I think you know that I like to source (or complete) a vasana publicly whenever one arises for me. I do so to illustrate how I go through a vasana without projecting it onto someone else.
A vasana is a triggered issue which has us go berserk and hails from a traumatic incident in the distant past. We can go berserk quietly but our system gets all in a pickle whether silently or loudly.
Some good friends revealed, unintentionally, that they discuss me behind my back and ridicule me for my beliefs. Until now I had thought I had their respect, but evidently, no, I’m the butt of their jokes for the beliefs that all of us here share.
So what am I going to do about that? Resent them? Get even? Gossip about them to others? That’s the old third-dimensional way but it won’t work any longer.
So how do I deal with the unpleasant feelings I feel inside if I don’t scream and shout at them?
Here’s what I do. Not saying it’s what you should do. Not saying it’s somehow the best way. But it works.
Not saying it’s my own invention either. I got it from the est training, Vipassana meditation, encounter groups, enlightenment intensives.
First of all I pin down exactly the way I’m feeling. I name it.
I’m having trouble with this one. The feeling exists high up in my throat and I’m having difficulty naming it. Tears seem to be associated with it. It may be humiliation. Public embarrassment. Like being caught doing something I shouldn’t be doing or caught with my pants down.
The minute I name the feeling as humiliation, a percentage of the charge disappears. So simply naming it accomplishes part of the healing process.
But then I go a step further and ask myself: when was I publicly humiliated?
And immediately I flash on a scene in high school. This was in 1964 and you have to remember that being a member of a “broken” family was the subject of much gossip and disdain in those days.
Here I was on the platform of my high school receiving a prestigious award and the Vice Principal asked my parents to stand up. Oh my Gawd. Mr. Rogers, you should have known better.
My Mom stood up on the floor of the gymnasium and my Dad stood up in the balcony. I could have died.
I experience through the humiliation I felt. I’d say seventy percent of the unwanted feeling has disappeared.
But there’s still a portion of it hanging around. I look again for another incident. And I see one that is too gruelling for me to acknowledge publicly. So I’m censoring that one. But censoring it doesn’t stop me from experiencing the incident to completion.
I do and I’m now, I’d say, around 95 percent complete.
But now something unexpected happens. Could it be a feature of the rising energies?
Now many incidents race through my mind – the first time I made love (disaster!), the time I made love to a gal and she asked, in a pained but casual-sounding voice: “Can we stop now?” (Devastated me!)
An avalanche of incidents roll out: the young leftist club (if I mention the name of it, I’d have the NSA breathing down my neck) whose meeting I attended out of curiosity, saying, “We have a traitor in our midst” and I looked around only to find they were talking about me.
The time I took a stand on an unfair student issue, following the advice of a fellow I considered a friend who was anything but, and found myself being considered to have resigned from my student-political position (Speak of entrapment! Speak of being dumb!).
The incidents roll past my mind.
Being caught as a kid for stealing peanuts, rock candy, chocolate bars. Confessing my kleptomania to a junior school counsellor only to have the whole matter escalate and get me in worse trouble than I was already in! Getting the strap for lazily carving a notch in my desk (oh, my life was over!), only to find out years later that my Mom knew all along since the principal had to call her before he did the deed (required by law)!
Being rejected in relationship, losing money, being taken for a sucker. Oh Gawd, how many incidents have we in our lives that sit there undigested and roast us worse than Scrooge on Christmas Eve?
I experience them all, allowing myself to relive them for the time that’s needed. And then it all stops and I’m restored to Self.
What a rollercoaster ride!
So the vasana is complete – this time. And I haven’t broken off my relationship with my friend or added a new layer to the vasana by shouting at him.
In fact, rather than having added a vasana, I’ve gone a ways to making one disappear and reducing the stack by one.
Bliss arises and I’m back to life as it was. That for me is the way to handle an upset without losing friends, ending up in a police station, adding more humiliation to one’s life, etc.