Turn your understanding of meditation inside out and upside down
Meditation has found a home in the West. Countless scientific studies tout its benefits, and a multitude of students proclaim its life-changing value. I am one of those students. For over forty-five years I have practiced this ancient art, and I continue to reap its remarkable rewards. While I remain a follower of many wisdom traditions, and believe that no one has a patent on truth, thirty years ago I took refuge in Buddhism. The adage “Chase two rabbits; catch none” points out the necessity of commitment, and the dangers of spreading yourself too thin.
My passion for meditation led me into the traditional Tibetan three-year retreat, where I became a monk with robes and a shaved head, meditating fourteen hours a day in a remote monastery. I even slept sitting up in meditation posture, practicing the nocturnal meditations of dream and sleep yoga. Three-year retreat is like a meditation university, providing the opportunity to practice dozens of meditations in the most nurturing environment. It remains the most transformative experience of my life.
Of the many practices I was introduced to in retreat, one meditation stands out: the quirky, intense, multifaceted, and revolutionary practice of reverse meditation. I learned these practices within the context of Mahāmudrā (Sanskrit for “great seal”), a lofty tradition in Tibetan Buddhism that explores the nature of the mind. This was over twenty years ago, and since then these radical meditations have become a cornerstone of my spiritual path.
They’re called “reverse” meditation for a number of reasons. First, these practices are the opposite, or reverse, of what many of us associate with meditation. Most people think that meditation is about feeling good, getting “Zen,” or otherwise chilling out. But this is just one small aspect of meditation. Complete meditation is not about feeling good—it’s about getting real. And getting real requires dealing with the reality of difficult situations.
Second, these unique meditations are designed to reverse our relationship to unwanted experiences, which means going directly into them instead of avoiding them. In so doing we can discover the basic goodness of whatever arises, which is deeper than interpretative goodness. Basic goodness refers to the ineffable “suchness, isness, thatness” of whatever occurs—good or bad.
If we capitulate to our usual avoidance strategies, we push the acute, conscious psychological discomfort of avoidance into becoming a chronic, unconscious mental cramp. The discomfort is still there, but now it’s buried deep in our body-mind matrix, where it works backstage to dictate much of our onstage life. The rejected experience then manifests symptomatically—it becomes an undiagnosed reflection of an underlying discord that expresses itself in virtually everything we do. Our actions then become evasion tactics—reactivity, psychological duress, physical illness, and all manner of unskillful responses to the challenges of life—as we try to skirt these buried, uncomfortable feelings.
The reverse meditations give us the opportunity to relate to our mind instead of from it—and also to establish a relationship to our evasion tactics, which otherwise become obstacles that act like scar tissue to sequester the unwanted experience from consciousness. Relating from our mind, from our reactivity, is no relationship at all. In place of conscious relationship, we respond with knee-jerk reflexes to difficult experience, a reactivity that kicks us out of our feeling body and into our thinking head, and into unnecessary suffering. Instead of dealing authentically with the challenging somatic sensation, we leap into inauthentic conceptual proliferation (confabulating and catastrophizing) to buffer ourselves from the discomfort of our feelings. We run from the honest pain and real news that come with being human, and into dishonest commentary and fake news. The truth is that many of the worst things in our life are things that never really “happened”!
Third, the reverse meditations upend our sense of meditation altogether. They represent a revolution in spiritual practice that turns our understanding of meditation inside out and upside down, and therefore radically expand our practice. Situations that were once antithetical to meditation now become our meditation. Obstacles that previously obstructed our spiritual path now become our path. This means that everything becomes our meditation. Nothing is forbidden. We can enter lifetime retreat in the midst of ordinary life.
Excerpted from Reverse Meditation: How to Use Your Pain and Most Difficult Emotions as the Doorway to Inner Freedom by Andrew Holecek.
Andrew Holecek is an author, speaker, and humanitarian who offers seminars internationally on meditation, lucid dreaming, and the art of dying. His work has appeared in Psychology Today, Parabola, Lion’s Roar, Tricycle, Utne Reader, Buddhadharma, Light of Consciousness, and many other periodicals. Learn more at andrewholecek.com.
Nature Meditation by a Window
With many people home-bound, we may need to get creative in seeking ways to connect with the natural world. Sitting by an open window is one excellent practice for connecting with the outdoors, and it can be a powerful form of nature meditation as well.
