The practice of 'turning towards'
Rather than turning away.
It seems to me that the writing on the wall everywhere these days is telling us that the best way to deal with what really hurts is to simply turn towards it.
And feel it.
Feel how bad it sucks.
Right there in the upper left side of your throat.
Or perhaps inside tears that still hide behind your eyes.
Sometimes when I cry, it’s like choking - only sobbing provides oxygen. Still, I resist.
But more recently I’ve come to see that tears are the people I can trust.
Tears are a recognition of truth.
I’m sad right now.
It’s an opportunity.
Acceptance is a crucial frequency within the bandwidth of human emotion, the realized expression of the power of sadness.
(I’ll say more below about the work of Vivian Dittmar and her proposal that emotions can be usefully thought of as ‘social powers'.)
It’s wise to pay attention to the quality of listening that sadness affords.
In the practice of Metta (which I’ve written about recently), we can train every cell in our being to resonate with loving kindness.
Obviously, this changes the character of every thing we do. It also alters our perception, making it possible to see that which we absolutely would not see without it.
Just as the practice of Metta helps unblind us to that which only love can see, we can similarly unblind ourselves by embracing the feeling of sadness when it is present and taking on its point of view.
All the emotions are ‘true’ in the wordless language of your body. They simply are the way you feel right now. Each emotion has a different energy. Each one trains the eyes differently, revealing details that other feelings cannot see.
Yet if we refuse to look because we’d rather not feel, our blindspots persist.
Vivian Dittmar tells us that sadness is the frequency that helps us see the necessity of acceptance. Without sadness, we might fight hopeless battles indefinitely.
This is the power of sadness.
The shadow of sadness is depression. Which is different.
Joy (the emotion we like) makes it more likely we will appreciate our experience.
Yet joy has a shadow too, the mindless positivity of bypassing - which is the opposite of turning towards our experience.
When we talk about shame, we generally think of its shadow, how it makes us attack ourselves. Yet when we tune correctly to this energy, it can become healthy self-reflection on an important question:
What kind of person do I want to be?
Anger, tuned correctly, produces clarity.
Tuned incorrectly, it creates modern human ‘politics.’
FUCK!
Yes, I know - let’s take a breath.
Whatever is there, whether it’s anger, sadness, joy, fear or shame, it’s just there.
The only intelligent thing to do is ‘feel it.’
How does it breathe?
How does it move inside your veins?
What embodied memories does it connect you to?
When shit happens in your world, you can always whip yourself into a behavioral response that helps you maintain your chosen identity.
You can always “take action”
But the art of orientation in today’s world - the discovery of the clearer signals we need within a sea of noise - increasingly depends upon our skillful discernment of the wordless energies that are passing through us.
It can be a mistake to try to articulate them too soon. Often the most honest thing to say about how we feel is that we don’t know how to express it.
And this is uncomfortable.
But stepping outside of the habit of seeking comfort yields crucial information.
Tracking your breathing in relation to each person you know is a good place to start.
For example, who is someone you are in conflict with right now?
And what is the quality of your breathing when you bring them to mind?
What would need to change in this relationship in order for you to breathe more freely?
Some things in life suck to feel. But you will never taste the wisdom that is woven into their very nature if you always turn away.
These are the moments to practice ‘turning towards.’
Do you know how to turn towards fear?
Dittmar offers a meditation to help us embody the creativity that fear demands of us. She shows us how to have an experience that isn’t just paralysis.
(She has written many books in German. Two that are available in English, both of which I recommend, are The Power of Feelings and The Emotional Backpack.)
I am currently learning her practice of Conscious Release *, a partner practice where two people take turns silently holding space for each other.
That’s it. Just holding space.
Enough space to see that it’s ok to turn towards what’s there and feel it.
With my partner the other day, I faced some fear. She faced me while I faced it, showing me that she was willing to be with the discomfort of my discomfort.
Which made it easier for me to turn towards what was there. And feel it.
Then something moved.
Dittmar recommends we build a small network of two or three friends with whom we can practice. And do so every day. Like brushing our teeth.
Instead of oral hygiene, this is emotional hygiene.
Our world is crying out for it right now.
It’s good to feel what’s happening in your journal and on your meditation cushion. But it’s even more powerful to feel what you feel in the presence of others.
We can’t feel for each other but we can feel with each other.
When you hold space for someone else, you too can be moved, by witnessing their refusal to turn away from what’s difficult. As you watch them become more human, the frequency of your own humanity becomes easier to sift out from the noise.
These kind of shared experiences create what people call ‘the field,’ a term that shouldn’t be confused with woo. ‘The field’ is simply an acknowledgment of the wordless frequencies that are an essential ingredient to all our communication.
When emotions move through you, your body changes. If the person next to you is willing to turn towards you, they will not fail to notice and be touched by it.
