Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö:
I’m dealing with fear on an emotional level off the cushion now (responsibilty-related anxiety that usually manifests in avoidance). I don’t know if it’s related to the stage of fear, but it would make sense if it did. Any advice on how to move this struggle into the practice so that I can deal with it on a sensate level instead? I would rather deal with it on the cushion than letting pople down. I’m trying hard to be mindful of my avoidance tendencies and avoid them (hehe) but would love to find a way to move this beyond the emotional level.
Deep breath...deep breath...
Okay, so here's what you need to keep in mind: in the dark night, dissolution, fear, misery, disgust, a desire for deliverance, and a freakout mind are all likely to occur ---- as mind states. You are basically being shown a movie of all of your hang ups, your shadow, your history. It's not because you are bad or flawed or unworthy. It's because your mind really does want to digest this old material and move beyond it. There is no way to move through things like trauma or PTSD or dark night without going through some difficult mind states. It's simply the nature of healing.
Notice how you are already thinking in terms of not being able to handle it, letting people down. There can be a lot of guilt and shame that also arises when we face our old materal, shadow self, and past history. Again, this is not because you are bad or flawed or unworthy. It is because the mind wants to protect itself and avoid stuff until it can move through it.
The nature of mind is such that it wants to be safe AND it wants to heal. Healing involves going into those yucky sensations, awkward emotions, and oppressive thoughts with mindfulness, appreciation, friendliness, caring, and acceptance. When you go through these mindstates with awareness you realize that they are old baggage, not relevant, weather that is here now and gone later, not the same as the Self, transitory. You also can connect to the witnessing/aware mind that SEES all of this. This is what develop the more adult and sane mind that is resiliant.
A mature, sane, and adult mind can experience fear, misery, disgust, desire for deliverance, and momentary freakout and say "oh, look at all these fears, look at all this misery, look at all this disgust, look at all these desires for deliverance, look at the mind momentarily freaking out." Ironically, it really is that simple. Of course, when we identify with the mind we tend to think/feel "I AM afraid, I AM miserable, I AM disgusted, I AM desiring for deliverance, I AM freaking out."
There really is no one on earth that can "teach" you to switch from one to the other. In the end, we need to ____GRADUALLY____ let ourselves be exposed to these difficult mindstates and let them happen and notice how the come and go.
A last point: as developing humans, we can become very paranoid about these difficult mindstates because we don't see the good in them. Why on earth should we sit on the cushion and go through all of this? What does it get us?
All these difficult mindstate will also have a piece of wisdom connected to it, sort of hidden within the noise. There is a >positive intention< that is within each state. Fear just really wants to keep us safe. Misery really wants the world to be more fair and just. Disgust really wants us to make better choices and care for ourselves. Desire for Deliverance really wants us to work carefully toward improving. And Reobservation really wants to give us a guided tour of all of our silly trigger thoughts/feelings so that we see that freaking out isn't helpful. So on one level, meditation is giving you a personally guided tour of all of the nonsense in our mind so that we can re-connect, re-interpret, re-evaluate the thoughts and feelings we have toward ourself and the world.
This is also why mediation improves psychology and morality --- we have to go through this character growth in order to be able to rest in Equanimity as a stable state. If we don't grow and develop, then any little dark night blip of discomfort will throw us around. When Equanimity is mature, aspects of the dark night pop up as little purifications and we can even go through a Reobservation-like mindstate without being freaked out.
The normal human progress for developing resiliancy is:
* first we are only stable when the body and mind is stable
* then we can be stable when the body is freaking out but the mind stays clear
* finally we are so grounded in the Self that we can be stable when the body and mind is freaking out
It really is amazing what is possible... but we have to ____gradually develop_____ these skils. While meditation on the battlefield is theoretically possible, we can't start a meditation practice there. We would just traumatize and re-traumatize ourself. We have to gradually develop calmness in the face of challenges. And these challenges should be at an appropriate dose, so that we can develop resilancy over time.
You have to learn your weaknesses and take them into account. Are you someone that rushes foolishly into too much intensity? Are you someone that repressess and avoids direct experience? Are you someone that fantasizes that suffering is heroic and a good thing? Are you someone that fantasizes that suffering means you are a failure and will never be any good? We all have tendencies toward greedy, aversive, or delusion modes of relating to our inner experiences... it's important to learn the ways we cling, avoid, and are indifferent to our experience.
Build a support group before things get tough (normal firends, meditation friends, teachers, advisors, etc.), study the terrain through books and conversations with others --- and when the time is right, go slow and go through.
A forum will never be able to provide perfectly accurite advice and no one should blindly trust/believe/follow anything they read on the internet!! So you have to take responsibility for yourself. My own sense is you are going a little too fast and need to slow down, but I don't believe that that is necessarily the right advice either. You need to decide for yourself.
Hope this helps in some way!