Now a days, these last years, but even more this last time since the start of the intensification of the contemplative life, I get almost excited when coming into contact with a trauma or wound. This means new progress has been made, and it provides raw material for the alchemical process, so to speak. Or more plainly - it means healing can take place and level of well-being rise a notch. Often I rush into it, that is, I watch it in meditation, try to get into contact with the underlying emotions and memories and make peace with it.
Often, I will think, when the emotions surface and are about to leave, that I must be a bit weird looking forward to this, because becoming free of them often means reliving, or at least being in contact with, the emotions, so that they can be let go of or assimilated. But the peak of this process is always truly non-pleasant, and requires some kind of back-burner equanimity. Or remembrance and faith. That this is some thing I chose to enter into in order to heal myself a bit. Because it is not necessarily so, that the memory or emotions surface during a meditation session, but it can come later too.
I hope that many of you will recognize at least something of this, but I suppose that each of us will use different words to describe it, and might even have a different way of dealing with this kind of stuff.
I also suppose that dealing with this kind of past wounds is at least one way of understanding the concept of karma. Especially now that I have come to experience that sometimes these traumas seem to come from previous lifetimes.
I'm quite used to the process described above, but today I experienced what I think was more of a root cause, than an actual trauma. Because it did not follow the usual process. I was doing laying down meditation and incorporating the new way of meditating on the body that I described in previous posts. I started with taste/stomach and then moved up to smell/lungs, but after that I noticed that I need to meditate upon the rib-cage too, the externals of the body surrounding the lungs because I often feel a bit uncomfortable there. I decide where to go next by keeping the bliss growing and glowing and noticing what in any of the four corners of mindfulness that makes ... resistance. What is not yet blissful. Often it will be parts of the body resisting the breath, or, of course, the graspings or aversions of the psyche.
This time I noticed a heavy weight upon my upper chest, that also put tension and resistance in the diaphragm because of the pressure I suppose. The body is in many ways a 'closed' mechanical system so tension will often propagate. I was in meditation and could without trouble spot that the origin of this resistance was in my soul rather than my body, and it was the feeling of 'not being good enough'. This supposedly came from a traumatic childhood with abandonment issues and stuff, but I also guess that it can happen to pretty much anybody, as most families and societies are dysfunctional one way or another, and could propagate such an attitude to a young child in many different ways.
Any way, this realization was very undramatic and the tension lifted. I was a bit amazed that I could actually find such a deep psychological issue and 'work it'. It seems like one of those things that I thought was carved into my soul and I would have to live with. But now I threw it away from me like an old used blanket, at least during meditation.
I do not care to worry about whether it will come back, or rush to implement a new day to day psychology with all the 'software patches' implemented in my psychology to work around such an issue removed. I have tried to work things out at that level before, and the results are often questionable. What matters, and what works, is that I can lift off this burden again and again, organically, when going deeper into the bliss, and in that way associate - that is, 'hard (or wet) wire' - freedom from that issue with the ever deepening bliss and joy of the first (to fourth) Jhana.
This way, even the deepest wounds and bugs of the soul will not get primary attention, but their resolve will always be a by-product of some thing very nice, that is, meditation. The contemplative practice will go on, and will be the joyful driving force in the healing. This way the tendency of making past trauma into new fixations and just make worse complexes and neurosis out of it all is avoided.
This turned out to be a long post about the bridge between 'psychology' and deep meditation, among other things. What I had intended to write about, was the astonishing fact that such a deep wound as 'not being good enough (to ... x,y,z)' was 1) actually found in a concrete way 2) lifted off 3) without any drama. This was surprising and joyful.
Thinking about it post-writing, maybe it is not a root cause, but rather a consequence of traumatic experiences in the past, that is why it was easy to get rid of and did not come with a memory. It was something learned, and integrated into ones sense-of-self, from, and in relation to, the world. "If I am treated like this, I must not be good enough to be treated better." Or something.
