When Old Material Surfaces
Cuando emerge material antiguo
A student describes how forgotten fears and childhood emotions have been resurfacing, and asks whether to stay with the bodily sensations or allow the narrative to play out. The teacher redirects toward the student's own deepening intuition.
When Old Material Surfaces
A student describes how forgotten fears and childhood emotions have been resurfacing, and asks whether to stay with the bodily sensations or allow the narrative to play out. The teacher redirects toward the student's own deepening intuition.
It has been pretty wild the last few weeks. A lot of old stuff has started coming up: fears, things I felt were sorted and forgotten, now making an appearance. The movement is actually not away from it but toward it, in a natural way. It's here, and there's a wanting to embrace it and be with it.
Yesterday I was doing a breathing-through-the-heart practice with another teacher, and really deep childhood material started to come up, tears and everything. I was being with it, feeling it in the body, the sensations. But I could also see the story come up, the narrative about what it is. It was clear to me that it was something from childhood, from school. So my question is: do I try to go deeper, stay with the sensations, or allow the narrative to also play out?
The key there is: what's the problem? And I don't mean that as a trick question where the answer is "oh, there is no problem." No. What really matters is that wisdom comes in becoming more and more intuitive around the nature of what's happening and what the problem actually is. Is there some form of illusion? Is there some form of resistance to experience and sensation? Is there some avoidance of life, of intensity, of aliveness, of uncertainty?
The approach follows the intuition
The approach will be varied depending on the intuition. As you are awakening, deepening, and growing up in all of the ways that I talk about, the answer lives in that intuition and in your own exploration. You bring me a question, but in a sense I'm gently putting it back to you. Because at one moment it might be about sensation, and at another moment it might be about seeing the illusory nature of that appearance, where the sensation is just an emotional reaction. The intuition required is very subtle, and as we deepen it becomes quicker and quicker, truly moment by moment.
At an earlier stage, the shifts might take a year. It could take a year to snap out of a belief, and then we snap out for a minute and go back. Or it could take a year to have contact with a difficult energy and then six months until we get in touch with it again. But as things become more free, the intuition operates moment by moment: what's happening right now, what's the illusion, what's the reality?
That's why I don't think I can answer your question directly. If I did, I'd be lending you my intuition while being very far from the immediacy of what you're actually experiencing, from the complexity and richness of your own knowing. The answer, for me, is: what is your intuition? Then we can talk about that, and I can perhaps reflect and help.
That is actually a very good answer. I think I was looking for advice on some kind of practice, like "do this or do that." So that was very helpful.
The right tool for the right moment
There are practices, yes. But they are appropriate as the right tool for the right moment and the right problem. Right now, with what you bring, my intuition is not to give you a practice or to lend you my direction on which way to lean. I know you well enough, and it's an intuition that you know yourself well enough, that only you at this point can really explore that at the level of subtlety it requires. Also, what's right for the next five minutes might be a different thing tonight.
Thank you for that, because it gives me encouragement to trust more. When it was happening, I was just letting it be, both the narrative and the sensations. And what you said is true: it's amazing how intense it got, really intense and deep. And then it was gone so fast, maybe half an hour. And then there was this lightness and settledness.
Surfing through it
That confirms my intuition. There is already a fluidity in your process. You get stuck on something, then you see through something, then an energetic movement takes over. You see the narrative, you go into the sensation, the energy moves. But then that is also seen as not ultimately that deep or real, and whatever energy gets processed naturally through the body is released. Then a calmness comes.
It's like surfing through it: the mind, the sensations, the body. I can imagine you're experiencing it as though you see through the mind's illusion, and then the experience that the mind was helping you not get in touch with directly becomes available. You see through the illusion, you contact the experience, and the energy moves. It's intense, and you realize, "So I was avoiding this." But then the thought comes up: "I need to go through this thing over and over again now." No. It just came up, that's it, now it's gone. That thought is also the mind's illusion, the idea that you now need to do a process.
Right, the illusion that it's a kind of practice, and the doership thing comes in again.
Exactly. Whatever comes up, when it's coming up, you surf with it. It's going this way, and you go with it.
But when it gets very still, it almost feels good, yet something is stirring underneath. So now it's that.
Yes. Exactly.