A Love, A Lie and a Meditation Practice
How my meditation practice turned into emotional bypassing
Me and a beautiful summer evening. Photo by Ida Kristiansen Balle.
A love
My impulse for entering my path of meditation was to impress a man I loved.
In an ideal world, I guess our impulse for entering our spiritual path arises as an answer to a yearning from deep within. And it’s true that I had felt that yearning. But I had probably not answered it as I did, hadn’t a man that I was keen on catching suggested it to me.
At the very beginning of my 30s, my relationship of ten years fell apart. That relationship had already dissolved itself many years earlier, but I had clung to it, desperate to make it work. So that I could secure myself a future with a husband and 3 children and my little red house in the countryside. And some apple trees too, preferably. When we finally ended the relationship… I saw my dreams of family life fading slowly away in the distance.
But then, within a short time, a beautiful man entered my life. And I fell passionately in love, maybe for the very first time in my life. This man made me feel like a Woman. He rekindled my curiosity about my inner worlds. With him, it was like my life gained its colours back. I started dreaming vividly. And I started writing again. This mans depths made me remember both my creativity — and myself.
Oh, how I saw this man so well fitted inside my little red country house, standing in front of an open window with lace curtains blowing softly in the breeze — giving way to a garden of blooming apple trees outside.
Some days, there were even kids playing hide and seek in that garden.
Anyway, this man was very committed to meditation. I would say that he seemed to be more committed to meditation than he was to me. So when he suggested I should give meditation a chance, I was not hard to ask. Not only did his suggestion tickle my curiosity. I also hoped that if I could find my way to be a bit more “enlightened”, my man would surely become more interested in committing himself to me. Maybe, I thought, if I can only master meditation; all my dreams will finally come true.
A meditation practice
That spring I established a discipline of sitting in meditation morning and evening, and during the course of half a year, I gradually expanded my sittings into lasting for an hour each. My goal with this was to prepare myself for a three weeks silent meditation retreat with the teacher that my lover had been studying with.
And finally, the time came when I was ready to go. I was thrilled and exited. I had never attended a spiritual retreat before. And since my lover needed to stay home working, I was travelling on my own, which was also an entirely new experience for me.
It was the most beautiful three weeks. I loved every part of it. The silence, the food, the feeling of community without having to do the small talk that I’ve always been terrible with. We were sitting 30 people together in silence the whole day, in a meditation hall filled with sunlight and smelling of incense. During the evenings they played beautiful classical music as we entered the hall, and as we left it for bedtime. In between the sittings, we had walking meditations in the woods. There we went, step by step through small picturesque trails, to the sound of a little bell carried by a girl walking in the front.
Ding, ding, ding.
I loved the retreat. And most of all, I loved the thought that when I came back home, I would be one of the initiates. I would be one that knew how it was on a silent meditation retreat. I would be no more spiritual novice. I would be a match for my man.
But… my story took an unexpected turn. While I was at the retreat, my man fell in love with another woman.
A lie
When I came back home from the retreat, the summer had turned to autumn, and everything had changed. I knew it the moment the man picked me up at the airport. Something in the field between us was different. But he said… nothing.
A few weeks later, I had a vision as I was riding the bus back home from work. I saw my man and a woman with long blonde hair holding hands outside a grocery shop which my bus was passing by. The man turned around as we drove away, and I realized he was not my man. Yet, this vision deeply disturbed me. And I could not manage letting it go.
In my man’s house, blonde hair one day appeared in the bedsheets. The man said something about neighbours with long blonde hair and shared tumble dryers. But he was weird. And subconsciously, I understood very well now what was going on.
Still, many months went by after this. The man didn’t have the heart to tell me about the other woman, and I didn’t really want to hear about it either. He would show up at my place every other weekend, and then disappear again, sometimes pretty abruptly after getting a message on the phone. We spoke little in between. I pressed all my angst back into my subconscious and hoped that things would move in my favour.
