Visualization News – July 2003

Hello and welcome back! I need to point out that this distribution includes a July and August Visualization News edition. I didn’t want to send out two simultaneous notices because I thought it might create confusion. This document only contains the July edition. Please see my Yahoo Groups site to view the August edition, or view it in web page format on my home web site at http://www.geocities.com/visualizenews/august2003.html .

This week we will be discussing a very useful meditation/visualization technique called Releasing the Darkness Meditation. This meditation form was developed to identify and release feelings of self-hatred. These feelings are not actually part of yourself, but your impressions of other peoples’ hateful and negative treatment of you over time, which you have taken on and identified with. These are contaminating feelings that are not a natural part of you. These feelings poison you with self-hatred as well as creating anger in reaction to the feeling of being hated.

This is obviously not a one-time cure. Through habitual repetition you may be able to give yourself a different way of feeling about yourself. An excellent companion piece to this meditation is a book by Dr. David Burns called “Feeling Good.” This is a book on cognitive psychology that addresses the thought patterns that convey depression. When I complete a course of this meditation, I typically feel very unburdened and light. A lot of anger and angst is diffused by it. But, I have to warn that there is also a “snapback” problem with this meditation. The force of your internal habit will tend to throw you back into self-hatred very hard after a while. Maybe 12 hours or so after this meditation I notice bizarre thought-patterns that seem irrational and not like me at all. This is just junk coming to the surface, but if you expect it to show up, you will feel less freaked when you see it. Don’t get upset over it; just observe it and take a mental note. That tone of thought, whether it is rage, sadism, self-loathing, fear, depression, paranoia or apathy will be a signal to you that it is a good candidate to work on in your next meditation session. I find that new material makes itself known loud and clear.

The meditation starts with getting relaxed. Then, find a mental focus in one of three approaches: you can focus on a single problem, such as an illness or physical problem, or a state of anger or depression that you are aware of, or alternatively you can choose a location in your body that often seems to hold a lot of tension and stress, and focus there. Or, you can see a circle filled partially with black liquid. This liquid represents all your self-hatred. As you resolve this self-hatred, you can go back and see how much you have left in the circle to resolve.

Begin by going into the problem or area of the body and see a deep blackness. The dark area is the self-hatred itself. This is not part of you but is something you picked up from one or many people in your past. Actually look at the core and ask to see clearly how this area of dark self-hatred is not you. You may see images from your past, events, or faces of people. These are people that expressed this feeling to you. You will feel that this emotion did not come from you, but from other people. You can, if you wish, ask to see the truth that is hidden behind the curtain of your self-hatred. This truth often appears to me as a mosaic of gems of many different colors, but all beautiful.

Next, see if you can feel the emotion of the darkness. It is usually a very clear, “negative” feeling that is easy to identify. There are two aspects to this feeling. First, there is the feeling of the victimizer. This feeling could be hatred and contempt for you, or condescending, sneering superiority or even raw sadism and a desire to see you die or suffer, for example. There are many possible variations. The second aspect of the feeling is your feelings as a victim of this feeling. You could feel crushed and helpless, lost and confused, depressed, vulnerable, cold and numb or any other of a host of feelings. It’s important to feel and distinguish both simultaneous feelings as both the victim and victimizer of yourself.

The final step, once you are able to see clearly that these feelings are not your own but belong to someone else, is to release them. To do that, I imagine that black birds are flying upwards out of the deep black self-hatred. They represent my mental attitude of release of these feelings that are not me. I can release them easily because they are not me and they represent a contamination of my mind. When this letting go really starts to take shape, the birds will really start swarming up and out of the problem. When the birds stop flying you are finished.

As far as the meditation form itself goes, I find it helpful to breathe in slowly while internally saying “I am in Releasing the Darkness meditation on…,” then I breathe out, internally saying, “[name the problem or area you are focusing on.]. Mentally walk through the steps outlined above, but keep the internal repetition going as you do it. Don’t push this meditation too fast. Give it time to take on a life of it’s own. This is a concentration-intense meditation, and it takes a while to really get going.

One thing to look out for in the final stage is resistance to letting go of these emotions. You might, for example, find the feeling of contempt. When you try to let go of it, you mind reasons, “but I am worthy of contempt! Look at my miserable life of failure! I don’t even have equity in my rear end and my career is a joke.” Just remind yourself of what a famous rapper said, that a beaten up flower growing up out of a crack in the concrete is worthy of our admiration not our contempt. We should be amazed that with our strength rather than putting ourselves down. We all have been mistreated in one way or another and have spent our life and energy trying to keep up with more successful people who haven’t had to fight any of our battles. Even if we are not as successful and earn their contempt, we can exhibit our accomplishment in the quality of our being. When we can show people we have character, that can’t be diminished in the light of lack of external achievement. We have invested in character because we had to. So, don’t excuse any kind of self-diminishing feelings. Find a logical, rational argument to put them to bed once and for all.

There are blocked areas all through the body, and each one is different. Each area tends to carry a particular feeling that is unique, such as rage, depression, sadism, etc. However, when you attack a problem, it tends to be more confusing as the core area contains a mix of many different but related feelings.