When you witness someone stepping outside their comfort zone in order to confront what’s true, it’s unmistakeable. It’s a gift to experience.
These phenomena aren’t black and white, but we can learn to recognize their patterns and gradually make them more familiar. We can learn to place more trust in the language of our bodies.
When we do this consistently and in the company of others, the idea of ‘turning towards’ stops feeling quite so scary.
Fear takes hold in us when a situation feels terrible.
If it was simply wrong, we could get angry and do something about it. If it was simply unfortunate, through sadness we could learn to accept it.
But what is terrible only shifts when we become creative and do the opposite of what seems to come “naturally,” when we refuse to turn away and choose instead to practice ‘turning towards.’
When we are brave enough to feel what is so difficult to feel.
It seems almost too obvious to say, but actually it must be said:
All of these feeling live in your body.
So the practice of ‘turning towards’ involves a willingness to spend more time in the field of our sensations. It might mean briefly (or not-so-briefly) closing your eyes in the middle of a conversation to make sure you are truly in contact with the truth.
It might mean walking away from your computer for five minutes and taking a walk around the block.
What takes practice is that embodied truth in the form of feeling can have multiple layers that are simultaneously present - and that can be confusing.
Suppose a friend who you dearly love is being less than loving with you right now because they are struggling with life-long patterns that, for whatever reason, are distorting their experience of this moment.
You can imagine how you would feel many things at the same time: the care at the heart of this relationship, a sense of hurt at how they are interacting with you right now, a sense of compassion for the difficulties they are going through.
But how do you put those feelings in order or allow dialogue between them? Which layer of feeling is the “most important” right now? How much control do you have about which feelings are in the foreground and which feelings are in the background?
It’s also possible that, quite apart from your experience with your friend, that you are having an extremely busy week, you are concerned about your finances, and have several pending decisions which you are unsure about. And you have a headache.
Meanwhile, it could be that you and your friend are sitting in a loud restaurant where the service is very slow and you are both a bit annoyed about that.
Everything described by the many words above is present in your body in a single instant, in a soup of sensations - without the words.
Yet, your mind is filled with words all the time, and these words often come between you and the wordless sensations.
One of the easiest ways to avoid what you feel is to think about it.
It’s not the same thing.
So turning towards the present moment truth of your body is not so simple. It might require a willingness to close your eyes for a moment to probe below the surface of all the noise - and your friend’s willingness to give you the space to do so.
Maybe then you can open your eyes again and attempt to speak from your heart.
Often our ‘turning towards’ is incomplete.
Yet if it involves more ‘towards’ and less ‘away’ than the moment before, we have at least begun to orient in the right direction. We have afforded ourselves a little bit more of a view of that towards which it is so tempting to be willfully blind.
Practicing with your friend in the restaurant doesn’t feel like meditating, walking in nature, attending a movement class or a therapy session.
But in each of these contexts, it’s the same basic question:
Can I turn towards what’s here right now or do I turn away?
Some contexts afford more time, space and security within which to examine all the layers - and it’s vital that we regularly and intentionally set aside time, make space and create the conditions for the security we need to consciously turning towards feeling.
Just like going to the gym to train our muscles makes it easier to lift a heavy load just once in the midst of some housecleaning, our formal practices can prime us to more spontaneously stop and listen to our bodies’ wordless expressions within the daily ups and downs of our unscripted lives.
Yet it’s crucial to hold that intention to practice with us at all times - so that ‘turning towards’ becomes much more of a habit.
Even those experience that are “too much” for us to fully encounter in the moment, that require further processing after the fact, are opportunities for us to practice turning towards - at least a little bit more than we usually do.
Then, somewhere along the way, we may recognize - during an interaction with an angry person, an unexpected disappointment, an loss or a brush with danger - that we are . . . just fine!
And that experience can build more trust in our capacity to be ‘just fine’ next time too.
Furthermore, it builds trust in us among those who share our company and a greater likelihood they will want to stay connected with us through thick and thin.
In other words, making a life practice out of ‘turning towards’ opens us up to the possibility of a broader range of experiences and a stronger sense of belonging.
Right now might be a good moment to stop, close your eyes, connect to your breath and enter into the stream of wordless sensations in your body.
Turn towards what’s there for you right now.
And feel it.
The doorway to Heaven is in the center of Hell. You won't find it by turning away. 😉
OMG! This is so good! I resonate deeply with what has been communicated in this blogpost. Being with what is, feeling everything as a practice has been a big part of my journey. I also noticed that you mentioned Vivian Dittmar's practice of Conscious Release. When I watched her conversations with John, I was intruiged and super interested in this practice but did not know where to begin or how to practice it. I would be interested in learning this practice and eventually sharing it with my community here in Québec. If I could get more info on it, that would be super appreciated! Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts, and very beautifully too, these are very much needed topics!
Camille