On not feeling the negative feelings. Posted by John on July 17, 1999 at 12:31:39:
In Reply to: addendum posted by Douglas on July 14, 1999 at 20:35:55:
(7 pages)
I am not in very good shape as I am sitting here with you now, Douglas.
l am in a state of shock, and, every now and then, my eyes are tearing
up and I've been weeping a little. Night before last, I had insomnia
myself, for a few hours before I finally fell asleep. I wonder if
that's some sort of "sympathetic neurosis," in view of your recently
commenting on this.
As I turned to you from the conversation with Suz of the Northwoods last
night, I decided to try to hold down some supper and go to bed for a
full night's sleep. There was still time to do that and get up early
this morning to "finish my week's work in this class" with some sharing
with you, long anticipated by me, by the way. (That's true self
enthusiasm, not ego.) Supper went well. It's the first time I've felt
friendly with food since my son and I got food poisoning two days before
that when we went out for lunch together. We both got bean burros,
enchilada style, tasty enough at the time. So, long hours of you-know-
what, and cramps with extraordinary pain. I just sat through it— :-)
—and believe it or not, feeling the pains and inward sensations of it,
all the way through awarely, two days. I have a way of neutralizing the
suffering aspect of such events by dealing with it that way. I try not
to make much of it. Yet, as we have noted, pain hurts. It's real.
And, fortunately, however, my computer isn't too far from the can, so
I've gotten some work done here.
And now, I'm grinning. "Defy it," is what don Coyotl says about this
kind of situation. That strategy, along with the short-version of the
Serenity Prayer ought to appeal to our warrior sisters in this class.
So, last night there was time to get a good night's rest, if I would
sleep or not, and pick up with you early this morning for as long as
possible before heading out to the ranch after noon. I did my evening
preparations, and followed instructions for an exercise don Coyotl
recently gave me, was asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow, was
awake and aware inwardly before I opened my eyes in the morning and
continued following the instructions in don Coyotl's exercise with my
eyes closed (work in the field of "dreaming" and "recapitulation," for
any who have this frame of reference). Whereupon, I opened my eyes to
face a new day, feeling just great, and ready to hit the trail to
Webland on the trot. (Freudian slip?) Well, not on the trot any more,
but in fine fettle, whatever that means, does anyone know? I felt good.
And as chance would have it, I just turned on the t.v. "for a minute" to
"see if there was any news," and here we see what happens when "things,
bodies, and words" impact upon a human body. The news, of course, is of
that amazing Kennedy family, with a family story that rivals those in
the Old Testament. The family that "has everything." Oh, Lordy! Why
this, now? I remained for hours transfixed before the television
monitor, hoping with so many others that there was still a possibility
that young "John-John" and his companions were still alive, and
remembering all my impressions of a lifetime of this remarkable family
and the many, many *classical* tragedies that they have endured. And
the impact of this "therapy session" was hard on my body, and stunned
me, and dazed me, and yet brought me through to a realization of my own
fears, my own sense of insecurity, my own deep sadness, and my own
questions about love and the universe.
It's interesting to me that so many commentators have noticed how many
people "remember where they were when they learned of John Kennedy's
assassination. I do so, vividly, vividly. I remember that I was facing
due south, although I took no particular notice of it at that time.
This is reminiscent of the process of recapitulation, the ancient
American Indians' way of dealing with this same burden that people carry
of the past.
Let me say right away, that I do not intend to attempt to "teach" any of
the things I am learning from don Coyotl in our class here. It wouldn't
be right for me to do so, because I am still really only a beginner in
that work. I am not even very good at it yet, as students of Mexican
nagüalism go. And I've been doing this training over the Internet with
this wonderful teacher for as long as I've had this mindfulness school
on the Web. I do not have a right to attempt to teach it, and it would
be farcical if I attempted to do so. I can say this, though. Wherever
we look into the whole trainings of different spiritual groups around
the world, including these prehistoric Americans, we find that there are
methods and techniques for dealing with the repressed material that
constitutes the traumas that we have experienced from childhood and in
growing up.
I remember, many years ago, I was standing in the hall, in the College
of Religion, outside Mits' office, on the campus of the University of
Hawaii. And I had come to the realization that the practices of Primal
Therapy (Arthur Janov) that were being conducted in the Hunnewell House
learning center that I was living in then with a commune of gestalt and
primal psychotherapists, I realized that these techniques were too
powerful, too aggressive, too, in a certain sense, "violent," for me to
be happy doing them any more. (This was just Sacha's style, the teacher
at the Hunnewell House, I realized long afterwards, and certainly was
Janov's style, as well.) What I am referring to are techniques which
actually jar a person back to childhood events where, I, for instance,
remembered the dress my mother was wearing, the pattern of it, her
smell, her facial expressions).
