Healing From Betrayal (Meditation and Intuition - Part 6)

If you have been betrayed, you know how much noise it makes in your head. This is because to be betrayed, we have to have been sold out or attacked by someone we trusted and considered a friend. Betrayal feels completely different than when we are attacked by enemies or competitors.

When a friend betrays us, the damage goes deeper than attacks by enemies. There are two reasons: one is that they are closer to us, inside our guard; the second is that when a friend betrays us, we have to doubt the part of us that trusted them in the first place. We come to doubt our whole relationship to the world. We may recover from the external damage that the betrayal does to our life. But the lasting damage, more difficult to heal, is that we turn against the part of us that trusted them. In other words, being betrayed can damage our ability to form friendships and to trust anyone in the future. Then, because we have to form alliances with someone, we become more open to being betrayed again in the future because our whole signaling system is out of calibration.

For meditators, this is important because healing the damage from betrayals is as painful as having porcupine quills or cactus needles pulled out of your leg. It's a series of ouch, ouch, ouch moments. And there is no Novocain for it because the type of healing that is needed is conscious healing. The last thing you ever want to think about again is your friend who betrayed you. The very thought of them is like a virus that crashes your computer. But when you feel safe and relaxed during meditation, their image will come up, the mini-movie will start playing, and you will be inside a debriefing session as your inner intel staff and your inner Sun Tzu sit around and work on the problem of how did you get there, what damage did you take, how were you deceived, how does your intelligence gathering and assessment system need to be revised, and what exact steps to take today to move toward a solution. And how to prevent a scenario such as this from happening in the future.

As part of recovering from betrayal, you have to learn to distinguish between different kinds of pain - the pain of the needles in your body, the pain of the infection around the needles, the pain of pulling the needles out, the pain of cleaning the wound, the pain of the scar tissue as it forms, the pain of working the scar tissue so it becomes more supple.

If you are in the process of healing from a betrayal, don't give up on yourself. You can heal, and you can be better than before. But ouch, the healing process hurts!

Wash The Fear Out of Your Body (Meditation and Intuition - Part 5)

Sometimes just a little bit of meditation gives the nervous system enough juice, relaxation chemistry, that a significant amount of fear is released. This is possibly because some of our chronic fear is fear of relaxation itself. We are afraid to let go of the continual vigilance and shift over to really living. When we make the decision to meditate, then, that decision has a lot of personal power behind it. This means a lot to many of us, especially those who have not done such things before.

The basic mental focus of meditation is some aspect of life's rhythm: the continual flowing of the breath, or the flow of a yummy sound such as a mantra, or the flow of energy in the body. A sense of steadiness does emerge in this flowing rhythm, but you do not need to focus on it. The more you allow yourself to perceive rhythm, the more an underlying sense of stability will emerge.

As the senses become absorbed in perceiving rhythm and stability, the muscles of the body relax and let go of tension.

Now, let's go over that sentence again: "As the senses become absorbed in perceiving rhythm and stability, the muscles of the body relax and let go of tension." This is so obvious that it's easy to miss.

More on the Debriefing Process

What happens when the muscles let go of tension? Often, we become aware for a few seconds or minutes of what we were tense about. We see little mini-movies of what we were doing when we tensed up – an unfinished conversation, a disagreement, a negative emotion that came up between us and someone we love, a tense situation at work, a failure, a success, a deadline. This is your mind/body's natural debriefing mechanism at work.

In the military, whenever anyone comes back from a mission, they get debriefed on what happened, so that the intelligence agents obtain a more accurate assessment of the environment and the forces arrayed. Football teams also debrief about their games, and probably most professional sports use the technique.

If you have been meditating every day consistently, then most of your debriefing may be about current events, because you have caught up with yourself. If you have just started meditating, or have recently been through a lot of battles of some kind, then the debriefing that comes up during meditation may cover the whole time period. You will find your brain reviewing in excruciating detail crucial events of your life and how you responded to them.

How long does debriefing take? This is the weird part. Thoughts come in unpredictable bursts, just when you are most relaxed. This is because the body loves to do the debriefing while at ease, whatever level of repose is available at the moment. Unless you have some comfort in your nerves, you won't be able to filter away the excess tension.

