Meditating on the Symptom

One of the most powerful concepts in psychotherapy is as ancient as humanity itself, but it's something that we quickly forget--that when we resist something, it usually gets stronger. Jesus said, "Resist not evil," which isn't exactly a winning position in politics, or in war for that matter. But in the realm of intrapersonal dynamics––that is, our relationship with ourselves––healing usually commences only once "lay it down," to use the words of Waylon Jennings. In Ericksonian hypnotherapy (i.e. the work of Milton Erickson), this profound truth is represented by the "principle of utilization," in which the hypnotherapist essentially tells the client to "hang onto to that symptom," or even to "make it bigger." Of course, it's counterintuitive that one must first yield to a symptom in order to defeat it, but it works so very well that most master psychotherapists are firmly established in this practice, and will rarely be caught fighting symptoms, or telling a person to change directly--unless it's a matter of life and death. Indeed, they are much more inclined to lean forward and listen when a person is battling something, looking for ways to positively reframe the symptom, and encourage positive engagement with it, so that the relationship with the symptom will become useful, and the battle will subside.

This stance requires a radically inclusive spirit, in which most of what we consider "bad" is explored for its value. There are practical, ethical, and moral limits to considering everything useful, but most of us stop far short of that limit, and end up doing battle with a lot of would-be allies.

One of the most direct and fruitful ways to explore the power of embracing the symptom, is to meditate on a negative feeling. Sometimes I feel anxious or afraid, or depressed, and the typical reflexive thing for me to do is to struggle against the feeling, and to try to make it go away. I'm not even aware that I'm fighting the feeling until I "go into" it, and discover that the level of distress is largely a function of the tension between my reaction and the feeling; and that when I move toward the feeling, the battle subsides, and the feeling transforms into something totally different. 

So try this. The next time you feel a significant negative emotion, for whatever reason, close your eyes and go into whatever form or meditation or prayer that feels comfortable to you, and then enter more fully into the feeling itself. Allow it a place, and welcome it. See if you can put the thoughts that provoke the feeling aside, and simply attend to the feeling itself. You may find, as I have, that the intensity of the negative emotion subsides, and the feeling begins to reveal unacknowledged layers of subtlety that were hidden by the struggle. You may find that you can completely let go of the struggle and enter more deeply into communion with your deeper self. 

Stopping and Seeing

On two consecutive Friday evenings, Julie and I have taken a boat ride to the sand with her kayak.

There, she takes her kayak downwind while I wade further east into bootie deep water where a "few good fish" can often be found coming upwind in the low sunlight, visible as dark shadows in the clear water. Then, after half an hour or more, I return to the boat and drift downwind and pick up Julie for our ride home. On the way, I have stopped in a favorite muddy lagoon for just a few minutes, to see if the laughing gulls were working over pods of redfish. We have entered the lagoon on both Friday evenings, and stopped immediately in front of several pods of fish feeding visibly under birds. However, the pods have been comprised wholly of saltwater catfish--not a very desirable catch, since they have poisonous fins that often wound an unwitting angler. Knowing that the reds were probably there, too, but not so conveniently marked in the muddy waters, I stepped off the boat and simply observed the melee of mullet, catfish, and barely discernible signs of larger fish. 

On my first visit to the lagoon over a week ago, while standing and watching, I saw a vague wake and made my first cast. Ten minutes later, I landed a 27+" redfish after dragging it back to the boat for a photo. I released it and we headed home.

A week later, just this past Friday, we returned to the same spot and found the same roily conditions with balls of catfish feeding under crazed laughing gulls. There were no obvious signs of redfish, but again I simply stepped off the boat and walked 50 yards and stopped. After a few minutes, I saw the tip of a tail that I thought was a catfish. But not knowing for sure, I casted to it, and stripped the fly slowly past where its head could have been. I felt a tug, and grimaced, thinking that I would soon have to deal with a spiny catfish at the end of my line. But instead, a fish with considerable authority ripped my line and drove a huge wake in the 9" water. Fifteen minutes later, I landed a 30" red at the boat, took a photo, and released him.

