The Way of It

This morning I got a question from a dear someone I met a few months ago when I was volunteering my time at Katie’s Hotline. The answer I gave her may be useful to more than one, so I decided to post it here:

Q: How do you do The Work, if you can not reach your memories about something, but if you just have the feeling?

A: Hi, this is what I do in that situation. There are several options:

1. Go very still and get really in touch with the feeling, allow the feeling to become very prominent in your awareness, if you will. And wait. Really, wait. A thought might pop up. Do The Work on the thought that arises. Now, some people try this for three and a half seconds and then say “nothing came up.” And the reminder is: this is meditation, give yourself to the process, give it enough time, five minutes, ten minutes, one hour, your entire life, if it’s the truth what you’re interested in.
2. You can also ask the question: if this feeling had a voice, what would it say? and wait, see if you hear something, in your mind.
3. Sometimes it helps if you begin to explain how you feel to someone (maybe someone who has done The Work, but this is not necessary), and ask that someone to look for underlying beliefs . When you speak about how you feel, be spontaneous, don’t censor yourself, don’t speak from the motive of trying to find the underlying belief, simply be genuine in explaining how you feel.
4. Identify that same feeling on a specific person you know, and answer yourself the question “what do you think their underlying belief is that is making them have that feeling?” Then do the work on that underlying belief as if it was your own.
5. Ask someone who knows you well, where do you think this feeling comes from, in me? It might be transparent to them, what is still not transparent to you.
6. Take a look at your motives for doing The Work. If you’re doing The Work with a motive, with a particular outcome in mind, say, to make sadness go away, the thought that brings the sadness may not show its face, because looking at it may bring some more sadness, and “it” knows you believe you don’t want any more of that. To work with this, go brutally honest and make a list of all the things you think you will get from doing The Work. This is how you discover your motives. And they are not right or wrong. They are what they are. Don’t even try to change them. Just enlighten yourself to them, and ask yourself: “Can I absolutely know it is true that my life would be better if I get what I want from The Work?” Then go back to one of the previous exercises.
7. If this fails, investigate on whether you really want to know the truth. Sometimes we just love our dramas a little too much because we think the drama is more exciting than peace, that peace is boring. You can question that, and until it changes just know yourself as someone who loves the drama, without guilt or blame. I actually admitted this to myself this last Sunday, and it was tremendously liberating, because it freed me from the (imagined) prision of trying to be who I’m not. The paradox is: by admitting it, I found peace, and this peace (surprise, surprise) tasted much better than the drama. It’s the truth that sets me free, and sometimes what the truth looks like is: I don’t want to know the truth. Can you be true to that?

Even if all of this fails, there’s no failing in it. Just notice that this is how your mind operates, right now. Then take a break from it: go for a walk, have a cup of tea, take a long shower, and come back to it at another time, or simply drop it, and do The Work on something else. And keep it very simple: pick someone you haven’t forgiven 100 percent, fill a judge your neighbor worksheet on that person, and do The Work on your stressful thoughts about that person. You know the gig.

We begin now.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 7:02 am and is filed under Begin again, The Work, Truth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.