Note here that the intelligence in your body does not care about you being relaxed. It only wants efficiency, and relaxation is usually the most efficient mode. The adaptive intelligence also wants you to have the most perfectly sensitive danger recognition and stress-response system. The keyword here is accuracy. The body wants totally accurate sensory information and totally appropriate response.

This is for most of us the hardest part of meditation, the toughest to take, this cycle of relaxation and tension release. While it may make sense logically to say, "Ok, when you relax, you let go of tension," in practice it is a bit of a bitch. You are sitting there all relaxed and at ease, and all of a sudden your brain is filled with images of when you were definitely NOT at ease, and your muscles are jumping with tension. What the f—- is going on here?

Again, what the f--- is going on is that your body/mind is taking advantage of the situation of meditation to wash the fear out of your system. You know this is happening during meditation because your awareness goes from being extremely relaxed, to replaying a movie of some time in the past when you were in a stressful situation, or some time in the future you think will be challenging. And what, really, is your body/mind doing? Practicing being relaxed while engaged in that situation, as relaxed as is optimal for your performance. Ask any martial artist, you are better off when you are relaxed. Ask a soldier who has been in combat. You are usually better off if you can keep your wits about you.

If you work from 8 to 5 each day, and meditate in the morning before going to work, most of your time during meditation will be spent thinking – your brain just going over the choreography of the day ahead, musing about your relationships, sorting, prioritizing, and mulling over anything that makes you tense. Only a few minutes will be spent in something like transcendence, where you are savoring the vastness of life, the delight of being alive, the incredible richness of the moment. These few minutes are precious, to be sure. But the unstressing aspect of meditation is just as important, because it allows you to live honestly in the sense of delight the experience of vastness gives you.

How to Have Good Personal Radar (Meditation and Intuition - Part 1)

One reason to meditate is so that you don't miss out on the beauty of your own life as you move through the day. It is so easy to lose the joy of life in the living of it, to get caught up in hurrying and mental chatter about how late you are, how many things you have to do. When we find the style of meditation that works for us, we often find that our senses open up, and our intuition becomes more accurate. And at the same time, we engage in the actions of our everyday life with more relaxation and ease.

Because of this, many people think that meditation is about being open and relaxed, but this is not actually true: meditation gives your nerves a chance to be in deeper contact with reality, and as a result you will be more open and relaxed much of the time, because there is not an immediate threat. And because your senses are more open, you can perceive both safety and danger more accurately. And ask any warrior: relaxation is a great place to come from when preparing for combat, if that is what's called for.

Another reason to not leave home without meditating is that if you are relaxed as your baseline experience, then when you get tense, it is a signal, a clear blip on your personal radar. Relaxation is like having a well-calibrated radar system, that gives few false signals.

Unless you are relaxed and at ease, you will have a lot of noise in your nervous system. If you are afraid all the time, and suspicious of everyone, you won't know when you actually are in danger, because your danger signaling system is blaring all the time. If your radar is showing threats that are not there, you will have to learn to ignore it to get any work done, and then real threats will go ignored.

This is why meditation is part of the training in many martial arts, and why meditation and martial arts training are complementary opposites, enriching each other.

As an aside, though, I have to mention that sitting on your ankles, or sitting cross-legged, can be very bad for the knees. Sitting in a chair with your feet on the ground is a great pose, plus it has that extra sense of groundedness.

In the following several sections, we cycle through the interplay between safety and danger, because this is the most basic of instincts. We will look at the way rhythm occurs in meditation experience, and we will approach the same point again and again, spiraling in at it from slightly different angles, because it is such a challenging issue for meditators. Most people never get it, and the lack of this understanding is a major reason people quit meditating. So forgive the repetition.

Trust Your Instincts

Meditation is a built-in ability. Your body already knows how to do it, as part of your survival instincts. The ability is there, in your nerves and muscles and metabolism, always ready and waiting for you to access it. There are thousands of techniques for meditating, which means there is something for everyone.

