This was my week-long wrap up session. My big question was, what are my blind spots? Those areas in my perception of self/others that I am missing. My therapist said I really only had one, and that it was big, and that was my lack of using my emotional core and being in touch with it. In other words I am dissociating too much. The big thing I have to work on is emotional awareness in the body….NOT the head.
I then asked him if there were meditation techniques to help cultivate emotional awareness, and he said there weren’t any really and the closest was probably Vipassana. Although he did warn, extensive prolonged hours of meditation tends to lead to dissociation in most people which really is the opposite of getting in touch with your inner, higher self. Watching your mind (taught in most meditations) is like watching the secondary effects of something. What you want to be watching, increasing awareness of, is your emotional core for that is the primary source of your unique individuality, creativity and essence. It is precisely that which most people in society are sorely disconnected from, and mind meditation while it may have some minor benefits….if it leads to extensive dissociation leads to an almost psychopathy. My therapist had been a therapist for people who had gone through 20 – 40 day meditations and said that these people can turn out really quite disjointed and disconnected from their own emotions, this is regression. I asked my therapist if he were to wager a guess, how many people on the planet were actively trying to increase awareness (emotional) hes aid maybe 1 in a 1000 probably a lot less.
My therapist said meditations 3x a day 10-minutes at a time would be the maximum he would suggest. This is line with meditation guru Herbert Benson’s suggestion as well. The best time to practice internal emotional awareness is when communicating with other people. Cultivating this works best when with others NOT if you put yourself in isolation. It is other people that evoke emotions in us the most. It is through the reflection of others that we learn the most about ourselves. My therapist maintained that we have a highly individualized life experience, we really don’t know what it is like to be another. It is when we use our emotional core to intuitively attempt to understand how other people use their emotional cores different than us, and we are aware of this process, that this is where we as humans stand to grow the most! In his opinion this is pretty much your life’s purpose and I would have to agree with him.
This is why diversity and novelty are probably the most important aspects of life. This is the reason why being at Burning Man felt like it was literally rewiring my brain. My best friend & my gf had the same experience. My therapist went on to tell me the best possible way to increase intelligence was to do as MANY different things as possible. Intelligence in the pre-frontal cortex expands latterly. He said there was a window of age 20-30 where this worked best. He recommended trying everything at least once, especially those things you think you wouldn’t like. Snowboarding, Tennis, Ping-Pong, cooking, Pottery, etc. By doing things so drastically different one from the next you increase the greater use of unique neuron pathways in the brain. This creates foundations for bringing in a greater diversity of creativity to the thing you eventually do decide to solely focus on. I am going to try and make a list of things I haven’t done/tried and make an attempt to try them all at least once. (hmmm this is tough, only things i can think of is skydiving & paragliding…)
Novelty is the key to life. This is exactly the conclusion Terrance McKenna came to as well. My therapist said that I should also pay particular attention to those peoples feelings, who I thought were dumb, stupid, uninteresting, awkward, strange, disgusting, boring, etc. I tend to be judgy of such people, and this is the wrong approach. It is of utmost IMPORTANCE to appreciate differences. Every person has something unique to offer you. He said to use other people to learn about yourself, and to expand your emotional awareness.
To close off I asked my therapist with all his knowledge and experience what his greatest source of confusion was. And he said it comes to him in the form of people that sit where I was sitting. He said it is the most screwed up people the ones who look hopeless, that when they learn about their emotions and find inner emotional peace, it are those who can become immensely powerful. I must be one of his most boring clients! My therapist is one of the most sought after therapists, his clientele include Hollywood stars and billionaires. I have gained a lot from my sessions with him. It has opened a whole new area of my life for development. An area I didn’t even know existed!
Heroic Mastery 