A perfect left foot of a baby
The human body is resilient and animated by pure energy, vitality, and spirit that we can get in touch with. Photo of a baby’s left foot by Diana Pole at Unsplash.
The fire and searing pain were immediate.
This last week, as I was getting back into my weight-lifting routines, —boom!— I dropped a five-pound weight on my left foot. Ouch! I could not believe what had just happened. How could I have been so, so… careless and inattentive? But hold on! Hold on! In that moment, I had the great opportunity to try out a meditation technique, which is best used if you have a horrible pain to focus on. Reverse Meditation. Yes, this is a term coined by Andrew Holecek. “Reverse meditation” is an exercise for understanding what is happening in the mind and body when you are in meditative states. You think that meditation is about being at peace or having your mind go quiet. But reverse meditation is about accessing and locating the meditative state when you are in the middle of the WORST life has to offer. Like physical pain.
Pain is a perfect condition to try reverse meditation.
Here is what I did that absolutely changed my pain experience into reverse meditation.
Reverse Meditation
The five-pound weight slipped out of my hand and onto my left big toe. I immediately breathed in and said a prayer silently in my mind to empty my mind of any unhelpful negative thoughts. No complaining, no analysis, no blame or no imagining the worst, like a black and blue bruise or broken bones. No! Nothing of the kind will enter here, I thought. Instead, I recited my morning prayers in my mind. My morning prayers are when I give thanks for the day, its beauty and its light. I focused on my Original Spirit, unblemished and completely well, staring out of my physical eyes and observing my experience. My Original Spirit is always renewing my mind and body. And then, I felt the pain as purely as I could. For those few seconds, my left big toe was on fire, and it felt like all of reality collapsed into that one sensation of sharp intensity like lightning striking a tree and blackening it completely. White hot, intense pain. I imagined there was nothing else going on in the entire universe except this sensation, this pain, this experience. But I did not imagine this by saying the words. I just felt the pain sensations as purely and honestly as I could while breathing and existing as only this moment.
Then, something curious happened: I entered the meditative state of slow breathing and expanded awareness right in the middle of the pain. I felt my awareness touch into the space around my foot, around my body, and in the entire room. It was restful. “I am okay,” I felt somatically in my body, without saying it in words.
My experience reminded me of that scene in the first Matrix movie, when the main character, Neo, gets a bullet to the chest while in the Matrix: he falls down, bleeding and dying, and then he gets reminded by Trinity speaking into his real ears that he is in the Matrix and that what he is experiencing is a powerful illusion. “Get up!” she whispers into his real ear. He gets up in the Matrix, breathes in, and then looks out at the illusion where he can see all the bits, the ones and zeros, blinking on and off on every surface everywhere and falling down like rain. It’s a great moment. He can see everything, every last bit of existence, glowing and pulsing with energy! With this new awareness and experience of the Matrix, Neo then fights off the powerful Agent Smith, who in the Matrix now appears as just another mountain of ones and zeroes moving about.
Neo is now free. Now he’s just breathing and existing and witnessing existence purely. It is a moment of power and knowing.
For me, in that moment of feeling the pain in my left foot, of engaging in reverse meditation, my left big toe was like a fountain of big hot pain. I felt the pain was changing and swirling like flames around my whole foot. I breathed. The sensations in my foot were changing rapidly, shrinking and growing, and shrinking again. “No harm done,” I thought to myself. My mind felt clear. The pain shrank enough so I could walk. I said, “Thank you,” out loud. When I took a shower a few minutes later, there was a little stinging sensation from where the hot water hit my left big toe. But there was otherwise no sign of harm. No bruising, no redness, no inflammation. There was a memory of the event, a feeling in my big toe of having been through something, but the experience was totally different from the last time something like this had happened and left me with a blackened, bruised toenail years ago.
That’s a moment of reverse meditation.
Reverse meditation works best with pain or some other intrusive event like noise or irritation. The intent of reverse meditation is to sense into pure experience, pure perception, pure being, as you are going through the pain or intrusion. It helps to think of pain, intrusion, or unwanted experience, as contraction. So, to do reverse meditation, you sense the contraction as purely and deeply as you can in the moment. The invitation of reverse meditation is to change your relationship to the contraction. Contraction is like a ball of tangled energy where the energy itself has many stripes and levels. Contraction is usually “bad news” or “something bad happening” to someone, to you. This naturally leads to a feeling that you are NOT meditating. Ah. In fact, you are not meditating when you are bothered and distressed and in the middle of high drama and totally in your feelings and in the middle of an unfair human experience. Ha! You have a legitimate reason not to meditate amidst all the suffering and drama! Pain is like the ultimate drama queen showing up in the body, causing suffering, contracting, and the thoughts of poor me, this is terrible, this should not have happened just seem to appear out of nowhere and then give way to frustration, anger or sadness. So, it can be a challenge to relate to that kind of experience, the contraction, differently, that is, to reverse it. Instead of going into the drama, the story of the pain (how it happened and all that), the invitation is to be there in the middle of the contraction itself and experience it in a fresh and spacious, new way. In reverse meditation, you get to know the contraction as best you can. This means not going into the usual blame, analysis, story, or judgment of what is happening. It’s like “going non-verbal” about pain and experiencing it the way a baby or a caveman might experience the pain, but with your adult modern day consciousness of pure awareness and presence. That is the practice: It is a pure, fully present, simple being in the contraction, the yuck, the pain. It takes practice to experience pain in this new way.
Here are the reverse meditation steps:
Observe. Whack! The ton of bricks, the five-pound weight, the explosion of pain coming into being, into existence.
Be with it, become it. There is nothing else going on. Focus on just the pain, the irritation, the feeling. Treat this one sensation, this single intensity, this one experience, as the only thing going on. How big can it get? Begin to truly wonder and even be in awe of what is happening.
Examine it. Look into the deep nature of what is happening. Be in awe. Feel what is happening as deeply as you can. Listen to it. Get to know it intimately. There may be sensations of pulsing, fire, noise, pressure, static, obstacle, heaviness. What is the nature of it, deep down, under the appearance of what seems to be happening? Underneath this so-called “accident” or “mistake” or “disease,” what does it do, how does it move and have its being? How big can it get? What is it really doing in the moment? Is this sensation appearing or taking shape anywhere else in the body, anywhere else in the room? Just look. But look deeply.
Yoke with it. Become the sensation, the experience, the disturbance. Experience what is happening purely and completely as if it is the only thing happening. What part (of what is happening) is totally new to you? Become your awareness listening to it, tasting it, sensing it, and being it. No words, just breath, awareness, and pure feeling like you are trying to memorize it.
What happens next? Ah, what I noticed is that I did not get rid of the pain exactly! The pain just became something else that was no longer intolerable. It was not awful. It was not suffering anymore. It was just sensation. That’s when I realized I could walk on this foot. That’s when I said, “Thank you.” Then, after the shower, the pain changed again and was gone. Curiously, through this “medicine cabinet” of the brain, my nervous system (my body) ended up releasing the chemicals that prevented my foot from feeling further pain and becoming inflamed and injured. There was a memory of what happened, sure, but no signs of harm. Ah.
I was able to bend and curl my toe afterwards and still experience my toe as just a toe. Thank goodness it was not broken!
As with anything, reverse meditation takes practice. But you can try it with smaller things like interruptions and disturbances before you try it with actual full-blown physical pain. Just remember to rest in whatever arises and breathe gently as you practice reverse meditation, as you would do during regular meditation.
To learn more and dive in more deeply into this practice, read Andrew Holecek’s book, Reverse Meditation.