Mits put his hand on my shoulder, and he said, "John, you don't need to
go back to the past in this way. All of these things that happened to
you in the past are imbedded in your body now. You can work on all this
in the here and now by simply observing what you are feeling, thinking,
saying and doing in the life that is going on now."
That was a great relief to me at that time. I transferred the focus of
my energies from the work I was doing with my housemates at the
Hunnewell House, where I had learned *so much*, so much that I am
grateful for. And I placed it into volunteering to help Mits with his
classes and his system of labs. I followed my "path of heart."
And now, all these many years later, I have become interested in those
more bold techniques that are out there in the world of self-knowledge
and discovery, for these, too, "work." That is how I have come around
over the course of my lifetime to attempting to learn what I can of the
methods of primitive American sorcery, certainly even more daunting a
field than I faced when I was such a young man, among primal therapists,
at that time.
All of this is by way of saying to you Douglas that I do not ask you to
re-visit the painful traumas of your past in the approach that is being
coached in this school. That is not to say that those ways do not work.
It is just not the way that I happen to do it from the training I have
completed so far.
It is possible that such pains as you *might have*—I say that because
you say that you do not have any that you know of—such pains might be
anesthetized in you, somehow. And you have a right to have it be that
way, if you prefer. In fact, that is the logical and sensible thing to
do, I suppose. So you have to make your own choices about that.
The most interesting thing to me yet, of all of your postings so far, is
that you seem to have correctly understood something that I often teach
about in classes (see the classes on feelings in the kindergarten, for
instance). If we manage to suppress the sensations of our negative
emotional feelings and pains, we also turn off the experience of our
positive emotional feelings and pleasures. This is so valuable to
understand, at least . . . if not, indeed, to work with. If we are
going to suppress the pains of life, we have to be willing to pay a
heavy price in giving up some measure of the happiness and joy of life.
Why, how does this happen? It is because the sensations of *the same
muscles* are involved in the negative and positive feelings. Anger, for
instance, is clenching up the muscles in the face, hands, and arms.
Humor is laughing, opening up all these muscles, applauding and
cheering. If this group of muscles in a human body are chronically
clenched up and one evades the feeling of the anger this physically
represents, that process will, de facto, erode the body's capacity to
have fun. Those muscles are "busy already," being angry. Sadness is
the clenching up of the heart, throat, and face in a different pattern
than the pattern of anger. And if this sadness is there, chronically,
and one has become anesthetized to the painful feelings of it, that
frozen blockage of the heart means that the loose and free vibrations of
the heart muscle when love is happening cannot very easily happened.
The heart is "occupied already." Fun is trammeled by anger. Tenderness
love is trammeled by sadness. So there is a price to pay for having
these negative emotional feelings anesthetized this way, and just
leaving them blocked up that way. And it is reasonable not to care to
pay that price! Feeling the negative emotional feelings is "the
warrior's price." This is the price that a warrior (at least, in this
kind of an approach) has to pay, for all the rest of the beautiful ride
of getting to be a mindful warrior.
And I'd say we don't have to go back to our childhood traumas to do this
work. Some systems do, and some systems don't. We can just work, as my
teacher Mits taught me, many years ago, to work with the effects of
these traumas that show up in the patterns of the ways we are living our
daily lives in the here and now. We can work directly with this, and
free our bodies of the burden of it. We can do this by patient,
courageous *dissolving* of it in the light of awareness. When you learn
to focus your mindful awareness on the spot where you can perceive THE
SENSATIONS OF physical or emotional pain, and you keep your awareness
focused there, soon enough you will see that what you are experiencing,
obvious and apparent, will start changing. This changing is the
beginning of its dissembling, on its own, merely by you having the
patience and courage to watch it there in the full light of your mindful
awareness.
Well, it's getting on towards noon now. There's much more that I would
like to discuss with you, Douglas. I'll try to do that with my
Powerbook, out at work this week, if I can, and perhaps post a little of
it, as I can, along the way.
>I can't really say when the dissonance between reality and my false self system led me to consider radically different ideas and perceptions. I like to think it is when "the Blues" no longer gave me any solace.
Well, you "*like to* think," so there is still some true self in there
alive and kicking in you. "Not dead yet," as you titled a previous
piece. I'd really like to be able to coach you back to a place where
the Blues give you solace again. That's a concrete goal we can work on
together, if you'd like. I think I can do that, because I've been there
where you describe on that subject, and I've found my way back here
again. Just thinking about the blues brings tears to my eyes. And
that's where the healing begins.
