As I write about in self inquiry, This is the meditation and subsequent reflection routine I do whenever I’m triggered, judgmental, or otherwise generally confused about why I feel the way I do.
Step 1: Body Scan with some record keeping
- Observe your emotions (you can use verbal labels, or just focus on the sensations in your body):
- best case: meditate on the breath and the sensations aka emotions in my body (usually all torso, sometimes the emotions affect my head and neck too)
- less good: do it wherever you are. just less good bc it’s harder isolate the thoughts that are coming up due to your emotional state vs the emotions and thoughts triggered by your environment
- note each thought that comes up and come back to the breath each time for several minutes. Keep a background intent to keep track of these thoughts. It would probably be counter productive to recite the thoughts in your mind. For me, just intent to remember is enough for me to recall them later.
Step 2: Recalling the thoughts that came up
- After 5-10 minutes, stop returning on the breath and recall every thought that came up.
Step 3: Self Inquiry
- analyze if there is a common trend and how the thoughts are related to the sensation, if you figure out something, great, proceed to the next step. If not, you can note down what you observed and bring it to your therapist.
- Sadly, this step requires a healthy dose of self compassion and knowledge of how your history causes your current experience of the world and irrational but strong self beliefs.
- Say something to soothe the shame, fear, anxiety, sadness, disconnection with my body or longing. (I chose these emotions because those are the main ones I feel)
Example
- therapy session in Better understanding my urge to impress people
Source
This “technique” I developed is just a combination of body scan and my knowledge of psychology.
- body scan: a modern western term for a 2000+ year old class of meditation techniques from buddhism and likely earlier called vipassana, traditionally is used to go deeper into the mind and develop deep states of concentration, I stay relatively shallow here. I’m using it for two purposes:
- as a way to become slightly more concentrated for the post-meditation dialogue with myself,
- and as a way to “hear and understand myself”. in exactly the same way you sit down with the pure purpose of curiosity and compassion with a friend when you want to listen to them, you approach the body scan curiosity and compassion, rather than indifference and judgement. Doing this on the cushion with yourself is just about as hard as it is to truly deeply listen to a friend 😉
- psychology: the source of my knowledge here is pretty hodgepodge, unfortunately (because that makes this process hard to learn to do). In short, my greatest influences in order are: my therapist, Gabor Mate’s Compassionate Inquiry course (expensive!), Buddhism, several books: what my bones know > self compassion, radical self acceptance, the myth of normal, etc. See About for more details on how these books helped me.
Holding my heart 