Revisiting Meditation: Week 3

As predicted, emotion was a tough week for me to put words to. I’ve never really understood why it is so difficult for me to think about my emotions and really examine them and pinpoint what it is I’m experiencing on a “global” level, but it’s always been the case. I can always be aware of the really big ones or the ones that arise from specific causes: Anger, happiness, sadness from a fight, physical pain, or something that happens at work.

Unless I’m extremely stressed out, or have had a big fight with my husband, friend, or children, there’s not usually an emotion that I can put my finger on. I can say “I feel OK,” but that feels pretty generic. Most days, I feel OK. I can be aware of some stress in the background perhaps — and they are usually about things that I am feeling anxious about for the future (Will I manage to correct all those tests in time? Darn it, I need to call that parent back, I forgot!), but much beyond that, it’s really difficult.

At the beginning of Gil Fronsdal’s guided meditations when he asks “What are you feeling right now?” I inevitably have the answer “I don’t know.” Sometimes I feel like my emotions are the slippery vein that wriggles its way away from the needle of scrutiny. The more I try to pinpoint it, the more it just slips away, and the more I try, the more frustrated I become at not really being able to name what my feelings are at that time.

That probably makes it sound like I have no emotions, but of course that’s not at all the case. I experience my feelings, very much on automatic pilot, I suppose. And perhaps, that’s the issue. I’ve experienced my emotions without thinking about them very much, so I don’t know how to be aware of them when I examine them. When the question “How are you feeling right now?” gets asked, my answer is always “I’m OK” or “Good.” Yet that’s not always true, and I have an uneasy sense of that, but I can’t name the feeling that makes it not completely good. Or, I may say that I feel OK, but can’t be any more specific than that, nor can I pinpoint what makes up that “OK” feeling. “OK” is what I use when I feel neutral, I suppose. Is there a ‘neutral’ feeling?

I really wish I had more time to work with emotion so I can get to the root of this. It may be something I come back to after I’m done with this audit of the Insight to Meditation course — a good project to keep me going once the March Challenge is over!

On a more mechanics level, I did have a little trouble with meditating again this week. I never actually stopped the timer and gave up, but I was feeling plenty of impatience and anger as I sat there and meditated through my 5-minute longer sessions. Believe me, I pinpointed those emotions just fine, and I know just what was causing them too.

A) I didn’t want to add 5 more minutes! I thought I was OK with it, and honestly, 5 more minutes? No big deal. Or so I thought when I first set the timer and tried it out. As I sat there, and my reminder bells rang at 5-minute intervals, I could feel my ire rise. Impatience. Started right in my chest and just radiated outward from there. Pretty soon I was tense in my shoulders, had to relax my jaw and neck again, and needed to keep re-check my posture and tension through body scans.

B) All that future-thinking! So much of it, it’s incredible!

Reluctantly, I’ve moved on to Week 4 of the practice, whose theme is Thinking.

Week 4: Thinking

The reading and instructional material for this week’s theme for meditation can be found here: https://sites.google.com/a/audiodharmacourse.org/mindfulness-meditation/week-4-thinking

I love the analogy that Girl Fronsdal uses regarding thoughts during meditation:

Imagine yourself after a busy stressful week, and so glad the weekend has arrived, and you’re going for a nice hike, you’re so glad to be out. You come to an edge of a river, a nice oak tree.  Sit next to the oak tree, have your picnic. … And then, one of those showboats go by.  Flashing lights, casinos, dance shows, dancers and everything.  Pretty exciting.  Next thing you know you’re on the boat, and you’ve been on it for the last 24 hours.  And you didn’t even know it.  What happened to the riverbank?  Somehow you manage to get ashore and get back to the tree, so happy to be back there, watching the river, content, and the next thing you know you’re on a warship that goes by, and you’ve been fighting wars for a couple of days until you realize, wait a minute, how did I get on here?  Then you get back on shore, find your place by the tree again, and then this really poor destitute raft comes by and next thing you know you’re struggling for survival on this desperate little raft.  And then you wonder, “How did I get on here?”  So you go back ashore again and back to your oak tree.  And all these boats go by and after a while you think, you know, there must be a different thing to do besides getting on every boat that comes by?  Why don’t I just watch it? So you decide to stay here, I’m not going to leave, I’m just going to watch it go by.  I’m going to see it, the shape of it, the color of it, what’s going on.  I’m not going to leave my place, my seat, I’m just going to let it go by.

So, while I continue to also work on decoding the emotions part of meditation, I’ll be striving to be the person sitting on the banks watching my thoughts float by … some day, perhaps I’ll get there.

Note to readers: This is the third installment in a weekly series which focuses on establishing or re-establishing a consistent meditation practice. Please refer to my introductory article on this topic.