Once Upon A Time (this is a blog about stories after all)… I was sitting in a peaceful meditation hall situated amidst beautiful countryside, alongside a group of other silent meditators. And into that stillness arose a white-hot bolt of pure anger. Where on earth did that come from?!? I’d learned to embrace many painful feelings during meditation, but I hadn’t expected that.
Until then, I’d never really admitted that I feel anger. It scared me a bit, and I didn’t want to think of myself as an angry person. But I’m so grateful that this part of me kept on knocking at the door of my awareness on that meditation retreat. Because it triggered one of the most powerful journeys my mindfulness practice has taken me on (so far!). I’ve described this journey in three stages below. For me, having a reminder of this 3-part process is really helpful when I need to stay mindful in difficult moments.
1.Paying Attention
Instead of pretending I didn’t feel anger, I started to pay attention to it. I got to know how anger felt in the body, as a heat and energy in my chest area. I became intimate with it, without judgement. I came to understand anger as ‘a life-supportive response intended to impact an unsupportive environment’ (a description that I love, from the psychotherapist Laurence Heller). With loving kindness, I could listen to what anger was trying to tell me. I stayed present to the feeling, and I was reminded of a part of my past that I’d always shrugged off. I’d spend my whole childhood being told how capable I was, all the while feeling incredibly out of my depth. I had shut this feeling away for years and years, and here it was resurfacing, now that I had the resources of awareness and kindness with which to meet it.
By paying attention to this feeling I realised that now, as a grown-up, I would often get incredibly defensive when I felt pushed into a role of being responsible for anything. An intense and paralysing fear would typically accompany my efforts to appear capable, and I’d always tried to shut that fear down with yet more striving to be totally competent. In opening to these buried feelings, it was as if the anger had shown me that enough was enough: that it was time to see how I kept myself stuck in acting out this role, and how I was ready to set myself free from it.
This was a big reminder not to treat an uncomfortable feeling as an enemy, but as an ally, like a radar nudging me towards an important discovery. Some feelings need to be paid attention to, and taken seriously with compassionate acceptance, before they can be let go of.
2. Noticing The Story
In daily life, I started to take the energy of anger as a cue to look more deeply. What I noticed was that when I felt defensive, and the heat of anger would arise, there was often a particular story present: my thoughts and feelings were perpetuating a certain belief about myself. This belief was that I needed to be supremely capable, or more accurately, omnipotent in a superhero-like way. Like it was my job to make sure nothing bad ever happened, even to save people. This mistaken belief had created huge amounts of suffering in my life, not least a whole load of unnecessary anxiety. Mindfulness had always helped me to cope much better with these anxious feelings. And now my practice seemed to be taking me further down into the root of things.
If you’ve come across the idea of limiting beliefs before, some of this may sound familiar. This wasn’t a new idea for me either: before I began practising mindfulness, I had tried other techniques to try to ‘re-programme’ limiting beliefs. In my case, trying to affirm a replacement view of myself only seemed to make these beliefs dig their heels in further – they weren’t going to be convinced by evidence, logic or repetition. There was no shortcut to a shiny new ‘me’.
By contrast, a mindful approach felt less forced. I simply paid close and compassionate attention to my experience, and a new clarity began to emerge, as if the anger was burning away a layer of delusion and enabling me to see things how they really were. With this clear seeing, I understood that in fact a story had been given to me by a set of circumstances that didn’t exist anymore. I was no longer in the situation that had given rise to the story. I had fabricated an entire identity as a ‘capable’ person out of this belief about who I needed to be in the world. The burden of this identity was that I constantly felt anxious about things that were way beyond my control. Once I could see that this particular view of myself was just a story, something began to unravel, as I was no longer under its delusive spell. It really was just a story. And no more ‘true’ than the fairy tales we’re told as children.
This has become a really valuable tool for me in living mindfully – to get curious and ask myself ‘What’s the story that’s present?‘. This awareness becomes more subtle and intimate the more I use it, so that once I’ve identified a particular story, I can see it popping up all over the place. Then it’s time to dig a bit deeper.
3. Questioning The Story
As I became quicker to notice my ‘capable’ story, I began to ask myself ‘What if I wasn’t believing this story? What might be possible?’ For me, this is one of those powerful ‘what if’ questions that just works away in the background, even when you’re not consciously thinking about it. I discovered that if I wasn’t believing the story, then alternative thoughts, feelings and behaviours became available to me, ones that weren’t so self-limiting.
