What am I sitting with?
Making space for complex discomfort & calibrating the energy of anger
photo by Mehrpouya H
This post is the third in a series about meditation. The previous posts were:
The problem with meditation
&
‘Ancestors don’t wait. They meditate.’
This week I had a second exchange with a client about how to deepen the practice of meditation as an improvisatory everyday response to life in addition to its formal practice as sitting in stillness.
(Our first exchange was recounted in the first post of this series)
At a recent doctor’s appointment, a scan revealed a nodule in her lung and another in her breast. But she hadn’t been able to reach the doctor for further explanation for over a week despite multiple attempts.. She was about to leave town for two months and unwilling to do so without more information.
Finally she reached an advice nurse who agreed the situation was unacceptable, promptly found the doctor and put him on the phone. A lung specialist, he said the nodule in that organ was not a problem. As for the nodule in the breast tissue, he said “you should probably consult your PCP about that.” He didn’t wish her well or apologize for his previous lack of communication.
“I trust doctors,” my client, a retired scientist, said. But this experience felt like a breach of trust. Furthermore, she wondered, would he have talked like that to a man?
This was the shape of what was living in her psyche, nervous system, soul.
She was sure of one thing. “We definitely have to meditate.”
I agreed this was a great idea - in particular because of how different it is in such a situation to meditate on the experience rather than feeling stuck waiting for external circumstances to change.
(see my previous post, ‘Ancestors don’t wait. They meditate.’ for more on this distinction)
I’ve known my client, who I’ll call Sarah, for several years. Primarily, we work with Functional Integration, the individually tailored somatic learning process of the Feldenkrais Method, conceived by its founder as “a dance of two nervous systems.” It’s a movement-based form of inquiry involving light touch, exploratory movement and, sometimes, dialogue.
In our work together, we have addressed Sarah’s recovery from injuries to her pelvis, left ankle and right hand, challenges with breathing, vision and balance. Despite these physical descriptors, what makes Functional Integration unique is how attuned it is to the psychological experience of the healing the body and improving function.
When my body is injured - when, for example, I am unable to bear weight on one of my two legs - I am deeply humbled. If I’m unable to detach my expectations for recovery from the inhuman tempo of market-based culture, I’m liable to re-injure myself or convert my injury into decades of future dysfunction.
Self-hatred often tags along.
The patience required to make adequate space for the miraculous self-healing that our bodies are capable of profoundly challenges our habits of chasing productivity. Paradoxically, when we fully surrender to the tempo of devoted self-care that asks only what the body needs right now - instead of “what’s the fastest way to get this over with” - rejuvenation can often occur much sooner than we expect.
Yet there is a stumbling block for many people in this learning process. Patterns of living in modernity have made them nearly allergic to anything that moves this slowly. To be present in stillness, or the glacial tempos that approach it, requires curiosity to reside in an entirely different frequency than what our educational institutions and employers have generally prepared us for.
In this way, a thorough process of healing can involve challenging encounters with unmapped psycho-somatic territories. One’s entire relationship to self and reality comes into question. The tone of the inner voice becomes a crucial factor in a successful healing process.
Despite all she’s been through, at 80 years old, Sarah starts most sessions by describing how good she feels and how grateful she is for her capacities. This attitude assures her the best of outcomes because her curiosity is always online. We took a major step forward about a year ago when she started requesting that before working with movement, we begin each of our sessions with 10 minutes of meditation.
So her request on this occasion was expected, but also unique because of the dissonance of her recent experience. So before closing our eyes to sit we took a few minutes to look at what she was sitting with.
There were several specific strands of energy all woven together into the complex turbulence she felt in one side of her chest. One by one, we examined:
her concerns about attending to her health while traveling
the betrayal of her trust in doctors
the echo of larger societal patterns between men and women
the stark confrontation with uncertainty
and, above all, her anger.
Whenever anger is present, I find it valuable to ask:
Does this anger compress me and turn me inwards or does it lengthen my spine and motivate me to take targeted action to set right whatever seems wrong?
Sarah laughed at my less-than-serious question -no, she wouldn’t wish for that doctor to get in a car accident! But perhaps she would communicate with the hospital administration and ask if her experience met their standards for proper patient care. She noticed how her body resonated differently with these two different potentials for translating her anger into action, which idea rang true and which one didn’t.
We also reviewed our previous session where we clarified that there is no single prescribed way to meditate for all occasions, that whatever is present here and now is always an appropriate place to begin.
Then we talked about three possible ways for Sarah to be with her discomfort that differed from what she said she had mostly been doing over the last week - just trying to push it away.
One option was to place her attention directly in the center of discomfort and notice:
It isn’t static. It keeps moving and changing.
Unpleasant as it is, there is something here to observe and get curious about.
Of course, this might be intense. So I pointed out that it would also be fine at any point to say, “that’s enough for now.” If she wished, she could simply rest in the coming and going of her breath.
Or, she could maintain connection to the discomfort, but zoom out to sense her whole body with the discomfort in her chest as just one feature within this larger container. She could zoom out further to sense the discomfort as just one feature of the space of the entire room or even imagine infinite space in all directions.
Ten minutes later she told me that after exploring some of these options, she landed in a feeling of joy that simply grew. Her body seemed to expand and she had the sense of growing taller and taller.
After the meditation, we shifted to Functional Integration.
I noticed that she lay on the table with a bend in her waist such that both her upper body and legs reached to the same side. My offering to her was mostly a slow and methodical exploration of moving each of her limbs a little closer and a little further from the midline of her body, gently rotating her arms and legs in and out, but never forcing any movement that encountered resistance. I did a similar thing with her head.
To conclude, I invited her to explore one at a time where she would like to place each of her arms and legs - at what distance from her midline should she rest each limb to find her most expansive breath?
Before she came up off the table, I invited her to imagine she was making snow angels and feel how just this thought sent energy up and down the length of her spine.
Sarah was bouncing on the way out. Her overall circumstances hadn’t changed, but the energy that was stuck in her chest was moving through her again and she had clarity about what she was going to do next.
If you have ever felt robbed of your agency
during interactions with health professionals,
you are, unfortunately, not alone.
The truth is that no one is more of an expert about your experience than you are - and you deserve to be supported in developing that expertise to the highest possible degree.
The practice of deep listening includes body, mind, heart and soul.
The 4 Postures of Love workshop is a community practice space
for life-long learners who want to develop the capacity of following their inner compass
so they can navigate complexity while maintaining their integrity.
Click below to see when the next workshop takes place.