I'm not telling you this as a way of bragging. I am telling you because I was amazed, and believe there's something to be learned from these successes. Both felt, from one perspective, like miracles. But from another perspective, they felt as easy and as natural as a laugh. It happens all the time, as Julie has observed time and again. Why is this possible, you might ask?

What I experience on the water is what I want my clients and friends to experience: To immerse oneself fully in the context in order to perceive what's there, but unseen. The Buddhists refer to this meditative process as "stopping and seeing." Both are natural components of experiencing fully.

When all agitations have ceased and not a single wave arises, myriad phenomena are clear, without confusion, without obstruction. Thus seeing is not separate from stopping. Once the layers of obscurity have been cleared and no clouding occurs, the ten directions are empty, without stirring, without agitation.
http://www.dailyzen.com/zen/zen_reading0511.asp


The "stopping" involves allowing all of the perceptual information into your awareness by surrendering the assumptions that filter the information into biased observations. For example, an angler can stand on an open flat, and say, "There's nothing here," and he will see nothing because he has failed to "stop" his limiting assumptions. Or he can stand there and open himself to the full array of information that normally gets constricted by assumptions. Then, once the full array of information is flowing into one's awareness, one can begin a process of "seeing" -- that is, concentrating on emergent phenomena that may have been invisible beforehand. The "signal" that one is looking for often becomes evident only once all of the data is considered. I have often heard master anglers say, "I can see fish even when there's nothing there." What they're saying is that they are permitting subtle information to pass into deep awareness without the usual biased and constricted filtering. They see things that others don't see, simply because they are more open to the fullness of their experience.

But one cannot be aggressive or ambitious to allow this process to unfold. That shuts down seeing, and it prevents the "stopping" by being attached to crude measures of success. Indeed, the paradox inherent in this process is that, fundamentally, one cannot have much ambition in order to succeed. For myself, I don't much care if I catch a big fish or not, because the richness of the experience means more to me than that. When a person with sufficient skill and experience surrenders one's assumptions and becomes open to the moment, everything becomes possible, but nothing is really needed. 

Skyping with Ryan Hurd

About once every two months, Ryan Hurd and I catch up on dream-related topics via Skype. It is one of the richest, most enjoyable exchanges that I have with my colleagues and friends. Ryan's www.dreamstudies.org has become the clearinghouse for all dream-related research, lucid dream induction and theory, as well as a place where thousands of dreamers meet for seminal exchanges on a variety of topics. Ryan is positioned at the center of dream studies, and thus is a perfect choice for the IASD Board and IASD's chair of the social networking committee.

One thing that Ryan and I share is a deep respect for the dream characters. Neither of us feels comfortable relegating the felt-personhood and otherness of dream characters, especially in lucid dreams, to the traditional "self-created" dustbin. Instead, we elect to suspend our judgment about the ultimate nature of dream characters. Three years ago, I debated with Stephen LaBerge at the Nonduality Conference in San Rafael on the ontological status of dream characters. I argued that, in the absence of knowing, we had to extend personhood to the dream character; for otherwise, we would be committing the fundamental solipsistic error of rendering ourselves as the only living thing in the dream. LaBerge, as a scientist, was understandably loathe to go there, but the consequences of reducing dream characters to psychological extensions of the self are equally disturbing. Tarnas comments on this problem in The Passion of the Western Mind, in which he discusses the impact of Newton's brilliance on the scientific field; that is, to reduce everything in the known  universe to mathematics, thus "de-animating" the universe and leaving ourselves essentially alone.

We can commit the same unwitting error by reducing everything to an extension of ourselves. What self? Now that's an interesting conversation. Perhaps there's a meeting ground in redefining what we mean by the "self." But if the self to which we refer is "larger" than the conscious self, we have effectively creating a realm of "ownership" without commensurate awareness of what we have created. For all practical purposes, this is exactly the same as granting our dream characters a separate ontological status, but "feels better" because we imagine that they exist within an as-yet unconscious domain of our destined greatness. Let me know what you think about this thread.

