Contemplations on healing and meditation


Exploring inner healing

Inner healing begins with learning how to relax. You'll find that you need to relax very deeply. Deep relaxation helps to counteract the effects of chronic self-sustaining stress.  

To counteract the effects of deeply rooted grasping, you need to learn to let go. You need to learn new ways to watch yourself. When you find yourself craving something, or being drawn to a particular thought or feeling, then say to yourself that you will let go of them, loosen yourself from even the most subtle attachment to anything you sense.

To counteract the effects of deeply rooted aversions, you need to learn to accept. When you feel the urge to push something out of your thoughts or emotions, or when you feel some mental or emotional discomfort, tell yourself to accept them instead of continuing to push them out of your minds.

Exploring various techniques of inner healing will broaden your understanding of self and others. Not only will you gain better insight into the workings of the world, you will also begin to sense and explore the web of interconnectedness and spiritual energies. You will find greater value in exploring these things for yourself, and become free of the habits of thought and emotion that limit your explorations.

The nature of chronic self-sustaining stress - the originator of human destructiveness

Grasping and clinging - clutching to something you feel satisfies your needs.

Aversion and suppression - pushing away something you feel threatened your needs.

Grasping tends to stimulate the fight-responses.

Aversion tends to stimulate the flight responses.

Persistent stimulation of your animal brain will lead to overreaction of the fight-or-flight responses. The fewer breaks you get from this stimulation, then your fight-or-flight responses become increasingly stressed.

Under the influence of grasping and aversion, the mind and emotions are shaped by the experiences of pleasure and pain, comfort and insecurity. The mind is conditioned - develops habitual patterns of activity.

Under the influence of the many stressors in our lives - patterns of thought and emotions become their own sources of stress. This is how internally generated stress escalates.

Put all these together, and you can account for the many varieties of stress.


Patterns of thoughts and emotions

If you watch your thoughts you will realize that they frequently repeat themselves. A particular thought sequence will reoccur frequently - maybe once a week, once a day or once an hour. You will often feel that these recycled thoughts are new - each and every time it appears - and you rarely have awareness of their repetitiveness. There's nothing wrong with this in itself. It simply indicates that patterns of thought are somewhat habitual. They are a learned response within the mind, a conditioned activity.

Although a reoccurring pattern of thought is not bad - attachment to it creates problems for our inner lives. Attachment to these patterns of thought creates imbalance and leads to over-reaction, which in turn gives rise to the hindering emotions of fear, hate, rage, aggression, ambition, greed. The same is true for patterns of thought that we deliberately or unconsciously try to avoid.

Just as there are patterns of thoughts, there are also patterns of moods, feelings, emotions. There are patterns of body sensations and patterns of behavior. There's a pattern in the feeling or sense of identity - the ego - whether it's the ego of the body, the ego of the mind, or the tribal/national/cultural ego.

Sensing the fabric of our inner being

At each moment, there are huge numbers of internal processes that add up to the way we feel, and think. The way these processes operate, the ways they cooperate, counteract each other, and interact - defines the web of our inner being - the structure of the self. These collections of patterns change from moment to moment, day to day, event to event. Some of these patterns reoccur. As we shift our goals, desires, ambitions - we alter the relative importance of these patterns.

As we become more immersed in our attachments and aversions, these patterns become more rigid, more limiting. The fabric of our inner being stagnates and decays.

When we become more immersed in attachments to these patterns, our souls increasingly feel as if they are lost, disturbed, isolated, dissatisfied, anxious. It becomes harder to see that our minds have become attached to habitual patterns of thought-emotion-memory-body-behaviors.

These habitual patterns go hand in hand with the inner forces of grasping and aversion. Attachment and aversion to these habits of mind and emotion are the roots of the illness of chronic self-sustaining inwardly generated stress. These stress patterns are sustained by a variety of influences - including physical, social, cultural, religious, emotional, mental.

At the end of all this, the brain is constantly being exposed to this stagnation of the web of inner being. Our soul senses that this stagnation is somehow dangerous.  It's as if the brain is being constantly exposed to a low level danger - and under these circumstances the animal brain becomes imbalanced, over-reactive, eventually hyper-stimulated. It makes people quick to anger, always ready to be afraid, always aggressive - without even realizing it.

The consequences of chronic self-sustaining stressful arousal of your inner animal

We are all suffering from chronic arousal of the fight/flight/freeze responses - our basic animal survival drives. Our brain has been conditioned to constantly arouse it's own inner animal nature, and the consequences of this constant self-arousal include:-
Understanding how to counteract chronic self-sustaining stress

There are many ways of learning to overcome the effects of chronic stress - the "relaxation response", calming exercises and meditation techniques. Here you will learn how we use a variety of techniques, and we offer you a simple insight that helps you discover which techniques are best for you and how the suitability of these techniques varies over time and with changes in your circumstances.

The first thing you need to do is gain some insight into these things:-
You also need to learn how to enter the state of inner healing. There are three basic steps that you repeat:-
These three steps form the basic framework for discovering the type of meditation that is best suited to your current needs. You also will learn how to recognize the conditions in which meditation should be avoided, because sometimes the level of inner arousal and agitation is so high, that the mind will be unable to settle down. For these situations, you will learn of several methods to use when the mind and emotions seemed to be locked in self-agitation, including:-
If you continue to try to calm down while your mind is over-stimulated, then you run the risk of making it harder for yourself to relax in the future - because your mind begins to associate the relaxation technique with agitated states of mind and emotion - thereby creating even more problems for yourself. Some research into meditation techniques does show potential for creation of new problems when people regularly practice meditation twice a day - we need to develop ways of coming to a better understanding of these processes - and need to learn how to be more flexible, adaptive, and creative. For those of you who are deeply locked in stagnation of your Web of Being - you may find it better to practice meditative techniques on rare occasions. Or, you might need to take a long vacation and learn to relax, very very deeply.

