Lately I’ve noticed an absence of emotional response in some situations that seem as though they should evoke horror, grief, or alarm. This numbness has a strange familiarity and I began to wonder how often I've felt numb without noticing or acknowledging it.
At first, I found myself looking back and wondering whether the numbness was tied to something old that had been suppressed. But in meditation, I noticed that the sense of disturbance came afterwards, with the thought that I should feel something. In other words, I found myself turning an experience into a problem to be solved.
In this exchange between Rita and Ken from A Trackless Path 2, even though Ken describes numbness as “basically a protective mechanism,” he cautions against judging too quickly or forcing an interpretation. Perhaps there is simply very little emotional movement. He shifts the emphasis from judgement to allowing.
The part of the exchange that goes deepest for me is Ken’s question about control and manipulation. Rather than going right into the experience of numbness, I put on the evaluation hat, analysing why it didn’t match an idea of how I thought I should respond. In retrospect I see how I've been swallowed—caught by a demand that experience conform to expectation.
Mindful of Ken's reminder to be clear about intention, when the sense of numbness arises, I've begun to work with Seeing from the Inside, also called the five-step practice, my first resort when there's disturbance.
Rita: If you’re sitting with things that are difficult, sometimes your experience of what arises is very vivid. It’s all there and there’s a lot to work with. Then sometimes maybe the next time you sit and everything’s pretty clear, and maybe the next time you sit, you just feel numb. And it’s a familiar numbness, because you’re aware that you’ve been keeping something suppressed, because you feel like you shouldn’t be feeling this. So there are a couple of ways to work with that. One would be to sit with the numbness, and let it unfold itself as it will. And the other would be to poke it a little bit by bringing to mind those things that you know that you’re suppressing in that moment. And so I’m wondering if they’re both kind of equal in ways of working, or if one is better than the other?
Ken: I don’t think one can say one is better than the other. There are additional ones, in addition to those two. When we start to practice, we learn various techniques, methods of practice. Some traditions, they train you in just one and then you learn how to apply that in everything. In others—and I’m thinking of my own training in the Tibetan tradition—you’re trained in hundreds, so you always have these arrows in your quiver and you pull them out.
The first step is to learn the techniques and learn them well enough so that you really know how they work and you develop facility with them. The second level of training is to train probably in a fewer number of techniques to the point that they just happen whenever you encounter certain things. That is, they become second nature. The third level of training is to remove everything inside you that prevents that technique from manifesting when it needs to.
As one trains in these, one is developing a great deal of knowledge about one’s self, about how the technique works in you, what works and doesn’t work, and there’s even a kind of evolution of the notion of what “this works” means. So as you mature in your practice, it becomes increasingly important to be clear about one’s intention. Because intention itself evolves. And I don’t mean you’ll always have a good reason, “I am doing this because,” that’s at the rational level. As one’s experience of practice matures, it can become much more intuitive in a felt sense rather than a conceptual sense. So, there’s “Oh, I need to go in this direction.”
And one of the things that I’ve learned, actually from Jeff here, is—one has to be a little careful with this—to explore one’s relationship with resistance. I’m going to put this in a kind of oxymoronic way. “How can I experience resistance without encountering resistance?” That is, you were saying there’s something in you that is causing some difficulty or disturbance. Okay, how can I experience that or work with that without creating more resistance, or making things more imbalanced than they are? Or maybe I need to make them more imbalanced. But it becomes an exploration of experience. And it’s an exploration of experience that is informed by the accumulated experience and understanding. It doesn’t come out of a vacuum, if you follow. So, there’s something you experience, you sense that is there, creates or generates a numbness which is basically a protective mechanism. So okay, experience the numbness. Maybe that helps. Maybe you poke at it. Maybe that helps. Maybe you just sit and wait because nothing works.
Within your question there’s another whole consideration and that is, to what extent are you trying to control or manipulate your experience? And one of the purposes of this retreat actually is to provide the opportunity of actually exploring not manipulating one’s experience in any way, and what’s that like. Because certain approaches to practice you get very used to directing experience in a certain way. Is this helpful?
Rita: Yes.