Finding the Center Within: The Healing Way of Mindfulness Meditation. (35 page)

sense the heavy weight of the door, though its hinges operate smoothly, easily. As the door opens I walk into the sunlit courtyard before me. There is a colonnade around the perimeter, and at the far end, a glowing figure in white, with a long beard, thin, seated in full lotus posture, surrounded by flowers, eyes half-closed, smiling. Though he does not move I feel him beckon me to approach. Instinctively, I remove my shoes. I am on holy ground. I approach the wise one. While I bask in the warm sunlight of this courtyard and of the wise one’s presence, the grass beneath my feet is cool, damp, and refreshing. I feel each step, then sit on a mat before the wise one. His eyes open fully, though they retain their inward quality. They are full of love and peace. The love is both impersonal and personal at the same time, both a universal love and a love for me alone. Silently, he bids me to ask my question, remaining silent for a moment after I speak, mindfully drinking in what I have asked, then he says . . . [then write down what comes to you].

It is important that the figure you imagine is a loving one. If you encounter other feelings from this person, feelings of judgment, anger, or even playfulness, experiment with some different imagery. Ask for someone else to appear. You probably are not in contact with that aspect of yourself that can help you—in Jungian terms, the wise old man or the wise old woman.

After a while, you may not need the imagery to contact your wise inner self. If your attention becomes unfocused or you are experiencing especially stressful times, you can always go back to it. Listen to Your Wise Inner Self

What might you hear from your guide? This depends on your need and the situation for which you are seeking guidance. And your guide may be a very different character from someone else’s. Some guides have quirky personalities. Some are talkative, others say little. But we can share a few generalities from our own experience, and a few caveats as well.

Perhaps you have had this kind of experience: A friend of yours comes to you with a problem. Say it’s a relationship problem. After lay-09 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 10:02 AM Page 227

Sensing the trap of giving an opinion, you say something truly banal, like, “I think you’ve got to follow your own heart.” Your friend gets angry at you. How could you tell her such a thing? How could you dispense such cheap, trite advice? Obviously, you just do not understand her pain and the complexity of her situation.

A few days later, your friend calls. She has seen her therapist, and she is feeling better now. You ask what the therapist told her, and she tells you that the therapist said she needed to follow her own heart. You try to remind her that this is the very thing you had said, and which she found dramatically unhelpful a few days before. Your friend stoutly denies that you ever said such a thing. What is going on here? One thing is that therapists study timing. They develop a sense of when advice is likely to be received and when it will be difficult for the client to hear it. They don’t always get it right, either. But then they know how to process these “empathic failures”

with a client. But there is another reason why this could happen. It has to do with
preparedness to hear.
We may be more receptive to hearing some truths from our therapist than from our friends, because we have invested a certain role and a certain kind of expectation in the therapeutic relationship. Inner guide journaling prepares us to receive these truths. The advice you hear from your guide may sound cliché or trite if you told a friend about it. It may indeed be of the caliber of “Follow your heart.”

The skeptic, or the skeptical aspect of each of us, may have some doubts about this process when your guide seems to come out with such truisms. But the difference is that the contemplative process of journaling has prepared you to receive a truth that you could not have heard before. The soil of your psyche has been plowed, fertilized, and cleared of rocks and debris. Now the seed is received into the soft ground. But without this preparation, the seed cannot take root. Furthermore, consider what makes something cliché. Things are often cliché, not because they are not true, but because they are profoundly true though overused. Take the slogan “One day at a time.”

Said at the right time, to “prepared soil,” this can be both wise and helpful. But if said in an unthinking, reflexive way, as a kind of BandAid for another’s pain or indeed as a way of distancing from the other’s pain, it can be incredibly unhelpful or even destructive. Our experience suggests that guides can talk in ways that might 09 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 10:02 AM Page 228

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sound trite at times, but that we usually do not experience them as trite. In fact, these truths often captured something we needed to hear or needed to remind ourselves of.

You might be looking for very specific advice from your guide. For example, if your problem is money, you may hope your guide will say,

“Take everything you own and hock it and invest in XYZ stock.” Or if your problem is loneliness, you might hope for an answer like, “Go to the Walgreens down on the corner and smile at the first person you meet there.” We have never had this happen. And in fact, while we do not exclude the possibility that there could be truth in such oracular pronouncements, we suggest skepticism about them, particularly if the advice is risky. Use common sense.

More likely what you will get from your guide is an apt summation of the circumstances you find yourself in and the issues involved. This can be very accurate and bring you to a new level of understanding of your present circumstances and how they relate to ongoing life themes and issues. Or at times a guide may refocus your attention. All of this can be very helpful, even if it does not yield an immediate solution.