It was as if a big cloud of misunderstanding had been stripped away, leaving the exciting possibility that I didn’t need to keep believing the story any more. This was a revelation to me, the idea that I didn’t need to keep acting out a particular identity or role. When feeling stressed, I could spot that the same old story had been activated, and rather than reacting automatically from my conditioning, I could respond to what was really happening in that moment. I discovered that I’m not a slave to this conditioning, and that I can open directly to my real and immediate experience of life, instead of seeing it through the lens of an unhelpful story.
One particular incident sticks in my mind which showed me this. In a work situation, a mistake had been made by someone else, and while I didn’t handle things perfectly, I did notice a huge change in myself. Usually, I’d have blamed myself for the mistake (believing I should have somehow prevented it, even though it wasn’t my mistake). I’d have also taken on the responsibility of stopping it from happening again (believing it was down to me to prevent a recurrence). I’d have got caught in days – if not weeks – of ruminating over this self-blame and worry about the future.
But this time, I did neither. With clear seeing available to me, I saw the story begin to arise about how I was responsible and should have been capable enough to prevent the mistake. But in seeing it as just a story, I could also see the truth of what was actually happening: that it wasn’t down to me to have prevented or fixed anything. And that a mistake isn’t the end of the world, it happens, and we can move on. In seeing the truth, I was able to let go. With this, a huge weight began to lift as I stepped into a new way of being with my experience. Ever since then, things have been getting steadily easier in situations that used to feel crippling. More and more, I’m learning that some things are only stressful if I’m believing a particular story. Without the story, I’m free.
Over time, ‘clear seeing’ has become easier to access, like a secret weapon that short-circuits my reactive patterns. I still find myself triggered at times, suddenly feeling defensive or deeply vulnerable, but I’m more able to meet these as a manageable part of human experience, rather than getting tangled up in a dramatic or tragic story about myself. And so when such feelings arise, I don’t get so easily carried off into unhelpful habits of blame and shame, or trying to be a superhero.
I’ve got to know quite a few different stories that can sneak up on me, my ‘top 10 tunes’ as James Baraz calls them. But when they arrive, I can interrupt them by making a choice – to pay attention. Mindfulness is the art of paying attention. When we pay attention, clear seeing becomes available: we can see what it actually happening in our experience now, with complete clarity, and respond appropriately. What helps me to see clearly is to stop and ask myself:
What’s asking for my attention?
What’s the story that’s present?
What if I wasn’t believing the story?
This opens up a space for something pretty amazing to happen. I’m a lot more calm when I’m not buying into a story. Life is more peaceful and joyful. I’m less self-absorbed and more able to connect compassionately with others.
We can’t remove all difficulty from life, but we can take away those stories that make life feel harder than it needs to be. I’m not suggesting that mindfulness can help us find our happy-ever-after ending. What I am suggesting is that our practice can help us find a much greater freedom, by letting go of the story altogether. We can free ourselves from the shackles of delusion, and escape into our real life, the one that’s actually happening, right here and now.
I can’t quite put into words how liberating this feels, so I’ll leave you with some words that seem to capture it, from the Kelis song ‘Acapella’:
“I stopped overthinking
Decided to draw back the curtains
And I cleared all the cobwebs
And began to let in the light”
If you’re on the mindful path yourself, I’d like to send you love and courage as you too begin to let in the light of clear seeing.
[This article can be discussed in the forum]
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Author’s footnote: I’d like to offer this particular post with gratitude to one of my teachers Singhashri. Her influence is very evident here: a few days after I posted this, Singhashri gave me a piece of her own writing in which she touched on a couple of the things I’ve mentioned above. I was most reassured and encouraged by this. Singhashri has previously been interviewed for Everyday Mindfulness https://www.everyday-mindfulness.org/interview-with-singhashri-gazmuri/
Hi Sheila,
Thank you thank you thank you for writing this post. I’ve never seen the topic illustrated so clearly. I’ve always labeled my stories as ‘narratives’ and always try to remind my self ‘don’t spin narratives’ but it’s a very difficult thing to do when the mind is reeling. I love the way you articulate it above, and will return to this post many times when I am struggling with my practice.
Wishing you the best.
Thank you so much for taking the time to leave a note, I’m very moved by your comments. I’m also very glad to hear that you’re finding things that support your practice, such as blogs like this. Sending you much kindness and appreciation.