So ... let's begin exploring this new framework for inner healing ...

The Inner Animal and our Spacious Mind

Science is discovering how the basic survival drives are rooted in the limbic region of the brain, and to some extent science can show how emotions, memory and thought relate to these basic survival drives.

Here we combine some of this scientific information with insights from meditation to provide a map of these inner processes.

The limbic region of the brain is a collection of several distinct regions of the brain - including the amygdala, the hippocampus, the hypothalamus. These are the parts of the brain that are home to the basic survival instincts, emotions, memory formation, memory retrieval, recognition, and play key roles in the front-line response to sensory perceptions. This is our "animal brain". The human animal brain is similar in function and organization to that of many other animals. The main differences are in size, complexity, types of interconnections. There are some differences in neurochemistry, but in general there are more similarities than differences.

One major difference between human and animal brains is that we humans have a larger cortex, with much greater complexity of interconnection and more capacity for explorative and organizational kinds of thought. In animals the lack of complexity in the cortex tends to restrict the range, complexity and level of detail that the animal mind can handle. The cortex deals with more integrative levels of behavior - coordinating perception and action, altering the level of alertness. In animals the cortex is mostly responding to the impulses from the limbic brain. This is also true for many humans. So although we have the potential to be more expansive, creative, intelligent, and explorative that animals - we often are not.

We can learn a lot about ourselves by thinking of the limbic brain and the basic parts of the cortex as our "inner animal". Also think of the larger cortex as the "bigger mind" that can roam beyond the boundaries of the mostly reactive, conditioned behavior of the animal brain. The bigger mind does things like organize, analyze, create, invent, make art and music, use the imagination, explore models of the world, create new kinds of awareness and inner sense. We could call this Brain Version 2.0. But we'll call this analytical and creative part of us the Spacious Mind.

Nature has provided all life forms with a basic survival training course. Over millions of years, species have learned how to avoid becoming lunch, how to find lunch, how to make existence more fun, and how to have fun with other creatures. An important part of all this is the fight-flight-freeze responses, in addition to sexual and hunger drives. There are also drives for cooperation and compassion that are too easily overlooked these days.

Scientific exploration into the functions of the brain has shown that there are good and bad sides to the fight-flight-freeze responses. These survival instincts have been programmed into the brain during the long evolution of life. The fight-flight-freeze responses are a small part of the overall functions of the brain. As the brain becomes larger and more complex, it can store and process more information, more details. The brain is able to create and organize a network of memories that form the basis of our understanding of the world. This network of memories is the main ingredient of our inner abstract model of the world. As we become more capable of working with abstract thought, our world model incorporates more complex and detailed ideas. Also - the higher mind sets goals for our lives. For the animal, these goals are fairly predictable - seek food and company, avoid predators and other threats, find a safe place to rest, and so on. The human brain shares these same goals - but is also capable of developing goals based on more complex and abstract perceptions - the abstractions and details that are part of the complex human world model.

However, under the influence of those self-sustaining stressors, we distort our understanding of the world, and negative emotions more easily take control of our inner lives. Under these circumstances, our goals can become disorganized, devoid of wisdom, destructive, aggressive, mean and cruel. Most of us have a tendency to be led by this (often unwittingly) destructive matrix of goals. In this state, the survival responses become aroused more easily and more frequently. Frequent arousal of these responses programs the animal brain to become more aggressive, less sensitive, more over-reactive. This is the basic mechanism of self-limiting programming in the brain - the root of the entanglements. At each step in the emergence of these entanglements, the basic forces of grasping and aversion add fuel to the impact of the stressors to each iteration of the process.

Some measurements on neural pathways seem to indicate that there are substantially more neural connections from the animal brain to the cortex than the other way. It's not clear that they are one-way connections - there may be two-way influences. There are also indications that parts of the cortex - particularly the parts that play a role in setting goals and planning - can exert a strong influence on the animal brain. From meditation you may discover that resonances occur between the workings of the animal brain and the spacious mind. These resonances may be related to these neural pathways between the different regions of the brain.

When self-sustaining stressors are dominant (as is the case with most of us) these resonances tend to be destructive - leading to fragmentation, inner conflict, friction between the inner animal and the spacious mind. These self-sustaining stressors and the resulting effects are referred to as the "entanglements". These entanglements lead to fear, rage, hate, aggression, violence and war. When we practice inner and spiritual healing, these resonances tend to become more integrative, unifying, cooperative.

To counteract the entanglements we need to do these things:-

Compassion is part of the survival matrix

The most often studied feelings associated with the basic survival drives are fear, hunger, flight. Humans have created a culture that celebrates competitiveness, believing (wrongly so) that these basic survival drives are the magic ingredients that have led us to becoming the dominant and most inventive and successful species. We tend to believe that these survival instincts are the keys to handling our self-made competitive scenarios. Again  this is simply an outcome of our culture of conflict - we are taught to go along with this competitive game plan of our culture - and are taught that to succeed with this game plan, we simply have to be more competitive, more aggressive.

In addition to those basic survival drives, animals are capable of caring and compassion, empathy and sorrow. The drive toward cooperation, sharing, compassion are also part of the survival matrix. So too are curiosity, the impulse to explore.

There are many similarities between humans and animals. Humans have an animal core. The differences are in the peripheral details of the human mind.