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Some helpful things to say to people
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Some helpful things to say to people
19. One kind of helpful thing to tell someone has to do with letting one's feelings be felt (as in No. 13). It helps to assure people that it's OK to have their feelings - at least long enough to feel what they are. The same is true of needs, desires, ways of seeing things. There are various reasons people stay clear of their feelings. Here are some spec1fic things to say:
20. " Feelings and actions aren't the same thing. You can let yourself feel whatever you do feel, there’s room in you for seeing what's there, then when it’s clear you can still decide what you choose to do. " (Some people avoid their feelings because they think they would then necessarily act some way they are afraid to act. )
21. " It's OK to need. Trying not to have a need you have makes a lot of trouble. There it is, you need that. Even if you can't get it, don’t fight needing it. "
22. " It isn't like just wallowing around it what you feel. Let yourself feel whatever is there and expect it to resolve, to open up, to get un-hung up. "
23. " Weird states are different from feelings, it helps to move out of them toward life and ordinary situations. Weird states may not ease by getting further into them. What in your living is making things bad, now? Can you sort of move forward, both your body and your sense of things? What happens if you lean forward into living, instead of laying back? " (But you shouldn't ultimately decide whether to go into, or out of, anything; he should decide. He may need someone who is willing to go with him into some weird things. Anything is safer in gentle company, than alone. ) If his life is now intolerable, or his relationships are bad or non-existent, help him arrange what he will do to change or find new ones.
24. " To change something or to do something that's been too hard, we have to find small steps, some first and second step you can actually do. What would that be? " (Then make suggestions if he has none, but don’t settle on anything unless he feels with some elation that he actually can do the first step. )
25. " Put away for a minute what they think and what they said, and let's see what you feel about it, how you see it. ” (Some people are so into what somebody else is thinking, or what they have been told, that they need help getting to what they themselves think and feel, or how they really perceive the situation. )
Other ways to be helpful, other than centering on the other person's trouble
26a. You can talk about yourself, your day, what other things you are into, work, dance, anything, also private things, ways you feel about you, or light things - anything you feel like saying from you. You need not always try to get into the other person's heavy things. Of course, if he is in the midst of speaking from them, or indicates that he would like to, you would then not refuse. Also, the person should know that you would welcome hearing what really troubles him. But there will be times when it will be a relief to the troubled person to find that you can just talk of you, and other things.
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26b. Silent peaceful times are also a great thing. It is good to lie on the grass, to do Yoga, go for a peaceful walk, just being together, without any tension of waiting for something to be said.
26c. You can get a very freaked person to talk (or do) something he is competent in. For example, sewing, music, or some subject he is into. This helps him sense himself OK for a while, and lets you respond to him as to a competent person. It gives him the opportunity to be responded to positively and for good reason.
It is often after such times, after having been able to just be with you, that a person might feel like taking you into some of his heavy things, and then you would be willing if it feels all right to you, then, to stay longer.
Two items about very freaked people
27. If the person says a lot of strange stuff you can't understand, then maybe does say one or two things that make sense, and then goes on with strange stuff, stick with the one or two things and repeat them again and again many times. They are your point of contact, and by repeating them (if nothing further comes) you are retaining and remaking contact. It is all right, then, to keep saying these things, with silence or other attempts in-between, even for an hour.
28. If the person says stuff that can't be true, respond to the feeling that's in it rather than to the facts or non-facts. For example, “The Martians took everything I had away from me… " You can get the feeling here. Say, " Somebody took what was yours? You got robbed some way or messed over? "
Betty Lou Beck, Self-healing meditation
I am interested in symbol meditation as a powerful healing technique, but usually there is a leader who chooses the symbols and guides the process. How do you go about doing this for yourself so that it can be a daily self-healing meditation? This paper will describe a way to use image focusing (Reference 1) to get a symbol to meditate on. Briefly, first you focus to find out what you are feeling in the moment, then you use this present feeling as the context in which to ask, " And what can I give myself right now? ", " What do I need right now to heal me? " The answering image that comes up is the symbol to meditate on.
