Meditation and metaphors

When I started formally  meditating I did not have many expectations and pretty much engaged in it with a beginner’s mind trusting the process even when the sitting was not easy. It is now very much part of my daily routine like eating and drinking water and have found it to be a powerful tool to regulate, to contain experience, to build up resilience and  to awaken or increase understanding. It brings about both shedding and expansiveness. Our sense of identity is in some terms desolidified and not perceived as rigid, which eventually brings more lightness of being. It also shifts our sense of experiencing the self and brings to the foreground our connectedness to all. These last few days I have been listening to podcasts from the Mindfulness and Meditation Summit by Sounds True, where many aspects of these practices are discussed and various practices are presented. There are many research findings now that suggest multiple benefits of these practices and how they nurture neuroplastic changes in the brain. It is interesting to see the relation and correlation between tangible changes like increase  in regulatory processes and capacity to return to baseline and growth in the prefrontal cortex and so on.  Richie Davidson discusses how sustained meditation over time develops lasting physiological and behavioural traits and refers to benefits such as decreased implicit bias of outgroups,  increased expression of gamma oscillations, etc. He also refers to available data that supports our innate human propensity for kindness and goodness. In one interesting experiment young babies consistently preferred puppets that were friendly and prosocial over the aggressive puppet scenarios.

Our mainstream cultures mostly encourage us to turn away from pain and grief, medicate it, drug it, dissociate it, push it out of view or at least get over with it quickly; however, meditation requires we become intimate and compassionate with pain, ours and others’. In one podcast Kate Johnson focuses on tonglen practices of receiving ours and others’ pain and sending out acceptance, love, peace, light, compassion, a practice that I have found fosters compassion, connection and letting go, even forgiveness. She also mentioned that a sitting meditation may not be the ideal approach when it comes to high levels of anxiety or panic, where perhaps recognising and naming the experience and movement are more appropriate. She provides a useful metaphor to make this point clear. Often anxiety can be the secondary state that’s pushing down the primary emotion or experience. I like to sometimes think of anxiety as a gate, our own fierce attempt to censor what’s coming up, is salient and in need of our attention. It disrupts functioning and hijacks our attention and body, and therefore, leaves little room for further processing, momentarily relieving us of deeper experiences like memories or grief. Her metaphor is that of a cat trapped on a toilet seat, which is in a frantic state because moving may land it in the toilet basin. She suggests that the cat represents our anxiety or panic and that we need to get the cat off the seat, in order to see what’s lurking in the basin.

A metaphor is a figure or speech in which one thing implicitly represents another thing. For instance, we understand that someone is not literally a rock or on fire. In art, we do something similar with our use of imagery. A visual metaphor is an image that we are meant to understand as a symbol for something else, which helps us communicate a lot of information within one image and without words. In art therapy the use of metaphors has been found to facilitate the processing of difficult material, the accessing of deeper layers of memories and emotions, working through distortions, and communicating our experience with economy. Through art we discover symbols, shapes and colours and other forms of expression that reflect our inner landscapes and represent particular experience. Artist Georgia O’Keeffe said that she found she could say things with colour and shapes what she couldn’t say any other way. Visual metaphors in particular have helped me describe emotions, physical sensations and dynamics, and experiences with brevity. For instance, the minimal images in Let me be were multilayered and contained the sensations, the emotions, the layered narratives and distortions and the dynamics of a much longer story.

The publication of Let me be, a product of processing traumas at a particular point in time, brought about a tsunami of responses. I have written elsewhere about the prevalence of child abuse and its potential role as a means of oppression  and subjugation across contexts and cultures and about societal denial and patriarchy’s investment in preventing speaking out about these issues. In my case the backlash for breaking the silence has been both subtle and intense and consistent over the last ten or more years. I have experienced procedures that have generated grief and fear and injustices at a systems level, and yet both this post and this site and my more awakened state of being through meditation and new learning are to a great extent the result of the culmination of these events. This website has given me a platform to speak, to become visible and vulnerable on my own terms, to connect and to increase safety, which may sound like a paradox since it has also brought about increased harassment. Let me be mostly ended up stored in boxes in my small storeroom and later I witnessed people tearing the posters of artwork that I exhibited in the street while the glue was still wet. Rented and For Sale signs with no information on them were mounted on many of the posters. However, the site has become a kind of home where bits of expression, truths and fears, knowledge and experience, mine and others’, have found shelter over time. A new illustrated tender little story is ready and I have not yet figured out whether I will make a book out of it or post it for free on my website or elsewhere, but it is good to feel that I have a place for it and I will not be intimidated to silence.

Finally, I will end this post with Kate Johnson’s encouragement to tap into the larger pool of goodness across the world. We often forget this in our isolation or the moments we are bending over our own worries, but there are so many people doing small acts of courage, kindness and goodness everywhere everyday as they go about their daily lives. Tapping into this larger pool of goodness is facilitated during meditation when barriers seem to dissolve and an increased sense of connection arises.