The Humbling of Knowing
La Humildad del Conocer
A student describes intense relational trauma surfacing in her life and practice, and asks how to meet overwhelming emotion more fully. The teacher points toward the attachment to knowing as the deeper obstacle, and distinguishes between cycling fear and the deeper fear that leads to genuine surrender.
The Humbling of Knowing
A student describes intense relational trauma surfacing in her life and practice, and asks how to meet overwhelming emotion more fully. The teacher points toward the attachment to knowing as the deeper obstacle, and distinguishes between cycling fear and the deeper fear that leads to genuine surrender.
I came on wanting to ask about how to better meet intense emotion, because a lot has been coming up very intensely. After talking with you about going toward life, it was as though intelligence just knew what that meant and began doing it on its own. I've been hitting hard against all the relational trauma I was trying to sidestep.
I volunteer at a healing center, and a lot of that pain was being pushed under. I was aware it was being pushed under, but I thought it was acceptable. Then it was simply no longer acceptable, and that wasn't my choice. It all came up and led to a dramatic exit from that place. So much of the emotional trauma mirrors dynamics from my childhood. The same patterns, the same stories. It's been very intense the past couple of days.
There's a lot of emotion, a lot of looping in story, and then I try to keep coming back to the body to feel, because I know the looping is trying to avoid the intensity. But when I go back into feeling, it seems like endless fear and pain. There's always this question of whether I'm meeting it correctly. It doesn't move quickly, like being present with it so it can pass through. It's drawn out and intense, so it feels like there must be very strong resistance.
Then in our meditation today, I dropped to a very deep place, much deeper than any of that. I met this feeling of, "Oh my God, not this." I pulled back, then kept creeping back in, doing that dance of pulling back and going back in. It felt good to me. It's located in the lower belly, and it's been an ongoing contraction there.
Then when another student was sharing, I just started crying and crying. There was such deep resonance with whatever this resistance is: resistance to this self, to this death. Maybe it's a fear of fully letting go, and the pain that comes because I want it so badly. There's a very intense sadness that keeps coming. I don't really know what the question is, unless it's simply how to meet it more fully.
Sadness is a really good direction. When you're with sadness, that's often something deep.
But you brought up the fear and pain early on, and the question of how you're meeting it, whether you're meeting it in the best way. For that, I would recommend working with a trauma therapist, because that can really help clarify things in the moment and how to walk through them.
I do EMDR every week with a therapist. It's been the same stuff for years, working on the same relational trauma. This is why I keep asking, "What am I missing?" It's always the same stories and the same emotional patterns, and I'm not getting to the root of it.
The narratives we want to keep
Part of what I want to share with you is this: look at which narratives you really want to hold on to. If something keeps repeating, there are narratives we're attached to.
But I also want to say that it sounds like you're moving in a really good direction. Going back into difficult feelings, and that sense of meeting a sensation where you felt "not this" in meditation, that's a good sign. There can be, as you said, a dance: back and forth, toward it and away from it, toward it again.
Surrender as the humbling of knowing
The key to all of this, in a sense, is that it's a process of humbling. It's a process of humility in all of our knowing and our attachment to knowing. You said you really want to surrender. What needs to be surrendered is the knowing itself.
The struggling and fighting is our attachment to knowing. And that includes a certain kind of knowing around the understanding of that pain: where it's from, what it's about. That understanding also needs to be seen through. That will be the surrender.
Two kinds of fear
When I say fear and pain, there's a fear that can be a kind of cycling. And then there's a deeper fear, more like despair, helplessness, a sense of powerlessness: "I can't. I just can't." That is the humbling.
I think the crossroads you're at is this being churned, this bringing of humility. But it's a universal thing. It's not you specifically. It's what happens when a very deep attachment to knowing becomes an obstacle, and the sensations of that pain need to be met more directly. Not managed by the knowing of what it is, or the knowing of how to manage it, or the knowing of how to approach it, or deal with it.
And be really gentle with yourself when you're there.