Meditation is the action of riding the instincts into your inner world. There you can rest, and at times rest from action completely. The instincts — hunting, homing, grooming, feeding, mating, exploring, resting, healing, adapting — are the wise motions of life. Meditation techniques access the instincts in infinite combinations and permutations.

The most important techniques are as simple as paying attention to your breathing. Find something interesting about your breath and hang out with it. Breath is our main food – we breathe about 22,000 times a day, and the oxygen in the air feeds the body. It's the oxygen that lets us burn the fuel to generate heat and power to move.

Meditation techniques are things people invented or discovered going on within themselves, then systematized and put into a formal system. But they emerge from an extremely informal, intimate way of being with life. The techniques the meditation traditions have so diligently collected and preserved over the millennia are there to remind you to create your own system. Always remember this. Coaches and teachers can help you to access your inner knowledge, but the basic skill is already there inside you. I advocate an instinctive, passionate, and natural approach to meditation as the best way to begin and continue.

The six books I talk about on this site - Meditation Made Easy, Breath Taking, Whole Body Meditations, Meditation Secrets for Women, Meditation 24/7, and The Radiance Sutras - are tools you can use to begin meditation, and if you already are meditating, sustain, enrich your practice.

I call the instincts "the wise motions of life," because they are deep impulses through which life is always renewing itself, evolving itself, creating its art.

What Are the Instincts?

They are the moves you are always engaged in, the rhythm and melody of your dance with life. You know what they are and you don't think about them.

Hunting is an instinct. If you are here on this website, you may be hunting for information about how to improve your life. Surfing the web is enabled by computers, but the real power comes from inside us, the human instinct to figure out how the world works. Curiosity is an instinct. Exploring is an instinctive behavior.

Making a trail is instinctive – if you found your way here, and perhaps bookmark the site, that is making a trail. When you go shopping for food or clothes, you are engaged in multiple instincts: you follow a trail or series of roads you know to get to the market or mall; you gather things you need, or you browse and search for things you need; and you bring them back to your nest. Saying something is an "instinct" is just a way of saying it is natural, a natural move.

We each have our own favorite instincts, combinations of instincts, and sequences. As individuals, we have preferred styles of activities, and things we don't like so much. Raising children involves many instincts: nurturing, bonding, communicating, protecting, setting boundaries, guarding boundaries, nesting. And, of course, getting in to position to have children usually involves the mating instinct.

The process of meditating itself is very playful. Playing is an instinct; all mammals play, and in playing they rehearse actions, practice moving in a coordinated manner, and engage their talents. When we meditate, the body gets a chance to rest more deeply than sleep; resting is an instinct, and we all do a form of resting every day called sleeping. Sleeping is an instinct, and when we sleep we dream. What is a dream? While we are asleep, the brain creates, directs and acts in mental movies, which we sometimes remember when we wake up.

When we meditate, the feeling of meditation itself alternates between resting, playing, communing, dreaming, and so on. Sometimes we feel we are being fed, nourished, by the peacefulness of the meditation. Other times we feel we are being stimulated, awakened, excited by the meditation experience.

Everyday life is structured around the instincts:

• Resting – sleeping and dreaming.

• Feeding - yourself and your family and pets.

• Grooming - bathing and getting dressed, doing your hair. Picking the nits out of your children’s fur.

• Gathering - foraging by going to the store or the garden and bringing food home.

• Hunting – searching for what you need in the environment, shopping for the best buys

• Exploring – looking and sniffing around to discover what interests you. Going on an adventure. Expanding your horizons.

• Homing – the navigational skills to find your way home when you have been out exploring.

• Nesting – building a home or tending to it, decorating, cleaning. Being cozy, snuggling in bed.

• Socializing – talking on the phone, getting together with friends.

• Playing - having fun, doing things for sheer enjoyment.

• Courting – flirting, considering possible mates.

• Mating – developing a love relationship. Having sex.

• Procreating – the urge to bear children.

• Communicating – expressing, singing out, saying what you know.

• Communing with nature.

• Protecting - the self, the cubs, and the tribe.

• Establishing dominance – competing in the workplace. Finding your place in the pecking order.