The Awkwardness Principle
January 31, 2021 2:50 AM Subscribe
Mefi's Own™ Oliver Burkeman's newsletter this week discusses the awkwardness principle when trying to make a personal change:
I keep coming back to a line in the excellent book Already Free, by the psychotherapist Bruce Tift: “The practices that carry the greatest potential for transformative change are usually counter-instinctual.”
"I take him to mean that if you’re trying to get better at life in some way – more patient, or better at listening, or less prone to procrastination or anxiety or self-sabotage – the necessary actions are pretty much guaranteed not to feel especially good. They’re more likely to feel scary, or at least awkward, like wearing an ill-fitting shirt, or writing with your non-dominant hand. While learning to be patient, you should expect to feel restless. As you embark on a long-postponed creative project, you should expect to feel unready. One way or another, change will feel crappy." Newsletter home page.
"I take him to mean that if you’re trying to get better at life in some way – more patient, or better at listening, or less prone to procrastination or anxiety or self-sabotage – the necessary actions are pretty much guaranteed not to feel especially good. They’re more likely to feel scary, or at least awkward, like wearing an ill-fitting shirt, or writing with your non-dominant hand. While learning to be patient, you should expect to feel restless. As you embark on a long-postponed creative project, you should expect to feel unready. One way or another, change will feel crappy." Newsletter home page.
Great post, thank you.
posted by Bella Donna at 8:15 AM on January 31, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by Bella Donna at 8:15 AM on January 31, 2021 [2 favorites]
Thank you!
posted by shesdeadimalive at 9:38 AM on January 31, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by shesdeadimalive at 9:38 AM on January 31, 2021 [1 favorite]
Thanks so much for this I was really sad when his guardian column came to an end so learning about this has made my weekend.
posted by tomp at 9:49 AM on January 31, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by tomp at 9:49 AM on January 31, 2021 [2 favorites]
it's good to be reminded that it probably won't feel comfortable to begin with.
Yep, this needs repeating. There is a darker or more difficult side to meditation that often isn't discussed as often as it should, and that it can be very uncomfortable and unsettling - even traumatizing.
And it doesn't map well to Western schools of thought that seem to say that meditation should be relaxing, or purely blissful, or that the concept of satori is inherently warm or calming feeling, or an escape from ones troubles or other concepts of self-soothing and self-comforting.
It's not necessarily self care like a nice hot cup of tea or a glass of wine in a nice bath. It's often work.
I had a breakthrough with meditation a bit over a year ago and realized for that most of my life I was - for all intents and purposes and speaking personally - that I was doing meditation "wrong" by aiming too deep into stillness and nothingness.
I put "wrong" in quotes because I was fairly comfortable with this concept of nothingness and even sometimes achieving complete internal silence and stillness and getting to a place where there was just nothing there - and then wondering why I didn't really feel any effects at all other than the rather unsettling feeling of being comfortable with being in or being of nothing at all.
The epiphany for me was that apparently I'm not really supposed to be completely silent, and that I should have been listening to and feeling something - that perfect silence was counter-intuitively not the goal.
The breakthrough was realizing that I could internally visualize sounds. That if I let go of the words and symbols constantly running through my mind and replaced them with a harmonic internal tone and sound. And then - for lack of better terms - if I then listened for an external tone or sound coming from the universe and harmonized and pitched my internal tones to match, harmonize and complement the external tones I was feeling that it was like I suddenly opened a door and there was something there, an entire world of sound and tone that was all around me, all the time.
Oh, duh. Ohm. Ohhhmmmmmm. Cool, ok. Lose the mediation of symbolic language and make some noise so you can hear/feel the cosmic noise. Got it, I think.
And it was and is beautiful. It sounds and feels like the most beautiful and terrifying ambient music of the gods, like the whole cosmos is singing with you. The mental state and mode felt almost exactly like taking psychedelics in a beautiful natural place and just being totally overwhelmed by the stark beauty of it all, how the absolute perfection of the stars above and the flowers at your feet could cause you to burst into tears about how awesome and huge and beautiful it all was. That part does feel warm, nourishing and edifying just like music can be.
This is all fine and good and very uplifting.
The darker, less comfortable and more awkward part of this is that - and again, speaking personally - that the self-inspection, self work and even real healing can start happening in a hurry and you can deeply over-extend yourself or get in too deep.
The first time I had this breakthrough of "let go of symbols - make music and tone" I was kneeling on a stump in a beautiful forested place in sunlight and I just went for it, and found and felt some really deep psychological wounds and scars, like there was this huge, tough old scabbed over chunk of damage or even cancer attached to my presence and energy.
And I felt some number of entities or some kind of collective streams of energy and tone approaching me both in time/space as well as in tone and seemed to say "You don't need this any more. Let this go." and it felt everything like something reaching into me and tearing that scar tissue away like they were quickly ripping off a bandage and I couldn't stop it from happening if I wanted to - whomever "they" were or are. I remember thinking/emoting "Wait, that's part of me!?" and mentally reaching out for it as it was pulled away.