For example, in my exploration of my acid-reflux condition, I found a lot of feelings that came to me from my father, such as anger, contempt and bullying. Find the common thread of the varied feelings as you release them. You will probably find many layers of feeling that need to be released around a single problem.

A good affirmation to go with this meditation practice is, “I am a whole person. I trust my instincts to lead me to my niche.” By whole person I mean that you are born into the world a whole person. No one attacks a baby and calls them a loser or a failure! It was enough for us to live, breath and eat. We are whole and when we get rid of the contaminating feelings and judgments of other people we actually feel whole. We didn’t have to apologize for existing when we were young. We never should again, as adults.

We can trust our instincts as whole people. We know when we are not where we need to be to be comfortable and happy. We can trust our instincts to gradually lead us to our niche where we will be with kindred spirits and have a supportive community. I can’t say I’m there yet myself, but I’m just passing the information on direct from my guidance. It makes sense to me but I’ve only just started to live it.

To outline the whole meditation process briefly:
1. Get comfortable with pen and a journal.
2. Begin the meditation process by internally saying, “I am in Releasing the Darkness meditation on…,”
3. Breathe out, internally saying, “[name the problem or area you are focusing on.]"
4. Start to think about what you would like to focus the meditation on, a body area of tension or a specific problem, or all of your self-hatred
5. See that problem/area as an area of darkness
6. Feel the emotional content of the self-hatred
7. Distinguish and feel the victimizer component of that feeling
8. Distinguish and feel the victim component of that feeling
9. Seek to see the faces of the people who put that feeling on you
10. Release that feeling as not being part of you, while seeing dark birds flying up and out of the self-hatred
11. You can look at the truth that is covered up by the self-hatred, as an alternative method
11. Repeat the process with a different problem/area of self-hatred if you want to

I hope this all makes sense and is helpful!

Take me home!

Visualization News – August 2003

The Twenty-Six Healing Keys (Part I of IX)

Hello and welcome back! Today I will be rolling out part one of a nine-part series on the theme of internal healing. I have to admit that I generated this material as part of my attempt to heal myself of a chronic health condition. Although these techniques have been very valuable to me, they haven’t healed me physically, so at this point you should think of them as purely healing to the psyche. There are twenty-six “healing keys” in all, but we will only be discussing the first nine, which is plenty to work with in one sitting. In fact, I would recommend breaking it up over several sessions if possible. For September 2003, I will roll out numbers ten through eighteen of the “Healing Keys.”

Before I discuss the first healing key, I want to explain the meditation that you will use with all these healing keys. The meditation is specific to this exercise, although it could be used in other contexts. We will call it the “healing lock” meditation. This meditation will specifically work with each “healing key” in the best possible way to release its maximum positive impact on you. Begin by getting relaxed and have a notebook and pen handy.

Visualize a gold or copper circle with a black (old fashioned) keyhole design in the middle. As you breath in, say internally, “I am in healing lock meditation on…,” here you breath out slowly, saying internally, “…the healing key of ____healing____ .” You will fill those spaces in with the name of the healing key, which is always described in the form “x healing y.” Conceptualize this meditation as being the perfect lock for the key to operate in, the perfect means to achieve the healing. Simply plug in the name of the healing key after reading the description and memorizing its basic meaning. If you have insights during your meditation, you can jot them down at the end of the meditation period.

The first healing key is seeing the mind healing neurosis. By developing self-consciousness of mind, the operations of the mind come under conscious awareness, and thus to a higher and higher degree possible self-influence. You can’t change what you can’t see in yourself. By becoming self-conscious of mind, the operations of the mind are laid bare and every habit of mind can be scrutinized.

You might wonder what the advantage of such scrutiny would be. First of all, it allows the self to become something that is created, rather than just an unchanging vehicle. Imagine a person pinned down, tangled in a barbed wire fence. That person would be immobilized and in pain. If that person was hypnotized to no longer be aware that they were stuck in the fence, they might struggle in vain to free themselves. Freeing yourself requires a conscious effort. To be conscious of how your mind is stuck is necessary in order to free yourself.

The mind develops neurosis as a strategy to deal with internal stress, rather than becoming self-conscious and working on how to free itself. Neurosis is a painful and self-defeating way of being. The only way out of neurosis is full self-awareness.

Self-awareness falls into several different categories. First is awareness of self in the world. Knowing who you are in the world, where you are and what is going on is a fundamental level of awareness we take for granted. However, at more subtle levels, this awareness provides us many clues as to how to act, the presence of opportunities, and the means to foresee and avoid dangerous situations. At a very refined level, awareness of self in the world also improves our social skills and ability to find our niche in the world. By maximizing our self-awareness in the world we stop struggling with circumstances and start using them as clay to build what we want out of our life.

