We have this unique ability as humans to hold our attentional awareness on purpose. And as we hold our attentional awareness on something on purpose, once a day everyday, we are rehabilitating the prefrontal cortex- that part that is responsible for emotion regulation.
Otherwise, what happens is, something pops up, our old pattern kicks in, our defense mechanisms come up, we go to our old “stuff”, we’re not regulated and we’re reaching for something to soothe that instead- the phone, drinking, drugs, sex, all those things we talk about. Those things in and of themselves are not bad, but if we’re using them to soothe, we’re getting the dopamine hit, it feels good for a little bit, but it’s in fact just one more layer on top of what we were already trying to avoid in the first place.
And so, this ability that we have as humans to actually hold attentional awareness, practice on purpose, get the prefrontal cortex online… in doing so, we engage emotion regulation, we engage our clarity, our decision making, our executive function. And the,n we’re able to actually sit with this range.
And as the old stuff comes up and through our loving awareness, this is where these old imprints have the room to move freely past our loving awareness. This is where the healing occurs. It graces past that love enough, that the love itself often is what’s healing it.
And so the question is, “How is loving awareness part of the agent for healing?”
Of course, an awareness practice, the context that we talk in, is there is an element of non-judgement in a meditation practice. And so that is the loving awareness part. And so, we’re practicing attentional awareness, we’re practicing non-judgement so then this becomes loving awareness.
So, how does this help heal old stuff, deep imprints? We can pick any emotion that we either know we’re contending with or suspect it might be in play.
I’ll use one example. Let’s talk about resentment.
If we are living with resentment, we tend to go towards that other persons wrongdoing- how right we are and how wrong the other person is. And, if we’re really doing the work, or sitting with something- you hear that expression, ‘I’m going to sit with this’- if we’re really doing the work, we sit with resentment without getting too hooked into the narrative, we keep that loving awareness in tact, we’re willing to say, ‘Not right now! Not for my practice. Maybe later I’ll judge that, maybe later I’ll go back to making them wrong and me right, but right now this is just allowing resentment to move.’
As it does, what happens is we begin to see the other parts in play. We begin to notice, what was my part in that too? And, a lot of times, we don’t want to look at that shit. It’s too convenient to really stick with this area where they’re wrong and we are right. If we can actually, little by little, begin to sit with what our part is in it, we can see more clearly a fuller picture.
By the way, when we’re in a stress response- we’re sitting there with ‘they’re wrong, I’m right’- that low to mid, mid to high grade stress response- we are very zero’d in on one thing, and it’s what the other person did or didn’t do. And we are loosing all the other rich information available.
Rich information in the scenario that I’m describing right now is, what was my part? And even if our part was only 3%, what was our part?
To be able to actually look at that and be willing to look at that with that same non-judgement, with that same loving awareness…. I’ll beat myself up later, maybe, but for our protected time in practice, it is literally sit with that, look at it, notice it without necessarily having to do anything about it now.
This takes us into layers of shame- shame and blame- big ones.
So, sitting with shame. Like, “Gosh dangit, for x amount of years, I made that about this and here I am with a part in it to.”
The invitation is to always stay in our lane, to use our practice to support us in sitting with these things that it’s probably time to face.
In fact, if you have an item come to mind now, that’s your item right now.
The practice then is- using breath, or whatever techniques or practices that you’re experienced with that you know support you. The practice supports us by using breath to regulate the system, or using grounding with sound or another grounding practice- whatever it is that you can pull from your repertoire. But to regulate your system so that you can continue with this process of looking at hard stuff.
Imagine a world where we’re all willing to sit and look at our own stuff. ❤
…instead of the invert where we’re in a world looking at how f*d up they are, and what they did last, and what they didn’t do, and what they’re going to do next and all that jazz.
The deeper you go into this work and the more you join with others in circle, and you begin to get more exposure to the human experience, the more we’re able to uncover all of the ways that the practice actually supports us. And, we’re able to then experience first-hand this ability to be with emotions that some of us have been dodging for years. Maybe not consciously, explicitly, “I’m going to not deal with that emotion today”, but we have at least one little thing that we know is ahead of us to contend with, and we take off little chunks at a time. Our practice actually helps us take these things little by little in a more skillful way. Skillful being, we’re able to have some comfort in the body and ease in the mind as we do it, as we learn what’s beneath, as we allow up those things that we know are there, we’re just not positive what’s going to be there when we let it rise.
