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MEDITATION
THAT HELPS
UNDO NEGATIVE THOUGHTS
We
have said that the core of negative ideas is in feeling one's own
ego as something different from the universe. The problem is this
interruption, this fracture, this opposition between me and everything
else.
Once you have understood this and you have seen day by day how you
live in the projection of your negative thoughts, you can practice
two very useful meditation techniques. The first involves imagining
that you are losing your own physical boundaries and merging with
the environment. The second is meditation on the Inner Light.
After the first experiences with passive meditation, as you relax
you will feel, a luminous and colourful sub-sensation inside you.
It lasts only a few seconds, but you can identify it. Follow it
lazily. Let this pseudo-light flood you, melting the hard crystal
or filling the empty box of your ego. Are you able to imagine that
the light floods your entire being and makes you and all that surrounds
you equally transparent and luminous?
Do these mental games for a few minutes without worrying if you
become distracted. It is enough that you feel an idea for a few
seconds, then you can let your mind wander aimlessly while you savour
the pleasure that these new thoughts have left inside you. This
way, you help your subconscious assimilate the new ideas.
ATTENTION!
By
learning to listen to oneself, one needs to be careful not to "fall
in love with one's little pains." If I become fixated in singling
out negative feelings "in order to heal them," I send
to my subconscious a negative message which will induce it to keep
producing little pains in order to please itself. In self-listening,
it is always better to favour pleasant feelings. By listening to
pleasure, we increase our health. For example, at the first symptoms
of the flu, listen to all the sensations without resisting, but
also singling out (above all) the pleasant sensations, which in
the numbness of flu, accompany the discomfort. This is important
because even in a "painful" situation there are a lot
of perceivable shades of meaning, and not all of them are painful.
Let me explain better: as children we sometimes play "painful"
games, such as biting ourselves or clapping hands with each other.
Play makes us feel pain, but we don't stop to identify it, engrossed
as we are in having fun.
To find this ability again "that doesn't dwell on pain"
is an extraordinary self-cure method. It is not, I repeat, a matter
of resisting pain or contracting yourself. As mentioned earlier,
these two reactions tend to deny pain, and therefore they prevent
mind-body communication and the setting into motion of the spontaneous
processes of self-cure. It is a question of accepting pain, looking
at it, and embracing it in a relaxed way, because it is our ally,
it is our cure.
At the same time, however, one needs to avoid basking in painful
sensations: once the pain has freely reached the brain, it is more
agreeable and strategically correct to tune in to the perception
of pleasure, not concentrating on pain or thinking about it, but
letting oneself be attracted by a pleasant inner sensation (or an
external sensation: a smell, a sound, a caress, etc.). P.S.
This book has come out of the courses of Comic Therapy and Occidental
Zen that I've held for ten years all over Italy and at Alcatraz,
a cultural and therapeutic center, situated in the woods on the
hills of Gubbio. Here one meets many researchers, experimenters,
and various types of madmen, and new ideas often come to shake up
our minds. This text is therefore a photograph of the current level
reached by this work.
Expect more astonishing new things in the future. Finally, I wish
to mention that at Alcatraz there is a "Time Bank" based
on the exchanging of "Five-Person Massages" and on meditation
in water.
Index
of contents
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