The Contraction That Won't Resolve
La contracción que no se resuelve
A student describes a persistent contraction in the heart center that returns no matter how she approaches it, and asks how to reach its root. The teacher suggests the deepest fear may be inseparable from the deepest longing.
The Contraction That Won't Resolve
A student describes a persistent contraction in the heart center that returns no matter how she approaches it, and asks how to reach its root. The teacher suggests the deepest fear may be inseparable from the deepest longing.
I have this contraction in my heart, and it's been there for a very long time. I do a lot of meeting it, feeling it, observing the different sensations. Every time I meet it, there's some release, and then it just recontracts again. So there's this constant state of contraction, release, contraction, release. My sense is that this is the gripping of the separate self, the center of that identification. Whenever I do inquiry into it, it gets so much louder and more intensified. Then I sit with that and allow it to just be there.
I've tried two different approaches: being unaffected and observing, or merging with it completely. They produce slightly different results, but it's still the same in the end. It's always there, and it recontracts again. It just doesn't feel like I get to the root of it. I'm wondering if you might have a suggestion for how to approach it or get to the root.
At certain times it feels better. When I'm blissing out, at peace and present, I won't necessarily notice it. But if I do put attention on it, it's always there.
With this kind of deep experience, it's always a bit of a mystery how to approach and work with it. You've approached it from, in a sense, all the right angles: self-inquiry, meeting it, feeling it, that kind of relationship. I'm wondering if you've explored looking at what it is saying, in the sense that if you were to listen to what it wants, what it needs, and if you were to be open to it being a lot more than what might be easy to hear. You're saying it's in your heart center, so it might be, for example, a huge desire for something in life, something that's not necessarily what we'd call a spiritual thing. Something you want to live.
Listening for what the contraction wants
So much of the direction in spiritual work is addressed to people who are running away from deeper sensation, avoiding the inner world. There's all this guidance around going in and meeting what's there, not trying to find something in the world. But sometimes the opposite is true, or more what works, especially if we have already done a lot of that going inward.
I'm wondering if you've explored what it would be asking for or wanting. Perhaps something in life that is big and scary. The way I often phrase it is: look at what you want, as if you are the universe wanting something through you.
I've definitely explored that. In every therapy session I have, I work with this. I take every angle: talking to my inner child, asking what it wants to say, feeling into it. It's interesting, because the things I'm most passionate about in life, after non-duality, just became irrelevant. The deeper I went into non-duality, the more they all fell away. But even when I try to reopen my passion for these other things, I find that when I do them, this heart contraction actually gets so loud, and it manifests as total exhaustion in my body. It's some kind of resistance or fighting, even for those things, not just non-duality, but the things I love to do. I feel too exhausted to do them, and then I just rest for a long time afterward.
The most peace I get is when I don't do anything, when I just sit in meditation. Really doing nothing is when I feel most at ease. It could be what you say is true, that there's something in me that wants to live and do these things, but whatever resistance shows up, I can't really get to what it's about. It's just fear and anxiety. There are no stories, no thoughts around it. When I ask, all I hear is something like, "I'm scared."
The fear beneath the contraction
So what you're saying is that this contraction in the heart center is fear.
Yes, definitely. And there are waves of grief. It used to be that I was just crying all the time. I would allow the crying and that felt good. I loved it when I was crying. But then I stopped crying, and now it's very little crying and more just anxiety. If there is a story, if I dig and try to put a story to it, that will allow me to cry more. But I don't think that's the way.
No, not that one.
What we fear most is what we want most
Because it's a fear, and you can't name what the fear is of or about, that tells us something. Usually when we can't find what it's about, it's deeper. And ultimately, what we fear the most is what we want the most.
You've mentioned the word peace. So I'm wondering if what you're contracting around and afraid of is a kind of peace, well-being, joy, or expansiveness. You obviously long for it, but there's something in us that can't have both.
I didn't catch that. What do you mean by "can't have both"? What can't remain the same?
If you were to fully open up to what you long for (to use words: peace, joy, well-being, expansiveness, freedom), you cannot remain the same. Something has to give.
Something has to give
When we're meeting deeper sensations, deeper fears, deeper pains that are hard to grasp within a story or find a cause for, that is ultimately what it's about. It's not about leaving something specific, and it's not about meeting the sensation either, because the sensation is ultimately the resistance to what is. The resistance to what we want. The resistance to the love that is here, that we are.
In order for us to fully realize that and know it directly, something in us has to give, has to change, has to end. And we often struggle because we want to have it both ways.