Please enjoy the following streaming audio of a guided mindfulness and forgiveness exercise. This practice will help you begin to unwind the chronic tension in the mind and body around unfinished business with a person you feel has hurt you. Please pick something of fairly low emotional intensity to work with at first (this is explained in more detail in the recording.) We want this to be a gentle compassionate process. This exercise has been a fruitful one for my clients and I hope it is helpful to you.

Please use your discretion when using any of the guided meditations/exercises I present here. If you ever feel overwhelmed or uncomfortable discontinue the exercise. The most effective way of working with this would be with the help or support of a qualified therapist. Keep in mind that forgiveness is a progressive process and you may not feel you can completely open to or arouse and kind of heartfelt quality of forgiveness during the exercise. Approach the person, situation, or memory with gentleness and take your time. Bit by bit, moment by moment, practice by practice we can learn to let go of our pain, resentment, rage, sadness, and other types of suffering. Regular practice is required to feel the full benefits of the exercise.

Therapists and healers please feel free to link this or distribute to your clients.

Find a quiet place where you will not be disturbed for the next 20 minutes or so and follow along with the audio.

This is also available streaming from my website, downloadable as an mp3, or you can subscribe to this as a podcast/feed from this page.

Forgiveness is at the heart of developing compassion. Many of us carry around memories of actions, decisions, and words we have used against ourselves, and against others. We may also carry the memories and stories of how we have been hurt by others. Over time these have solidified into contraction in the mind and chronic tension in the body. Until we let ourselves feel this, and allow ourselves to forgive ourselves for how we have hurt ourselves, how we have hurt others, and begin to forgive those who have hurt us, we cannot move towards freedom and happiness.

A first step here is often to catalog those things we wish to forgive ourselves for or wish to forgive others for. It is helpful to write these down, perhaps in a journal. Look at each item and notice the felt sense in your body. Is there tension around your heart? Perhaps in your belly or jaw, sadness or the tingling of excitement or anxiety… observe your reaction. Our bodily felt sense can tell us alot about what we are carrying emotionally.

Are these memories, stories, situations that you are really willing to let go of? Do you feel ready to at least attempt forgiveness? If so put a check mark next to each one you feel ready to face and make your best attempt at forgiveness/self-compassion.

I will be posting another audio feed/downloadable podcast soon that will be a guided mindfulness exercise on forgiveness. This is a tool which you can apply to one or more of these memories you have chosen to direct forgiveness towards. Look, or should I say listen for that soon.

Warm regards,

David

Most of us feel anxiety every day of our lives. Anxiety in small doses can be a healthy motivator and part of our daily performance in life. However, for many people anxiety reaches an intensity level around certain experiences and situations that prevents us from making the choices we want and engaging in activities that we wish to. Anxiety falls into the broad category of ‘Fear’ and is generally a constellation of feelings and thoughts around an upcoming situation. It is largely anticipatory, meaning that the fear and the fearful thoughts occur before the actual event/situation/circumstance that we are actual afraid of is taking place. If you have any question about this notice anxiety next time it comes up for you….is a fearful situation actually happening when you feel it or is the negative feeling/thoughts/sensatiosn occurring beforehand….? Please check this out in your experience.

Because anxiety is based on future events Mindfulness can be an antidote to this future-oriented fear. How? We have defined mindfulness practice as using our attention and concentration to be in the present with our moment-to-moment experience. If we are present in our bodies and thoughts then we cannot be anticipating or jumping ahead to future oriented events. Often our minds are conditioned to look towards the future and this disconnect from our present experience has alot to do with the unpleasant feelings in our body that come with anxiety. Our being is split…the mind is in the future and the body is in the present, this conflict brings about a sense of dis-ease.

From my own experiences with anxiety and my work with clients I have found that often the feeling of anxiety is much more accessible than the thoughts that go with the state of being anxious. I am often aware of a tightness in my chest, or a sinking feeling in my stomach, perhaps also a tightness in my throat or jaw. These are my first indications of anxiety….another good indicator is that nothing is happening in the moment to cause this fear. I am safe yet i am having these sensations and feelings that I associate with fear. Next I might go to the thoughts. I notice that I am telling myself a story…’the last time you did this they all laughed at you…’ That is a common story that runs through my mind before I do any kind of public speaking or teaching. There was a single incidence in my past of people laughing at me in 5th grade while i gave a presentation. Yet close to 30 years later the same story that was true one time, and has been untrue many other times still comes up.

