In this essay, I describe a meditation technique that I frequently used some months ago, but which I've dropped since then in favour of a more relaxed let it flow-approach.
One of the main tenets of Buddhist psychology is that our mental life is in large part determined by two forces: craving and aversion. Craving is holding on to a current pleasurable experience or trembling in agitated anticipation for the next one. Aversion is rejecting some unpleasant experience, current or anticipated.
In concentration meditation, we come into contact with craving and aversion pretty immediately. When you focus on your breath and some thought pulls you away, in my experience, there is always an underlying sense of either craving or aversion that has generated the thought. The standard instruction is that when you catch yourself thinking, you return directly to the breath. This works well sometimes, other times you come back to the breath for two seconds before being pulled away again. In my experience, this is because you haven’t attended to the underlying craving or aversion yet. When you drop the thought, this underlying force generates a new one right away because it has hardly lost any of its power in the meantime.
There is one solution that I found works well for me, though. If, after dropping the thought, you focus on the sensations of your body, this will be unpleasant in some subtle or maybe not so subtle way. If you’re experiencing craving, your mind will not want to focus on the body but instead focus on the pleasurable experience which is (always?) some thought. Maybe you had been lost in some pleasurable reverie or you had been planning to do some important thing later on or you were pondering some intriguing intellectual problem. Whatever this object might be, if it was pleasurable, it will be unpleasant to drop it and this sense of unpleasantness can be felt in the body as a sensation after the thought has been dropped. The same goes for aversion. If you’ve been lost in angry thoughts about someone and you drop that thought, you now find yourself with a whole lot of unpleasant body sensations; so unpleasant that your mind would like to just leap back into thinking about that someone again.
In both cases, I have found it helpful to try and isolate the unpleasant feeling in my body, to locate it as precisely as possible and to investigate it in detail. This is a very counterintuitive thing for our minds to do because the sense of unpleasantness will increase in the short term. Viewed from a distance so to say, the sensation seems solid, unpleasant, and static. But when you zoom in, it becomes apparent that it is somehow very fluent and made up of smaller sensations that are very short-lived but, most importantly, the sensation stops being unpleasant. When you focus on this sensation for long enough, it slowly dies down and your mind starts to become calmer and calmer. After this sensation has disappeared and you have come back to the breath, you will find that you can stay here much longer until a disturbing thought arises. When it does, it will probably not have much strength.
But what if it does? It can happen that you deconstructed the sensation of craving or aversion in the way described above, you have come back to the breath and you find yourself back with your old thoughts in the course of seconds. Then I would go back to the underlying sensation and investigate it further. When this happens to me, I find that I hadn’t deconstructed it thoroughly enough. It is tempting to stop this process of deconstruction as soon as the sensation has stopped to be grossly unpleasant. But this might not suffice. I think it’s helpful to deconstruct it until it (almost) disappears. Maybe the process of deconstruction makes you notice that there is in fact a second sensation in a different spot that likewise has the characteristics of craving or aversion. My advice would be to finish decomposing the first sensation and only then move on, even when the second sensation feels much stronger and more urgent. If you don’t finish your first sensation before moving on, it could grow again in the background as you start deconstructing the second one. As you are midway through your second sensation, the first one all of a sudden seems to be much more urgent and you switch back and forth between them without getting any real work done, at least that is a pitfall I have observed in my own practice and it still happens if I don’t pay enough attention.
When you investigate the sensation, it is important to strike a balance between being too aggressive and being too passive. When I first found out that you can deconstruct your negative sensations in this way, I focused the fuck out of them to make them go away as fast and effectively as possible. This approach is bound to fail, it further agitates the mind and also, you’re not really seeing what is there to see because you do it with the aim of getting rid of whatever there would be to see. Neither do you want to be too passive because then you’re not doing any of the required work, your brain will quickly get bored and get back to the much more interesting experience of thinking. So, you need to be a bit vigorous to make progress but also passive enough to observe whatever there is to observe. How do you know that you are doing it right? When you are too aggressive, you will notice that your body tenses up somewhere, most probably in the muscles surrounding your eyes. When you are too passive, the sensation will not change at all. So as long as you’re moving forward into the sensation or as long as it is still decomposing into new micro-sensations without you tensing up, you’re doing it right.
Sometimes the sensation that is underlying the thought is so strong so that when you try to deconstruct it you immediately slip away into thinking. What has helped me here is the noting technique as taught by Shinzen Young for example. You basically observe your mind or some part of it like your mind’s representation of your body. Then you give a label to each sensation as it arises by saying the label out loud inwardly. The labels I use are “see” for visual sensations, “hear” for acoustic sensations, “feel” for all other emotional and somatic sensations and “thinking” for thoughts. Some people don’t use the label “thinking” because our thoughts are always made up of sensations that belong to one of the other sense modalities. For example, these people will inwardly say the label “hear” when they think in sounds such as inner chatter etc. You can also refine your labels but for me personally, these four labels prove to be quite sufficient. Importantly, you don’t direct your attention to this or that sensation. You stand still, so to say, and let them come to you and then you label them. Try to go for one sensation per second at first. You’ll get quicker over time but don’t push it too hard as this will make you tense up. You will find that there are a lot of sensations in between the ones that you manage to label but don’t worry about that. Your aim shouldn’t be to attain completeness but rather to establish a nice flow of attention and to let it go wherever it wants to go without getting caught up in thinking or getting stuck to any particular one sensation.
