Follow Your Myth

I have spoken in the past about my approach to meditation and my use of music to help focus the mind.  Humans have intuitively used music for thousands of years to alter our state of consciousness.  We still do this all the time. We do it in private, in our car, at concerts, at a temple, church, or other gatherings.  Music appears to weave a spell within us, and when we go to a concert or a film, it can evoke something from deep inside.  It is this evocation of something from within that is of deep interest to me because I believe it is tied to some other way of being in this world that is natural to us.  We understand this through a feeling sense. 

Perhaps we first felt this when chanting or drumming in a cave.  Thousands of years ago, we set our minds to these things, creating prayers, songs, dance, and art.  The rhythms conjured something, creating a space for something to emerge into.  What emerges is what I think of as aspects of the unconscious psyche, as reflected in states of awareness that are emotional expressions, rather than intellectual.

The meditation and music may also allow us to access, to varying degrees, what Jung referred to as the Collective Unconscious, or what Hindu or Buddhist traditions refer to as Collective Consciousness.

To my young mind, I thought that meditation meant to stop our thoughts and clear the mind. I had no idea what might be revealed if I managed to stop my thoughts altogether, but I tried and failed over and over.  As a Jungian and Depth psychotherapist, I am at a place where I am meditating and allowing something to emerge.

I hesitate to say what I think meditation brings us to definitively, but from my perspective, it is more about revealing mind, revealing psyche, by quieting ourselves and observing.  This is more complex than simply quieting the mind. 

What I’m suggesting is that in meditation, we can allow awareness of thinking, but also allow an awareness of feeling to emerge, which is far more subtle. These together are part of what makes up our psyche, yet we live in a time that suggests only one type of mind is important, the thinking mind.  This is so apparent that I don’t even like using the word mind because it implies thinking and being conscious; I prefer psyche, which encompasses both a thinking aspect and a feeling aspect of ourselves. 

In this article, I want to talk about two aspects of meditation, and at least how I approach them by collaborating with music. These two aspects of meditation are: Stilling the Mind, which relates to thinking, and Insight Meditation, which relates to feeling.

COLLABORATING WITH MUSIC IN MEDITATION

Before I talk about stilling the mind and insight, I want to talk briefly again about collaborating with music in meditation.  

I often approach my meditation with the goal of stillness first.  Often, I choose quiet meditation music like Peaceful Journeys; this music evokes calmness in a non-directional way. The songs meet me where I am at.  I imagine using this music much like one may use a mantra.  If we repeat a mantra to get us out of our thinking, busy mind, then in a similar way,  what I do is what I call *attaching* my mind to this music.  

I simply allow myself to let the music guide me downward out of my busy mind. I parachute out of the sympathetic nervous system into the parasympathetic nervous system.  This music does this for me because it reminds me of waves on the ocean, and as I gently descend, it seems to gather some force; it amplifies some of the feeling tones deep within my psyche. 

This amplification of feeling tones in my psyche is somewhat difficult to explain.  A way to explain is to use an analogy of a storm.  

ANALOGY OF THE STORM

Understand that we always have emotions moving around in our psyche; this includes our entire body and mind.

I imagine emotions moving like subtle weather patterns, they are currents of emotions building and moving throughout the day and night.  If the clouds and winds of a hurricane building over the ocean are the storm of thoughts, then the emotions are like the heated waters of the ocean; they provide the energy source for what is above.  This is like our psyche, the ocean is the unconscious emotions, the winds are the thought patterns above, and there is a direct connection between them always.

I refer to these energies as fields of awareness or fields of emotions. 

My goal in meditation is to understand that the Self that observes the thoughts and works to still them, also observes the feeling tone that is becoming present as I descend into deeper levels of meditation, where those fields of emotions are.  This is done indirectly, as if we are simply allowing something to emerge, not engaging our thinking about what is emerging.  

I know that’s confusing!  

In stilling the mind, we calm the thoughts.  In insight meditation, we allow the emotional energy to emerge (which requires no thought). 

The music can touch into these feeling tones and bring them forth; it may amplify a feeling of anxiety, loss, love, or gratitude, for instance.  When it does, I say that something may become more dominant or cohesive, and the field emerges.

We don’t think about this field of awareness because we become the field of awareness. We do something that is natural for humans, we feel. 

SHAMATHA:  STILLING THE MIND:  

For Buddhists, the first function of meditation is referred to as shamatha, which is stilling the mind or calm abiding.  In my earliest years, I believed that eliminating thoughts was the only goal of meditation, and I think one may be forgiven for thinking this.   

This first function of Buddhism, shamatha, aligns with my sense of meditation from a Depth perspective.  We are working to drop down out of the stormy thinking mind and descend inward. 

STILLING THE MIND

Here is the method for how I approach this stage of meditation, where I am working to quiet the thinking mind.

