| | Meditation for me is often an reflexive shutting out of... something. Like there's a sense of having to "press down" or align my mind with the meditation protocol, which interferes with whatever my mind was doing beforehand. I didn't know how to meditate any other way.
Even with a "doing nothing" sort of meditation, or "leaving things just as they are, not starting, stopping, suppressing, or enhancing" I still had/have to enact that protocol (forming the intention to gently deny intentions and attempting to let go of that intention too), and that has the same effect of kind of "tensing" my mind.
But, I have discovered, for myself at least, that it's possible to meditate without this "tensing," in a sort of quasi-vipassana noting yet going with the flow kind of thing. It sort of feels like internal gymnastics or internal anticipation, almost a moving toward an attention seeking target or potential source of suffering before it gels or solidifies. It's a very loose, fast-moving, almost lightning-fast, continuous, fractal multi-limbed internal "movement." There's a sense of "energy" flowing downward, too, mostly on the lefthand side of my torso. There's also a subtle muscular relaxing or opening in the area of potential suffering/attention.
Doing meditation this way prevents a rising anxiety that I sometimes feel during meditation. In this new way it's like I'm meditating with all my parts, or not shutting anything out, or letting all aspects of self participate in the meditation, or making sure every part of me that wants to help guide the session is on board. Parts aren't scared or don't feel shut out or denied.
This book Self-Therapy by Earley helped me stumble on this way of meditating. Is there any literature that describes what I'm talking about from the meditation side? I'd like to find some prior language or theory to help my conceptualize what I'm doing during a meditation session. |