>Which brings me to my third motive for my involvement with Buddhism and Present Centred Awareness — the deconstruction of the defences of a lifetime. This is not to say that reluctance and resistance aren't my daily companions.
I think you've loosened up some. :-) I see changes, and the capacity
to adapt to our untidy environment. I've seen you make mistakes and not
have to clean them up. I see "movement" in you, bruddah! You seem
looser and freer than when you got here. More open. You haven't got
such a tight hold on your "image" here in class any more, and you seem
more and more willing to just be who you are, like the rest of us are
trying to learn to be, and just be present and awake. We all see that
you are quite a human person, Douglas. I appreciate that very much.
And we know that you've got a lot of impressive stuff. And that's all
to the good, too, when we know you as you are.
>It is now time to listen.
>Douglas in appreciation
Yes, sir. Thank you. I've been wishing to hear you communicate like
this. Here, for the first time, I am able to feel that you have joined
in the efforts that are going on here. You and the others around you in
this class are all worthy of this learning, whether you are to find it
here or in other approaches. These approaches are all compatible with
each other, and it is simply a matter of taste, to follow what you like,
to follow your own true self.
There was one phrase that you used that really stopped me in my tracks
with you, Douglas. To some extent, you've done this again and again,
but here you really whacked me.
>Setting aside the issue of whether I am getting it or not (particularly given the fact that I would prefer to be asleep right now),
I can have no "investment" in your not having gotten it. I can only
know if you have gotten anything when you tell me that you have gotten
something. I wish you'd address a few questions to me beginning with
the words: "What I haven't gotten is . . ." or "What I haven't gotten
seems to be . . ." I think this might help me get focused on your
actual experiences better. Also, I'd like it if you would write me a
few things after the heading, "Coach, what I'd like for you to be able
to teach me would be . . ."
I enjoyed the long abstract from Jack Kornfield's writings. I don't
know much of him except that he is highly respected as "one of the
giants" in mindfulness teaching, again by the Vipassana approach, I see.
I'll have to look for the time to do a whole class on that piece,
because it can be very valuable to see a comparison of the
compatibilities and differences between an approach that is grounded in
sitting meditation and the use of the breath as the central mantra, and
an approach (entirely reciprocal) that is grounded in walking around in
the world, and using the raw sensory phenomena of life as "the mantra."
Either approach is great. One can do either and both, if they like.
The awareness game is a little different than Vipassana, yet they are
totally compatible as far as I can tell. In the awareness game, the
central mantra is the tangible feeling of being present within.
And there are several other passages I'd like to get to commenting on
from your recent postings, Douglas, but this is a start, and time is
running out for me now. It will keep. I have to find solace in the
conversation with hoodoosuz yesterday, and let it go.
I didn't mean to imply above, in greeting your interest to listen, that
you ought to be posting any less talking than you wish to post, Douglas.
Go on posting, as you do, and if you are listening too, that is good
enough for me.
When you are posting next time, I wonder if you would try something
once. In your personal comments (apart from quotations of teachers),
would you see if you can avoid saying things in a round-about way,
albeit a clever, maybe brilliant round-about way? Would you see if you
can say what you say, straight out, as simply and clearly as possible,
without leaving us having to guess or figure out what you mean?
This request may seem utterly baffling to you. See if you can discover
anything useful to you in it.
I'm very delighted with this class as I leave now for a long stint of
hard work. I'll be dancing like nobody's watching, I'm sure, since
there are bound to be things that impact on my body that come up.
There's always the dog. Dancing the blues away.
If there had been a mockingbird singing, that time you were in the
meditation hall with people scribbling in their notebooks, Douglas you
might have just accepted it into your meditation of the actual
experiences of the moments. The task would be to do the same with the
sounds of their scribbling. Simply *incorporate it* into the
meditation, without any resistance. Listen to it like one listens to
the sounds of one's breathing, or the wind. Of course, what you
described is a perfect exemplar of "There's always the dog." And
there's always something a sly warrior can do about it, too.
Incorporate it into the experienced reality of the moment. Ain't easy.
Can be done, with practice, in the thick of life, even when it hurts the
most.
Aloha all. I'll have a little more weeping for little John-John today.
When the radar data indicated they went into a dive . . . . perhaps this
ol' mindful ranch hand can empathize *too well* with the realities of
such a moment. Oh, Lordy. The time has come.
Well, back to the rest of what we've all got left in this left! I feel
pretty strong, heading out to work now. And I feel like I've gotten an
honest week's work done here in school. And I'm over that food-
poisoning.
I wish you all the best.
Coach
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