Meditation is not all about watching golden lotuses, says meditation master and teacher, Sally Kempton. Even the great meditators, she says, have to wrestle with unwelcome thoughts and feelings that surface right in the middle of a mantra.
In her book, Meditation for the Love of It: Enjoying Your Own Deepest Experience (Sounds True, January 1, 2011), Kempton helps to move us through the “mentalogue,” beyond the troubling thoughts and emotions that surface during meditation to a more profound practice of self-discovery. Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, calls Kempton’s teachings, “the most important travel guide you’ll ever encounter,” one that can show us how to replace the “mundane din with a mind of quiet wonder.” (Gilbert penned the book’s foreword.)
But the act of sitting quietly and focusing inward produces more than just a mundane din. “It can churn up a whole host of buried beliefs and heavy emotions,” says Kempton. Meditation allows these obstructive ideas and painful emotions to float to the top of our consciousness, where they can be recognized and removed.
No need to analyze them (even those feelings about your mother). Just witness them; then breathe them out, releasing on the exhalation. “With practice,” says Kempton, “we learn to use this “inner witness” as a platform from which to look at and heal these feelings, to let our own Consciousness dissolve them.”
Since the process of meditation is ultimately about self-confrontation, self-recognition, and the gap between who we’d like to be and who we are, even the most embarrassing, hostile or frightening thoughts need not disturb us. The important thing to remember, believes Kempton, is that whatever shows up comes out of Consciousness and therefore, love.
Here are a few of the many tips Kempton offers when thoughts and feelings make meditation tough:
Let go of tension. At the beginning of the meditation, scan the body noticing where you feel tight or uncomfortable, and then breathe out the tightness. Breathing out the tightness in the body does more that relax us physically, it quiets the mind.
Sweep your heart with a mantra. An empowered mantra acts as a sort of cleansing force, a subtle but extremely strong broom that sweeps away the mental and emotional “stuff” in the basement of our subconscious.
Let go of your attachment to being the thinker. Instead of identifying with your inner thinker who focuses on thoughts and desires, identify with your inner witness, the watcher of the thoughts. Don’t try to cast out thoughts. Let them be there, but pull back from them.
Don’t judge the content of your thoughts. Negative thoughts exercise a particular power over us, partly because we tend to judge them more harshly than other thoughts. Don’t push them away—they can take you where you need to go.
Look at the shifts in the way you feel about yourself since you began your practice, the changes in your character and the subtle shifts in your inner atmosphere. Write down what you discover; take some time to honor your own process.
Keep on meditating. No matter what’s going on. Spiritual progress is not a straight line, but rather a zigzag of two steps forward and one step back. It is for most people a slow and gradual process. If we keep at it with strong intention, we do arrive at the destination.
About the Author:
Sally Kempton is an acknowledged master teacher of meditation, subtle energy and Tantric wisdom who has been practicing and teaching since the early 1970s. A former swami in one of the Saraswati orders of India, Kempton is a teachers’ teacher whose students now include leading teachers of yoga and meditation around the world. She teaches at the Kripalu Yoga Center, Esalen and other notable centers; leads retreats and workshops internationally; and writes the popular “Wisdom” column for Yoga Journal.
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