Meditation: Taking the Next Steps

We can hardly escape the feeling that the unconscious process moves spiral-wise round a centre, gradually getting closer, while the characteristics of the centre grow more and more distinct. - Jung

Welcome back, dear reader, I hope the last week has found you well. I want to say thank you again, for your patience in waiting for this discourse, I know it has been a long time coming but I have been trying to find the best way to explain what we are going to be discussing today and me and the team of alchemists have been experimenting with these steps to try to come to the best consensus of general steps and how they can be applied to different aspects of your psyche. These steps are not guaranteed to work for everyone, but they are the result of experimentation by several trained alchemists and have been distilled down to their most basic aspects. Without further ado, let us jump into this long-awaited discourse.

Our last discourse covered a very basic form of alchemical mediation and how we can implement that into our daily lives. Our focus today is going to be on taking the next step and using our newly found meditation practices to work toward a more perfect version of ourselves. The most basic way that I have found to do that through meditation is by holding the events, emotions, thoughts, or fears that you are wanting to work on and then, when you are ready to, working through them.

That might sound a little confusing to those of us who don’t have a degree in psychology or aren’t fluent in the tiktok mental health scene. I know when I have been told to “hold space” for things or to “be mindful” or doing something “without judgement” I was genuinely confused about what they meant, until recently, and if I ever asked someone, they would just use other psychology terms without defining any of them. Because of this I want to try to put what we are talking about today into the most easily understandable terms I can.

Since we have learned to sit quietly and to notice what is going on in and around us with each of our senses (or being mindful), we can now move one step further and take a single event, emotion, or thought, hold onto it and work our way though it.

All of us have had something happen to us that has caused a level of anxiety, fear, or trauma, these are the events that we are talking about “holding space for.” It is probably better to start working with an event that is not incredibly difficult to think about just because it is difficult to meditate if you start with a panic attack, but in the end it is up to you, sooner or later you will get to those hard ones if you keep going with the process. For an example today, we will assume that as a child I was bitten by a dog and it has caused a lot of anxiety since, while I work on this alchemical form of meditation, I will remember the event in as much detail as I can, like I am watching a movie. It is pretty common in the early stages to notice your heart rate or blood pressure rise or feel parts of your body tense up during this part, for me, I can often feel my neck tense up and pulse when my heart rate and blood pressure rise when I think about stressful events. As I notice those things happen, I want to only notice them and let them float away the same way you let thoughts move through your mind like clouds. Noticing these can help you stay grounded and keep an eye on your own anxiety level, but you don’t want to focus on them. I would try my best to view the event from a different angle each time I rewatch it, every meditation that is focused on this alchemical experiment would slowly dissolve the event as you watch it. The more you repeat this experiment, you will notice that the unconscious reactions, like a racing heart, will start to happen a lot less often. The hard part to work through after that is to view this event “without judgement.” When the dog bit me it hurt, of course I thought that getting bit was bad, getting hurt is bad! But as I rewatch the bite it will stop seeming like such a bad thing, the bite doesn’t hurt when it happens now and my heart races even less each time, instead of being a traumatic event it is now more like just a thing that happened. Most of the things that happen to us are not automatically good or bad, most of them only have the connotation that we place upon them, and these feelings that we place on them are what cause the anxiety that we feel.

Once I feel like I have dealt with my feelings around the dog bite adequately, one trick that has been recommended from our experimentation is to place yourself back in the 1^st person point of view of the event and reliving it with a different, optimum outcome. This technique can help me deal with the fear and anxiety about the dog bite and now that I have relived it with a different outcome, I can have less anxiety when I am in situations with dogs and have better reactions around them in the future. This aspect is one that not everyone does but the alchemists that added in that step thought it was beneficial enough to recommend adding it.

Once we have worked through the little things we can move on to bigger and more triggering situations and learn more and more about how we react the way we do and why. The better we know ourselves, our past, our traumas, our desires, our fears, our triggers, the better we can anticipate our thoughts, actions, and reactions in any given situation and consistently choose better courses of action. We are making habits within ourselves and creating neurological connections in our brains to have the reactions and coping mechanisms that we want to have.

For those of you who have studied psychology, this may sound familiar to you. What we are doing here is basically exposure therapy for your mind. We have found that what we once thought was completely set in stone, the layout of a person’s brain, is a lot more plastic (or movable, not actual plastic) than we thought and because of that plasticity we can rewire how the brain works and reacts to things.

When I mention exposure therapy to people they often think of therapy for phobias like spiders, where you put your hand closer and closer to a spider through each session until your fear is manageable. When we look at the example of me with the dog it makes perfect sense to think of it that way. I got bit by a dog; it was scary and now I avoid dogs because dogs are scary. Because I avoid dogs, I can’t really expose myself to them very well, by doing these exercises I can imagine that I am in a situation with a dog without actually being there. Once my brain is ok with the new connections I have made, I can try to take those new connections for a spin. Maybe I walk past a dog park, safely on the other side of the fence while monitoring my body for the signs of stress that I know to look for. If I can do that a few times and not be afraid, maybe I can walk into a Petsmart without having a panic attack. Each time we reach a new plateau we can re-evaluate our next step and choose how to move forward next.

I want to stop here for this week because we have covered plenty of information to think about for a week. In fact, in order to get the best results from these two discourses, I recommend you come back to read them again later. I promise that if you come back to these pages after completing some of the exercises you will find new, even more helpful information. As for the next discourse, I am sorry to say that there will not be another until early June, I will be spending the next several weeks doing some international traveling for my work and research and cannot commit to posting each Monday when I don’t know when I will have internet. With that being said, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that when I return, I will be coming back with a lot of research that I would love to share. Thank you so much for your time, I wish you the best of luck in your meditations, and may the next week find you well.

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