I” is constructed from a value system that is essentially baseless and secondhand.

When you see how creaky even your most cherished beliefs actually are, you have seen reality. Now you are free to create your own core beliefs, which is what mature adults do. They have their own personal values. They make judgments based on actual facts and direct experience. They are not unduly influenced by secondhand opinions. These are good developments, psychologically speaking, but at bottom all beliefs are illusory. They lead to blanket responses—like thinking that life is unfair or other people cannot be trusted—that are inherently unreliable. Life changes all the time. It is never fair or unfair as a rule, not even as a rule of thumb. Likewise, the next person you meet might be totally trustworthy or a slippery liar.

The solution is to go beyond all beliefs. This is the goal in total meditation. By living in the present without the baggage of old beliefs, you are awake to the situation at hand. The point of dissecting your core beliefs is to bid them farewell. An unhealthy belief is the fossil of unreliable thoughts in your past. There is no need to hold on to them.

The second aspect of stickiness is that it is emotional. Emotions are stickier than facts. If an aggressive dog terrified you as a small child, the fact that most dogs are harmless and friendly isn’t likely to change your attitude toward them. Being teased for stuttering is hurtful even though your parents might tell you that the majority of stutterers outgrow the problem after childhood.

Earlier I mentioned that a tiny number of people, perhaps two dozen in the world, have the ability to remember every event in their past with photographic accuracy. However, this condition, superior autobiographical memory, isn’t as neutral as a photograph—the emotions associated with the memory return at the same time. As one woman ruefully observed, thanks to her perfect memory, she could recall all the times her mother told her she was fat.

The stickiest part of a memory is its emotional charge, which some psychologists have termed our emotional debt from the past. We stubbornly hold on to old resentments, grievances, fears, and wounded feelings. When positive and negative electrical charges build up in the clouds, we see the explosive discharge of lightning and thunder. In humans, the same occurs when someone says “That’s the last straw!” and proceeds to release built-up anger.

The trick is to discharge emotional energy without a sudden explosion. There are ways to release old anger, fear, and resentment without allowing them to build up. Or if you are already holding on to these stored-up feelings, the same techniques are just as useful. The difference is that the longer you have been holding on to emotions, the longer it takes to release them.

How to Discharge Sticky Emotions

The following techniques for discharging sticky emotions are easy and natural. Emotions by their very nature rise and fall, and most of the time a cooling-off period suffices to return you to a settled state. But sticky emotions don’t fade away on their own. They ask you to assist by discharging them through various practices.

TECHNIQUE #1: If you feel an uncomfortable emotion that persists, center yourself and take slow, deep breaths until you feel the emotional charge start to lessen.

TECHNIQUE #2: If you recognize an emotion that has been around a long time, notice its return, then say: “This is how it once was. I am not in the same place now. Go away.”

TECHNIQUE #3: With a particularly stubborn emotion, sit quietly with eyes closed and let yourself feel the emotion—do this lightly, not sinking deeply. Take a deep breath and exhale slowly, releasing the emotional energy from your body. It might help to see your breath as a white light carrying the toxic feeling out of you.

TECHNIQUE #4: If you feel no specific emotion, but rather a general mood of being down, blue, or out of sorts, sit quietly with your attention placed in the region of your heart. Visualize a small white light there, and let it expand. Observe the white light as it expands to fill your whole chest. Now expand it up into your throat, then your head, and up out of the crown of your head.

Take a few minutes to carry this technique through until it feels complete. Now return to your heart and expand the white light again until it fills your chest. Now see it expand downward, filling your abdomen, extending down to your legs, and finally out through the soles of your feet into the earth.

These four techniques can be applied separately or one after the other. But it is important to be patient. Once you use a technique, it will take time for your whole emotional system to adapt to the discharge. You might not immediately feel better. But the intention to discharge sticky emotions is powerful, and the message gets through to every cell and every corner of your awareness.

Remember, too, that emotions want to discharge. This is in their nature. So they will leave you if you create a path for them to follow. It is your choice whether to let them discharge or to harbor reasons to hold on to them. These reasons are ego based. “I” feels justified in holding grudges, never ignoring a slight, nursing grievances, and fantasizing about revenge. Your true self has no such agenda. If you are sensitive, the next time you go off on an emotional tangent, or see someone else going off on one, you will notice that the ego derives a kind of self-righteous pleasure from displaying its stored anger.

But this pleasure is shortsighted. In the long run, sticky emotions keep you tied to the ego and deprive you of the awakened life. Paying some attention to discharging old emotions and sincerely wanting them to go are signs that you are awakening. If it could, “I” would hold on to toxic emotions forever, believing mistakenly that they are somehow worth hoarding. They aren’t.