Normal Resistance to Maturation

“If you feel safe and loved, your brain becomes specialized in exploration, play, and cooperation; if you are frightened and unwanted, it specializes in managing feelings of fear and abandonment.”

Bessel Van Der Kolk. “The Body Keeps the Score. Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.” Penguin Books, 2015.

Most of us have probably had sufficient trauma in our lives to be more armored, rigid & closed off than we realize. Our present way of being in this world and our attitudes, no matter how strange they may seem at times, are perfectly reasonable & appropriate considering all that we've been through.

“Every life is a piece of art, put together with all means available.” Pierre Janet

But this, primarily subconscious general orientation towards life, involves some degree of aversion towards: flexibility, openness, self-exploration & meaningful change - which is a real handicap to normal healthy maturation, happiness & overall quality of life.

It takes real bravery, patience & persistence to go against our longstanding self-protective instincts, and intentionally set out on a lifelong path of self-exploration, leaning into all of our historically out-of-bounds dark places. We must remember to be infinitely patient & understanding with our own & others' resistance to undertake this journey.

I was fascinated by, and read about meditation for 30 years before I actually started to practice. Why? Though I would certainly have expressed it very differently at different times during those decades of (now obvious) 'intellectual distancing,' the real reason of course was that it didn't feel safe, so I wasn't ready to release the self-protective armoring.

Truth, like love and sleep, resents

Approaches that are too intense. W.H. Auden

“The ‘night sea journey’ is the journey into the parts of ourselves that are split off, disavowed, unknown, unwanted, cast out, and exiled to the various subterranean worlds of consciousness…. The goal of this journey is to reunite us with ourselves. Such a homecoming can be surprisingly painful, even brutal. In order to undertake it, we must first agree to exile nothing.” Stephen Cope

“What is critical is that (those who've experienced trauma) themselves learn to tolerate feeling what they feel and knowing what they know. This may take weeks or even years.”

Bessel Van Der Kolk. “The Body Keeps the Score. Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.” Penguin Books, 2015.

“Silence is the basis and the background of everything. We are an expression of this primordial silence and stillness. But the habits of our mind overlay this simple truth and keep us from experiencing ourselves as a full-spectrum human being.” Sharon Landrith

"To be attentive requires tremendous love of living. The total revolution we are examining is not for the timid or the self-righteous. It is for those who love truth more than pretense. It is for those who sincerely, humbly, want to find a way out of this mess ..." Vimala Thakar

Meditation “... has been used as a technique to help gain experiential understanding about the nature of the universe, reality, and oneself at the deepest and most fundamental level of knowing.” Shapiro DH. "Examining the content and context of meditation; A challenge for psychology in the areas of stress management, psychotherapy, and religion/values." Journal of Humanistic Psychology 1994; 34(4): 101-135.