Chthonic (pronounced THON-ik, from Greek khthon = “earth” or “soil”) means:
Relating to the underworld, deep earth, or subterranean powers — especially in myth and religion.
I do not claim to be an expert or a mystic when it comes to meditation. I approach meditation from a psychological and intuitive direction which includes trial and error in my meditation practice. One important thing is that I track my trial and errors, in seeking to understand meditation more deeply. This is partly what I refer to as Insight meditation, the tracking is part of processing, and I refer to this as Insight journaling.
INTRO
In this article I want to frame a type of meditation as chthonic meditation we can think of this as a descent into the labyrinth of the mind.
At the beginning of any meditation is a clearing the mind, and quieting monkey mind. Often though we speak of meditating on something specific like loving kindness or compassion as a deepening part of the meditation.
I want to suggest that in Chthonic meditation we are making space to tune into what is already there beneath the thinking mind, deeper than our focus on our breath. This isn’t about thoughts, this is far deeper than that in the unconscious and one has to let go and drop down to begin to feel into this.
So it is a descent into the unconscious territory, into the feeling sense that is unfocused most of the time. In chthonic meditation I am suggesting we tune in and drop down. I hear it, I just sounded a little Timothy Leary saying “turn on, tune in, and drop out.”
Instead let’s think, Tune In, Drop down.
My idea for Chthonic meditation is that this meditation is about allowing some deeper feeling sense from deep down, to come forward because in these quiet subterranean places of the unconscious is information about what can relieve us of some of our pain from the past. Can we tune into something we know about ourselves by focusing on the feelings that may be present? How might we go about this?
TUNING IN vs TUNING OUT
A lot of what I talk about is learning to tune into what is going on within one’s psyche, rather than focusing only on tuning out the stream of thoughts, although that is part of it too.
There are many types of meditation, and there are different goals in meditation. Meditation may be done with the goal of calming the mind and grounding ourselves. In this act when we focus on the breathing, and when thoughts come in we can reflect,”I’m observing a thought“, and then let it go in a thought bubble and as it drifts away we refocus on the breath. Because I encourage the use of meditation music, in this type of meditation I often speak of attaching our mind to the music and flowing with the stream, or letting the music bring the reassurance and calmness to us.
In my experience, thoughts and feelings come up in waves that may get further apart as we become more skilled in meditation. To me this is the first stage of meditation, a calm grounding that requires tuning out the busy thinking, the monkey mind, the daily worries and stressors of our world. It is intentional to take this space, so that we can be grounded in life, and continue to know ourselves. This is important in developing resilience in our lives.
In the absence of our stream of thoughts though – a gap appears.
In the gap we are in this middle space, observing self between thoughts, and feelings. We may not have penetrated the veil to the Brahman mind in this gap, but we may have just found ourselves get some of the overview effect that I often talk of.
The overview effect is a perception of our self-image, our ego, from outside of that ego. This overview place is a good place to be. Here we have tuned out the noise, the stress, and begin to experience ego with some detachment rather than defensiveness for who we are – and this is where insight often lives.
It lives in the gap where we get the overview effect.
When I speak of the overview effect I am quoting astronaut Frank White who wrote of this experience in regard to being a shift in consciousness that comes from when an astronaut is above the Earth. I write more about that here in Fractals of the Mind.
We drop down as we are learning to tune out thoughts and be the observer. We tune into the gap where we may find ourselves having an overview experience of self. In this overview effect is where we can then move even deeper – past the thinking mind, and the defensive mind into a new area, the potential to feel into the unconscious which I will speak of next.
FEELING INTO THINGS
Perhaps this is a Jungian version of meditation, a Chthonic meditation that is about entering the underworld, and embracing something that may feel harder. So instead of meditating into a field of loving kindness, or gratitude, or safety I’m suggesting that for this meditation we are meditating into the quiet gap when we suspend our thoughts. We are outside of ego self and in this space we are floating within unconscious territory and can begin to tune into the deeper feeling sense.
Humans are good at feeling into things. We are built for this, there is a reason we’ve been meditating for thousands of years. We have to give ourselves permission to get there, and imagine that we are able to feel into other things, different states of our psyche.
How do I know that we can feel into things? We do this all the time!
