The Interplay of Relaxation and Debriefing (Meditation and Intuition - Part 3)

During meditation, within a few minutes, you will find yourself relaxing deeply, as if you were several days into a vacation. Then suddenly, aaaoooah, you will find your brain reviewing something that feels like your personal car alarm. This happens because life is ruthless in its own way. You may want meditation to be a blessed respite from your life, and it will be, for a few minutes. Then your brain and entire body start to engage in a deep process of reviewing every time your alarm system went off, and assessing: was this really a danger? Does that alarm system need to be adjusted? In the military, this kind of after-action reporting is called a debriefing. Sports teams also debrief, often with video replays of crucial action.

You want meditation to feel like soaking in a hot tub, but suddenly you are in a room with Sun Tzu, and maybe a logistics guy, an intel guy, and a cartographer, and they are all interrogating you on why you pushed the panic button or called in an air strike on your own position. They are sitting there with clipboards looking at you and asking, "You called in Broken Arrow. What was your justification for that? What were you seeing, hearing and feeling?"

This aspect of meditation feels extremely uncomfortable, like watching a frame-by-frame replay of how you miscalculated something.

It is ruthless because your body-mind system wants to review exactly what your senses - your spies - were telling you, and exactly how you interpreted this data and said, "It's a threat," and then exactly what alarm or stress response you invoked. This will go on for a grueling 30 seconds or couple of minutes, then you will be in the hot tub again, relaxed more deeply than before, for a couple of minutes, then back to the room with Sun Tzu. (For an interesting story of when Broken Arrow was called, see We Were Soldiers with Mel Gibson).

Why does this happen? In essence, because it's natural. Your body, your brain, are part of life on earth, the hundreds of millions of years that nerves and senses have been evolving. This deep instinctive intelligence in you is a master of survival. Meditating is somewhat of an unusual situation because what you are doing is paying close attention to this intelligence functioning. Mostly you have to just let it work and learn from it and give it permission. Your body wants total elegance and grace, to move through the world with animal alertness, and an almost molecular precision in how much energy you expend on recognizing and adapting to dangers.

Your brain is not imitating the way the military debriefing or sports coaching works. It's the other way around. The military and sports coaches are utilizing the way the brain works. They conduct debriefings because this is the way the human brain works at its best, and they want to do what works. Military action and sports are always about success through exact application of force or energy, also speed, timing and synchronization. And they are always about learning from mistakes.

The debriefing process is painful and wonderful and educational, and when it is over, you can safely feel great, because you have learned from your mistakes on a deep level.

Keep in mind, when you meditate instinctively, your body goes into a state of rest deeper than deep sleep. This is healing, and your body-mind system conducts some of the brain rejuvenation that is usually does only during sleep. In meditation, we are simultaneously resting more deeply than sleep, and awake and alert. So we have to learn to put up with processes having to do with life maintenance that the body & mind do whenever we rest deeply. The brain and body do this same review when we are sleeping and dreaming, and the threats show up symbolically in the characters and plot structure of our dreams. When we are meditating, the review shows up as "feelies" – short video clips with sound tracks, emotions, and intense physical sensations. And we feel everything intensely because we are not only awake but more aware than usual.

The reason your body-mind system will zero in on the times during the day you felt afraid or invoked the stress response is because the response is so expensive energetically. The body stops everything else it is doing – resting, healing, digesting, learning, enjoying - and just focuses on the threat. This is absolutely great if you are in immediate physical danger of the kind that requires you to suddenly run a few hundred feet or instantly leap into combat. If the danger is not immediate, within a few seconds, you are like a car sitting in the driveway revving the engine up to 5000 rpm. A waste of good energy. Most human illness has a stress component, because the stress response wears out the body in various ways. Doctors have known for decades that 80% of all office visits are caused by the wear and tear of stress, and recently the percentage has been revised upwards.

I know this is a challenging point, but if you can stay with me here and really get this, it will change your life and meditation will forever be much easier.

Re-Calibrating Your Danger Signaling System (Meditation and Intuition - Part 2)

A dog that barks at every person and every leaf that moves is worthless as a watchdog. A car alarm that goes off because the wind blows, or someone walks by, is worse than useless – your neighbors will be glad someone steals your damn car, just to get that horrible noise out of their lives for a few days. And if we are tense and suspicious all the time, this is not good armor and not good radar. No military can be on high alert all the time – things break down.

Meditation is adaptive – this means that the power driving meditation and making it work is your body's innate intelligence, which is only interested in helping you to survive and thrive. This is the natural tendency of meditation, by the way – you can observe this in yourself, and you can find it out through interviewing others. Instinctive Meditation is just a name I give to a system for recognizing and utilizing what happens naturally during successful and healthy meditation. I developed it by listening to people who were thriving in meditation and in life, and I learned in a different way by listening to people who were taking damage.

As part of this adaptive process, one of the dynamics that goes on during meditation is that your body and mind will re-calibrate your danger signaling system, to make it more accurate. You'll find yourself going deeply into relaxation, and then your nerves will jump a bit as they replay the memory of a threat that you perceived. Then your nervous system will study the relationship of that perceived threat with your current sensory intelligence about your world, and evaluate the best course of action. This is an almost involuntary process. It has great survival but everyone almost without exception hates it because they think it shouldn't be part of meditation. It feels like you are at home having dinner, or resting, and a technician from the alarm company comes over unannounced and starts testing the alarm system, opening and closing doors and windows and checking the perimeter. If you allow this process, you will find that after meditation, your danger signaling system is more accurate with fewer false alarms, and you can go through life more relaxed because you trust your sensors.

How to Have Good Personal Radar (Meditation and Intuition - Part 1)

One reason to meditate is so that you don't miss out on the beauty of your own life as you move through the day. It is so easy to lose the joy of life in the living of it, to get caught up in hurrying and mental chatter about how late you are, how many things you have to do. When we find the style of meditation that works for us, we often find that our senses open up, and our intuition becomes more accurate. And at the same time, we engage in the actions of our everyday life with more relaxation and ease.

Because of this, many people think that meditation is about being open and relaxed, but this is not actually true: meditation gives your nerves a chance to be in deeper contact with reality, and as a result you will be more open and relaxed much of the time, because there is not an immediate threat. And because your senses are more open, you can perceive both safety and danger more accurately. And ask any warrior: relaxation is a great place to come from when preparing for combat, if that is what's called for.

Another reason to not leave home without meditating is that if you are relaxed as your baseline experience, then when you get tense, it is a signal, a clear blip on your personal radar. Relaxation is like having a well-calibrated radar system, that gives few false signals.

Unless you are relaxed and at ease, you will have a lot of noise in your nervous system. If you are afraid all the time, and suspicious of everyone, you won't know when you actually are in danger, because your danger signaling system is blaring all the time. If your radar is showing threats that are not there, you will have to learn to ignore it to get any work done, and then real threats will go ignored.

This is why meditation is part of the training in many martial arts, and why meditation and martial arts training are complementary opposites, enriching each other.

As an aside, though, I have to mention that sitting on your ankles, or sitting cross-legged, can be very bad for the knees. Sitting in a chair with your feet on the ground is a great pose, plus it has that extra sense of groundedness.

In the following several sections, we cycle through the interplay between safety and danger, because this is the most basic of instincts. We will look at the way rhythm occurs in meditation experience, and we will approach the same point again and again, spiraling in at it from slightly different angles, because it is such a challenging issue for meditators. Most people never get it, and the lack of this understanding is a major reason people quit meditating. So forgive the repetition.