ON APPROACHING PAINFUL MEMORIES AS A MEDITATOR
…one of the main problems you face as you meditate: getting over distractions. Distractions are little becomings. You're sitting here with the breath and all of a sudden you're off someplace else, at some other time, with a different identity. At other times, as you're working with the breath energy, you come across knots in the energy that, when you untie them, reveal… unpleasant presents, let's put it that way. You open one up and a really bad memory comes out.
When that happens, you have to remind yourself: "I'm still a meditator.
I was somebody else back in the time of that bad memory, but now I'm a meditator. I don't have to take on that identity any more.
The Buddha's approach is very different from some psychotherapists: They say that you've got to enter into the emotion, feel it fully, before you can get past it.
What you're often doing when you do that, though, is simply reinforcing old habits. You want to have the mindfulness and alertness to realize: That's not me anymore.
This is why we develop the observer: the one who watches the meditation.
That's a lot of what alertness is about.
You watch what's going on and you don't go into it. If you're going to go into anything, go into the breath, go into inhabiting your body as much as you can right now, finding the spots in the body that are comfortable, finding the areas of the mind that are able simply to watch and to notice what's happening.
The observer is not totally passive. It does more than just passive observing. When you step back, you try to access whatever wisdom you need in order to pull yourself out of those bad memories, because they're pretty sticky.
They have lots of hooks, and it's very easy for us to get hooked on them. Unlike fish, we don't get hooked just on our mouths. The hooks seem to catch us all over. So we have to learn how to shave off the hooks, by looking at the narratives that would pull us in.
And a large part of that narrative is your identity, your role in what happened. You have to place question marks in that narrative and around that identity. You're not there anymore.
You're someplace else; you're someone else.
The memory is lodged there. And you have to ask yourself, when you go into it, what's the allure of getting into that identity again? And what are the drawbacks? Then think about the allure of being a meditator: someone who can handle things like this and not be blown away.
That requires skills, because so many of our identities depend on our skills. If you learn how to play the piano, you're a pianist. If you learn how to do carpentry well, you're a carpenter.
And there are certain attitudes that go along with those skills, a certain type of confidence, that if particular problems come up, you have the skills to handle them well. Part of the attitude and confidence of a meditator is that "Whatever comes up in the mind, I don't have to go there, I don't have to identify with that…"
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Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Excerpt from “Approaching Painful Memories as a Meditator”
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