VBT – Meditation 42.4
Emotional Wounds
Emotional wounds……If you are feeling miserable, let it become a meditation.
If you are feeling miserable, let it become a meditation. Sit silently, close the doors. First feel the misery with as much intensity as possible. Feel the hurt. Somebody has insulted you: now, the best way to avoid the hurt is to go and insult him, so that you become occupied with him. That is not meditation.
If somebody has insulted you, feel thankful to him that he has given you an opportunity to feel a deep wound. He has opened a wound in you. The wound may be created by many many insults that you have suffered in your whole life; he may not be the cause of all the suffering, but he has triggered a process.
Just close your room, sit silently, with no anger for the person but with total awareness of the feeling that is arising in you — the hurt feeling that you have been rejected, that you have been insulted. And then you will be surprised that not only is this man there: all the men and all the women and all the people that have ever insulted you will start moving in your memory.
You will start not only remembering them, you will start reliving them. You will be going into a kind of primal. Feel the hurt, feel the pain, don’t avoid it. That’s why in many therapies the patient is told not to take any drugs before the therapy begins, for the simple reason that drugs are a way to escape from your inner misery. They don’t allow you to see your wounds, they repress them. They don’t allow you to go into your suffering and unless you go into your suffering, you cannot be released from the imprisonment of it.
It is perfectly scientific to drop all drugs before going into therapy — if possible even drugs like coffee, tea, smoking, because these are all ways to escape. Have you watched it? Whenever you feel nervous you immediately start smoking. It is a way to avoid nervousness; you become occupied with smoking. Really it is a regression. Smoking makes you again feel like a child — unworried, non-responsible — because smoking is nothing but a symbolic breast. The hot smoke going in simply takes you back to the days when you were feeding on the mother’s breast and the warm milk was going in: the nipple has now become the cigarette. The cigarette is a symbolic nipple. Through regression you avoid the responsibilities and the pains of being an adult. And that’s what goes on through many many drugs.
Modern man is drugged as never before, because Modern man is living in great suffering. Without drugs it will be impossible to live in so much suffering. Those drugs create a barrier; they keep you drugged and they don’t allow you enough sensitivity to know your pain. The first thing to do is close your doors and stop any kind of occupation — looking at the TV, listening to the radio, reading a book.
Stop all occupation, because that too is a subtle drug. Just be silent, utterly alone. Don’t even pray, because that again is a drug, you are becoming occupied, you start talking to God, you start praying, you escape from yourself. Atisha is saying: Just be yourself.
Tags: Emotional Wounds
