On a Shinzen retreat last year my energetic system was pretty down from. Frankly - it had been down for a long time. During one of the guided meditations Shinzen used the phrase "Jhana factors" and that unlocked something in me. I was in a very dark space at this time - I had been deconstructing and releasing layers and layers of memories and somatic sensations connected with the PTSD that I had uncovered earlier. I didn't know what Jhana is but I felt inspired to just try and enter some kind of very concentrated & positive space. I didn't know how to do that, but I already had a concentration momentum that was quite high, so what naturally came up was to just start repeating the word "Joy" as a mantra (try to focus on and cultivate sensations of joy) & set my meditation timer to 3 hours.
During that time a couple of things happened.
First - I had to choose an image to focus on, when doing the mantra. Becase I was about to generate some mental content, I was wondering what to use in order to create a minimal risk of causing magic & "spooky action at a distance" events. One option is any positive memory that I have - but I was worried that if I used a memory, the intense negativity that I was in would deteriorate or change it. Instead I decided to use the image of myself - smiling, happy and effortlessly "shining with" metta. That would both have the effect of having a safe visualization for the practice AND if it spills out I would just "enchant myself" towards an effortless, happy metta state of mind for some time.1
Second - after a short while of using the mantra, I felt that my body was starting to tense up at the appearance of positive body sensations. It was like my body was resisting the positivity. To address that I switched my technique to alternate between the "Joy" with generating positivity & using the label "Relax" and focusing on relaxing the parts of the body that were tensing up. That created a lot more space for the positive sensations and deepened the equanimity to allow for the whole-body positivity to accumulate and deepen.
Third - at some point during that process I found that there's a spontaneous positive reaction in my face and upper chest when I felt the effects of the positivity that were accumulating in the body. My body liked feeling good! I was noticing sensations of "happiness" coming up, so I used that and included it in the practice - alternating between
- the positive mantra & visualization
- relaxing whatever tension that comes up in the body
- focusing on the embodied sensations of positivity and happiness that came up as a result of the process
That meditative flow created a positive feedback loop between the three practices - each one made the effect of the other stronger and the accumulation of the positive sensations faster. At the end of the three hours my whole body was brimming with warm positive flowing sensations at a scale that I've never felt before. The words 'piti' and 'sukha' spontaneously came up in my mind which I haven't heard until now but knew to be the qualities which I was experiencing. I made a quick check in Wikipedia the next day
Piti is a joyful saṅkhāra (formation) associated with no object, so the practitioner is not attaining it by desire. It is often translated into the English word "rapture" and is distinguished from the longer-lasting meditative "joy" or "happiness" (Pali, Sanskrit: sukha) which is a subtler feeling which arises alongside pīti.
- Wikipedia
It was late night when I finished that 3-hour mediation, but I was in disbelief both about how good I felt at the end of it and how lower the bar was to getting to this place of being charged with positivity.
Trauma has the general move of stressing and straining the whole body-mind system. Longer periods of dealing with challenging trauma sensations can cause anxiety, lower motivation, general angst - that are very hard to overcome. This move had the exact opposite effect - it was both recharging the system and releasing the pent-up stress.
I discovered something that day that has been and still is an invaluable part of my healing process. I happily went to bed and had one of the most refreshing sleeps that I've had in my life.
1 Generating any mind content with the images of real people or yourself is risky and can have unintended consequences. Since this retreat I've found a number of relatevely safe images to use when you're generating a lot of metta - these can be - a letter or number of the alphabet (or any symbol) or a ball of light.
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