The role of the body is central to this process. Lowen (Reference 2) describes how we respond to painful feelings with muscular tension which blocks the free flow of energy, both physical and psychic. Feeling flows on energy, and energy flows when feelings are released. Symbols can act as bridges to facilitate the flow of energy between the unconscious and the conscious. First, energy must be flowing for the healing symbol to come up from the unconscious, and then, once conscious, the symbol can speak directly back to your energy and transform your feeling. So it helps to begin with warm-up exercises to open the energy vortices and to release the neck, which is the physical bridge between unconscious and conscious contents. Then relax and quiet your breathing (another bridge), and center down into your body. As you breathe feel the space inside and notice any blockages or tensions. As you relax notice where there is resistance. It helps to
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focus wherever you feel deadness or tension (or the stirrings of movement), because information is there about what you are feeling. Otherwise you can focus at your body’s center, your abdomen.
Focus down on the diffuse " felt body-sense" of your general background feeling, and from within this ask, " What am I feeling right now? " Let the immediate, superficial, already-known answer go, and wait with a kind of passive concentration for a clearer, more distinct feeling to surface from inside this. If words come, sometimes they are just right. If so you should be able to feel concretely what they mean. If you can’t, then let them go and wait for more, because that usually means they weren’t quite " it. " When they are it you feel them. Or you can go back down and wait for an image to form, a picture of what you’re feeling. For some people, an image comes visually clear and detailed. For others, it may be semi-visual, i. e., the basic elements are all there, but visually it is fuzzy. For still others the picture itself may be composed of words. If an image comes, focus on it, and see how it makes you feel. See if it holds the feeling-sense of the whole, is a container for all the nuances of what you are feeling. If not, continue to focus and wait for it to form itself wholly and fully. Keep checking back and forth between the image-sense and the feeling-sense until your whole psyche says, " Yes, that's it. " At this point you may have an image that you can’t even explain exactly right off, but it feels full, and you can focus into it and read from it what you are feeling.
Now, holding this image or feeling-sense, ask, " What do I need? ", " What can I give myself right now that will heal me? " Wait in the same patient way for an answer that feels right, that your whole psyche responds to. The image-answer may come up as a static or dynamic symbol, in the form of words, a gesture, a current of energy, a scene, a color, picture, object, etc. And when you meditate on this you can shift your feeling-energy and heal it.
Example One: When I focused there was a vague feeling of excitement, and mixed in with this were flashes of fear. Then an image came of a vast dark plain with fires burning in the distance all around the edges. From this I could feel how the situation I was in was both beautiful and dangerous and I felt shaky in both an excited way and a scared way. When I asked, " What do I need? " I got an image of myself throwing a handful of pollen on the ground a little ways in front of me. The pollen lit up my path, and I took a step and threw some more and then took another step. There was a sense of " staying with myself, step by step. " As I meditated on this image I experienced a calming and centering in which the excitement was still present, but I was not thrown off by the fear.
When you focus you might experience an absence of energy some place as a clue, or a sense of stuck energy that wants to move.
Example Two: Once when I focused I caught a sense of wanting something very much, but not knowing what, and a feeling of anxiety about it. Simultaneously I experienced this as something moving in from behind my belly and out my solar plexus over and over again. And the image of this was of a kind of fish that comes half-way up out of its hole, catches food, and then zips down again. In this example, the image and the feeling were accompanied by a sense of the configuration in my body energy. What I needed was to stay with this
up-and-down-again movement, and doing so I noticed that it never made it up to my heart. This brought a realization of how I was lacking work that I really loved. So, as I continued to meditate on the movement, I let it move up to my heart and open it to the possibility of finding nourishing work.
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Example Three: When I focused there was a feeling of fear about my unborn baby. What I needed came up as " courage" with a particular sense of need
in my upper back. When I focused there an image came of a beetle which
turned into a gold bug, which turned into a scarab; a sense of " carrying the sun on my back, " " carrying my son on my back”, with an accompanying feeling of the courage I needed. " Carrying the sun on my back" was the image which brought the real feeling of courage with it, so I meditated on this and let it shift my fear energy and heal it.
