Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.
— Mary Oliver
We learn early to feel the good emotions and put the rest away, so that we are easy to be around. Fear, anger, sadness — set aside, the lid held down.
Here we lift the lid. From a ground of stillness — the weight of the body, the breath, somewhere in you that feels stable — we turn towards a feeling we would rather not feel. Not somewhere safe, exactly. Somewhere brave enough to feel it.
Evoke a scene. Recall a memory. Let the feeling come, and let it be here — not pushed away, not acted out, but received as a signal, something deep in you speaking for a reason not yet clear.
Then look closely. Where does it live in the body — warmth, pressure, weight? Notice it is already changing. Search for the anger, the sadness, the fear itself, and find only sensation, shifting. Search for the one who feels it, and find no one there.
Happiness, love, delight. Don’t hold back — let one of them in. Recall the feeling in the body and give yourself permission to feel it fully.
Bring a scene to mind, remembered or imagined — the delight of slowly making coffee, the easy company of a friend — and let it carry the feeling forward. Take a deeper breath. Can I be with this?
Now look closely. Start with the sensations — where there’s warmth, lightness, an upwelling of energy — and notice they won’t hold still. They are already shifting, patterns of light dancing on water. Give the feeling its name, happiness or contentment, then search for the thing the name belongs to. You can feel it moving through you, but you can’t land on anything solid. Look for the one who feels it. Only more shifting sensation, a sense of density that also can’t quite be found.
What remains is simply presence — a knowing beneath the feeling. Here you can rest. The feeling doesn’t need anything from you but to be known. Let it move through, like light dancing on the surface of a pond.
A family holiday, and the thing I didn’t want to feel
I’m on holiday, staying with my family. I realise that I’m drifting in all the activity. I chat with others, go to the beach, eat food, play Settlers of Catan. Occasionally I’ll get stuck on my phone, but overall it’s pretty wholesome stuff. In the midst of all this I sense that I’m losing something of myself. I’m gradually disconnecting from my feelings. I’m sliding into going through the motions. I haven’t had much time alone, not to mention sitting quietly. On the one hand it feels like time by myself isn’t what’s needed right now, that sitting silently would be going against what I came here to do. On the other hand I’m starting to feel an itch not scratched, a vague and shadowy undercurrent of feeling beneath all of this that isn’t allowed to surface.a
I’m sitting on the couch as we watch a movie. It begins in comfort with cosiness and snacks. Then I get a little restless and fidgety. I sink into the couch, unable to move. It’s like I’ve turned into a log, dead inside. I’ve gone past boredom into zoned out; I stare at the screen like a zombie. When that becomes too much, I pull out my phone and stare at a smaller screen. All the while I’m drifting further into a mire. Eventually there’s a sinking feeling deep in my body, like a void or black hole, the sense of something being really wrong but I don’t know what. It’s a sense of missing something. A wave of tiredness pulls me out of this, and I get up from the couch, only to get stuck scrolling in bed.
All of these are pretty standard ways to be busy and to not pause and feel. There’s a move here of turning away from feeling and immersing in doing. Even when sitting on the couch there’s a lot of doing happening — choosing to direct attention to the external: the TV, scrolling on the phone. It’s a fairly mild form of the second arrow. However, in these mundane actions is something more profound, hiding in plain sight.
The move away from feeling is trying to get away from something. This is why sitting still is so hard for so many people — sitting and being with themselves leaves little room for escape. Being human sometimes requires feeling things that are unpleasant and even painful. The natural tendency is to turn away from this — moving towards what is more pleasant, getting rid of the unpleasant experience, or zoning out.
There’s a tendency to take a feeling as saying something final about who we are. Not just that I am experiencing a feeling of sadness, but that I’m a sad person. I’m not just feeling a sense of hopelessness — I am hopeless. I am broken, incapable, unlovable. From this perspective it makes sense that this is unbearable, and that moving away from the experience seems like the only option. It seems to say something about who we ultimately are. The second arrow is a reaction to feeling like the first arrow means something permanent and solid about us. The feeling becomes a life sentence.
Yet feeling something is not the same as being it. The feeling is the weather, not the sky. The clouds move, rain comes and goes, the sun shines and then doesn’t. All the while the sky remains.
I take a pause in the guest bedroom, creating a makeshift meditation cushion from a stack of pillows on the fold-out bed. I stop doing and sit still. I notice the urges to check my phone and to go out and see what other people are up to. I set the intention to be with this, just as it is. There are waves of restlessness and stress. I yawn and feel my shoulders release as the tension begins melting.
I discover a thread of feeling that bubbles up. It’s indistinct, murky, amorphous. I explore it, like a deep-sea diver sinking down past the well-lit shallows. I navigate a layer of distraction, then agitated worry. I steady my breath and stay with it. I follow a glimmer of sadness to a feeling that lives deep inside my chest. There’s a sense here of something being wrong, of just not being okay. It’s a yucky, grating experience, like a bodily feeling of nails on a chalkboard. I acknowledge the part of me that is bracing against this, and open to what is here as fully as I can. If I can feel it, then it cannot be me. I let go into it, each moment of surrender a little death. I allow the feeling, and it unfolds itself. The resistance gives way. The feeling empties out; my being is hollowed out. The feeling shifts — fading, then disappearing completely.
