Imagine you wake up one day in a room on a ship. Your little room has a nice porthole where you can look out on the ocean and get some fresh air. You have a bathroom and all the food you need. Otherwise, though, the room is bare and spartan. You live in it day after day, and it’s usually fine. Eventually, though, the little room starts to feel boring, cramped, and claustrophobic.
You noticed right away that one of the walls has a big thick heavy bulkhead door, like on a military vessel. You’ve tried to open it, but it seemed difficult. Finally, one day, feeling a driving need to explore the world outside of your one single boring room, you manage to get the door open. Immediately, all sorts of disgusting green slime comes flooding out. Gross! You find yourself immediately wishing that you had never opened up the door.
Slowly, though, having no other choice, you start to mop up the slime, throwing buckets of it out the porthole.
Finally, after a month or two, you have all the repulsive goo cleaned up. It was hard work, and at times you wanted to give up. But, now that it’s done, Hey, cool! Now you have a whole new room to live in also. You’re living space just doubled! Nice. On reflection, all the work was definitely worth it.
Eventually you notice that there is another heavy bulkhead door in this new room. So, after a while of enjoying now having two rooms, your curiosity gets the better of you, and you work to get the new door open. Soon, out flows another avalanche of slime – and the whole process begins again.
This somewhat strange scenario is a metaphor for the meditative journey:
- Waking up in the little room is like becoming conscious as an adult, and noticing the person that our genetics, our childhood environment, and the relatively blind choices we made when younger seem to have made us.
- The compressed smallness of the single room is the tight constraint of our normal, relatively fearful mind.
- Opening up a bulkhead door is doing deep meditation practice.
- The slime that pours out is the residue of trauma and difficult emotions from our past that has not been fully worked through, and that emerges into our meditation as difficult body sensations, emotions, and thoughts.
- Mopping up the goo is the process of patiently and mindfully sitting and opening to the discomfort that emerges as we meditate such that we work through it and break it up into happy and freely flowing life force. This process can sometimes take in minutes, but sometimes can take decades.
- Gaining new rooms for us to live in is integrating aspects of our previously walled off subconscious into our conscious mind, so that we are more self-accepting, integrated people living with new vitality, flexibility, freedom, and depth.