A letter to Andreas, a.k.a. "Meditating when Feeling Glum".
Dear Andreas,
This morning we dedicated the meditation to you and your Dad. We wish you both well and have you in our hearts.
The topic was originally “Meditation when Feeling Crappy”, but then I think you quite liked the word “glum”, so we’ve made it “Meditating when Feeling Glum” instead. :)
Angelika decided this morning that she actually quite likes to feel glum; there’s nothing wrong with feeling glum. If we sit and examine our ‘glumness’, we will even recognise that glumness has many nuances, changes constantly and has many different shades. ( 50 shades of glum, perhaps? ) Apparently there is even a book called " Why be Happy when you can be Normal?" And who wants to be constantly balanced and happy, anyway? No, we positively embrace Glum! (And you can clearly see the tone of our sitting this morning – har-har!)
On a more serious note, as you well know, meditating is really easy when you are feeling good, rested and relaxed, but it becomes much more of a challenge when we’re feeling glum, sad or depressed. Our tendency, at such a time, is to avoid meditating because to focus our attention on the feeling or emotion that we believe causes us unhappiness seems completely counter-intuitive.
Most likely we have some other strategies for when we feel unhappy? And they are probably not great. I read somewhere: “Human programs for happiness are nearly always shallow at the root.” One of my own tendencies, when I just can’t face a sit right away, is to get very busy to distract my mind. An “I’ll get to it later” strategy. When I ‘get busy’ like that, I quickly notice that I am clumsy, tend to bump myself or drop things, am quite absent-minded. (It doesn’t take a meditator or psychologist to work out what’s going on there!)
We “live in a culture of mandated positivity and compulsory happiness”, so we don’t always have the opportunity to talk about feeling glum, many people simply don’t know what to do with feelings like that, and some people even believe being unhappy is bad. We spend quite a lot of time either working on being happy or pretending we are, putting on a happy face, even when we are not. It can be quite oppressive or exhausting. There is definitely social pressure on us to ‘achieve happiness’. Happiness seems to be something we all can – and appears we should! – strive for and attain, and any sort of compromise must surely be a fault?
In my own experience, what works best in dealing with difficult feelings and emotions is to sit down and observe. Examine what’s going on in my mind more closely. I find it’s much easier to deal with emotions when I engage with them directly, rather than keeping them running like background noise. It’s there, and by taking a close look, we change the thing we are looking at. Not only because examining gives us a new perspective. We also know from the 6 element meditation that everything moves and changes. It moves in, stays for a while, moves out. This includes our thinking, feeling and emotions. Something else worth considering is the Observer Effect in quantum physics: “our observation and its residual consequence, intention, affects our personal realities”.
When we look closely at what we believe to be the cause of our unhappiness, we will most likely also recognise that a large part of the problem is our resistance to having the problem in the first place. An important part of sitting, examining and noticing is to not to think of it as work, as something we don’t want, something to get rid of or fix. We only use sitting to observe and get a sense of the quality and texture of our problem.
There are two or three other things I add to my practice when I’m feeling glum. Besides sitting and observing, I also practice gratitude, sharing happiness and setting an intention.
Gratitude really is an amazing antidote to almost every negative emotion or feeling I can think of. Yes, of course, sometimes we maybe feel so glum that we can’t immediately think of anything to be grateful for, and have to start with something ve-ery basic, like “I’m awake, I’m alive, I am breathing.” Or “the sun is shining, I can hear birds singing, I’m healthy.” But if you persist with this practice, pretty soon you’ll probably have quite an impressive list of things to be grateful for. I always find gratitude brings me a spark of happiness and light. Once you have that, it’s easy to grow this feeling by sharing it. A Chinese meditation master wrote: “Happiness is not happiness unless it is shared. For happiness is the one thing in all the world that comes to us only at the moment we give it, and is likewise increased by being given away.” Happiness is easy to give away, and giving it away doesn’t mean it diminishes in us. Happiness doesn’t work like that. In fact, the opposite is true. The more happiness we give away, the happier we feel.
Lastly, I find it useful to set an intention. If we sit for long enough, we often find at the base of our unhappiness and sadness, grief, anxiety, is a fear. Our feelings are often loaded with fear. So setting an intention is a good way to ‘let go’ of things that we feel might hamper our improvement during the day/s to come.
An intention a friend is using now is: “Everything is always working out for me”. I’m borrowing that for the week. I noticed it gives quite a nice sense of lightness – as if I’m shedding a worry that was running around like a subtext to my day. You can place the emphasis on the different words and even use it as a mantra:
Everything is ALWAYS working out for me.
EVERYTHING is always working out for me.
Everything is always WORKING OUT for me.
Everything is always working out for ME.
Lastly, a reminder that this kind of vipassana or insight meditation is not working to fix something. It’s just an observation. A tuning in. Tuning in to our life to see what the texture of our mind is, the traces the day or recent events have left on our mind. Difficult or raw experiences ‘bringing meaning to our life’. This has the potential to sound so worn and tired when reading it back, so we’ll use a beautiful group of words Carl brought this morning by Robert Partridge, who has a much more elegant observation: “As we grow older, we get revealed.” Touching briefly on the analogy of carving a figure out of stone or wood, shedding layers to reveal the beautiful figure hidden inside, whether through actions or people, or just time, we are all worn, shaped and molded by life’s experiences.
I am reminded, as I sit here, of a book by Irving Stone called the Agony & Ecstasy, about Michelangelo, who believed that the sculptor was not creating anything, but simply a tool of God, revealing the figures already contained in the marble. He believed his task was only to chip away the layers, “to reveal, through the incremental liberation of tens of thousands of marble flakes.”
Anyway, Andreas, wishing you happiness in your glumness.
With warm regards from us all,
PS: I know! What's with all the Eeyore!? Someone brought up Winnie the Pooh this morning, and Eeyore really does make me laugh so hard! :)