I breathe a deep sigh and notice that my sense of being feels different. There’s an awareness that is present and clear. I open my eyes to the space and feel ease with everything around me. The space, the objects I see, the activities we have planned, the feeling in the body — all a coherent field. I get up with a sense of trust and okayness. I surface once again, having let myself go through the feeling to find that I was still whole.
Feeling is both what we are scared of and the opening to a different sense of being. Feeling calls us to inhabit the depths, to feel all of it, then to return to the surface. Then it becomes possible to rest in this sense of being. After all, you don’t have to do anything to be what you already are. The feeling I couldn’t bear wasn’t something to be removed or replaced — feeling itself was the way in to presence.
This Sunday I’m leading an online workshop, Liberating Feeling, on exactly this — turning towards what we’d rather not feel, together, in a space made for it. Come explore with me if it calls to you.
The Buddha asked his monks: What happens when you drop a spoonful of salt into a glass of water? It turns undrinkable. How about the same spoonful into the Ganges? You can’t taste the salt at all.
This is something awareness can do. Open it wide enough and there is room for anything: the leftover charge of the day, an emotion you’d rather not feel, a discomfort you’ve been carrying since this morning. Nothing has to be solved. Held in a space this big, the feeling diffuses and shifts on its own. Awareness itself does the holding, with warmth and tenderness.
Begin with sound. Listen for the most distant noise, then notice the field that holds it — open, roomy, extending in every direction. Let the body appear inside that field. Then gently let whatever you are feeling come forward to be met.
Stay with it, and the feeling loosens. Where you thought there was a solid thing — sadness, or fear — you find movement, a shifting texture. Look for the one who is feeling it, and that too can’t quite be found.
What’s left is spacious knowing. Let the feeling move through it like a ripple through water.
It’s late, you’re winding down, and a notification arrives on your phone. Nothing serious. But there’s a flicker of irritation, a small charge moving through the body against the quiet you were just resting in.
The nervous system is always moving like this — across a spectrum of activation and rest, energy and ease. All of it is good. The charge that sets a boundary, the rest that restores, even the freeze that was once trying to keep you safe: each has its place, just as every part of the mind does. When nothing blocks the way, the system regulates itself. It rises into activation and on its own it settles again.
In this practice we bring a little activation in on purpose, in order to watch it shift and settle. Swing the arms for a minute, then stop. Feel the warmth, the quickened heart, the breath. Notice what happens as you pause and get out of the way.
Then bring something to mind — something small and irritating, an email you didn’t want, whatever brought a bit of feeling. Hold it in whole body awareness and tune into how it feels for you. Stay with the heart, the breath, the charge, with no need to change a thing.
I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
— Dune, Frank Herbert
Life is uncertain. There are things we can’t know, things we can’t control — the body ageing, the world shifting through change with no clear path ahead.
Begin by settling. Ease in, collect the mind, find an anchor that feels stable and grounding. Then open to the whole body and let the mind rest into it. Notice the felt sense — the overall tonality of this space, vague and murky, more than words.
Now bring to mind something uncertain: a situation, an area of life where there’s turbulence, unknowns, something out of your hands. Small or large, whatever feels alive. Doing this on purpose lets you meet it on your own terms. Let the fear, the worry, the concern arise, and find where it lives in the body.
Open, soften, allow. Don’t brace against the feeling — go towards it. Every cell of your body dilating to accommodate this texture of experience. Let it move through you, shifting and changing, a trickle from a deep well.
Let it fully envelop you, and you’ll emerge on the other side. What remains is the one who can hold all of it. Untouched. Whole. Nothing missing.
In becoming aware of the sense of self, it greatly helps to have a practice that enables shifting out of habitual modes into a more open and spacious awareness. One key to this is noticing the awareness, rather than objects of awareness, which creates a shift towards allowing. The self is known by this awareness (as well as body sensations, thoughts, and emotions). This beholding awareness can know the self as it arises and passes, as the sense of solidity increases and decreases. This also helps us tap into the sense of completeness of being awareness — where there is nothing missing and no self-deficiency.
This practice begins with belly breathing while counting the length of inhales and exhales, moving from equal duration, to longer exhales. This is a powerful practice for quickly calming and grounding.
This practice weaves together two threads: relaxing and calming the body by gently bringing attention to the whole body space; and knowing the body from the body. Awareness is effortlessly already aware, without you doing anything or needing to make awareness happen. So too does the body know itself — the body space is filled with bright, clear awareness. In order to get a sense of this, you allow the body and mind to settle through calming and collecting, then tune in to how it feels to inhabit the body, from the body. Allow awareness to drop down into the body space and behold itself.
This is an excerpt from a talk at the Day of Practice. I offer some thoughts on Presence, Buddha Nature, and Awakening. For me, I got into meditation to experience benefits such as relaxing, focusing, and improving my mental health. While these did come, the biggest shifts occurred when the practice opened to something more profound. Here I offer a way of thinking about what we are doing in meditation and where the path leads — towards recognising the interconnectedness and relatedness of all things, and to understanding ourselves as an integral part of the whole.
