Hi friends –
Our topic this week is one we’ve circled around quite a bit at Home Base. Many of us come to meditation because we’re dealing with emotional pain of some kind. The practice holds great promise: the potential to lessen our pain in the moment, and, more radically, to transform some of the deep patterns that keep us stuck in our emotional reactions in the first place.
What exactly can we expect from meditation here? What’s reasonable? Different practitioners will have different answers. I’m curious right off the bat to hear what this community has noticed for themselves in their practice – if inspired, please share in the comments.
In terms of my own thoughts, I’ll start with the work of shifting old patterns over the long-term, then I’ll get into the nuts and bolts of how that can look in the moment. Today’s guided meditation is all about that second part.
When I first began to meditate, I saw a lot of immediate gains: less anxiety, more settledness, more awareness of how I was around other people. More than that, for the first time I felt I understood some of the spiritual stuff people spoke about. I felt more intimacy with the world, had some profound experiences of inner quiet, and even had some noself-type experiences where I could really see how I was constructing both my own identity and my own suffering, from moment to moment. The effects of these insights lasted for weeks and months, and some of the understanding gained then has never gone away.
It was all pretty mindblowing, so much so that I became filled with … proselytizing zeal. I learned later this is a common stage of the meditation journey, particularly if you’re doing a lot of practice. The effects are so real, the breakthroughs so penetrating, that you can’t help annoying everyone you know with exhortations that they must immediately start meditating. In religious terms, this is known as a conversion experience. One school of Buddhism rather astutely calls this stage “The Corruptions of Insight.” The high-energy revelations of the practice are actually distorting your perception.
You think this is the new You, your new enlightened baseline. ‘I’ve arrived!’ I would stride in a distinguished manner around my neighborhood and dispense unasked for wisdom to the people. Ok I didn’t do that. But I did talk a LOT about meditation at parties. This is before I taught meditation, by the way.
Anyway, eventually the novelty passed, and my old habits began to reassert themselves. I realized I wasn’t actually fixed. If anything, I now had a clearer view of how screwed-up I was.
