Making Meditation Count

Like any other morning, the other day I sat down to meditate with one of Dr. Joe Dispenza’s guided meditation tracks*. I have been studying his work for nearly a year and find it to be a tremendous method to rework deeply-entrenched emotional patterns in an experiential way. In this post I’d like to share with you a bit of my experience, as well as some insights into how to use this kind of meditation in order to truly grow.

With my eye mask on and headphones in, I found my spot on the couch where I always meditate. The session the day before didn’t seem to go very deeply, and I was hoping this one would go further. (That self-judgment is so insidious!) It was my day off, so maybe not having anything scheduled later on would make for a more relaxed state and hopefully allow me to go deeper than the day before.

“NOW,” says Dr. Dispenza at the beginning of one of his many meditations. “Can you REST your awareness on the SPACE… between… your… eyes…”

That’s not too difficult to do, so I’m off to a great start. The next few instructions take me to a relaxed but present state. “This is going well,” I implicitly say to myself. I’m doing it “right”. (More self-evaluation — so challenging to let go of!) But, the meditation continues… Trance-like music fills my awareness for a while as I settle in.

“And NOW…” — some time later, Dr. Dispenza’s next directive suddenly jolts me. I’d gone into a sleepy state and now bobbed my head awake. Damn. Gotta get more “with it”, I gotta focus more. Shoot, what am I supposed to be focusing on now? I didn’t even realize that I hadn’t actually heard what the next point of focus should be.

The next chunk of instructions have me going between being able to stay focused and nodding off, each time mentally berating myself for it. Why can’t I get it together? Why can’t I really show up for myself? (Judgy, judge judge!!)

I remind myself that Dr. Joe has said himself that getting sleepy is not a bad thing when you’re meditating — it’s a sign that you’re able to get relaxed and that your brainwaves are actually slowing down. So now, every time my head bobs, I use the jolt to refocus as best I can — and this is an opportunity to use the process positively rather than judging myself in a familiar, but self-sabotaging way.  It’s an opportunity to practice a different way of perceiving my efforts. It’s not about failing or doing it wrong — it’s about earnestly showing up, in as many moments as possible. If I were to judge each moment I realized I’d nodded off, I’d waste my meditation time judging myself (or likely check out altogether!)

The second part of the guided process involves focusing on an emotional state you are wanting to rework and change. This doesn’t mean what you’re feeling that moment — instead, you’re asked to choose an entrenched way of being in the world that actually inhibits your self-expression in your life. For example, people who have an illness often choose to rework their belief that it is incurable, and use the meditation to see and feel themselves being completely healthy. Others choose to rework feeling sorry for themselves as their way of being in the world (i.e. being stuck in victim mentality), or their sense of themselves as worthless or abandoned, and so on. Yet others might use it to zoom in on unproductive emotional reactivity or anger.

As you follow the meditation, Dr. Dispenza asks you to recognize the ways in which you embody those limiting beliefs about yourself, and then to envision a different version of yourself.

Psychoanalytically speaking, the method of this practice is two-fold:

1. To bring into conscious awareness those unconscious ways of being and behaving that are based in one’s defensive structures. These ways had formed automatically at a very young age as a necessary means of self-protection in childhood, but now, in adulthood, actually prove to be inhibiting and even damaging.
2. Once you have the awareness of these erroneous beliefs and ways of being in the world — i.e., once you have brought them out of the unconscious, the next part of the work of meditation is to consciously choose a different way of being, to literally practice, right then and there in the meditative space, a different sense of yourself, one without those defenses that are now causing you pain.

This is where the meditation can really get surprisingly challenging — because we are so used to those familiar feelings. It’s easy to see yourself as the suffering self. But envisioning and experiencing a different version of yourself tends to be more difficult than it sounds. The familiar ways of thinking and feeling show up with a vengeance, right then and there in the moment.

As I emerged from that meditation practice, I caught myself wanting to scrap it, wanting to say that I failed at it “because it didn’t go very deep” and therefore I had not accomplished anything with it. But thenI realized that although I was no longer expressly meditating in that moment, I could apply the same method of awareness to my familiar way of thinking about myself. That moment of becoming aware of my self-judgment was one more opportunity to rework my familiar ways of thinking and being.

I immediately reminded myself that my earnest intention and effort really matters. Despite not “going deep” or achieving some thought-free inner state, I still tracked and reworked many moments where I was reverting to suffering and self-judgment, the places that I am so used to that they show up unbidden, and tend to slip by my awareness over and over. For example, during the practice, I would go into an emotional state of “I suck at this” or “See? I knew it wouldn’t go well again today”, or even “Well, this whole session is a wash” — and for a moment, I would actually believe each of those thoughts.