Now, when you find yourself with a particularly strong emotion such as anger and you don’t manage to focus on and deconstruct the core of the anger, just go into noting mode. The body will now move your attention to the sensation that most urgently “needs to be felt”. In other words, you mind is moving your attention on the most intense sensation. When you label it, you feel it’s emotionally charged quality just for long enough to make it calm down a little bit but not for too long for it to be unbearable. As you’ll move on to the next sensation in a second, you divide the process of deconstruction into bite-sized one-second-long bits each of which you can handle. Still, this requires a lot of attention because the pull to get back to thinking is so strong but nonetheless for me this is easier than direct deconstruction.
You can also use these techniques in your daily life, and I found this immensely helpful as many instances of craving and aversion are not triggered when you sit alone in a still room on your cushion with your eyes closed. In myself I have observed some recurring situations in which my head gets racy, in which I get agitated and find myself doing things or saying things that I wouldn’t have done or said in a more settled state of mind. For me, these situations include eating, wasting time on YouTube, learning, reading, and walking for a long time. As I am learning some vocabulary for instance, I observe that I am focused at first but then my mind continually slips away. Just as in the on-cushion meditation, I can then observe my body, isolate the sensation of craving or aversion, and then get back to work with a much calmer and more concentrated mind. It might be necessary to do this again in ten minutes, but I have observed that this distraction becomes less frequent over time. The same goes for reading texts, especially dense texts for a university class. For the longest time I have thought that my mind would just get tired after a while and of course this is not entirely wrong. Reading dense texts is exhausting. But I found that my concentration actually decreases much more importantly due to the unattended sensations of craving and aversion that build up in my body as I am reading and that keep pulling my attention away. This constant struggle against their pull, this constant bringing the mind back is actually much more straining than reading the text itself. When I notice the sensation now in any of the above-mentioned situations (and in many more), I basically stop doing whatever I’m doing, I freeze, close my eyes, investigate the sensations and then move on. It might seem a bit weird to others so don’t get caught. (;
When you have meditated on your craving and aversion for a while, you’ll notice them much earlier when they are still present only in a very subtle form. My hunch is that as we get better and better, we will at some point be able to recognise craving and aversion already when they have just barely come into existence and deconstruct them before they’ve had the time to burgeon.
One word of warning: The situation in which we are most strongly triggered by craving and aversion is obviously that of social interaction. Though there is surely much to discover here, I personally try to avoid deconstructing sensations when talking to someone and I stop my mind when I catch it doing this. I don’t know why but deconstructing your experience has a very destabilising effect in this situation, at least this is true for me. If you manage to do it without the conversation derailing, I think you’ve just hit a gold vein of personal growth. But I can’t do it. And there is enough to be done in this situation anyway. Listening to others, saying what you really mean, being mindful of your reactions to their words are all essential activities that require a high degree of focus and that keep our meditative skills engaged to the fullest. So for me there is really no need to go into deconstruction mode although it is very tempting and I still can’t always resist the urge.
A second word of warning: There is a phenomenon called “spiritual bypassing” in which you basically use meditative techniques in order to avoid your personal problems. How does it work? When you are able to reliably deconstruct your experience, it is just easier to break your negative emotions and thoughts into tiny bits as opposed to going out and changing the real-world cause of your negativity. I’m not suggesting that changing the world is always a good idea, in fact, it is pathological to think that the world needs to change when the problem is really some unresolved conflict inside. But you can easily imagine a situation in which deconstruction is not the way. Let’s say you’ve had a fight with a friend, and you’ve said some things in the heat of the argument that you didn’t mean to say. You now find yourself alone with a bad conscience because you know you’ve wronged them, but you are also struggling with your pride to go and apologize. Clearly the right thing to do here is to get over yourself, assume responsibility for your faults and clear out the problem. Deconstructing your experience in this situation is an incredibly effective mechanism of psychological avoidance and we must all keep an eye on not abusing the technique for this purpose.
I find this to be an extremely powerful technique to develop strong concentration because at some point you will be so good at deconstructing your craving and aversion that they will not pull you away from the object of concentration anymore. They lose their grip the more often you do it. Also, it is the ultimate technique of changing dysfunctional patterns of behaviour in our daily life because craving and aversion are at the root of all our small and big addictions. Surely you have already found yourself in this situation: You want to stop a certain behaviour, but the forces of habit are just too strong for you to do it. The force of habit is nothing else but craving and aversion. If you catch yourself being triggered, if you manage to deconstruct the underlying sensations, you will also be able to refrain from the behaviour and the more you do this, the weaker the underlying trigger gets. This is a very concrete way in which meditation could change our lives and I wish us all luck on the way.
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