Sitting Still and Cleaning Up: A Call To Visit the Places We Hide From

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast

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Once or twice a year, I find a place where I can stay alone for around seven days or so and spend long hours in meditation. 

At some level the experience is similar to fasting. Now, I haven't gotten way into fasting, but I know people who fast for 5, 10, or 20 days — to the point they’re drinking concoctions of water, vinegar, lemon, and maple syrup to clean out their organs and detoxify their blood. Then they come out of the fast beaming, their eyes are shimmering, and they tell you they have never been so alive.

In a solitary retreat, we fast from sensory experience. We fasting from all of the drama we get tangled up in day to day as human beings. 

Just like fasting, it can be difficult to sit still and encounter the content of our emotions and our psyches. It takes discipline to be still and really give our body-mind time to process these experiences. 

A little more than a year ago, I did a silent retreat at the same time as a house repair. You see, I’d bought a home with my wife and it was one of those mega-fixer-uppers, and everywhere we looked in the house, we seemed to find something new that would cause a major headache to undo and redo properly.

For example, the air intake that led to the central heating air conditioning happened to be carpeted. So it was kind of a green shag carpet that had been there a long time. When we moved in, the thing was covered in dust and felt, and you could almost hear the microbes teaming through that shag rug in our air ducts. It ran deep enough and it was disgusting enough that I saw it and was immediately repulsed by it. And I remember the inspector said something to the effect that the very first thing we should do when we moved into this house was clean that air duct out. So naturally, two years later, when I'm at my retreat, I schedule about an hour of physical labor every day because I know it's good to get the body moving instead of just sitting on a meditation cushion for 12 hours straight every day. I figure I finally have no excuse but to open that hatch and strip that rug out of the ducts. 

It took me a long time to get there, so the task was somewhat horrific. It felt like I was exposing myself to an entire universe of diseases and illnesses and infections. 

It took me a long time. I certainly wasn't able to do it in one one-hour work periods. It took me much of the week to get the job done and after I did, I felt highly satisfied. 

But the metaphor wasn't totally wasted on me.

Until then, I hadn't even allowed myself to consciously recognize that it wasn't just the carpet that was teeming with bacteria. It was the filthy air that was going into the furnace and being blown and distributed throughout the entire house.

Maybe you see where I'm going with this. I had put off this awful task and it only got worse. It only got worse and more disgusting and more threatening to my health and my wife's health and my brother's health and my puppy's health, who all live together in this house. 

I have learned over the course of my life that a similar kind of purging is also deeply necessary on a psycho-spiritual level. 

Fortunately, due to the help of great teachers and mentors and favorable life circumstances, I've trained myself to really turn towards a lot of the intensity of my life through meditation. And when I'm in need of a good scouring or a detoxification, I have a practice of sitting still and encountering it and processing it and letting it go. So, I just puzzled at how I was unconscious enough that I was willing to ignore the filthy bacteria in my house for almost two years before I finally dedicated the needed hours to scrubbing it out and cleaning it up.

Maybe you have something like that in your life. I could tell you stories about my refrigerator, which are metaphorically, similar to the run-in I had with my air ducts. I recently found some sour cream that expired in 2017, but that's a dark road, and we won’t go there now. :) 

What I want to say is that we all have places where we hide. And what's so beautiful about a practice of still sitting (or a practice of paying attention to how we pay attention, or a practice of being aware) is that we actually turn towards these challenges. We turn towards the infestations that colonize our emotional world and our world of thought. And by colonizing our emotions and our thoughts, they negatively impact everything we do in the world. And if we can bring ourselves to stillness — if we can acknowledge that we're in pain, if we can acknowledge that we're actually suffering and that we need to take better care of ourselves and do an about face and really process what's happening — that's when we strip the air ducts clean. That's when we empty the fridge out of rotten food. That's when we fast from the dramas of our lives and we allow spirit to really burn this stuff clean.

So that's what I learned at that retreat. The practice we're about to do is inspired by that and in service of pointing you towards whatever the psycho-spiritual messages in your life. There are areas that need more attention, more care, and if we can sit still with them and really fully feel them, something alchemical happens. We are cleaned out by something beyond us.

Let's do it. Find a place to settle in. Note that you can read this meditation out loud here, or listen from the 10:30 mark here.

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Take a moment to just gather awareness in the physical body. Take a moment to settle in and notice in your experience in this moment, if there's anything whatsoever that you would rather not feel. This could be very subtle, very subtle discomfort in the body, or very subtle discomfort emotionally and mentally. Or it could be very obvious and very overt.

As we do this practice, as we scan and awareness through our body, mind, spirit, we notice that there's a very deep seated pattern of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain.

If our meditation is feeling pleasant, blissful, we'll tend to cling. We’ll tend to want it to be even more blissful and last even longer. 

And if there's something uncomfortable about our practice, we'll tend to want it to be less intense and to pass more quickly. And so we push against a pain and pull more pleasure close to us.

And this is how we create suffering in our lives.

[Silence]

Notice any aspect of your experience in this moment, physically, emotionally, or mentally that you would rather not be feeling, rather not be experiencing in this moment. And instead of avoiding it, instead of choreographing your entire life around it, practice just for a moment doing the opposite practice and acknowledging it, noting it — as much as you can fully open up to it. 

A step I like to add to this process to reinforce the cleansing is ask ourselves the question, will it do me objective harm to experience this in this moment, to feel this way in the body? Most of the time when we asked this question to ourselves, the answer is no, it won't harm us. We don't like to feel anxious. We don't like to feel jealous. We don't like to feel worthless or aimless or any other number of challenging experiences. But the sensations in and of themselves are more than bearable, if not pleasant. 

So whenever you're able to locate in your body, mind, spirit experience in this moment, something you'd rather avoid, something you'd rather not feel. See if rather than escaping from it, you can escape into it. And what might be surprising about this process is that as we do it again and again and again, suddenly what seemed totally unmanageable — like a bacteria trap in our furnace system — suddenly seems much more manageable. It's not unlike being a child afraid of a monster in a closet. And instead of avoiding the closet your whole life, you gather up the courage to open the door and see if there's actually a boogeyman in there.

Once you finally opened the closet door, you realize the experience is manageable. Once we finally open up to the mess that we feel in our lives at times, we realize that the mess is manageable.

As you practice this way, you’ll gain confidence in yourself. You'll live your entire life on a new level.

No longer do you have to expend energy on avoiding all of the unpleasant experiences we’re subject to as human beings. But rather you start to move through life like a Colossus, each challenging experience an opportunity to strengthen your presence, to renew your commitment to yourself, to fully experience each moment that life serves up.

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Photo by Ryan Booth via Unsplash.