But those tiny moments when I could catch myself right there and consciously choose a different perspective (which leads to a different feeling) really count. They count for a lot. That’s because while some part of me wanted to “scrap” the whole thing as a way of sabotaging even the future moments I had remaining, I kept reminding myself that it’s not just the whole practice that day — but each moment of meditation is its own opportunity. I don’t say this as a pithy, new-agey way of trying to encourage you to “never give up”.  I fully believe that these are the micro-moments in which change actually happens. Each of them adds to and builds on the previous one. My old, familiar self wanted to sabotage the whole of that day’s practice, even before it was done, because then I would be off the hook and my internal status quo would get to go unchallenged for one more day. I could tell myself that I’ll try again tomorrow as a way of avoiding myself today.

We tend to think — and expect — that it’s the big, profound moments of meditation that have the “real” impact. For some people they do happen, and certainly do have an impact. But even for them, in actuality it’s these micro-events in which you are creating a new way of being and literally restructuring your biology.

Every time you catch yourself at reverting back to your self-sabotaging ways, you make that pattern a little more conscious. And then, every time you consciously choose a different way of being for that moment, you actually create those new neural pathways that lead to a new personality.

The familiar, self-pitying or self-denigrating ways of thinking and being shaped your personality from years of “practicing” them implicitly, first as a young child and then by default as an adult. The real gift of Dr. Dispenza’s work is that you can apply this method to make these old, unconscious programs conscious. And then, in a very similar way, the consciously-chosen, new ways of being which you practice in meditation can eventually become a new way of being in the world, as well.

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*Note: I am in no way affiliated with Dr. Joe Dispenza. I am a student of his work because I find it useful and am sharing the above as a personal experience and hope that it helps others to make use of either his meditations or any other form of meditation.

Some useful links:

One of Dr. Joe Dispenza’s meditations (similar to what I’ve described here)

Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself audio book (Free!)

Dr. Joe Dispenza’s website

Making Space for the Unknown

This year I have been deeply studying the work of several people whose ideas and findings are extremely important to the world of healing and personal growth, although they are not in the world of psychotherapy. Three of these people — all of whom are scientists, researchers, and speakers — are Dr. Joe Dispenza, Gregg Braden, and Lynne McTaggart, all of whom have written multiple books. I couldn’t possibly do them justice in a single blog post, but I wanted to express my gratitude for their work as it shapes my understanding of both my own experience and my work with clients. I find their work to be immensely important, and plan to eventually incorporate it into psychoanalytic work.

Before I get on to my topic, I invite you, right in this moment, to take a slow breath and notice your body in your seat. Then, place your hand on your heart and check in with yourself. Just doing this one small action, which should take you no more than 30 seconds, you have now given your body some attention and a little reset. Perhaps you were even able to hear from your body something it needs in this moment — a sip of water, a shift of your muscles, an unfolding of your shoulders. You have just made a bit of space for the unknown and likely just interrupted a pattern of unawareness. That has given your body an experience of moving into the present moment, and your brain has registered a data point of a different way of being. As you read the rest of my blog, you will begin to see why this is so important and so much more impactful than it seems.

In this blog post, I want to focus on and expand a point that Dr. Joe Dispenza emphatically makes in his workshops and books — and that is, making space for the unknown. He makes the point that more often than not, we function on a kind of auto-pilot, mostly based on our past experience. We have the same routines and the same thoughts and feelings day in and day out. Most people can map out their entire day, down to the minute details of the order of their routine (cell phone, bathroom, coffee, shower, breakfast, etc.) And if one does the same things day in and day out, it follows that they are also likely thinking the same thoughts and feeling the same feelings day after day. This makes life predictable and familiar, but also leaves little or no room for anything new to happen.

We want to be able to predict our day and to avoid pain or difficulty, if at all possible, or to at least minimize them. There are many reasons we automatically avoid and guard against the unknown. The unknown is potentially scary, evolutionarily speaking, so we seek out the known and predictable, since it’s helped us survive until this point. Also, when we start out as children, the unknown is adventure and fun! — but more often than not it gets taught (or “whooped” for some) out of us by frightened adults who want to prepare us for the knocks of the “real world”. Before we know it, we form a belief system where we associate the unknown with pain, and come to expect — and are even unconsciously looking for — things to go wrong. So, we learn the safe, familiar routines and hold on to the safe, familiar thoughts (even when they are painful!) On an unconscious level, we live in fear of those “knocks”, rarely embracing joy even when it does show up. Most people I’ve talked to about this say that as soon as things are good, they are cautiously looking around, waiting for “the other shoe to drop”. The joy, spontaneity, and sense of adventure are all but snuffed out by the time we enter adulthood.