It all happened very fast and it hurt. It wasn't pleasant or comforting. It hurt a lot and it was scary. It was visceral, like surgery without anesthetics. If anything it was worrisome and troubling and all very real and felt like it left a very raw wound on my consciousness.
I remember sitting there and contemplating what happened, feeling the internal tone falling away and growing silent again and sort of feeling my self and spirit to take stock and re-orient myself as I was surfacing.
Whatever happened sitting and kneeling on that tree stump was exhausting. I had only been there about an hour, and I could barely stand up and hobble back down the hill to home. I felt really disoriented, a strange mix of dissociated and acutely present and aware. But I felt lighter. Like I had molted or something, like my whole body had been scoured pink in heavy surf.
And then I caught a cold or got sick or something for something like three days, and it felt exactly like I had pushed myself physically too far on a hike in bad weather and gave myself a case of exposure and hypothermia.
But that feeling of feeling a bit lighter never went away, and the experience did leave me in a better place than I was. I feel like I'm carrying less damage and generational trauma. I have become a little more mindful and patient in various facets of my life.
I've heard about other people having experiences like this with meditation, that there have been some very uncomfortable things and feelings happen that aren't at all peaceful while you're going through them and doing whatever work one can.
posted by loquacious at 10:58 AM on January 31, 2021 [27 favorites]
Yep, this needs repeating. There is a darker or more difficult side to meditation that often isn't discussed as often as it should, and that it can be very uncomfortable and unsettling - even traumatizing.
And it doesn't map well to Western schools of thought that seem to say that meditation should be relaxing, or purely blissful, or that the concept of satori is inherently warm or calming feeling, or an escape from ones troubles or other concepts of self-soothing and self-comforting.
It's not necessarily self care like a nice hot cup of tea or a glass of wine in a nice bath. It's often work.
I had a breakthrough with meditation a bit over a year ago and realized for that most of my life I was - for all intents and purposes and speaking personally - that I was doing meditation "wrong" by aiming too deep into stillness and nothingness.
I put "wrong" in quotes because I was fairly comfortable with this concept of nothingness and even sometimes achieving complete internal silence and stillness and getting to a place where there was just nothing there - and then wondering why I didn't really feel any effects at all other than the rather unsettling feeling of being comfortable with being in or being of nothing at all.
The epiphany for me was that apparently I'm not really supposed to be completely silent, and that I should have been listening to and feeling something - that perfect silence was counter-intuitively not the goal.
The breakthrough was realizing that I could internally visualize sounds. That if I let go of the words and symbols constantly running through my mind and replaced them with a harmonic internal tone and sound. And then - for lack of better terms - if I then listened for an external tone or sound coming from the universe and harmonized and pitched my internal tones to match, harmonize and complement the external tones I was feeling that it was like I suddenly opened a door and there was something there, an entire world of sound and tone that was all around me, all the time.
Oh, duh. Ohm. Ohhhmmmmmm. Cool, ok. Lose the mediation of symbolic language and make some noise so you can hear/feel the cosmic noise. Got it, I think.
And it was and is beautiful. It sounds and feels like the most beautiful and terrifying ambient music of the gods, like the whole cosmos is singing with you. The mental state and mode felt almost exactly like taking psychedelics in a beautiful natural place and just being totally overwhelmed by the stark beauty of it all, how the absolute perfection of the stars above and the flowers at your feet could cause you to burst into tears about how awesome and huge and beautiful it all was. That part does feel warm, nourishing and edifying just like music can be.
This is all fine and good and very uplifting.
The darker, less comfortable and more awkward part of this is that - and again, speaking personally - that the self-inspection, self work and even real healing can start happening in a hurry and you can deeply over-extend yourself or get in too deep.
The first time I had this breakthrough of "let go of symbols - make music and tone" I was kneeling on a stump in a beautiful forested place in sunlight and I just went for it, and found and felt some really deep psychological wounds and scars, like there was this huge, tough old scabbed over chunk of damage or even cancer attached to my presence and energy.
And I felt some number of entities or some kind of collective streams of energy and tone approaching me both in time/space as well as in tone and seemed to say "You don't need this any more. Let this go." and it felt everything like something reaching into me and tearing that scar tissue away like they were quickly ripping off a bandage and I couldn't stop it from happening if I wanted to - whomever "they" were or are. I remember thinking/emoting "Wait, that's part of me!?" and mentally reaching out for it as it was pulled away.
It all happened very fast and it hurt. It wasn't pleasant or comforting. It hurt a lot and it was scary. It was visceral, like surgery without anesthetics. If anything it was worrisome and troubling and all very real and felt like it left a very raw wound on my consciousness.
