On the Relentless Rediscovery of Relinquishment

practice log

I was sitting this morning and did a longer sit which I haven’t done in a while, and I’ve been feeling “terrible” lately, for a day or so, like I went to contact improv last night and had to just sit there against the wall watching the others, feeling a frayed sadness that I couldn’t bring myself to expose, and therefore couldn’t bring myself to really feel, because the two seemed inextricable. I wanted to know what it was “about,” I cried a little walking home from the train, it still felt “stuck.” And this morning I said to myself, okay, I haven’t really, actually “remained uninvolved” in a while, so I’m going to do that. And I did, and it’s like it usually is when I make the firm commitment, it feels for a while like I’m holding my breath underwater and must surely die or disintegrate, and then there’s a breaking through when I realize there’s no need to hold my nose and the water is breathable and everything is naturally, insistently vivid without anyone’s having to convince it to be so.

I wound up sacrificing my intention to remain uninvolved at some point, about halfway through the 50-minute sit, on the altar of a curiosity about “identification.” I think this started when I noticed a strong sense of attachment or centeredness in my visual field, and I thought, “I wonder what it would be like to relax that, to not feel so tied to the visual field, as if it were the center of my being.” I gently suggested to myself that I could relax identification there, and there was a sense of things rearranging or loosening and it stopped seeming like there really was such a thing as “the visual field” at all, more like disaggregated colors, pinpricks of light-sensation unbound by anything like a flat surface. So then I was like, “more of that,” and just wandered around to different parts of my experience and suggested relaxing identification there, too, saying things to myself like “Not identified with my eyes; not identified with my heart; not identified with my body; not identified with my muscles; not identified with hearing,” and so on. With each one there was a redistribution of energy, usually from lower to higher, up and out of my head like a spout just barely big enough—which I wasn’t quite sure, as often I am unsure, to what extent “I” was “manufacturing,” so I said something like, “Not identified with beliefs; not identified with realizations,” which felt in both cases like an enormous relief.

This has happened before, the sudden rediscovery of an ability to actually release “things,” somewhat deliberately or precisely, to simply find some attentiveness to the places in my experience where I’m grasping something and with a very gentle suggestion invite the bodymind to relinquish it. Every time it’s surprised me how easy it is, and so I wanted to write it down as a reminder.

As I went along the things I was relinquishing became more abstract and existential, but not less relieving to relax. I became unidentified with my thoughts; with space; with particular points or regions in space; with my ability as a meditator; with my talent; with my abilities, the sense of pressure I sometimes feel in relation to them. The biggest thing I relinquished, in terms of the intensity of the release, was my voice, which had the feeling of a long-undisclosed possibility, to not “be” my voice or cohere around the question of whether my voice was present, reliable, properly expressive of a certain kind of persona. I started coughing. I laughed a strange laugh.

I took a stab at unidentifying with “awareness,” but that made less sense; but I could unidentify with the little guy who seemed to be looking around for awareness, seeming to say, “and is it here?; and is it here? And what about here?”

This unidentification, I guess it was uninvolvement, becoming uninvolved. It felt inclusive, non-judgmental, just like a noticing that ah, I could let this thing happen without its being the center or without prodding at it and demanding it be real.

I tried unidentifying with “myself,” too. At first I felt dimly confused, and bounced off that idea toward other relinquishments. When I circled back around it occurred to me I could unidentify with particular selves, that this was in fact kind of the whole process I was engaged in. The question of what the “I” was that was doing all this unidentifying seemed relatively unproblematic; unidentification didn’t seem to need any subject in order to happen, it was the release of a subject. I was aware that I was only using language as a kind of scoop, that it wasn’t precise but merely a way of pointing loosely in the direction of apparent aggregations and asking, “What if you didn’t happen in quite that way?”

Actually, something started to cohere, something I’ve started to think about many times before, about the idea that essentially what’s developing here is an “anti-pattern.” I notice the same thing when I do the clearing-the-space step in Focusing—when I make a gesture to take some rumination loop out of my mind and put it, say, on the shelf, it isn’t really like I’m getting rid of the thought or outright canceling the loop. It’s more like I’m instating a different pattern on top of it that says “obviously am not caught in that loop anymore; that thing is over there on the shelf, so it can’t be in my head, even if I hear it saying things”; and this different pattern nudges gently but insistently up against the original, the next few times it recurs, which it always does, in such a way that they both break up and fall into a common substrate that is suddenly revealed. Like a whirlpool in a bathtub colliding with another whirlpool. And it’s a bit like recategorizing the initial loop as a hallucination. As if to say, “okay, but that’s just stuff now, I’m not ignoring it, I’m just allowing it to be stuff.” Like how popping a balloon suddenly foregrounds the gas it’s filled with. Like a friend making fun of you.

And but it remains mysterious to me why sometimes this sort of thing is highly available, and other times the whole landscape seems fraught with danger and everything I try to do is pushy and false and clearly an attempt by one part of my system to murder another. The difference might really just be that initial holding on through the fear that comes up when I “actually remain uninvolved” with everything, when I commit myself to repeatedly taking my fingers off the scales until finally some mysterious balance starts to tilt. I seem to be most likely to relearn this when my at-oddsness with the world and self has reached a high pitch, when I feel like something about my whole approach to things simply has to change. How can I relearn it more often, without having to reach a breaking point first? Probably the answer is just to sit a full 50 minutes a day—to not get cocky and think I’ve broken through some threshold permanently when it’s more like I’ve temporarily released a bundle of tensions that are constantly slowly accreting again. Like how it’s “a good idea” to sleep eight hours a night and take a shit once a day.

Again and again, the impulse to think I’ve solved things permanently! As if I would even want to! Again and again, my edge seems to be that I want so badly to learn what can’t be knowledge.