Most of us have these stories, or as one of my former therapists called them ‘my tapes.’ Our tapes run almost all of the time and often shape our experiences in ways that we do not want. In this case, my story about performing was creating a feedback loop. First I would have the anxious feeling then the thoughts associated with the upcoming experience and that in turn intensified the feelings and so on…. With anxiety often a feedback loop is created between the thoughts and the feelings and each perpetuates the other; both phenomenon becoming stronger on each cycle. For some this experience escalates into a panic attack.

This feedback loop happens unconsciously for most of us and we do not recognize the thought or feeling component of this anxiety. Instead, because both the thoughts and the sensations are painful, we seek to push them away or banish them from our consciousness. Though the impulse to avoid pain is natural and very human it does not serve us in this circumstance. This avoidance tends to condition this feedback loop in an increasingly compelling pattern into our mental body, physical body, and emotional body. In other words it becomes a habit to feel anxious.

The answer to this is to start to pay attention to our experience of anxiety with as much awareness as possible. We want to approach our anxiety as a good old friend. To get to know its nuances and subtleties to let it know that even though it is unpleasant it is part of us, part of our experience and it is worth getting to know.

As said earlier, often the physical and emotional sensations in the body are the most easily accessible when anxiety is present. I have found that a very good strategy when feeling anxious is to direct our attention to the sensations of the anxiety. We use our awareness to surround the sensation, not penetrating it but finding its form and volume and surrounding it with our awareness allowing it to soak into the feeling. I often experience anxiety in my chest as a tightness, as if there was a clenched fist around my heart center. To encounter this anxiety I would surround the fist with my awareness feeling its details and being willing to know it, if even for a short time. You might even try saying silently to yourself ‘yes’ as you feel the sensations.

This strategy short circuits the feedback loop. First of all we are doing something different by not avoiding the experience. We are turning towards the anxiety rather than away from it. Instead of trying to feel something different or feel better we are just allowing ourselves to feel what is. This attitude of openness and acceptance characterized by the ‘yes’ is an affirmation to ourselves and an acceptance of our present experience.

By turning towards the feelings we are moving out of our future orientation and encountering the present in our bodies. As we become willing to connect to our moment-to-moment experience in our bodies we let go of the thoughts which are pushing us toward a future time or situation. By definition, our feelings occurring in our body are happening in the present. The thoughts of the future situation are about something that is a fantasy…we do not yet know what the future will bring.

The thoughts will keep occurring, but the important thing is to move our attention and concentration away from them and into our somatic experience. This creates mindfulness as we track and open to our sensations/feelings in the somatic body. Our thoughts are often compelling and we may have to move away from the the thoughts again and again.

The feelings may also be unpleasant. However, there is a rule with our feelings. They can only happen for a finite amount of time. They may grow weaker or stronger as we pay attention to them, but eventually they will pass away and we will feel something else. So instead of recreating these feelings in each moment by telling ourselves a fearful and future oriented story we are turning off the circuit by taking away the energy of our awareness and directing it instead to an experience of our bodies and our emotional energy in our bodies. Without being fed by fearful thoughts our energy in our bodies will move and change in response to the present. We will have an authentic experience of being rather than an inauthentic experience created by fearful fantasy.

This takes practice. I suggest you begin to notice if your anxiety works this way…and begin to have the intention of directing your attention and concentration to your bodily experience. Our body’s experience is generally related to our present experience. As we disconnect from the stories we tell our selves our bodies begin to regulate and experience feeling connected to what is going on in the present moment. Even if the present moment is not ideal there is a certain satisfaction and relaxation in connecting to what is rather than reacting to a fantasy. Trust your body to guide you in this.

My teacher Shinzen Young often uses this phrase to identify our basic strategy when building internal awareness of sensory phenomena (anything we think, feel, notice in the body-mind.) Having this intention to ‘divide and conquer’, can be a great aid in bringing mindfulness to difficult emotional or physical experiences. Breaking down our experiences into their sensory parts or pieces essentially creates some detachment and takes a lot of power out of what could otherwise feel like a very overwhelming experience.

There are essentially four realms or domains of sensory experience that we can tune into at any time. These are (using the terminology of Shinzen Young) Touch, Feel, Image, and Talk.

Touch space is spatially located in the physical body. This space is defined as encompassing purely physical phenomena. For instance, an itchiness on you right toe, or pain in our knee.