Presentations on Lucid Dreaming Available

To my dream-interested friends, I've just posted my three presentations that I gave at IASD at Berkeley in early June:

• “The Phenomenon of Light and Darkness on the Lucid Dream Journey," 
• “Underhill’s Three Stages of the Mystic’s Journey as Reflected in My Lucid Dreams" 
• “A New Method of Dream Analysis Congruent with Contemporary Counseling Approaches.

These postings include links to the audio, powerpoints, and text support.

http://www.dreamanalysistraining.com/styled-28/page9.html

Two visions in meditation

Being in the woods here in northern Pennsylvania has really deepened my meditations. I go home in two days, but in the last couple of days, I have had two visions in meditation that were not only beautiful, but deeply meaningful. In the first, I am with a woman from a different realm, or a different world. She is here in this world, but in order to enter this plane more fully, she lies down and places her feet against a beautiful young tree, with delicate limbs that make a symmetrical canopy. By touching the tree, she can have a greater influence in this world.

In the second, which occurred in this morning's meditation, I see a large wooden water wheel. Water pours into the top of it from an aqueduct that runs from right to left. As the water flows downward onto the wheel, it turns counterclockwise slowly. Then the water runs off the wheel into the ocean's edge.

These visions capture something true and objective, and "arrive" fully formed and with all of the awarenesses and feelings available without reflecting on them. They are precious gifts, even though, frankly, when I'm that deep in meditation, I usually don't pay much attention to them, and often forget them before the end of my period of silence.

Deep Immersion and A Vision in Meditation

People often ask me about my approach to meditation. It has evolved over the years, and is currently hard to describe. Suffice to say that my goal is to get beyond thinking, and to experience an immersion. At that point, my ego is "gone," and I lose my awareness of the here and now. I think this resembles what the Tibetans refer to as "chopping down the tree," in which the meditator endeavors to defeat each thought until thought ceases altogether. It comes fairly easily to me, and I'm not sure why. I know that's very different from mindfulness, in which one focuses on the breath and maintains an awareness of the here and now. But my problem is thinking and worrying about things that don't really matter, or over which I have no control. Also, if I can reach the state of immersion in spirit, I am immediately recharged and less attached to whatever is on my list of anxious worries.

Also, I often experience visions in the state of immersion that inform me of the "deeper track" of my life. For instance, this morning, I reached the state of alert immersion, and experienced this vivid, spontaneous "dream":

I am standing with a woman between two causeways, one old and one new (like to two joining Port Isabel to Padre Island in south Texas). The old one is broken, and no longer used for cars, and the new one is fully functional. I hear the phrase, "They are peers." When I came out of meditation and shared this with Julie, I realized that "peers" could be "piers." I then though of how the old causeway is used as a pier, and has become useful again.

There was a lot in the short experience, but I realized as I emerged from the experience that the dynamic or active work we do will come to a halt due to aging or natural cycles, but can then provide a "passive" and supportive foundation for others. It is so easy to value the current, dynamic work more highly than the past efforts, but as aging sets in, it's important to be able to shift to a sense of gratitude for the enduring contributions of one's life rather than the new efforts, which of course, in time, will also come to quiescence. At this stage in my life, both are quite evident--three presentations well received last week attest to the fully functional causeway, but that, too, must pass in time. It's always good to have a metaphor that compensates for the sense of decline. I am always impressed by the genius and generosity of the deeper self. Who could have rationally constructed such an experience that said so much in the span of mere seconds? Not my conscious mind, that's for sure.

Using lucidity to learn a language

A woman wrote me this morning and asked the following question:

For many years, I have been successfully dreaming with lucidity, which is joyous and life changing. I am able to focus enough to fall in and out of the same dream, creating my own canvas. I recently tried to learn words with a dictionary during sleep, but wasn't quite able to. Got the book off the shelf and opened it, but then woke up. Is it possible to utilize this ability to learn another language, in your experience?

My response was as follows:

An intriguing idea, but in my experience I have not found the lucid state to be a place where I try to learn new things that are immediately available to me in the waking state. I tend to approach it as a frontier, where I can become available to higher power and deep healing, and then have more energy and clarity for doing the hard work in my waking life. I think trying to learn a language there is like trying to learn to ride a bicycle by going swimming. You might feel more like riding that bicycle once you swim, but you'd be using the wrong context for learning the right thing.