Everyday Mindfulness

As I re-enter regular meditation practice, I am finding, as was also noted in a way by Vixinne the other day, that a lot of my anxieties are intensifying. I see lots of mental battles going on, and very counterproductive, habitual thought patterns and fears are arising with perhaps more frequency than they had in the past (or at least they are more intense now that my attention is squarely on them).

Sometimes (often) I find myself getting caught up in these battles, and then I set myself to worrying that mindfulness is making my anxiety worse or that I'm not practicing correctly or whatever. I notice tiny little anxious thoughts arise that I may not have been aware or before but now they are directly in the centre of my attention and I can't escape them.

I'm finding this experience to be comparable to something called a 'herxheimer' or 'die-off' reaction people often experience when treating certain pathologies or undergoing an alternative detox therapy. The herxheimer reaction is essentially the process of your illness getting worse before it gets better. It is likely caused either by the toxins let off by dying pathogens, or by the ensuing inflammation. The process can be excruciating and people will often experience what is referred to as a 'healing crisis' where they will want to abandon what they are doing due to fear and suffering.

The process of beginning mindfulness in the context of crisis is somewhat akin to that reaction. Can anybody resonate with this idea?

I think that question is something of a cry for reassurance, because really I already know the answer myself. Moreover, in a resource that Vixinne pointed me towards the other day, and for which I am eternally grateful, Vinny Ferraro offers an encouraging and insightful quote from the Arch Bishop Fennelon:

“As the light increases, we see ourselves to be worse than we thought. We are amazed at our former blindness as we see issuing forth from the depths of our heart a whole swarm of shameful feelings, like filthy reptiles crawling from a hidden cave. We never could have believed that we had harboured such things, and we stand aghast as we watch them gradually appear. But we must neither be amazed nor disheartened. We are not worse than we were; on the contrary, we are better. While our faults diminish, the light by which we see them waxes brighter and we are filled with horror. Bear in mind, for your comfort, that we only perceive our malady when the cure begins.”
~ Archbishop François Fénelon

The above talk can be found at the following link. Clicking on it should start automatically downloading the talk if you wish to listen to it: http://www.audiodharma.org/teacher/52/t ... dgment.mp3

Cheesus

Hi Cheesus,
I'm unable to speak from experience here, I'm afraid. When I took up mindfulness, my anxieties diminished almost instantly. So I can't talk about the experience of things getting worse before they got better.
As I've mentioned elsewhere on the forum, I started reading the Mark Williams/Danny Penman book and following the guided meditations. Then, after a few weeks of that, I began an 8-week course with a brilliant teacher.
I can't say for certain whether my experience of mindfulness would have been different without following the course with both book and weekly class as support. My hunch is that those means of support made the world of difference.
I noticed on Fee's thread that you mentioned you hadn't done the course before and that you'd only read bits of the book.
My feeling is that the course is very important in terms of giving a solid grounding to mindfulness. It is very carefully structured and remains more or less unchanged from when Jon Kabat-Zinn introduced it to his clinic in 1979.
It's good to hear that you'll be joining Fee and others in following the course over the next eight weeks. You're already committed to daily sitting practice and that bodes extremely well.
In her brilliant book Upside-Down Zen, Susan Murphy writes that, "We humans seem to fear what seems hard and we long for comfort, even though we keep discovering that the greatest treasure is what we find in ourselves at the far end of any really challenging process...difficulty makes the way genuine. The routine of a practice is a habit with the power to break all habit. Sometimes you will long to sit; other times you won't feel in the mood. Because it is a practice, you undertake to push through mood or resistance of any other kind and just do it anyway. What happens just past the strongest point of resistance is always the interesting thing, but you cannot find this out without seriously wrestling with your resistance. And even if you have a meditation that resistance quickly dubs "bad", you just stay unmoved and grow that into humour, tolerance and curiosity."
Amen to that.

