FEELING ACTIVATION IN A MEDITATION
I had an experience in a deep meditation some months back, when the ground was still cold here in Colorado. The practice took place late at night, as I meditated for hours. As usual, I am listening to my meditation music in my studio, working to deepen my practice. There were convincing, but fake, flickering candles, which I often use when I meditate, even though I keep my eyes closed, and I cover myself with a blanket like a cloak. This is also a form of setting intention, as the goal is to go completely inward. I remind myself that this is a slow incremental process, especially when I feel impatient with something I feel I may be carrying in my life.
In my deepest state of meditation, when I found myself slipping into liminal states of consciousness, at some point, I felt like I was feeling the presence of my father close by somehow. I don’t know how to explain this fleeting experience exactly. It could be that I slipped into the slipstream of memories that took me close to some of my earliest trauma (his illness and death). It could be that I brushed up against the visceral memories of caring for him in his earlier years in some way. In those moments, I felt it, and received a flash as if not just him, but my past was close by to my left.
As I felt myself shift my awareness to this, it was then that I felt something else; I felt my meditation abruptly end as if I were kicked clear by part of myself that shut the door abruptly. It was an emotional rebuff.
My eyes opened, and still under the blanket, I didn’t dare move. I tried to sense the confusing feelings that seemed to animate along that invisible constellation of my unconscious. I could see the candles flickering through the opening in my blanket and said, “Oh.”
This “oh” sound embodied a realization of something that bubbled up from inside, something I refer to with clients as unfinished business.
For me, I felt a clear part of myself present in that moment of meditation, a child part that was simultaneously hurt, and was this anger? Could I harbor anger against my sick and now deceased father? Why should I? As a psychotherapist, I know the answer is yes, of course, but I thought I had worked through this anger and hurt in the decades I’d been in therapy, or maybe in the years studying psychology. The clarity of an insight that came up in this meditation is that there is still a part of me that is hiding within. This child part, a small hurting boy, seemed very present that night in my studio.
A CONSTELLATION OF CONNECTIONS
Not only was this part of myself locked away, but he was keeping me from feeling and exploring something around my father, which I still carry. This unprocessed grief, anger, and hurt. This unfinished business. This is not to say that I blame my father for these things, but in this lifetime, I feel that my goal is to continue to explore these stuck places, the unprocessed parts that are part of that matrix of my psyche, the constellation of connections in my unconscious that I speak of.
This realization is what I refer to as intellectual insight, but this insight, which allows me to process this intellectually, is only part of how these deep hurts need to be processed. There is a feeling sense around these things as well, and expressing the feeling is more difficult – but is also where much of the healing is.
The reaction to feeling the presence of my father was met with this closed door within, as if this child part had locked itself away. I could only marvel at this realization that I could sense part of myself receding quickly, denying me more understanding, even though I still felt growing intellectual clarity around what I experienced. I touched something deep within. I was rebuffed, left with some insight, but there was no catharsis, no alchemical transmutation of energy into something else.
Many of us, perhaps all of us, have Unfinished Business in our lives. This is usually with those we are closest to, or at least had a chance of being closest to. The Unfinished Business is a relic of the past, a remnant of things we have struggled with. Even in doing decades of psychotherapy, journaling, studying psychology, and meditating, I am clear that I also still have these places within myself as well. There is more catharsis ahead, more transmutation, and time travel to the most painful parts of my life.
YOUR UNFINISHED BUSINESS
The unfinished business we each carry in our lives may be multi-faceted, of course. We may never find closure from all the unfinished business we carry, but there is some baggage that we may need to unpack and face. We may simply become aware of more of these hard places, these stuck places, as we get triggered by stressors in our lives.
Having that intellectual insight, though, takes time, and even if we say, “Ah, yes, I resent so and so, that’s my unfinished business,” it doesn’t mean that the weight of that baggage has been put down.
Consider that as we work to deal with parts of ourselves, we are not just working to uncover hidden memories, hard things from our past, but we need to find healing and resolution to a complex constellation of memories and emotions that are intertwined with those memories. I call them a constellation because a memory does not live in isolation; the way we perceive something in our past or present is linked to many past experiences that create a feeling sense around memories. Some of those experiences are outside of our narrative memory completely, but something older than chronological narrative memory has still been tracking our experiences.
