When ambushed by a memory during meditation, practice “love” by accepting its presence without fighting it, and “wisdom” by not taking it personally or getting sucked into the story. Observe it as sensations, then return to your breath, repeating this process to heal your relationship with the past.
When intense or sticky memories and feelings arise, “love them to death” by bringing acceptance and awareness to them, allowing their energy to be discharged and digested in the present moment, rather than resisting or fighting them.
Instead of seeing memories, thought patterns, urges, and emotions that arise in meditation as distractions, reframe them as “the good stuff” you’re meant to see in a new and more skillful way. This helps you engage with your inner experience rather than fighting it.
Practice total non-rejection of memory, giving radical permission for memories and their associated emotional resonance to arise and “blow through the space of awareness” without resistance or contention.
Understand that meditation practice can heal your past by allowing undigested memories and experiences to surface and be processed with presence, wisdom, and love, rather than being explicitly re-narrated.
To digest painful past experiences, consciously apply the wisdom you possess now to the lack of wisdom you may have had at the time of the original event. This helps to integrate and heal those memories.
Recognize that meditation practice is a form of “unsystematic exposure therapy” where whatever can disrupt your peace will eventually arise if you sit long enough. Embrace this as a core element of practice, allowing you to habituate to all your memories and inner experiences.
Practice dropping the compulsive self-assessment questions like “Am I okay?” or “Am I doing it right?” for even a few moments. This act of relinquishment is a deep surrender into the present, akin to a “readiness to die” to future concerns.
Avoid focusing exclusively on one type of barometer for meditative progress, such as only mindfulness or concentration. Recognize that practice has many mechanisms of action and can heal and awaken you in diverse ways, so appreciate all the different ways it may be functioning.
Understand “being present” as a direction not to be identified with discursive thought or the narrative of the moment. Instead, reestablish mindfulness by having metacognitive awareness of the phenomenal world arising and passing moment by moment.
Become sensitive to your brain’s “ambient vigilance” and compulsive prediction about future safety, which often manifests as the question “Am I okay? Will I be okay?”. Observing this helps in disengaging from constant future orientation.
Practice metabolizing and equanimizing the agitation and phenomena of prediction and self-modeling (e.g., picturing your body, surroundings, or anticipating the next moment). Recognize this as a fear-driven impulse and observe it as arising and passing phenomena.
Learn to distinguish between “true alarms” (genuine threats) and “false alarms” (egoic threats, threats to control, or predictions of future harm that aren’t actual existential threats). Practice de-escalating the arousal around these false alarms.
When experiencing pain, use the framework “pain is the prediction of bodily harm” to de-escalate catastrophizing. Assess if the pain genuinely represents tissue damage or an existential threat, and if not, consciously de-escalate the perceived disaster.
Instead of trying to shore up and become invulnerable, consciously move towards vulnerability and surrender more deeply, trusting the path of practice to meet your animal condition with acceptance.
Greet the vulnerability of your animal condition with acceptance, love, and patience, rather than demonizing yourself for natural tendencies to shore up boundaries or become territorial.
Cultivate an “open heart” or an attitude of warmth and wisdom (seeing things as they are, not solid, and passing) toward whatever arises in your mind, as this is the way to inhabit the present moment more fully over time.
Recognize that the present moment can feel claustrophobic due to fixation on the past and future. Practice letting go of future orientation and planning to enter the “bottomlessness” of the present moment.
To deepen your sense of presence, contemplate what a “futureless moment” would feel like. This practice encourages a profound surrender of the heart, placing all hope and attention into the present.
Engage in contemplations about death to consider how deeply your heart might surrender if the present moment were truly futureless. This practice helps cut through pettiness and fosters profound presence.
To relinquish vigilance and surrender more deeply into the present moment, cultivate conditions of safety in your practice, whether through seclusion or explicit ethical commitments, allowing your inner life to feel secure enough to open.
Cultivate inner safety in your practice to surrender more deeply into the present moment. This process paradoxically prepares you to deal with the inherent lack of safety, impermanence, and unreliability that is part of the human condition.
Shift your mindset from “trying to do the practice and make it work” to simply “doing the practice,” trusting that the benefits will unfold naturally without needing to force or manufacture results.
Instead of grappling with understanding and measuring every aspect of practice, surrender to its inherent logic, trusting that its goodness accrues naturally without you having to manufacture it.
Cultivate faith in the inherent logic and mechanisms of the meditation practice itself, trusting that its benefits accrue wordlessly without needing to busy yourself with additional efforts or trying to force outcomes.
Rather than approaching meditation as an explicit project to heal the past, cultivate a willingness to learn from and be softened by everything that arises organically in your practice.
Challenge your understanding of mindfulness and presence, even if you are an experienced practitioner, to prevent staleness and open yourself to new, radical possibilities of undefended awareness.
When experiencing amorphous dread or difficult mental states, consider giving them a name, even a slightly playful one, to help concretize and “tame” them, making them less overwhelming.
Shift your meditative gesture from trying to extract something (like more concentration or insight) from the moment to one of offering your heart up to whatever is present.
While daily practice is beneficial, consider attending meditation retreats, as they are often indispensable for most people to develop a deeper, multidimensional appreciation and understanding of mindfulness and its radical potentials.