“What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”
Crowfoot, Orator of the Blackfoot Confederacy
- Find a comfortable seat by an open window that looks outdoors.
- Morning, during the dawn chorus when birds are most active, can be a perfect time to enjoy your morning coffee or tea as you observe a new day emerge.
- Set an intention to stay present, letting go of thoughts or stories in your mind as they arise, and instead focusing your attention on whatever is fascinating in your environment.
- Sit for at least 15-30 minutes if you can. Practice regularly to help alleviate stress, increase your sense of connection with your local environment, and awaken your senses.
Find more practices for connecting to nature in Rewilding: Meditations, Practices, and Skills for Awakening in Nature by Micah Mortali.
Read Rewilding today!
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The Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Online Course
Dear friends, we are so happy to announce our partnership with our friends at The University of Massachusetts’ Center for Mindfulness, where we’re working together to offer the first-ever online version of the highly-acclaimed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program.
Learn more about this very special opportunity here.
In 1979, Jon Kabat-Zinn founded the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts to bring a form of meditation known as mindfulness into the medical mainstream. Mindfulness is a basic human quality, a way of learning to pay attention to whatever is happening in your life that allows you a greater sense of connection to your life inwardly and outwardly. Mindfulness is also a practice, a systematic method aimed at cultivating clarity, insight, and understanding. In the context of your health, mindfulness is a way for you to experientially learn to take better care of yourself by exploring and understanding the interplay of mind and body and mobilizing your own inner resources for coping, growing, and healing.
Nearly three decades of scientific research at medical centers all over the world suggest that training in mindfulness and MBSR can positively and often profoundly affect participants’ ability to reduce medical symptoms and psychological distress while learning to live life more fully.
Since its inception, more than 20,000 people have completed the MBSR training program. They have been referred by more than 5,000 physicians, by hundreds of other health care professionals, and through self-referral. These participants have been strongly motivated to do something for themselves—something no one else can do for them—by learning to draw upon their inner resources and natural capacity for greater health and balance, ease and peace of mind.
The MBSR Online Course is the only complete online training in the MBSR Online Course follows the same, well-respected method taught at the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. This eight-week course offers the curriculum and methodology developed by Jon-Kabat Zinn and is taught by Center for Mindfulness director Dr. Saki Santorelli, and senior instructor Florence Meleo-Meyer.
Tips and Tools to Heal Our Relationship with Mother Earth
Reciprocity
Tending to the natural world is essential. We can no longer ignore or expect the Earth to just be there giving us all that we need, shutting out her cries. Her resources are limited. She is our mother, and she is burning, melting, and roaring in a call for help for us to tend to her needs. Animals are becoming extinct and others are abused and mistreated for profit, as are our trees—our sacred lungs here on Earth. We are meant to connect to the natural world as if it were a friend, a sister or brother, mother or father. We are all a part of the same Earth family. The trees need the air we exhale, yet we forget that we rely on them to breathe, as well. We forget, so easily, just how important this relationship is for our mere existence. Our connection is such a simple act, but we’ve completely lost our intimacy with the natural world as a collective and it’s begging for us to return to this harmonious kinship.
The Earth is our mirror—the truest reflection for our collective. Its self-destruction and decay shows us the separation we’ve created with it, with ourselves, with all that is Sacred, and with each other. When she burns, it mirrors the repressed anger we are holding from not meeting the needs of our Spirit, for not listening to truth. Her polluted oceans reflect the pollution of our inner waters—our disrespect and dishonoring of the emotions and intuitive wisdom of the feminine. The remedy is actually quite simple: conscious communication, love, and connection can help restore this balance. Once we each form a relationship with our elemental allies, our awareness will shift to honoring and protecting, and change the way we relate to the natural world as a whole, just like a connection with any growing relationship. Our future depends on how we tend to the Earth today.
Working with the Land
When working with the natural world in our healing, we also must cultivate a relationship with the land that supports us where we live. We thrive when we are connected to and work with the land that holds us. Simple ways to do this include:
- Spend time with the land. Listen to it. Get to know its natural features, its seasonal blossoms and cycles.
- Research and recognize its indigenous origins. Who lovingly tended to the land before you? How can you honor these people? Are they still active in your community? How can you support them?
- Join a local land conservation group.