There is fluidity here. The image leads to a feeling which then leads to another image, on and on, clearer and clearer. Holding the healing image together with the feeling and letting them infuse each other is what allows a new, freer energy to flow. Not only can the symbol be fresh each time, but the meditation process is likely to be different, too. You can treat the image like a dream - become the sense of it, let it take over your body and thoughts, let it develop freely round your need. One time I experienced needing water, like a fountain inside to heal myself, and my meditation took the form of a detailed scene of a rushing spring-thaw creek with everything in the stream coming alive, coming into movement, in the water, on the surface, along the banks, in the forest alongside.
Another time I was experiencing an intense but diffuse sense of anxiety and fear. From out of this came a feeling of cutting myself off from my own power to act and move - a whole sense of hiding. Then I felt how this part of me didn’t have my best interest at heart, and that there was another part of me that did. Gradually the scattered and vague contents of these two sides gathered themselves into images; one, the hider, as a horseshoe crab, and the other, the healer, as a shaman, and I let myself feel out the characteristics of each part and the fullness of the image as it related to my feelings and my body sense. The meditation consisted of a dialog in which they both described themselves, and I got to know them a lot better. The horseshoe crab is a familiar toe-pinching creature of the ocean where I grew up. It is ancient, unchanging, slow, heavily armored, and it contains the sense of both how I feel when I obstruct my energy and how I obstruct it. The shaman is androgenous, able to mobilize the energy of the group, the balancer of energy who can talk with animals. The meditation ended with an image of the shaman’s drum resonating in my solar plexus, drawing the powers together, speaking to them with the healing clarity of my own inner rhythm.
This whole process can be done alone, but it can also be done in small groups, first focusing and getting the image symbol you need (about 10 minutes), then going around and briefly telling each other what came up for you, and then meditating together (10-20 minutes). It is interesting to learn how each person develops whole characteristic sets of processes unique to them according to their most developed functions. And from each other you can learn to expand your ways of speaking to your soul.
David's images would tend to be very visual, and part of the healing in his process would take place as he would hold the image and let it get visually clearer and clearer, more and more detailed. For example, once when he asked, " How am I feeling? " he got sensations in his body but no words came. Then an image come, a golden shape that he didn't recognize at first. Then he realized it was a horn, " a horn to use to be in the moment. " He rotated it around so that the bell was facing him. Inside it was dark, a hexagonal shape, with very matte black rods diminishing back to a circle of color. He decided to go in and see. Next, he emerged out of the dark tunnel into a wide grassy plain where he started to look around, seeing no-one. Then he decided to find someone there and got a sense of someone approaching from afar (possibly to be continued in a later meditation).
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Judy would often work with a chronic sense of stuck energy which felt like it was blocking her whole life. First in focusing there would be an urgent sense of wanting, wanting to do more (like writing papers), and not being able, and then a feeling of " but that's not enough, " accompanied by a longing for relaxation and pleasure (sun, music, dancing, poetry). The stuckness was in the conflicting pull between the two, and the presence of anxiety and anger at herself for getting neither of them done. Then she would take one aspect of the conflict at a time and, putting aside the negative messages of anxiety and anger at herself, focus on the positive feeling of the want underneath. Out of this she would get an image-word that seemed to really hold the body feeling, like " create" for the doing aspect and " open, receiving" for the relaxing aspect. Then she would use that word-image to get deeper into the pure feeling, feel it move up through her body and seek a healing image that went with it to strengthen it. The healing symbol of a golden sword for the " creating" and a glowing rose for the " receiving" were images of what her energy would move like without the obstructions. During the meditation, she would focus the two images together to integrate them by first flashing back and forth between them, and then juxtaposing them visually, or holding a sense of herself as either of them, or of herself as the two images together in a setting.
With this meditation technique, I get a sense of discovering and creating my own process, what works for me. From this comes a sense of trusting my own positive healing energy, a sense of becoming acquainted with my own power to give myself what I need. And I become more and more able to get in touch with what I’m feeling, because I know I can do something about it, I can let it flower and transform itself.
References
1. E. Gendlin and L. Olsen, " The use of imagery in experiential focusing, " Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, Vol. 7, No. 4, Winter, 1970.
2. A. Lowen, Depression and the Body. New York: Penguin, 1974.
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