Watch for bodily shifts as you write or reread the message from your guide. Shifts in our understanding are often connected with long sighs or changes in the felt sense of the problem. These give a clue that something important has changed in your understanding. Patiently Untie the Knots

A major life issue is like a large, tight knot. A difficult knot must be tugged at here, pulled on there, gradually loosened, bit by bit, until it unravels. Then at some point, the solution emerges. Issues reaching back into childhood or involving years to reach their present state of complexity are seldom resolved in a quick way. Instant answers are suspect.

You may recall the legend of Alexander the Great and the Gordian knot—a knot that no one had been able to untie. Alexander simply drew his sword and cut it right through. Problem solved. Some problems are like this. If we are not caught in a certain cognitive set—in this case, that knots are something to untie rather than cut—simple solutions will sometimes emerge. Yet for the most part, this is not the way 09 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 10:02 AM Page 229

Beverly once had the privilege of clinical supervision by the noted family therapist Braulio Montalvo. In one supervisory session, Montalvo crumpled a piece of paper loosely and threw it on the floor. Everyone watched as the paper unfolded itself, slowly, bit by bit. The point was clear: Progress in therapy, or any significant process of human growth, is often a slow and gentle unfolding. It cannot be rushed. Dialogue with Significant People

Sometimes when writing in your journal, you may think of a particular person, whether from your present life or from your past. Or you might find yourself at times just daydreaming about someone, giving him a piece of your mind or talking something over with him. This indicates unfinished business with this person. Your journal presents a special opportunity to bring this business to completion.

One way to do this is to engage this person in an inner dialogue in your journal. As usual, begin in quietness. Breathe in and out. Invoke the feelings and images associated with that individual. Touch the felt sense of these issues. Try to come as much as possible from a centered place, where you perceive your feelings, whatever they are—

hurt, anger, fear, whatever you feel—but where these feelings are gently, lovingly held and contained. Then write what you have to say to this person.

The next step is a little harder to do but also more rewarding. This involves putting yourself in the situation of the other person, and hearing what he has to say in response. Don’t worry whether you correctly infer what he would actually say. Ultimately, this exercise is more about you than about the other person. It is about the part of yourself that this other person represents. And in this sense, there is no way you can get it wrong. Just let the other person speak, telling you his side of things. If you have some trouble putting yourself into the mindset of the other person, get up from where you were writing as yourself and sit somewhere else to write as the other. The physical act of moving helps you separate from your own perhaps all-too-familiar perspective and enter a different one.

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After you take in the other person’s point of view, carefully, lovingly notice your reactions. Does it trigger more anger in you? Do you find yourself defending something? Whatever it is, be with those feelings, and then begin to respond in your journal to what the other has said, perhaps changing your seat again as a way to activate a shift in perspective. You then simply proceed in this fashion until the process seems to come to a natural halt. As a final step, return to quietness again, breathing gently in and out, and with love and acceptance, read the dialogue over to yourself again. Try to see each side not so much as right or wrong, but as different perspectives, each partial, incomplete, and distorted by the person’s own needs and issues. Doing this may trigger more feelings that you want to dialogue about, which you can then pursue if you wish. Or you may feel that you have gained a greater degree of resolution in your relationship with this individual than you had before. This is an indication that it is time to stop the dialogue process, at least for now.

Resolution is always relative and to some extent incomplete. There is always more that could be said. For this reason, you never have to feel that you must go on and on until you reach perfect peace about an issue. A process orientation is called for, a willingness to live with some incompleteness. When other life issues become more pressing and these occupy your attention, you have done enough with this one for the time being. Respect the flow of your own psychological energy. When your attention shifts to something else, it is time to move on to that issue and leave this one for now. You can always return to it later if you wish.

The Other Person Is You

In such a dialogue, you are ultimately dealing with
yourself
more than with the other person. If you are in conflict with another person, in this kind of dialogue you are dealing with the
internal aspect
of that conflict. Another way to say this is that you are dealing with a conflict in yourself, between different aspects of yourself, or with what that person
rep-
resents
to you more than the actual human being. For example, you may discover through this kind of process that at least part of your problem with another person is connected with ongoing life issues or themes that are part of a negative schema. In this way, your fight with Kathy is 09 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 10:02 AM Page 231

If the person you are writing about is in your present life in an ongoing way, your journal work may help to deepen or heal that relationship. However, this is not always the case, and at other times, resolution may not be possible. Yet again, you might find that interactions with this other person no longer affect you so deeply, though the outer relationship is more or less the same. There are many possible outcomes. But by honoring this material with your attention and mindfulness, you vastly increase the odds of finding a more satisfying way to deal with this person, and even more important, with the issues this person represents in your life.

Write Your Life Chapters

There are very many ways to use a journal. Some people choose journaling as their main tool for mindful living, for avoiding what Plato called the unexamined life. Such individuals journal religiously. Others will journal more or less frequently, depending on need. When life is chugging along without major difficulties, they seldom think of 09 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 10:02 AM Page 232

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