The second form of self-awareness is goal oriented. The self is a form of activity, and by becoming aware of our psychological and physical activity, we can become attuned to the invisible rhythms that our own actions are a part of. We can act in tune with our environment, so as to achieve the maximum result with the minimum effort. We can also attune ourselves to the psychological environment to take steps to relieve our own stress and suffering, or to maximize our ability to help others. By refining our activity through self-awareness, we become both creative and productive. Our mental activity and decision-making abilities are also enhanced by self-awareness. We can make decisions that not only solve problems in the short or long term, but can actually, through our higher level of vision, have vast and far-reaching implications on our future life. We can even help ourselves to take more effective action to improve ourselves.

A third form of self-awareness is awareness of feeling. The awareness of how we feel is fairly fundamental. However, at more self-aware levels we can actually get inside feelings and experience them spatially. We can use our self-awareness to navigate out of emotional traps through the use of reason and by seeing better alternatives. We can refine emotion through reexamination of how we perceive situations and problems. We can address our distortions of thought that lead to our emotional problems. It also allows us to begin to be able to access any state of higher feeling at will, enjoying sensations and emotions as we please. No longer being limited to the emotions generated by circumstances on our being, we can generate emotional states out of thin air for our own pleasure.

The final form of self-awareness is awareness of mind. The mind, thoughts and consciousness processes are all implied by this. By becoming self-aware in this area, you see the ways in which thought manipulates your feelings and alters your perceptions. By becoming aware of consciousness you are able to explore different states of consciousness at will. When we think of altered states, we often think of drugs. And yet, our brain is a chemical tapestry that is constantly putting us through one state of chemical feeling or another. Every state of perception is a distortion of reality. By finding states of consciousness that are less distorted than others, we free ourselves of self-limiting feelings. When we turn and face our own consciousness, we take our own Spiritual process in hand by making choices about how much of the truth we want to see. We find our own Spiritual answers and progress Spiritually by owning our own mind.

The second healing key is mercy healing the limitations of our selfhood. Mercy is the activity of helping and simultaneously forgiving others. Mercy is also an expression of the reality beyond ego, the understanding that we are all part of a greater whole that is interconnected. However, we can’t always feel that connection. To get to Mercy, we have to revive that connection. The analogy of limbs to the body can be made in understanding mercy. With the head, we create logical connections between ourselves and others until there is a clear view of how we are connected. The arms represent our ability to transform our relationship to the whole by “plugging in” our perceptions into a larger contextual framework. And, finally, our legs show us how we can transform our act of being into an expression of our interconnection. In other words, how we can live that understanding and act on it.

First, we have to clear a path from our “self” to the Whole. The Whole includes all consciousness in all forms, at all levels of existence. The steps to clearing the path are threefold. First, we must meditate on the self and the Whole simultaneously. That means that we see both simultaneously. We allow the self to align itself to the Whole so that they merge into one picture, one reality. When they merge, the image of our “self” vanishes into the larger network of the whole and can no longer be distinguished as a separate thing.

Secondly, the self must be distinguishable from the whole, and so, from this picture we create a self that is completely integrated into the Whole but can still be seen and distinguished from the Whole. This might appear as a circle of identity emerging from your picture of the Whole, but the circle is completely part of the Whole also. Lastly, the circle of the identity should contain an awareness of the Whole, so a circle representing the Whole should emerge inside the circle of the self, representing that awareness.

The act of plugging into the whole as a means of perception is achieved by distinguishing between several levels of mental substrata. First, we have mind as merely a reflection of our imagination and our conscious thoughts. It is like a mirror that reflects what we hold up to it. Then, we have a deeper conception of mind that feels. Mind not only feels everything it sees, but sees our whole physical life as well. Then, we take it one step deeper and explore mind as the building block of reality. The “body” and “world” are manufactured by mind, as well as the identity. This pseudo-identity is a construct inside mind, limited to the playing field created for it by mind. Mind that is less literal is not restricted to this physical body but exists on a higher level of mental illusion. But, ultimately, mind is the brick out of which everything is built.

By tapping into mind as mirror, we become aware of what we are thinking. From mind as interpreter of reality, we experience the various psychological realities. By experiencing mind as building-block of reality, the individual can directly touch the Whole and experience it at an emotional level.

As a visual model, see a brick made of golden-white light. This is mind as the building block of reality. Now, see your previous image of the Whole inside this brick, with the self and the Whole-inside-the-self as pictured before. Meditate on this image until you feel a connection to the Whole on an emotional level. This will manifest as a feeling of intimate connection with everyone and everything, as if you were a single word in a larger book. You can feel the blood of every living creature running through your veins and hear how everyone’s voice resonates with your own. This is a direct emotional experience of the whole.

The last phase of this project is to put this understanding into action. To do this you can simply enfold your daily work into the understanding. Start by getting prepared for any daily activity. Give that activity a visual symbol. For example, running on the treadmill could be a picture of you on the treadmill. Then, make that picture of that activity partially ghost-like, transparent. Take the image from your previous exercise, the brick of light with the image of the self inside the Whole, and make it semi-transparent. Now, place the two pictures together so that they appear to be one. This fused picture is all you need to merge your activity with that understanding. Now you can do anything and it will bring you into that state and understanding. Just keep the intent alive throughout the activity.

Take me home!