Carla, a woman in her early forties, recounted such an experience. “I grew up in the rural South, and although my family were all nice people, they had a set of fixed beliefs that everyone seemed to absorb from the air or the drinking water. My parents didn’t consider themselves prejudiced, yet they had only white friends. They didn’t strike up chats with a waiter or store clerk except white ones. The small talk I grew up around was knee-jerk conservative, and from an early age I chafed at hearing it.
“By the time I went to college I was the outsider. I worked for liberal candidates whenever I could. I had black friends, and I read the New York Times a lot more frequently than the Bible. If I came home with a new cause, my parents nodded politely, and waited until somebody could change the subject.
“One day, years later, something hit me, a kind of epiphany. If I was always doing and thinking the opposite of what my parents did and said, they still defined me. Being the opposite of bad doesn’t make you good. It just makes you the mirror image of bad.
“As I examined my beliefs, which I had always been proud of, I realized that each one was derived in the same reflexive way: I looked at people I thought were bad, and I made sure my beliefs didn’t match theirs in any way; I looked at people I thought were good, and I made sure my beliefs were exactly the same as theirs. Nothing I believed in was original. If being closed-minded is the same as not thinking for yourself, that was me.”
So what is an open mind? I asked.
“It can’t be a set of beliefs, no matter how good you think they are,” said Carla. “Most people hold their beliefs in order to feel good about themselves, not seeing the trap they’re falling into. The most liberating idea eventually turns into a shackle if you don’t keep changing.”
This example points to the pros and cons of reflection. Pro: If you look honestly at your beliefs and assumptions, you can head off conditioning before it becomes too deep. Your mind won’t get stuck as easily. You will learn how to be more flexible. Healthy doubt will keep you from falling into conformity. You open the way to become an original person, not simply a carbon copy of a social type. Con: Reflection tends to remain mental. It doesn’t move much energy in the body. As a result, its power to erase the imprints of conditioning usually isn’t very strong. You wind up seeing what’s wrong without going deep enough to create change. Reflection is also slow and time-consuming. It can even work against change by creating uncertainty and hesitancy—a problem begins to seem too complex and shaded. If reflection turns into just another habit, you don’t act with any kind of spontaneity. By adulthood, people are supposed to lose the recklessness of youth, and learning to reflect on your own actions is a large part of that. On the other hand, I don’t think I’ve met many reflective people who have changed their hidden stuck-energy patterns. They do a better job than average of not falling into thoughtless habits, but when their bodies really need change and not just their assumptions, reflection does them little good.
Contemplation involves holding one thing in the mind and letting it unfold. A religious person may contemplate God’s mercy, for example. To do that, he lets his mind roam over the topic, seeing images of mercy, feeling what it’s like to be merciful or receive mercy. (You may notice a connection to what I’m calling subtle action. They are alike, but subtle action has a specific intent behind it, while contemplation doesn’t—it’s more a way of letting go.) If the process is allowed to really open up, a contemplative mind can reach very deep. The main effect is to train your mind not to focus on single, isolated details. That kind of sharp focus almost always leads to a struggle with the thing you want to get rid of, and as we saw, struggle only makes conditioning worse by repeating the same conflict over and over.
Contemplation is a technique that need not be tied to religion or spiritual practices, venerable as that tradition is. You can take any bad habit and contemplate what it’s all about, persisting until answers begin to come. Those answers will move your energy in new directions.
Tyrone is a high-energy type who threw himself into online trading in high-risk investments. “By my mid-twenties I envied floor traders on Wall Street, the guys you see on TV, yelling, shoving, and going crazy during big market moves,” he says. “I had no chance of moving to New York and breaking into that, but ten years ago the Internet offered everyone a chance to be a gunslinger. I jumped in, and pretty soon every free moment had me glued to the screen.
“I didn’t have much money, so I bought on margin, which allowed me to make bigger and bigger bets. My risk-taking got bolder, and right away my wins were bigger than my losses. Before I knew it, my account was in six figures, and the top was nowhere in sight. I felt elated. Every morning I couldn’t wait for the markets to open.”
“Would you call yourself addicted?” I asked.
Tyrone shook his head. “The thought never crossed my mind. The day came when I was only a few trades away from making a million dollars. That was my benchmark. Once I crossed the million-dollar line, my life would change completely. That’s what I told myself.”
“But you never did cross it,” I said.
“I was a beginner, and I had only experienced success. So when my luck turned sour, I went into shock. I lost all my money, and all the money friends had given me to invest when they learned what a genius I was. I was shattered. Guilt and self-recrimination kept me up at night. Some people commiserated. They told me that trading isn’t for everyone; it takes toughness and nerves of steel.”
“Which only made you feel more inadequate,” I commented. “What happened after that?”
“I got back on my feet, slowly, and with fewer friends. But one friend, who was quite a bit older, told me something important. ‘Don’t think about the money,’ he said. ‘Think about what money means to you.’ I got into trouble, he said, by not knowing that in the first place.
