Most people know what it feels like to have a difficult emotional experience, and then notice that the aftershock is still eating at us and destabilizing our mood an hour later, or maybe many even years later. One of the many values that meditation can have is to help us to feel more clear, and to have such lingering upset happen less. By fully feeling our bodies with mindfulness, we can let emotions and other bodily energies move through us and not get stuck – we can actually get to a place of completion with them.
The practice here is to have a full and rich experience of each body sensation, emotional or otherwise, as it arises. We want to fully soak awareness in to each sensation, to explore it as fully and deeply as we can, and to deeply inhabit it and feel its fullness.
When we feel each sensation all the way down to its bottom so that it’s complete and done with, we may find that its energy has totally moved through, like electricity traveling through a wire with minimal impedance. We may then find that there is nothing left over, there is no residue remaining, like a log that burns itself so completely that there is not even ash left over, or like a battery that runs its charge fully off until it is empty.
When we take the breaks off and fully feel how it is to be us, however, the experience can sometimes be difficult to tolerate. When we open to what would usually make us squirm and try to avoid, we may say, “I don’t want to feel this”.
One of my teachers used to say, “Our job as meditators is to tolerate the intolerability of how it feels to be human”. Feeling like we are going to explode with agitation, but, despite that, sitting still and opening to it all can be some of the most valuable meditation that we can do.
After something difficult happens in your life – or if you are feeling “off” for no reason in particular – can you challenge yourself to stay with and open to your body sensations a little longer? Are you willing to explore the discomfort a little more?
Meditation invites us to do our best to tolerate, accept, and open to exactly how it feels to be us, each moment, in its pleasure and discomfort, its full richness, all of it. The challenge is to just accept how our body feels, to let each feeling have its time and space, and to deeply feel it all. We can learn to stretch out and widen our comfort zone of how much we are willing to feel, and, through that, how much of who we are we are willing to say “yes” to.
If we sit still and open to the physical residue of challenging experiences, we may find that they are actually more tolerable than we had thought. When we do, we will often feel an enjoyable vitality, openness, and wholeness afterwards.