I remember sitting there and contemplating what happened, feeling the internal tone falling away and growing silent again and sort of feeling my self and spirit to take stock and re-orient myself as I was surfacing.
Whatever happened sitting and kneeling on that tree stump was exhausting. I had only been there about an hour, and I could barely stand up and hobble back down the hill to home. I felt really disoriented, a strange mix of dissociated and acutely present and aware. But I felt lighter. Like I had molted or something, like my whole body had been scoured pink in heavy surf.
And then I caught a cold or got sick or something for something like three days, and it felt exactly like I had pushed myself physically too far on a hike in bad weather and gave myself a case of exposure and hypothermia.
But that feeling of feeling a bit lighter never went away, and the experience did leave me in a better place than I was. I feel like I'm carrying less damage and generational trauma. I have become a little more mindful and patient in various facets of my life.
I've heard about other people having experiences like this with meditation, that there have been some very uncomfortable things and feelings happen that aren't at all peaceful while you're going through them and doing whatever work one can.
posted by loquacious at 10:58 AM on January 31, 2021 [27 favorites]
I have had many similar experiences loquacious and if you'd like to talk more about them please DM me.
posted by panhopticon at 12:53 PM on January 31, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by panhopticon at 12:53 PM on January 31, 2021 [1 favorite]
Thank you for posting this! This is very germane to my situation of the last six months or so. Over the last five years, every member of my immediate family has had life-threatening or life-altering medical emergencies, except for me. Some of them were long-lasting medical emergencies as well, with effects that are still happening. I realized that I was stuck in a state of constant vigilance that was getting really unhealthy. I began to work with a therapist who encouraged me to try some mindfulness practice. I was resistant at first and I think the linked essay gets at some of the reasons why - I was conceptualizing, maybe on a subconscious level, that my 'anxious vigilance' mental habits were protecting me and couldn't be let go of.
In any case, I have found that rather than conceiving of mindfulness as 'letting go' of negative emotions or 'freeing' myself from having to feel anger or sadness, I do better when I conceptualize mindfulness as being about recognizing that my consciousness can hold multiple perspectives at once, almost as if I have multiple consciousnesses, or multiple 'me's.' Because I grew up reading superhero and transforming robot comics (and I still love those things), I sometimes conceive of myself as having alter egos or transformed states. So, particularly when I encounter stress at work, I can accept that I am frustrated by it or hurt by it, but also conceive of myself as having another 'me' that can watch over the hurt 'me' and make sure that that 'me' doesn't take over my body's emotional (and physical) health. Maybe it's also a kind of health compartmentalizing.
In any case, thank you for posting this!
posted by Slothrop at 4:36 AM on February 1, 2021 [4 favorites]
In any case, I have found that rather than conceiving of mindfulness as 'letting go' of negative emotions or 'freeing' myself from having to feel anger or sadness, I do better when I conceptualize mindfulness as being about recognizing that my consciousness can hold multiple perspectives at once, almost as if I have multiple consciousnesses, or multiple 'me's.' Because I grew up reading superhero and transforming robot comics (and I still love those things), I sometimes conceive of myself as having alter egos or transformed states. So, particularly when I encounter stress at work, I can accept that I am frustrated by it or hurt by it, but also conceive of myself as having another 'me' that can watch over the hurt 'me' and make sure that that 'me' doesn't take over my body's emotional (and physical) health. Maybe it's also a kind of health compartmentalizing.
In any case, thank you for posting this!
posted by Slothrop at 4:36 AM on February 1, 2021 [4 favorites]
I should add, btw, that like the linked essay articulates, for me 'anxious vigilance' was a family dynamic. In my case, there are even multiple generations of family members who have practiced pretty overt 'anxious vigilance' to try to deal with the uncontrollable misfortunes of life.
posted by Slothrop at 4:39 AM on February 1, 2021
posted by Slothrop at 4:39 AM on February 1, 2021
@loquacious I have lead a meditation group for an addiction recovery group. We had a loving kindness meditation one night. Wishing loving kindness to people we liked, were neutral toward and really did not like. It struck me that night, that I was probably the person somebody really didn't like during their loving kindness meditation. Kind of blew my mind actually. Real introspection is truly difficult work. When you open up that satchel of memory you have to be ready to do more work. I do think that many, many people will never even open the satchel. They don't want to know.
Thanks @ellieBOA for this post!
posted by zerobyproxy at 8:56 AM on February 1, 2021 [2 favorites]
Thanks @ellieBOA for this post!
posted by zerobyproxy at 8:56 AM on February 1, 2021 [2 favorites]
I asked this question about music practice the other day and can confirm that "getting comfortable with being uncomfortable" is foundational to growth (especially past a Certain Age).
posted by Sheydem-tants at 2:41 PM on February 2, 2021
posted by Sheydem-tants at 2:41 PM on February 2, 2021
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posted by ellieBOA at 3:35 AM on January 31, 2021 [2 favorites]