“I’m not sure why I took his advice, but I sat and really looked at it. Two big things came up right away: I liked the thrill of gambling, so money meant adrenaline; I felt like I wasn’t good enough, so money meant self-respect. At first, both those things were all right with me. So what if I like to gamble? Why not earn a little self-respect? If I hadn’t been feeling so terrible, I might have let it go at that. But I kept going, and one day I felt in my body exactly what the sensations of being on a gambling high were like. The adrenaline rush was there, my heart pounding and everything, but what I hadn’t noticed was my anxiety. What I had been calling a thrill contained a lot of fear, worry, and tension.
“As for self-respect, how could I claim that it had improved? I squirreled myself away in front of a glowing computer screen. My mood yo-yoed up and down with every tick of the market. I felt like a hero when I was winning and a loser when I was down. Don’t think it was easy for me to see all this. I was drinking antacids out of the bottle for two months after I crashed. But I let all the bad times flow through me again, and whenever they came back, I’d feel them rather than push them down again. The only way out is through, right? Eventually I was at peace. I could admit that I was an out-of-control gambler, an addict who had ignored everything but his compulsion. I expanded out of that suffocating straitjacket. I started to breathe the same air as normal people.”
“Do you consider yourself recovered?” I asked.
He looked thoughtful. “I’m not sure. I’m relieved that I broke my old habit. I don’t have a jones for trading anymore. And I’m relieved that I’m not tearing myself up with stress anymore. On the other hand, it’s been almost ten years, and I still relive the torture of losing all that money. I’ve turned my life around, but those impressions take a long, long time to fade.”
Tyrone’s story points out the pros and cons of contemplation.
On the positive side, contemplation can break the boundaries of narrow thinking. It can uncover hidden issues and allow them enough space so that their distorted energy is released. The process of letting go requires no struggle. You can face your demons at your own pace. If you keep
focusing on your weak spots with diligence, they will be healed by an expanded sense of self—you will see yourself as bigger than your problems, and that awareness has a tremendous healing power.
On the downside, letting go isn’t reliable. If your mind is confused and conflicted, it may be too restless and easily distracted to focus. Your focus may be too weak to actually move any large amount of stuck energy. Looking closely at your problems can create discouragement and depression. You may hate what you see and give yourself reasons to stop looking.
Speaking personally, I think contemplation is more powerful than reflection. It gets into emotions and sensations, while reflection tends to remain intellectual. Some hands-on healers like to say, “The issues are in the tissues,” meaning that you must get to the level in the body where the deepest impressions are lodged. Looking and letting go brings results. On the other hand, I don’t know many people who have the patience to return to the same focus day after day without getting bored and worn out.
Meditation involves the search for a level of awareness that isn’t conditioned. It takes the mind in its restless, confused state and leads it to a higher state that is clear and steady. This process is known as transcending. Countless traditions of meditation originated in India and China before spreading throughout the East, but they have in common the same notion of how reality works. Reality flows from finer to grosser states. First there is silence and stillness, then there are subtle objects of the mind (thoughts, emotions, sensations), and finally there are solid objects and the material world itself. When you meditate, you move back upstream, so to speak, going beyond the material world, then beyond the mind that’s full of thoughts, emotions, and sensations, finally to arrive at stillness and silence.
This journey is more than a subjective experience, however. Sitting in silence would be no better than sitting in a whirl of thoughts, if both were merely subjective states. In actuality, you transcend from one level of reality to another. Each level contains different kinds of energy, and as you bring in higher energy, your body adapts. Studies of long-term meditators show that markers for health improve, such as reduced blood pressure and stress hormones. But the body can adapt in far more profound ways.
If you touch the right trigger point in your mind, a longstanding distortion in your energy can instantly disappear. Unlike reflection and contemplation, the purpose of meditation is to find the switch that will turn off the automatic behavior created by your old conditioning. I don’t mean that lightning strikes all at once. Meditating is a process; it takes time. But the process can cause a sudden change, the way digging a well goes through layer after layer of dirt until suddenly you hit clear, flowing water. I’ve met many people to whom this has happened, including a man named David, now well past sixty.
“I grew up loathing my father. The full realization of my hatred came very early, when I was nine. It was Christmas, and I was assigned to find the bad bulb when a string of lights went out. As I unscrewed each bulb to test it, I accidentally slipped my finger in a socket. I got a jolt of electricity that threw me backwards. At the same time, the whole tree lit up for a second because my finger completed the circuit.
“As I lay on the floor in shock, I saw that my father was laughing. The sight of the tree lighting up was comical to him, like something out of a cartoon. At that instant I suddenly understood that he couldn’t care less about me. I burst out crying, and my father frowned. ‘You’re the oldest boy in the family,’ he said. ‘I expect you to start acting like a man.’
“Decades later I happened to visit a psychic, and she immediately told me that I had this old energy of hatred inside me. She said, ‘Visualize your relationship with your father. Don’t think about it intellectually. Relax and tell me what image comes to mind.’
“I closed my eyes, and I saw two knights covered from head to foot in armor. They were whacking away at each other with broadswords, relentlessly and brutally, but neither one fell down. They just kept battling on. The psychic said that this was my father and me, and that I’d never get rid of my hatred until I found a way for that image to dissolve.”
