Photo by Lubomirkin on Unsplash
Many people have this misunderstanding that we learn Mindfulness meditation to be calmer, or to be more regulated in our emotions. What if it’s the exact opposite?
What if you are allowing yourself to be deregulated?
To feel your full emotions and aliveness fully.
To be unafraid.
To welcome all – The anger, the shame, the jealousy, or the sadness.
To challenge the fundamental notion that we should feel a certain way and not another way.
A total deregulation of our conditioning.
The Habitual Way
Maybe having rules and having clear ideas of good and bad had helped us in feeling safe and certain in the past. It’s something we are so used to in our day-to-day life, that we have begun to assume ‘regulating’ is a solution for everything.
The one thing that we did not learn in school is that the need for certainty and being solution focused is very limiting when it comes to understanding and relating to our turbulent emotions and thoughts. It plays a limited role when we want to take care of our wellbeing or when we want to take care of each other’s wellbeing. If we fixate on control and certainty, how do we face our emotional and thought spontaneity with kindness and compassion?
It tends to guide us down the wrong path when our intention is to love ourselves and to love each other. If we fixate on right and wrong, how do we connect empathetically?
Learning a New Way
We are not renouncing the old ways.
We are learning a new way.
We are learning an openness, a versatility.
A psychological flexibility.
A space that allows turbulence and chaos,
with an embodiment of the stillness that is ever present.
A different way from fixing and entangling.
A different way from distraction and avoidance.
Complete surrendering and honouring of what is here in the moment
– be it good or bad.
A Way for Liberation
This was why it took me ages to realise what it really mean to practice mindfulness. What does it mean to deregulate? To allow? To let be?
Because it is new to us. Few have learnt it; not most of our parents, nor our school teachers and our country leaders. It is counter-intuitive from our usual mode of mind. It’s so hard that despite the careful guidance in each practice, we continue to think, ‘Am I doing this right? Is this the right way? I must be doing this wrong. I must be missing some steps.’
We are constantly seeking the steps, the certainty or the rightness of our action.
But the practice is certainly not about more rules. It’s not about having more things to do ‘right’.
There is a reason why mystics, spiritual and religious leaders don’t point to meditation for regulation.
The word they use is liberation.
The Practice
It begin usually feeling like work. Feeling like it’s all wrong.
Then gradually..
It’s ok that it feels like work.
It’s ok that it feels all wrong.
It stop feeling like work.
It stop feeling wrong.
Whatever I feel is ok.
I feel at ease.
Repeat many times.