From a neurological perspective, we might say that the need is to rewire the neural pathways of the brain. This itself may be a complex problem. The neural pathways that may have been created by that wound, the unfinished business, may be hard to navigate. We can find clues, though, because they leave a trail, an imprint, evidence. We can see how the stories that are woven by these connections affect our lives, our mood, and our feelings around what it means to be oneself. Are we feeling anxious and not confident today? Perhaps a constellation of self-doubt and rumination has been triggered.
This process itself may trigger feelings of shame or anger that make us not want to examine these feelings, but on the other hand, to pause and become aware (to fold with it) allows us to find some insight.
Another way to speak of it is to address the emotional imprint that is left behind from something. This emotional feeling is somewhat different than the straightforward narrative, as a narrative can be told with detachment. Feeling the weight of a narrative is another thing altogether. The feeling sense around something begs the question in general, why should there be a feeling sense around an experience or a cluster of experiences? We humans are not automatons that simply experience things like a computer watching the world through sensors; we experience at an emotional level as well, and to be in denial of this is part of where someone may also get stuck.
FINDING THE PATTERN IN THE NOISE
I am talking about the process of looking for connections within that may yield insight and healing. I often speak of slowing this process down and “folding” with the thing that comes up. We find clarity by going towards pain, rather than masking it, burying it, or ignoring the ways that it comes out. We look for clues in our lives, like where we feel our temper flare, or if we feel ourselves slipping into a depressed state. We may feel the vibration of anxiety from a social engagement, or the loneliness of retreating to our own space.
Often, we explore the latticework of filaments of the unconscious in ways that Freud would have referred to as free association. We explore something and seek the connection to something else. These associations from a Depth psychology perspective suggest real connections – a hidden latticework of the mind.
This combing for information, clues, and understanding takes time because, in effect, in therapy or in seeking insight, we are traveling to seemingly random places in the unconscious. We are listening, though, and trying to feel for a connection to a narrative pathway. We are trying to see the pattern in the noise, and it is revealed incrementally.
GRAVITATIONAL WAVES OF UNFINISHED BUSINESS
Consider that our lifetime of experiences acts on our psyche like gravity works on the dust and matter in space, where we now know it coalesces together, forming these tendrils of connection between galaxies. This is the hidden latticework that connects the galaxies, and it closely resembles the connections in the human brain.
I am suggesting it is not simply the neural pathways that we can see with a microscope, but that the same latticework is present in human consciousness as well.
This latticework begins to form at the time we are born into this world. In my article, Fractals of the Mind, I link to the simulation of the universe forming by Volker Springel. That simulation could also be imagined as human consciousness forming over a lifetime.
NASA astronaut Frank White in his book, The Cosma Hypothesis (2018), speaks about this latticework of cosmic filaments across the universe as not just matter, or energy but rather he describes the Universe as a living conscious system the way Earth was described as conscious, in James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis, which first appeared in a paper, and was later published as Gaia: A New Look at life On Earth, (1979).
This organizing principle of the Universe, White describes as “information.” We can use the idea that the latticework of outer space mirrors the latticework of information for the human psyche as well.
Our lifetime of experiences coalesce into the latticework that creates our sense of self.
Much of this is hidden in the unconscious, where our sense of self is shaped, and for some of us, the narratives attached to some strands of this latticework are narratives that don’t serve us and may be linked to hard experiences like trauma.
It could be that a strand of our unconscious gets activated when we are triggered by something in our lives. Someone cuts us off in traffic, and our sense of outrage is out of proportion to the event. Perhaps someone hurts our feelings in a way that vibrates along multiple strands of our unconscious and brings up painful feelings of abandonment.
We feel these effects on our psyche the way we feel gravity pull us down to Earth. There is a clear effect, and sometimes it can feel just like gravity in that we report we are feeling lethargic, unmotivated, heavy, or weighed down.
There are other ways of describing when we feel something within is triggered, but trying to find visual ways to embody this can help us navigate the latticework of our unconscious. Through this, we can explore ways that we are fused with an old story, or an old experience, like I felt with the young boy I felt triggered in my meditation.
All of this takes time.
These are slow explorations that we need to be patient with. There may be a sense that we make progress, and we retreat. There may be the idea that maybe we’ve explored everything, and yet something else gets activated again with a new experience, a new life transition, or a challenge.
Some of this is hidden from our conscious mind for good reason; it may feel too painful to have in the forefront of our awareness until we process around it and understand more of ourselves.
This slow unfolding allows us to build confidence, understand ourselves more deeply, and with patience and dedication, put down the most painful things in our lives so that we no longer have to carry the weight of Unfinished Business.
Follow Your Myth 