Inner Practice

I had another of those funny days where horrible emotional states kick in. The day started well; I woke early, had a pleasant meditation where I wasn’t trying to avoid everything, went to yoga, almost fell asleep in the relaxation at the end of the class, and came home and had a nap. During the nap, I had some lucid dreams where I was exploring some interesting sea creatures hidden under a rock. Then, when I awoke, I started to feel uncomfortable.

My focus shifted to some of my perceived failures in life. I felt there were things I wanted to have achieved, and I hadn’t. I felt my life was not okay. It was unpleasant; I felt helpless to do anything, and I wondered if I would do anything valuable in the rest of my life, or should I just end it now and jump under a bus? I felt very separate from everything, and felt that I needed certain things in my life to feel ok. My separate self sense was horribly magnified, and I didn’t like it.

These states are frustrating. I don’t like them. They are disempowering and don’t do any good. So, the question is, how did I get out of the state? It was as though something was directing my focus and there wasn’t much I could do about it.

• I have faith in the meditative practice and awareness. The first step was to realize I was in a negative state, and drop the ideal that I should be in a ‘good’ state. I had to get real with myself. I dropped the ‘ideal’ Bruce of being happy and open and expansive, and I saw how I was, which was self-contracting and separate.
• Next, I gave myself some supporting beliefs, such as “The awareness that knows I am experiencing this is free of this state. The awareness is liberating.”
• I noticed how I was attached to an idea of myself that hasn’t been fulfilled. I saw how the comparison of what I was, and what I wanted to be, caused me to suffer. I noticed how that comparison made me resist the truth of my life, and that resistance was the cause of separation and suffering I was feeling.
• I started to work with the energy. I felt the sense of separation and wanting even more fully. I started to do Tonglen (or compassionate exchange) while I was walking to work and on the subway, which was about 45 minutes. I imagined myself standing among whoever I was seeing on the commute, and imagined that they, along with me, were feeling a powerful and debilitating sense of failure and guilt for not being who they wanted to be. Then, I imagined myself breathing in all their guilt and feelings of failure into my heart, and imagined releasing those feelings into the infinite heart of compassion, and breathed the cool release back to them and myself among them.
• I continued doing this, going deeper and deeper into the feelings that I didn’t like, making them increasingly intense, and feeling them as fully as I could.
• I felt a lightness, and an energetic surge through me. The negative state was gone. I completed this with a short practice of gratitude.

Tonight as I write this, I feel open and complete. I feel I have energy that can be focused towards writing a blog that may be useful for someone, instead of directing that energy inwards in self condemnation. I can choose where I want to focus, and that is an almost effortless process.

As I came home tonight, I thought of all the times that I have been focused on negative states, without having the tools to transform them. I am confidant that the above process works well. I am also increasingly confidant that the key to success and happiness is being able to accept and investigate ourselves, and to understand why we are focused certain things. I must have read hundreds of self help books in the past, and few of them spoke about the process of inner, in the moment transformation of disempowering states. When a disempowering state arises, then if it’s not faced and transformed, it will just keep coming back and back, often with increasing severity.