- Try to source fresh herbs in your community or in the wild, instead of bought in plastic imported to your grocery store. Look for community gardens, farmers markets, CSAs, or even plant them yourself! For dried herbs and plants not native to your bioregion, check out your local apothecary to support small Earth-conscious businesses. Always ask where they get their herbs and if they are sustainably harvested or organic.
- Plant walks are also a great resource for learning how to spot medicine in the wild so you can forage yourself, and they can also teach you more about what grows near you. Find a local herbalist who you resonate with and support them.
Ways to Further Reciprocate:
- Talk to the trees like a friend. Ask them for guidance and support and listen with care and respect.
- Plant trees and flowers. Reforest and replant. Revive our dying plant species.
- Stop utilizing single use plastic, especially if you have a company that sells products. Our oceans are drowning in plastic and our sea creatures are suffering. We
are disrupting balance because of our addiction to consumerism. Plastic does not disappear and most of it doesn’t get recycled. You can nowadays find a plastic-free alternative for almost anything you could ever need with a little bit of conscious attention. Do your research and be mindful of your plastic consumption. Choose consciousness over convenience, the larger vision over a quick fix. - With everything you take from the Earth or that is made of the Earth, say a simple thank you before using or consuming it.
- Say intentional prayers and blessings for the Earth and her healing.
- Withdraw your support from companies and groups that are not in support of the Earth’s health and sacredness— companies that use unsustainably harvested resources or unnecessary plastic, those that engage in unethical farming, and fast fashion.
- Share with friends and family how to be more eco-conscious. Does your mom recycle? Is your brother still using plastic straws? Does your best friend need an iced coffee served in a plastic cup every day or can they bring their own cup to the coffee shop? Gently offer suggestions to support the Earth whenever you see fit.
- Support companies that focus on Earth connection and protection. We vote with our dollars and money is energy. Give your energy to those supporting the Earth.
This is an excerpt from Tending to the Sacred: Rituals to Connect with Earth, Spirit, and Self by Ashley River Brant.
Ashley River Brant is a multidimensional artist and feminine healer bringing her medicine through as the creator of Soul Tattoo®, a ceremonial intuitive tattooing modality, as well as with film photography, illustration, writing, as the host of Weaving Your Web podcast, and through her online courses. Ashley uses her gifts of mediumship and connections to the loving spirits of the natural world to offer a feminine voice of healing expression for collective transformation in all her work. Ashley’s focus is to assist her clients, and all who are drawn to her work, in awakening to a new wave of feminine power, attuned to the mystery, honoring the creative and intuitive power within us all, and embodying it with grounded presence and purpose, so that we may all heal, open our hearts to the sacred, and align with our authentic expression and soul’s true essence. Ashley will be releasing her first book and first oracle deck with Sounds True in 2021.
Learn More
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Unwinding Trauma and PTSD: The Nervous System, Somatic Experiencing, and Embodiment
The mind-body connection is still a new concept in Western medicine. Descartes’s declaration “I think, therefore I am” encouraged many to view the mind as separate from and superior to the body… for almost 400 years! So, to understand the discovery of feedback loops in the nervous system linking body and mind is to undergo a major paradigm shift, with radical implications for how we view and treat conditions like trauma and PTSD—and how you can empower yourself around your own healing journey.
Why Embodiment Decreases for Trauma Survivors
Until trauma survivors feel their safety has been truly restored, their nervous system relies on defensive mechanisms like dissociation, numbing out, or immobilization. This can feel subjectively like becoming a two-dimensional “stick figure” energetically, with a body that’s barely there.
If you feel like you’re not really inhabiting your body, know that it’s not your fault and you probably had very good historical reasons to leave it. With recent advances in mind-body therapies and somatic psychology, however, there are many ways—when you’re ready—to safely return to experiencing your fully embodied self.
Perhaps the most popular of these therapies is Somatic Experiencing®.
What Is Somatic Experiencing?
Somatic Experiencing is a form of therapy originally developed by Dr. Peter Levine. It proceeds from the premise that trauma is not just “in your head.” Though you may feel off-kilter psychologically in the wake of trauma, you’re not “crazy”—you have a nervous system that has been put into overdrive.
The body can’t distinguish physical trauma from mental or emotional trauma, and this leads the brain, once you’ve had trauma, to get stuck in a state of believing that you’re in perpetual danger.
