By Paddy Kamen, publisher, BetterBrainBetterLife.com
At 3:36 a.m. I was awakened by voices from the boarding house across the street. Mind started in with worries about health, money, and numerous perceived problems like the fact that I don’t have an adequate filing system and the garage is a mess of stuff that needs to be gone through so that if I die suddenly my children won’t have to deal with it. Mind would not stop. Some of this was gripping stuff, and I’m not being facetious (e.g. my health*). Some of it was less urgent (the dahlias are being eaten by bugs and I’m not doing anything about it). But when in a crisis like this, the important matters and the less so merge into a battering ram of misery.
After a while, I felt crazy, as in, ‘I can’t possibly cope with my life and I’ll likely end up in the hospital or homeless and on the street’. The mind crap was spiraling. I needed emergency self-surgery. I got out of bed and started to sit meditation.
After a while, I felt crazy, as in, ‘I can’t possibly cope with my life and I’ll likely end up in the hospital or homeless and on the street’. The mind crap was spiraling. I needed emergency self-surgery. I got out of bed and started to sit meditation.
With the battering ram of mind firmly in control, I prayed, earnestly, intensely, and with tears, for relief, to creator, to divine mother. Then, knowing I have tools, I started to ‘note’ (a technique you can learn about from my teacher Shinzen Young here). Noting has always been among the best focuses of practice for me. And this morning I tried something new: every time I noted that I was consumed by thought I did tapping in the form of Thought Field Therapy (TFT)**. Then I went back to noting. There was a lot of tapping going on.
It worked! The spaces between the worry-eruptions lengthened and my experience of those spaces became more absorbing. I sat for about one hour. Then I ‘heard’ a snippet of the Hathor Heart Chakra Meditation by Tom Kenyon in the mind and so I lay down on my bed and put on the headset and listened to these most-beautiful life-and-death affirming sounds with an expanded awareness of body sensation and space. I kept pouring my awareness into the bodily sensation – a continually changing landscape of experience – and opening to Kenyon’s profound vocalizations. How restful!
It worked! The spaces between the worry-eruptions lengthened and my experience of those spaces became more absorbing. I sat for about one hour. Then I ‘heard’ a snippet of the Hathor Heart Chakra Meditation by Tom Kenyon in the mind and so I lay down on my bed and put on the headset and listened to these most-beautiful life-and-death affirming sounds with an expanded awareness of body sensation and space. I kept pouring my awareness into the bodily sensation – a continually changing landscape of experience – and opening to Kenyon’s profound vocalizations. How restful!
This is the first time I thought of inserting TFT into the meditation practice. You may want try to for your own impending insanity situations, should you be subject to them.
I wondered if the meditation and listening might put me back to sleep but it did not and so here I am in the red chair, doing this thing called writing.
Wishing you all good things!
*This is a complicated story, the whole of which I have not told, but I found a great blog site on gut issues: http://allergiesandyourgut.com/, and you can read more about my fascinating gut in the previous post.
**TFT is the 'grandfather' of EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique). Both are good. In my practice as recounted above, I just noticed that I was thinking and did the TFT immediately. I did not, therefore, do the TFT correctly. Nevertheless, it helped. This video on TFT by Dr. Mary Cowley is one I like. According to Cowley (via private correspondence): "TFT was the original tapping therapy. EFT is an offshoot of TFT, using just one long sequence that is very effective in many cases, but when it’s not, there’s nowhere else to go. With TFT, if a “standardized” sequence (of which there are actually quite a few, to make the benefits accessible to more people) doesn’t work, someone who’s been trained in TFT diagnostics can determine the sequence specific to that person."
I wondered if the meditation and listening might put me back to sleep but it did not and so here I am in the red chair, doing this thing called writing.
Wishing you all good things!
*This is a complicated story, the whole of which I have not told, but I found a great blog site on gut issues: http://allergiesandyourgut.com/, and you can read more about my fascinating gut in the previous post.
**TFT is the 'grandfather' of EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique). Both are good. In my practice as recounted above, I just noticed that I was thinking and did the TFT immediately. I did not, therefore, do the TFT correctly. Nevertheless, it helped. This video on TFT by Dr. Mary Cowley is one I like. According to Cowley (via private correspondence): "TFT was the original tapping therapy. EFT is an offshoot of TFT, using just one long sequence that is very effective in many cases, but when it’s not, there’s nowhere else to go. With TFT, if a “standardized” sequence (of which there are actually quite a few, to make the benefits accessible to more people) doesn’t work, someone who’s been trained in TFT diagnostics can determine the sequence specific to that person."