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vipassana
retreat in Virginia. “On
the fifth day, we were doing a body scan, bringing our awareness to different
areas in our body. I had been sitting so long that I was in utter pain. We were
asked to focus our attention on our right eye. And tears just started to flow out of
my right eye, only my right eye. And then we got to our neck,” Kat says.
Kat’s neck was not an area she wanted to focus on. “I have a thing about my
neck,” she explains. (Her father killed her mother by strangling her with his bare
hands.) “I have somatized that memory,” Kat says. “I have never liked anything
that fits tight around my neck—clothing, jewelry. But here we were, focusing on
the neck, breathing. I began to feel my body welling up. All the pain in my body
just began to grow larger and larger. It was as if I had embodied everything that
had happened and all this negative energy had been stored in the cells of my
body. Bringing my focus to my neck triggered pain I’d hidden for so long.”
After that meditation session, Kat began sobbing uncontrollably. “I could not
stop the flood of raw emotion. It was excruciating, but it also felt good. I was
ready to be cleansed.” She could barely get up off the floor. “I struggled to my
feet. I was like Bambi, I couldn’t walk, and I was still sobbing as I made it to the
door of the meditation hall. I looked outside and saw a tree. And it was suddenly
as if I’d never seen a tree before,” she says. “Everything was new.”
That’s when Kat realized that “I had let go of my pain, my story of loss, my
victimhood, the grief and fear and sense of failure and shame and guilt from so
much abandonment. I had to say good-bye to all the negative emotions that I had
embodied over the years. Because when I let go, I was greeted by a new, deeper
layer of wholeness, a sense of inner freedom.
“I began to notice things I hadn’t noticed before: things as simple as the
beauty of the sun shining, or moments when I was with someone and we were
laughing. I began to connect with the world around me as if I were seeing the
beauty in the world for the first time. I began to wake up.”
As Kat began to see things around her more clearly, she learned to put a pause
between her feelings and her actions. She gained a sense of what her triggers
were, of what was going on deep inside her, her patterns, and the ways in which
she was working against herself. This led to her ability to have her first healthy
love relationship.
Today, Kat is engaged to a woman with whom she has an honest and deeply
loving relationship.
“I think I rewrote the story of my brain,” Kat says. “And that allowed me to
rewrite the story of how I loved.”
Other individuals whose stories appear in these pages likewise found solace in
meditation and mindfulness. Ellie, who grew up navigating a violent world in
which her much older brothers were often incarcerated, came to mindfulness and
meditation practice as a way to “clearly see how my current thoughts about my
lack of self-worth are connected to my long-ago past, so that I could try to get
my intrusive, everyday thoughts of how worthless I am to budge—to move out.”
It has been very powerful for her to pay attention to “not only what I am thinking
but how I am responding to my thoughts.”
Mindfulness has been “life changing” for Ellie. “I have been to many
therapists who’ve helped me to analyze my feelings, but no one had ever said
that it was possible to simply let my thoughts pass, so that I could experience the
freedom of seeing that I am not my thoughts.”
Meditation allows you to come to terms with your past so that you can live in
the present, be here, and enjoy what is right here, right now.
A daily ten-minute practice of mindfulness meditation can be an act of mental
hygiene that dramatically down-regulates your stress response.
The best place to start is to look for a local class on either mindfulness-based
stress reduction (MBSR) or an Insight Meditation Group, taught by a skilled
teacher. Luckily, many community centers, yoga studios, and hospitals now
offer MBSR and insight meditation classes for affordable fees. Some offer
MBSR discounts and scholarships for those in special circumstances, and most
libraries have a wide range of meditation CDs available.
To find an MBSR class near you, visit the Center for Mindfulness in
Medicine, Health Care and Society—found on the University of Massachusetts
Medical
School
website
at
www.umassmed.edu/MBSR/public/searchmember.aspx
. MBSR was designed
initially to assist people with pain and life issues that were difficult to treat in a
hospital setting, and utilizes a combination of mindfulness meditation, mindful
awareness, mindful movement, and yoga.
The Insight Meditation Society offers instructions and guidance in insight
meditation, also known as
vipassana
, a form of meditation that is in the Buddhist
tradition. The simple technique focuses attention on the breath, helping to calm
the mind so that you can more clearly see your own thought patterns, become
aware of your mental conditioning and how it may be working against you, and
learn to be more fully present in the moment. You can learn more about a wide
array of workshops, community meditation programs, and retreats with some of
the world’s most renowned meditation teachers at
www.dharma.org/
.
Hundreds of terrific
vipassana
insight meditations and downloadable podcasts
are also available free (or for a donation) online. I’ve been most helped by the
work of Tara Brach, PhD; Sylvia Boorstein, PhD; Jack Kornfield, PhD; Sharon
Salzberg; Trish Magyari (who teaches MBSR); Norman Fischer; and Pema
Chödrön; their guided meditations and teachings have been life-changing for me.
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