You wake in the middle of the night because even asleep you had to get up and use the bathroom. During the day you realize it’s well into the day when you suddenly become aware of feeling hungry. These are not thinking states, these are feeling states within our body, the unconscious.
It wasn’t too long ago that people put a cell phone into their pocket and we began to put them on vibrate mode. When this happened something strange happened, the phone would be sitting on the counter in plain sight, and we’d be experiencing a vibration on our leg where we typically put the phone. Our brain, and nervous system, along with those particular cells in our leg learned what to look for, and that it was important in a very quick amount of time. Because of neuroplasticity our psyche had adapted to check in for this information, and this is when a ghost vibration would occur in our leg – like our psyche was just making sure. This is because the human psyche is good at adapting to information that may indcate a potential danger, and this is the kind of thing that can also lead to an anxiety response under other circumstances.
These kinds of adaptations and our neuroplasticity can be channeled to our advantage when it comes to meditation. Instead of ignoring it, we pay attention to the more subtle vibrations in our psyche, I refer to these as frequencies because I think that different emotions carry different frequencies within our body and even from a biological perspective there is truth here – which I won’t get into right now.
SOFTLY FOCUS
We are trying to softly allow for a growing awareness of what may be present in this place. It is the unfocused feelings and experiences that swirl around from a combined life time of experiences in this deep Chthonic well.
We meditated into the gap, we experience the overview and the quieting of the mind. We fought past the defenses of the unconscious which like a minotaur does not wish us to pass. This is terrain we learn to navigate over weeks, months and years of meditation. It is learned from a repeated return to the labyrinth of our mind. The feeling sense is present though, and we softly turn our awareness to this, trying to feel into the frequency that is present.
What does it feel like we might ask? What do I know of this place?
Now we are feeling softly into the frequency, the feeling that is present.
Throughout the day the weather may change in this unconscious place depending on our experiences. They may be dependent on our connection to others, our disappointments and the pressures or stressors of the world.
In effect though much of this was set in motion by the youngest parts of our unconscious which is why it is Chthonic. This means that some of the things influencing our emotions here, our feeling sense are outside of our chronological memories, they may be preverbal or they may be experiences floating around that formed a meaning in our psyche that also causes pain and suffering.
That means that these expeirences may have taken on a meaning, a message. It may be a story we tell ourselves, a way we perceive the world or others. It may be a way we experience ourselves.
These beliefs and narratives may have gotten amplified in our life through neglect, abuse or trauma – and in this place, in the gap where we have quietly dropped down, we are in the presence of this frequency and we follow it as the music continues to vibrate with the frequency.
Over time we learn to sense when the music and the frequency now fall into synchronisation. Remember we are learning to tune in to what is present, but this is more complex and subtle than a hungry tummy.
When we are very deep, and the synchronization is felt – we may no longer be aware of the room, or our body.
We are only aware of the music in the way that we are now part of the music. The music brings the feeling closer in waves, like waves lap up onto the beach bringing information softly. There is a different kind of insight here.
It brings the frequency more into focus and the feeling becomes more clear, the frequency becomes more coherent in this place as we fuse more with the music, and allow the frequency and the music to merge.
When this frequency builds to it’s more coherent phase, then the presence of the music may return. The presence of ego may come back in suddenly, gently.
We may experience the “oh” a deep realization that something has been imparted from deep within our own psyche.
The coherence breaks and this is when there is a casacade of information that has come from this place.
This is insight meditation which is deeper than than the insight that happens around that gap of ego, in the overview place. In this place we are receiving insights that unfold gently and in this place, if we continue to tune in, we receive deep chthonic revelations about some of the pain we carry, or that mistrust we harbor, or the anger or jealousy – or whatever was brought forward in this deep Chthonic place.
We are then released from our meditaiton and we can process. We turn to write about the experience, and what we felt even if it was a faint signal, or a feeling we are not sure we can identify yet. It doesn’t come all at once, it may be revealed as words or understanding slowly over hours, days, weeks, months or even years.
We keep learning to return to this chthonic place to feel into this, and some days the internal weather systems will offer something, other days we may feel the calmness after a storm has passed.
Over time we learn to sense when something is brewing even before we sit on the mat in lotus because we develop a sense of of these deeper workings of our mind from previous sessions.
Follow Your Myth 