Making Metta Meta Again
I started meditating around the time I finished undergraduate studies. My practice focused almost exclusively on mindfulness, otherwise known as vipassana.
Here, one starts off by focusing on the breath, from the beginning of the inhalation to the finale of the exhalation. You do this without consciously influencing any metrics of the breath, which is actually a hard place to land. You soon realize that you aren’t immune to your own mind. As it relentlessly wanders to other thoughts, you retrace back to the breath. The muscle you’re building is the one that brings you back to the breath.
Of course, as is said by many a guide, there is nothing special about the breath. This focus can easily shift to bodily sensations, the feeling of weight, or numbness, and amazingly, even severe pain.
Over time my commitment to the practice vacillated. I’d turn to it more at certain points, depending on what kind of chaos was brewing around me. An early meditation-induced hallucinatory experience in a quiet basement apartment peaked my interest most. Auditory in nature, the sound reminded me of a sci-fi alien pinging, if that makes sense. It remains one of the strangest conscious experiences I have ever had.
During my first year of medical school a consultant psychiatrist and dedicated mindfulness practitioner held an introductory information session for our cohort on meditation. His main aim was recruitment for the school’s interest group and so my asking about the prevalence of hallucinations in the early going was met with a smirk and a laugh. He admitted this was something that could happen, but tried to preempt any sense of fear this gave to the brave souls before him, now considering a maiden voyage with their mind.
In medical school, a series of bouts with severe physical pain (the kind my mind will never forget) drew me back to serious practice. Far away from that time, in recent weeks and months, I’ve turned more and more to practice. As of late, I’ve wised up a bit. I’ve consumed a lot of theory in relation to the benefits of meditative practice and one key seems to be not to wait around too long. Life comes knocking at everyone’s door sooner or later. And whether its debilitating physical pain, or something else, I’ll be better off if I do some heavy lifting now.
A brief caveat before I go on - meditation really isn’t bullshit. It’s just incredibly hard and therefore easy to quit and easy to ridicule and blame to make oneself feel better. As with quitting an addictive substance, one needs to be ready to entertain steps in this new direction. Often these steps can come with surprises and tangents and off-shoots that are surely of value - but also surely distant relatives to the main point of mastering meditation.
And this is where my latest departure from the foundations of mental and emotional stability comes into play. Loving-kindness, otherwise known as metta is a form of meditative practice focused on flexing and growing the kindness muscle. I’d recently decided to go for a ride in this fancy new car.
The introductory session was easy enough. Close your eyes and choose someone with whom you have an “uncomplicated” relationship, someone with whom things are easy. Fair enough - a relatively easy task for a man of my social caliber.
I choose rather quickly and focus my mind on the person. Allow the well wishes to take your mind and body over, is what we’ve been tasked with on this end of the meditation application. The guide helps by periodically repeating “may you be happy” and “may you be free from suffering” throughout the session.
As I leaned into this feeling, the unwillingness to offer anything but the most sincere and best wishes to this person flooded and then launched from my mind. The tour’s guide then asked me to shift my focus to someone with whom the relationship was more complicated, someone with whom there existed a tension or negativity. Its suggested that beginners start off with a relatively easier case - someone with whom you simply may not like in the regular way, someone you find merely annoying. The guide suggests to build up to more intensely negative relationships, and its easy to see why once you’d tried this practice.
As per usual, I didn’t exactly follow the guide’s advice. Me? Why should I have to wait to stop hating these ‘higher ups’? I want at them now. It felt like a legitimate ‘put me in coach’ moment and I’m still pretty confident about that.
I fell somewhere in the middle, ultimately, choosing as a focus someone with whom I have very mixed feelings. As I wandered through the session, following the cues of the guide, something began to shift. As if the ground beneath my feet was somehow under threat and the tectonic plates of my mind about to go for a ride.
Let me paint the picture. The guide asks me to assume the emotional point of view of the person I’m focusing on. He asks me to consider the fact that they were once a child, someone who had little say in the world, and little say in the influences and genetics that made them into the adult they are now.
I began to falter emotionally but wasn’t conscious of it initially. Clarity arrived as it usually does, unannounced and unashamed. I was breaking in half and starting to choke up. The introduction primed me to feel the good vibes and to let them go, but this change in focus was like shifting into reverse while doing 100 miles per hour on the freeway. But it was, for a moment anyway, a physical reaction, not an emotional reaction.
I collected myself from the shock. The unwillingness to force it all away. The curiosity about what was happening and why. At precisely this point, the guide requested I reflect on the subjective suffering this person had faced and would be destined to face throughout their life. The guide asked me to consider the tiny up hill battles this person would deal with, in addition to the lost dreams and smashed hearts.
Suddenly but assuredly, their life opened up as if a football player, lunging through the field, dodging those wanting to take him out and make a name for themselves. “May you be happy… may you be free from suffering” - at exactly this moment, whatever fortress I thought my head and neck was making to stave off tears had been obliterated. It was a cathartic and brief jolt. An intense emotional reaction had now happened in the crucible of my mind, and out of nowhere, no less.
How very unexpected at this time in the evening, I thought afterwards. But during the session, particularly when the flood gates opened, I began to understand what the guide was referring to when it came to allowing the intense good will to flow through you and to really implicate you in whatever it was doing.
Not at this point, nor at any point, was I all-out crying, but I felt brutalized. As the feelings of good will I was pushing out intensified and as I focused on sending them to this person mind more and more, my body began to shed weight. There is a unity in terms of the sensory experience I’m feeling at this point. A minute ago, I could focus on sensations in my foot or hand or neck, but now everything is the same. It was, by some definition, dissociative.
The feeling doesn’t last very long as the guided session wraps up. I quickly hop up and without missing a beat get on with the rest of the evening.
The magnitude of the experience, I’m not quite done processing I suspect. Cathartic is a word I won’t let go of in describing the phenomena to others.
It should be noted that these quasi hallucinatory experiences or dissociative states are not the end goal with earnest meditative practice. Like reductions in anxiety and stress, and better sleep states, they are merely tangential benefits one may stumble upon.
There is something much more meaningful and foundational and protective to gain from sustained practice than those related to health as we understand it in the traditional sense. While I still believe that selling point to be true, I won’t mistake the above experience for anything other than what it was - a revolution and a pleasure, and a moment where I couldn’t help but feel alive.
After MAiD and this crazy shit, my first love is up next. Stay tuned and stay cool.
-d
*The Rosette Nebula, pictured above, is the ENT of nebulas. At least two heads, maybe three. Chimera in the skies?