• Intention: Sitting in lotus, eyes closed, I get comfortable.  I may cover myself with a blanket to focus inward.
• Stillness of Body:  I work to quiet my body first.  I eliminate fussing or figeting, inviting “stillness of body” and “stillness of mind.”
• Mantra:  I may repeat, “I am stilling my body.  I am stilling my mind.   I am dropping down.”
• Breath:  My breath is not forced.  When I breathe in I may invite in “connection” and breathe out “trust.”
• Still vision:  To still my thoughts I may focus my gaze under closed eyes on one thing.  A focused vision, with eyes closed, eliminates wandering mind.
• Attaching Mind:  As I deepen my stillness, I bring attention to the music and attach my mind, like stepping into a gentle stream.

EXPLANATION

So much of what I have experienced with meditation in recent years has followed the stillness of my body. The less I fidget, the more I can drop down.  I find that the mantras that I may at times say help to focus me away from thoughts.  This is not a strict thing I am doing, but it may be something I return to.  

My mantras may vary.  At times, “I am stilling my mind” works well.  I have spontaneously meditated with a mantra in the past: “I am the dreamer, I am the dream.”  I can’t say that this worked better, but it has a way of turning attention inward with intention. Typically, when I use words like “Connection” or “trust,” I am trying to meditate with intention toward a state of awareness rather than just dropping down.   

Perhaps the most difficult thing to explain is attaching one’s mind to music.  I think of this as collaborating with music.  If there is a sense of touching into something bigger than the Self, this is where much of the experience can be enhanced.  The music becomes that stream we enter that IS bigger, as though it is inviting us to connect with that consciousness that is bigger than ourselves, while simultaneously guiding us inward.   

INSOMNIA

I have found that this technique for stilling the mind works if I wake at night and my mind latches onto some thought train.  I do many of the steps above and have found the focusing of vision with closed eyes is particularly effective for allowing dream imagery to start coming up.

VIPASSANA:  INSIGHT MEDITATION

For Buddhists, the words Vipassana or Vipashyana are translated to mean insight or deep looking.   This level of meditation is where the insight comes from but from my perspective this is not done from *thinking* through something, but letting something emerge from deep within.

In the quietness that follows a meditation is where insight may follow.

This is when I open my eyes and may have an “ah” moment. The emotional field that may have become coherent dissipates and in its absence we can feel more clarity, or as though information is reaching the surface to consciousness. The music itself seems to release us as the song reaches its conclusion. This is the time when we are collecting ourselves, rolling up our blanket or mat and then jotting down some of the feelings that may have felt present.

We may ask ourselves a question as we are rolling up our mat, did something emerge from those chaotic feelings in the ocean of my unconscious?

In using music to drop beneath the active thinking mind, we are working to let something emerge from this ocean of emotion, but this takes some time and patience. We are working to quiet the stormy thoughts in the shamatha, and feel into what is present in vipassana.

In turning toward the feelings deep within I am trying to explore other ways of knowing in our psyche. To turn off the thoughts so we can reduce reactivity is a worthy goal, but understanding why we may have reactivity allows us to know ourselves more fully.

Again, this is done a little bit at a time, and that is why the practice of meditation and showing up is important. We are trying to slowly attune to these fields within ourselves so that we can understand ourselves more deeply, and over time this is where insight comes.

PROCESSING AFTER THE MEDITATION

It is after the meditation that I believe that waves of insight may continue to emerge. We can make space for this by jotting down some notes, and then journaling. We may write about feeling that was present, and if we stay with it we are now allowing the feeling to transform into written words and understanding, insight.

In my experience the more we meditate the more we can become attuned to these inner states where fields of awareness are expressing something from deep within. The expression of emotions is transformed into a wave of information when it comes, and we have to be ready to ride this wave of information when it arrives.

The meditation itself is not the entire process, it is part of the process and we may process it more by journaling. We may wake at night and become more aware that the feeling that emerged in meditation also emerged in a dream. When I wake from a dream I ask myself, “what was the feeling present?” I believe the feeling present, is an indicator of the field that became coherent while we slept. I understand that when I wake up it is because the field collapsed and the feeling was expressed.

Over time we may feel this overlap of the field that is present in a dream, with a field that is present when we meditate. This is because in slipping into sleep we are experiencing what is present in the unconscious. We can easily see that in sleep we have in fact relaxed the presence of our conscious mind and in this the unconscious naturally emerges and expresses.

If simply quieting the mind and the nervous system is the goal of meditation then shamatha is most likely where someone will stay focused and there is good work that is done at this level of meditation. For those wishing to understand more of themselves and the storm of emotions that drives a storm of thoughts, then vipassana, insight meditation is the direction.

When we can stay with what emerges in meditation and learn to be with it, then we can learn to ride the waves of information that are being expressed. We do this by developing awareness of the feelings in our psyche as they emerge and inviting them teach us what we need to know.