Cheesus wrote:Vinny Ferraro offers an encouraging and insightful quote from the Arch Bishop Fennelon:

“As the light increases, we see ourselves to be worse than we thought. We are amazed at our former blindness as we see issuing forth from the depths of our heart a whole swarm of shameful feelings, like filthy reptiles crawling from a hidden cave....

Wow, lol, pretty graphic - Christianity has always been good at that. This experience is also apparently reflected in Buddhism as the description of one being 'attacked by Mara' - our ego (or as I like to put it 'amplified feral dimension') tends to invent all manner of horrible things to try and force us to quit our 'noble path'. Here is an image I have liked to describe the intensity one can feel while practicing seated mindfulness meditation:



All it takes for these intense experiences to dwindle, however, it seems, is for one to remain steadfast - watching the fluctuations in tension in one's body, and practicing acceptance and radiating as much compassion as one can. Also practicing charity of any sort - sharing what luck one has had in life with others, appears to amplify one's altruistic, more civilised dimension which sensitively and compassioantely embraces one's feral dimension as if it were a screaming baby. Comforted and 'pacified' by one's compassionate nature, the more reptilian side is subdued. This dimension to our secular practice was represented in ancient China by the statue of GuanYin with baby:



There is an obvious link here to Madonna and Child in the West:

JonW wrote:I began an 8-week course with a brilliant teacher.

I was going to say that direct human inspiration can work wonders in my opinion - such people can instill a deep faith like powerful and potent seeds being planted within one's subconscious, and then if they teach one how to regularly water those seeds and nurture them in the garden of one's life, so to speak, then as one enjoys the beauty of these new novel plants, one may not even be aware of the weeds around them shrivel up and become compost for the new plants.

Keep on keeping on Cheesus, and you will find the practice 'doing you', rather than the other way around. Our reptilian nature apparently got our DNA through the tough times in our evolution to our present state - it seems we couldn't have arrived here without it, and acceptance, charity, and compassion keep it 'friendly'.

All the best,

Bio.

Bio, yes it is a brutal quote indeed! I think that might be why I like it so much That imagery you shared is very interesting indeed! Thanks for the insight.

I think compassion is something that I have been lacking in my practice. I have found a good guided metta meditation, so I think I am going to start practicing that every other day to try and make my meditations a bit less clinical. I think you're right, though, in that perseverance is key.

Jon, thank you for sharing that quote. It conjures up images of the 'wall' that long distance runners often need to break through. I think this is similar in some ways, but perhaps rather it is not a single wall but many little ones. Practicing through thick and thin will no doubt produce benefits in the long run. Moreover, I am seriously looking forward to the structure of having an 8 week course. During that I should be able to get started with my mindfulness-based psychotherapy too which I think will be great for me.

Onwards and upwards!
Cheesus

We all wish you well, Cheesus. And three cheers for your positivity.
All best, JW

Detoxing is a really interesting metaphor for starting meditation and that makes a lot of sense to me. I have been dealing with some similar things come up for me, lots of emotion, some anxieties, and an overall heightening of a lot of things. I found myself losing a bit of motivation last week because of this, but am still practicing every day. Seems like through it all that is what matters most. Hope this is the case for you too - and really glad you enjoyed that talk as I did!

Dogo Barry Graham writes in Kill Your Self: Life After Ego -
"Meditative practice is the practice of being with things as they are, with yourself as you are.
"Pleasurable feelings that come up when you sit are fine. Miserable feelings that come up when you sit are fine.
"People starting a meditation practice sometimes judge their meditation. They talk about a "good" meditation (mind and body calm, quiet, focussed) or a "bad" meditation (agitated, noisy mind and uncomfortable body).
But these are not different. The calm, quiet, focussed state is simply what happened that time, so it's what you observed. The agitation, noise and discomfort are simply what happened that time, so that's what you observed.
"If you tell yourself a story about how this meditation is good or bad, how you like it or how you don't, you're no longer sitting in meditation. You're back in conceptual thinking, separate from what you're doing.
"Just pay attention to whatever is, neither fighting it nor attaching to it.
"Just be aware. Just sit."

Sound advice in my opinion.