So, when in the course of our everyday lives we are struggling and hoping (or even praying) for something to change, if there is no room in our lives for anything new to show up, change has no place to enter our lives, except through a crisis of some kind. So another thing we tend to associate the unknown with is crisis or something challenging happening to us, something being out of our comfortable control.

What Dr. Dispenza points out, however, is that making space for the unknown on a regular basis is the only way for our lives to actually change for the better — both on a personal and on a collective level (which are, of course, inextricably connected). More often than not, when the unknown shows up in our lives, it is our own Self coming to us with information, some aspect of ourselves we’ve neglected even though it is desperate for attention. Or, it might be some important ideas we don’t make time for, or some signal from our body, or it might be even a psychic or spiritual message. In fact, the more I listen to Dr. Dispenza’s material, the more I see how exciting and magical the unknown can potentially be. We often perceive it to be “negative” because it’s not something we expected, and perhaps it even interrupts the flow of our lives. But how often do cancer patients say that cancer was the best thing that could have happened to them, because it finally woke them up to how they were mistreating or neglecting themselves?

Dr. Dispenza passionately urges his students to make space for the unknown in their daily lives through meditation — through sitting down, and focusing on Space in your body and outside it (and a number of other techniques). Focusing on the space your body occupies, and the space around your body, takes you out of the realm of thinking about your life and into the realm of direct experience. He also cites scores of meticulous scientific research (some of which he’s done himself), pointing toward the tremendous impact of “teaching your body emotionally”, bringing up one’s own powerful feelings of gratitude and love, and using your powerful imagination to envision and feel the kind of You that you want to be. This acts as an antidote to the cyclic ruminations of your everyday thoughts, and your body begins to learn and neurologically wire those emotions into your neural circuitry with repetition.

When I’ve sat down this way — even with Dispenza’s guided meditation audios — I suddenly found facing myself in a way I didn’t expect. Hey, that’s the unknown in action, from the first moment! I’ve initially found myself restless, anxious, and sometimes frustrated. As any meditation teacher will tell you, making room for yourself every day is what creates change — it’s not having that perfect meditation posture in white cotton robes, with the perfectly balanced breath and an impossibly straight spine. Often it’s a sweaty, uphill battle. But, as I’ve discovered, that’s not as masochistic as it might sound. It’s a path toward befriending your body and getting to know your energy. I’ve had meditations where I cried in frustration, and others where I experienced exhilaration at feeling my energy field reaching out to fill the entire room.

I do not believe that meditation is the only way to make space for the unknown, although I’ve found that it’s one of the most potent. Journaling/writing is another powerful way, if you are able to stay open to the present moment and allow your conscious awareness to unfold (rather than only writing down thoughts you’ve already had). Making art of any kind — with the same premise of spontaneous expression — is a very rich ground in which the unknown can emerge. And another powerful way, is, psychoanalytic sessions. On both sides of the couch, a therapy session is like a mutual meditation, where both people are attending to the present and are (hopefully) open to something new arising at any moment.

Any practice(s) you create where you consciously make regular time for something to unfold that’s different from your daily tasks and habitual thoughts can create that space and opportunity for positive change. And that’s not just something that sounds good to say — doing this allows you to regularly break up the habitual, cyclic patterns of thinking and feeling, which overtime literally causes those old circuits to prune apart in your brain. Every time you drift in meditation and think about the next thing on your To Do list (or about lunch), and then bring yourself back to the focus on space, you interrupt an ingrained pattern and encourage/strengthen a different one. Or, if you’re writing, when you bring yourself back from checking your texts or looking up a product on the internet — same thing. In an analytic session, bringing yourself back from a tangent, speaking up when something isn’t going in the direction you need, or allowing yourself to explore an uncomfortable topic (and so many other examples!!) allows you to have that same effect in your body, brain, and entire energy field.

It is difficult to convey how powerful this truly is in just a few paragraphs. I think it’s clear that I’m not talking about any kind of magic, “think yourself happy” thing — but a pathway toward deep change on so many levels, facilitated by consciously stepping out of the familiar. I highly recommend the books of the authors I listed — the links at the beginning of the post take you to their respective books for you to explore. All three authors also have multiple fascinating talks on YouTube.

How can you make more space for the unknown in your life?