How do you meditate? Do you use it as a way to escape your thoughts? Does it feel like you’re going out of body when you meditate? Are you escaping to a peaceful place outside of physical reality during meditation?
Using meditation as a way to calm yourself is one incredibly useful byproduct of the practice. However, if in meditation you find yourself escaping from your life more than facing it, you might not be utilizing your practice to its fullest capability.
Escape Versus Experience
Going out of body via meditation is an interesting way to escape the craziness of our minds and lives, but it can also become a tool for avoiding the feelings which need to be felt within us.
Meditation can become an intellectual strategy to avoid life rather than experience it fully.
How to Feel Your Feelings Instead of Intellectualizing Them
A shift I’ve made in my meditations may sound simple, but it’s incredibly powerful.
Instead of trying to release your thoughts as they come to you in meditation by pushing them away with your mental willpower, try this: When a thought or vision enters your mind, move it down into your body so you can have a feeling experience of the thought. Feel the thought vividly in your body.
That’s the shift—learning how to feel your feelings instead of intellectualizing them. Moving from head to heart. From concept to sensation.
Transmuting Into Power
As you feel your thoughts and visions rather than merely learning to push them aside, you’re actually transmuting them into personal power and potential.
Avoidance is a method of strengthening our mental willpower but it puts our emotional system into atrophy, limiting our potential.
When we recognize this—everything we perceive in reality, including our thoughts in each moment, is a mirror showing us something we’re refusing to feel—then we begin to see everything as a tool for bringing our emotional network, our quantum computing system, back online.
The Experiment
When we meditate to feel rather than avoid, we step into an entirely new level of potential for solving the issues in our lives and growing in love, wisdom, and power.
The next time you sit for meditation, consider an experiment: Sit and ask your body or spiritual entourage to show you what you most need to feel and to help you feel it fully.
Then whatever thought or vision or feeling comes to you, pull it deep into your body and experience it. Feel it. Feel it until the vision dissipates and releases into something more expanded.
This is an incredibly powerful technique for handling every event and scenario in reality. Feel rather than avoid.
This is shadow work in action.
If you’re ready to feel rather than intellectualize, explore the Shadow Work practices.