After a terrible Christmas with lots of back and forth, he finally told me about the other woman. As he did, there was a sense of relief in me — since it forced me to acknowledge for myself what was going on. But, the moment our relation ended, all the emotional turmoil that I had suppressed within myself; surfaced.
A Wound
It was as this breakup brought the terrors of years back into my life. I cried. I screamed. I had deep existential anxiety. I felt terrified of dying, and of being alone for the rest of my life.
I was extremely angry about having lied to myself about the other woman. I had dismissed both my intuition and my observation, in order to maintain an illusion of a more convenient situation for myself. If I could not trust myself to acknowledge the truths of what was going on in my life, what then?
I was furious. I was angry with my lover, but decided to put all the blame on myself — that way at least I felt a sort of control of the situation.
I told myself that everything that had gone wrong with this relationship had happened because I was — and always had been — unable to relate sanely to anyone, especially to men. And I didn’t stop there. I started beating myself up for staying in my previous relationship for such a prolonged time. I raged at myself for never succeeding with my freelance work. For not managing to build a community around me. For not living out my dreams. And in general for my inability to build a life for myself where I felt happy and content. I raged at myself for all my weaknesses, and hated myself for all the possible “wrongs” I had ever done.
The only break I found from my self-loathing was to sit in meditation and attempt not to think at all. The problem was just that since my thinking had such an emotional charge behind it; I had to space out entirely to keep my anger at bay. Under a cover of meditating, I started leaving my body on a regular basis. Through my practice, I found a way to dismiss my hurting, deeply feeling self. In the vast nothingness of what I perceived to be the transcendent realms, I felt received and understood. Meditation became the only place where I felt I could… be.
It didn’t feel as if I were thinking much as I sat in meditation. I took that as a sign of my success. Surely that must be what all meditators aim for, not to think at all? Actually, I didn’t feel anything either, as I sat there. I just enjoyed my moments of peace. And that way, hours went by. And somehow the painful days went by too.
I expanded my practice, and could sit up to 6 hours a day. I organised myself at work so I could meditate there too. People said I seemed so calm and peaceful. But was it true? Really? Certainly, it didn’t feel that way within me. Outside of meditation, my emotional turmoil was grander and more pressing than ever before.
When meditation becomes a method of emotional bypassing
Leon Jean Basile Perrault - Meditation (1893)
Looking back on this period of my life, I realise what I needed at that time was to learn to listen to and express the pain inside of me. Since I didn’t have any tools to deal with my pain, I reached for the only tool that seemed available to me: my meditation practice.
Through my meditation practice, I taught myself to push my emotions out of conscious sight. But that push came at an expense: my presence. I was actually using my meditation to teach myself to space out!
Isn’t that ironic? Meditation, which is supposed to be a tool to practice presence, employed to space out.
But then, what could I do? I had no idea of how to face my challenging emotions, so how on earth could Isit there silently and stay present to all that arose within me? It was impossible! And so, I started emotionally bypassing instead.
Without the fundament of basic emotional acceptance, we are nearly bound to employ meditation to escape our pain, rather than practice staying present to it. Just as we could have used alcohol, or a movie, or food, or a night out, or anything else to distract ourselves from what is painful, we sit in meditation — and we space out.
Today, I forefeigh the view that meditation only can be helpful after we have built a fundamental understanding of how to acknowledge and handle our emotions. If we realize we are spacing out — or more likely: if we realize we do not know if we are present or spacing out — chances are that we have some emotional work to take on. And to be honest, I think most of us need to.
Personally, I had to let go of the idea that sitting silently in meditation could make me conscious, content, and happy in itself. Today, four years later, I still love to meditate, but I have learnt to compliment my meditation practice with some serious emotional and relational awareness work.
I went to the tantric scene to get help with this — but that’s another story.
Lawrence Alma-Tadema - The Roses of Heliogabalus (ca.1888)
1: Fossella, Tina; Welwood, John (Spring 2011). "Human nature, buddha nature: an interview with John Welwood". Shared through Wikimedia.
