Guided Meditation: Stay
In preparation for a class I’m teaching later this week, I was reflecting on this idea of Reactivity. So, often our minds can be off to the races - triggered by a thought, a sound, a sensation. Many times, we might not even be aware that we have been triggered and that we are now in the throes of reactivity….that we’ve been pulled away from the here and now.
In the mindfulness tradition, there are several ways we work more skillfully with reactivity.
One of those is the concept of allowing. Of being with. One way this might show up is with discomfort in our sitting practice. We’re sitting peacefully noticing the natural rise and fall of our body as our breath cycles through…and we are rudely pulled away to the pins and needles that are creeping into our feet. A few things can happen next.
We react without even knowing it. We stand up. We shift. We groan. We stomp our feet to give them blood and abort the meditation.
Our mind hijacks our experience. We are quickly in the proliferation of thought - this is killing me. I gotta move. I’m not a good meditator. My leg is about to explode. I GOTTA GET OUTTA HERE.
Both of these are forms of reactivity. And while it’s by no means the end of the world if either of those happen (on the contrary, it’s perfectly normal) - I believe we miss a chance to benefit our future self when we don’t explore a third option.
Can I sit with it? Can I allow it to be here? Can I give it space to morph and change? Can I hold it with a tender and kind heart? Can I open my perspective to what else is here (a sound, the weight of my body sitting, the air touching my hands)?
I encourage you to try this the next time an unpleasant experience comes your way in your meditation practice.
And why do we do that? So we become master sitters? NO.
Many times life gives us experiences we don’t want. If we can only be “OK” when life goes our way, it’s a tough road (I can speak from experience here). When we can practice being more accepting, more open, more spacious (i.e., the opposite of reactive) about the things that are out of our control, a more easeful life begins to unfold.
What I have come to see is that most phenomenon have a very short life span (for me, this mostly shows up as difficult emotions). If we can build our capacity and our spaciousness to let them be with us, many times they simply fade away on their own. It’s when we push them away, when we exacerbate the story, when we vehemently react - that we give these phenomenon more power.
So we practice.
We do that so when our small child is having a fit, we can sit through the discomfort as frustration builds in our body.
We do that so when a driver cuts us off on the highway, we don’t waste energy ruminating and cursing and analyzing, we sit with the rising and falling of the anger and move on.
We do that so when a friend is suffering, we can hold space for our own suffering - we don’t need to fix but can simply listen.
We do that so when our inner critic is yelling at us for something we should have done, we turn from the story to the feeling and let it subside.
We Stay. We stay with ourselves.
I’ve included a new guided meditation to assist you in exploring this for yourself.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power and freedom to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness”