Without a way to shake off the effects of having been in a dangerous situation in the past, trauma survivors disconnect from their bodies; the trauma gets “frozen” inside. With this frozenness in the body, your emotions can become dysregulated easily; you might at times feel spacey, agitated, depressed, panicky, collapsed—or all of the above.
Again, it’s not your fault that any of this is happening: dissociating and numbing are a natural defense mechanism. Still, it may take some work, often within a therapeutic container, to start to “thaw” the frozenness or unwind the trauma.
Somatic Experiencing practitioners help clients increase their awareness of their kinesthetic, embodied experience, and lead them through techniques to gradually release stresses that have been locked into the body. Allowing both physical responses and emotions to come through, bit by bit, restores psychological balance and can help resolve even long-term PTSD.
How It All Works: Polyvagal Theory
Neuroscientist and psychologist Dr. Stephen Porges synthesized Polyvagal Theory as a way to explain human behavior in terms of the evolution of our autonomic nervous system. It not only provides a biological frame for parts of Somatic Experiencing, it has helped therapists develop a host of somatically attuned interventions and refined the way they interact with clients.
The centerpiece of Polyvagal Theory is the vagus nerve. This long nerve mediates what Porges calls the “social engagement” system. The vagus nerve’s ventral branch supports social engagement: a calm and playful, pro-social state. Its dorsal branch supports the opposite: immobilization (characterized by dissociation, depression, numbness, or “freeze.”)
If you undergo a trauma, the dorsal branch of the vagus nerve activates a state of immobilization. On the other hand, when you feel safe and embodied, your parasympathetic nervous system functions smoothly and you can (ideally) engage socially. What makes all this possible is neuroception, perception that takes place without our conscious awareness, tipping us from safety into other modes, like fight, flight, or freeze.
Clinicians trained in Polyvagal Theory support clients in making shifts in their autonomic responses, from “freeze” and shutdown to fight or flight—to safety—in order to restore a healthy range of responses and the feeling of being safe.
Practicing co-regulation with their clients helps the clients to re-establish inner safety and other positive feeling states.
How You Can Increase Your Embodiment
Trauma severs us from our body, and embodiment brings us back.
Embodiment practices like somatic therapies, qigong, and various athletic activities are some of the best medicine around for the nervous system. Even just taking a long walk while paying attention to your feet making contact with the earth can be quite supportive.
Sounds True also has created The Healing Trauma Program to offer support for your healing. The course has a faculty of 13 esteemed trauma experts—including Somatic Experiencing founder Dr. Peter Levine, Polyvagal Theory expert Deb Dana, Dr. Gabor Maté, Konda Mason, Thomas Hübl, and many others. The program takes place over nine months and is truly an immersion into the world of trauma recovery, with teachings, guided practices, live practice sessions and Live Q&As. Find out more about The Healing Trauma Program.
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction – now offered totally online!
Dear friends, we are honored and excited to bring you the first ever Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program delivered in a fully online format. Now you enjoy and benefit from the very same curriculum that has been offered in-person in the comfort of your own home, in a self-paced, interactive training program.
In 1979, Jon Kabat-Zinn founded the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts to bring a form of meditation known as mindfulness into the medical mainstream. Mindfulness is a basic human quality, a way of learning to pay attention to whatever is happening in your life that allows you a greater sense of connection to your life inwardly and outwardly. Mindfulness is also a practice, a systematic method aimed at cultivating clarity, insight, and understanding. In the context of your health, mindfulness is a way for you to experientially learn to take better care of yourself by exploring and understanding the interplay of mind and body and mobilizing your own inner resources for coping, growing, and healing.
Nearly three decades of scientific research at medical centers all over the world suggest that training in mindfulness and MBSR can positively and often profoundly affect participants’ ability to reduce medical symptoms and psychological distress while learning to live life more fully.
Since its inception, more than 20,000 people have completed the MBSR training program. They have been referred by more than 5,000 physicians, by hundreds of other health care professionals, and through self-referral. These participants have been strongly motivated to do something for themselves—something no one else can do for them—by learning to draw upon their inner resources and natural capacity for greater health as well as balance, ease, and peace of mind.
The MBSR Online Course is the only complete online training in MBSR and follows the same, well-respected method taught at the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. This eight-week course offers the curriculum and methodology developed by Jon-Kabat Zinn and is taught by Center for Mindfulness director Dr. Saki Santorelli, and senior instructor Florence Meleo-Meyer.
