Meditation & Self

We finished a session last week with a 30 minute standing meditation (for those who wanted to stay a bit longer - which turned out to be 99% of the students). As we wrapped up with a discussin, the phrase “ego death” came up to describe the experience.

I am reminded of a misconception, the idea that meditation/stillness is about being alone with your thoughts. Maybe not, however: meditating isn’t about being alone with your thoughts; it’s about being alone without them. And discovering, there is still some “thing” there. As the students put it, ego death, the cessation of the default mode network.

Lately, we have been working on a kind of “proprioceptive hack” in our meditation, using the weird relationship between body and mind to create a loop that gradually reduces the noise of thoughts. It’s a brilliant device learned from our teacher, Ido.

In this practice, something curious arises - we lose the default sense of our body (reminiscent possibly of psychedelics?), and this has a distinct effect on the sense of who/what we are. Which speaks to the rub in the riddle of the mindbody phenomenon - your sense of a body is constructed. And that sense influences how you experience your self - in fact, it isn’t separable from it: as you change how you sense your body, YOU change. Losing your body means losing the distinction between you and the world around you - that’s not an illusion… it’s just another state of experience, no more and no less descriptive than any other, but certainly less common. Rodolfo Llinas, the researcher, gives us the beautiful metaphor “I of the Vortex”.

Looking forward to another week of playing in the vortex.