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Healing must feel good.
The premise of Inquiry Meditation is that healing can feel good and that, indeed, it must feel good, all along the way, to truly work. (I go into more detail about this aspect of IM here in this blog post.)
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It's still commonly accepted, though, that healing might have to feel a little bad: there are some reasonable realities you just have to come to terms with and swallow, feelings you just have to push through, and past events you're just gonna have to get over.
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Something about this arrangement doesn't feel quite right.
You might not be able to articulate what this "something" is, which could mean--maybe it does mean this--is it even real?
Who knows, maybe this "off" feeling is just in your head, and, you know what, even if you could name what felt off, who do you think you are, the Queen of Sheba and you don't have to suck things up sometimes??, and you know what, you probably are overreacting--you have been known to overthink and make things bigger than what they are, and omg thank goodness you made it here because YOU ARE RIGHT.
Something. Is. Off.
And there is a better way.
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"Leslie brings a sense of calm curiosity to our sessions. She facilitates in a way that makes me feel guided but at the same time totally in control. Instead of feeling gutted and in a dissociative state, like I did after old therapy appointments, I leave our sessions with a sense of clarity and deep healing. I feel like I'm healing myself from the inside out. I couldn't be more grateful."( Read the rest of this review here!)
Erika S.
A somatic experience of softening
If you are here, you've probably tried to do many things about your pain. Yet it, or a problematic issue, returns again and again.
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Why?
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Because we tighten in the face of it. Tightening in this manner is our default setting. When we tighten in the face of our pain, though, our pain tightens, too. This tightening creates the tension that keeps your pain in place.
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​Thus, the better way to which I refer in the above section is the way of softness--somatic softness, that is. Softness releases the tension that has kept your pain in place.
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Softness as the answer to your problems and pain may sound strange and maybe downright wimpy.
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Very understandable. We’ve been trained to act from tension, otherwise known as adrenaline-fueled list-making, Googling, making calls, solving, fixing, going: what I call reacting, or doing. Our culture rewards us for our doing, even as we are worn down to nubs. And then, sooner or later, our situation/pain resurfaces.
In Inquiry Meditation (IM), we practice the one act from which we've been discouraged in the face of our pain--the one thing that will dissolve our pain.
We back away from the Googler. We stop with the lists and the solving and the fixing--all our doing..
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We learn--we remember--how to soften with our problems and pain.
We practice nondoing.
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“Doing” in this context refers to the action we take—and thinking is an action, too—as a reaction to our pain.
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Nondoing, then, means we consciously pause from taking action that is pain-based.
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This pause is quite active!
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Because in pausing our reactive action, what happens?
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We come face to face directly with our actual pain.
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And perhaps for the first time, instead of being like, “Fuuuuuck—lemme get away from this” via reactive thinking and activity: we learn how to be with it.
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How do we be with our pain?
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Well…how would you be with a frightened puppy?
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Whatever your answer is, that’s exactly right!
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Doesn’t that feel nice?
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That’s exactly what we are up to do in IM.
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Nondoing, Pleasure, Softness, Approval, POWER: it all goes together. The presence of one implies the presence of the others. (The opposite applies as well.)
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Inquiry Meditation is a pleasure practice because nondoing, even in the face of very dense content, feels profoundly good.
And contrary to what we may have been told: we need not feel even a little bit bad to heal our pain. We can't, actually.
We can heal only when we feel really, really good.
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Is IM for you? I suspect so:). Learn more here.
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"It’s hard to describe my sessions with Leslie, as they really are all about taking the focus away from mental understanding and putting it in the body’s wisdom. What we did together felt fucking huge. "
Nina F.