Feel space is also spatially located in the physical body, but could be said to also include the subtle or energetic body. Feel type experiences are those that are physical sensations, but also have emotional content. Say for instance that you have a tightness in your chest and there is awareness that this is anxiety, that is Feel. If it were simply a pain in the chest with no undertone or flavor of emotion it would simply be touch. So to discriminate between a Touch and a Feel type sensation it is necessary to discern if there is emotional content or not. Often we will each have our own unique feel centers. For me, much of my Feel occurs at or around the center of my chest.

Image space resides spatially just in front of or behind the eyes. For me it is slightly above and in front. For each person the location of these sensory phenomena may differ slightly. Image space is where we ’see’ the visual component of thought occurs. Say you are thinking about your partner or a friend. Chances are if you check in with Image space you would notice a visual representation of that friend or partner projected upon your image space. Image space is almost like a blank screen upon which we project our visual thoughts.

Talk space is spatially located between the ears. I locate mind towards the back of my head and between the ears. Again, this may vary from person to person. Talk space is where the verbal component of our thoughts occur. If we are scared and we become aware of the activity of in talk space we may find that we are repeating to ourselves something like ‘I am scared, I am scared’ or creating some narrative about the frightening situation. If you were to say to yourself silently, ‘One, Two, three, four….’ and count to ten. The area in your head where you ‘hear’ the these numbers being spoken is Talk space.
So why is this important?

To be truly mindful, in a sort of global way, we would need to be simultaneously aware of all four of these spaces as we experience them. For most of us this is impossible. Particularly if what we are experiencing is a difficult, disturbing, or overwhelming thought or emotional pattern. Instead we will use these sensory spaces to divide up our experience piecemeal.

Let’s take a look at what might be going on in these areas if you are experiencing sadness.

Touch: sensations of watery eyes, tears rolling down your cheeks

Feel: A throbbing knot in your chest, pulsating in and out

Image: the picture of your friend who you just had an argument with

Talk: ‘He or she is never going to forgive me, I’m a bad person, I should have hurt him/her, I’m no good….etc. etc.’

The best way to begin using the Divide and Conquer approach to your experience is to set aside a time to do some sitting mindfulness practice.

1. Choose a sensory space to pay attention to: Touch, Feel, Image, Talk

2. find your comfortable upright seated position and devote a certain amount of time to the practice, 10, 15, 20 minutes or more.

3. Spend a few minutes, maybe 5 or so attending to your breath to settle the body/mind. Anapanasati practice, as explained in a previous post.
4. Begin to ‘tune in’ to your chosen space by finding its location in the body. Experiment until you find the place where your selected sensory space occurs. This may take a while to locate. Try to just remain present and patiently and mindfully aware to whatever part of your body the sensory space occurs in. (For instance, Talk space would be in the head, between the ears.)

5. If you find you have wandered from the space you have committed to exploring gently bring your self back.

6. Notice what is going on in your chosen sensory space. Say you chose Image space, notice at first nothing there a sense of blankness, then after a few moments you may notice an image begin to arise and fade away, or perhaps a stream of images much like a movie. Just be present with whatever arises, or does not arise. We are not attempting to make anything happen here.

7. Very often there will be sensory phenomena occurring in 3 or 4 of the sensory spaces at once. You may be distracted by ‘Talk’ when you have committed to sensing Image space or you may feel a ‘Touch’ (a pain or sensation in the body) when you have committed to exploring Talk space. If you find you have left your chosen domain, gently bring yourself back again and again.

8. Allow yourself to return to the breath as the object of mindfulness for the last 2 minutes or so of your practice, and end after that.

This is a simple way to bring mindfulness to the component parts of your experience. It is highly therapeutic in that you will over time find that a certain amount of spaciousness occurs in each of these sensory spaces making a difficult experience less painful, and we are able to observe with detachment.

Often my clients report that painful phenomena, when focused on with mindfulness will quickly break up or fade away. Sometimes the phenomena grow stronger or stay the same, but over time these difficult and painful experiences lose their power as we relate to them and become familiar.

We also grow much more accustomed, and develop insight into what we may define as ‘anger’,’sadness,’ loneliness,’ isolation, or any other negative emotional experience, making it less painful. We realize that our emotions are not as big, real, painful, and scary as we think they are. Instead we see that they, like all of our experiences, are just a collection of visual and verbal thoughts, feelings and sensations.

Painful and difficult emotions are like a tightly bound knot in the body/mind. Mindfulness creates space and loosens tension. The knot over time unwinds, and healing occurs.