“Did you take her seriously?” I asked.
David gave a wry smile. “I couldn’t get past the feeling that my father was a selfish, heartless bastard. He had hurt every member of my family one way or another. Years went by. Eventually, a girlfriend talked me into meditating. I liked it. After each session I felt more relaxed and quiet inside. Then one day my father called without warning—he was almost seventy at the time—and I noticed that the sound of his voice didn’t make me bristle.
“The next day I did my morning meditation, after which I lay on the floor to rest, which is what I had been taught to do. The teacher told me that it’s necessary to rest because the mind needs time to absorb the deeper awareness it has been exposed to. Unexpectedly I saw the image of two knights again, still hacking away with their broadswords. This time a small voice asked me if I saw any reason to stop fighting. Only one came to mind: I was getting exhausted. This fight had gotten nowhere. My damn sword was heavy! Believe it or not, that did it.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The energy of hatred vanished. Even though I felt totally justified in loathing my father, I let go. Or maybe it let go of me. Within a month I had only the vaguest recollection of my old hatred. Within a year I went back home and actually smiled at him. For the first time since I was a boy, I could be around my father comfortably. Sometimes, to my amazement, I feel real affection for him. I was healed in a way I never expected to be.”
David’s story points out the pros and cons of meditation.
On the plus side, meditation goes to the source. It takes you away from the level of the problem to the level of the solution, which is stuck energy. It releases you from the obligation to dwell in negative thoughts and fight against bad impulses. It is effortless, silently dissolving old conditioning. The overall effect is general—instead of focusing on one issue at a time, meditation carries the whole mind beyond problems.
There are no innate drawbacks to meditation, but there are pitfalls. The wrong kind of meditation simply doesn’t work. It may bring on a hint of transcendence—a temporary sense of peace and calm, passing moments of silence, a settled contentment. If you are depressed, meditation may cause you to dwell too much inside yourself. The same is true for people who are introverted: they may retreat inside without reaching a deeper level of awareness. The test of whether meditation is working comes down to energy: if you aren’t moving old, stuck energy, your meditation isn’t effective.
The benefits of meditation rest on the ability of awareness to change reality. Now we know why that’s valid. The chain of events that ends in the body begins in consciousness. By moving stuck energy, the free flow of consciousness is restored, which is enough to bring the body back into a healthy state. Remember, even though we divide problems into the categories of physical, mental, emotional, and so on, the chain of events is the same. To say that someone like David held his anger at the emotional level would be too limited. He held it at the energy level, and his body had adapted, from the brain with its angry thoughts to the cells in his body that responded to the brain’s signals. Between them, awareness and energy are the most powerful healers in existence. With that in mind, here are three simple meditations that can set you on the path of healing:
Meditation on the breath. Sit quietly with your eyes closed. Gently put your attention on the tip of your nose. Breathe in and out normally, and as you do, feel the air flowing through your nostrils. Envision your breath as a faint cloud of pale golden light going in and out of your nose. Feel the soft energy being carried by your breath. Let it relax you and still your mind, but easily, without forcing anything to happen. The process will take care of itself. To help keep your attention from wandering, you can add the sound “hoo” as you exhale.
Meditation on the heart. Sitting quietly with your eyes closed, rest your attention on your heart. You don’t n
eed to be anatomically precise. Simply find a place in the center of your chest where your attention can rest easily. As you breathe in and out naturally, keep your attention there. Allow any feelings and sensations to arise and pass. If your attention wanders, gently bring it back to rest on your heart.
Meditation on the light. Sitting quietly with your eyes closed, envision a soft mixture of white light tinged with gold flowing through your body. See the light come up from your feet and fill your torso. Watch it continue up through your chest and head until it comes out through the crown of your head and goes straight up until it disappears from view. Now envision the same sparkling light descending back down, first entering through the crown of your head. It reverses the upward path from head to chest to torso, exiting the body through the soles of your feet. Once you have mastered this visualization, time it with your breathing. On the inhale, slowly draw the light up from your feet and out the top of your head. On the exhale, draw the light in through the top of your head and out through your feet. Don’t force the rhythm. Breathe slowly and naturally in a relaxed state as you perform the visualization.
In Your Life: A Softer Kind of Awareness
Certain eye exercises can teach people how to relax their vision through “soft focus.” Because unhealthy energy is hard, rigid, and stuck, it’s helpful to learn how to have “soft awareness.” I don’t mean a woozy blissfulness, but a state of mind that is open, relaxed, and receptive. In that state, you give yourself the best opportunity to flow with life instead of putting up barriers and resistance.
As regards eyesight, hard focus is specific and particular. You take aim, so to speak, and keep an object in your sights. Soft focus widens the field of vision. Instead of isolating one tree, you see the whole forest. I don’t know if this approach will actually improve a person’s eyesight, but it is very beneficial when applied to the mind. A tightly focused mind becomes narrow and linear if it can’t expand. We are all guilty of following narrow mental grooves, like a train confined to one narrow set of tracks. We experience our minds one thought at a time. What this habit leads us to miss is true understanding, because your mind is much more than one event after another.