The psychopath’s bewildering ways of talking

Louise, I agree about your recommendation of “The Verbally Abusive Relationship.” If I had found that earlier, I would have gotten out the relationship faster, and I think my recovery would have been quicker too. I never thought about him as verbally abusive — although his criticisms and disdain just crushed me — because I was defining my problem as being exploited. But that book just nails it.

About meditation, there are a lot of approaches to it. When I first started, I tried to use it to “get above” myself, doing white light work and also imagining myself in rising above everyday reality.

In this recovery, I developed another technique by myself that seemed to work better for the highly stressed and emotional states I was dealing with. Later, I found Pema Chodron, a female Buddhist monk whose books and CDs are really excellent. The way she teaches is very close to what I do.

I’m passing it on, in case anyone is interested. First comes attention to breath. Ideally you’re breathing long belly breaths (inhaling deep enough that you can feel your belly expanding), and if you want in through the mouth and out through the nose.

The breathing does a couple of things. One is that it oxygenates your body, which is an improvement over the shallow breathing we tend to do when we’re stressed. A series of long belly breaths is called by some people a “mini meditation” and will tend to help smooth out the brain noise. So a lot of people do this anytime their faced with something that upsets them.

The other thing it does is give us something to focus on. Like a hypnotist uses a metronome or mirror. One of the biggest challenges of meditation is shifting focus away from the “monkey mind” that makes so much noise. This is a simple way to do it. If it helps, you can count, like 20 breaths and then start to count again. The whole point is to occupy your mind with this simple physical thing.

Your mind is going to keep on generating noisy thoughts. But at this point, your task is just to observe them, not get pulled into them. You don’t have to think about where they’re coming from, or anything else. Just watch the activity of your mind, don’t argue or resist it, just let it be and act as an observer. If you need to verbalize, you can think, “Oh, that’s interesting” or “Gosh, look what I’m thinking about.” But don’t get pulled in.

What I’ve just described is the first level. If you try it, you’ll discover how much discipline it takes to just observe your mind, without getting seduced into your transient thoughts. Everyone, even the Dalai Lama, talks about how noisy the mind is and how hard it is to resist getting involved with this stuff, even for the little while you give to meditating.

However, even a bit of effort at this, has good effect. One is that your perspective changes as you practice observing. Insights that have been blocked by our obsessive attention to our problems start to rise up, and we see though the problems in new ways or see through what we’ve been doing. We’re also exercising a different part of our mind, the observer or governor, that is more calm and dispassionate that our angry, fearful or sad selves. This definitely affects our brain chemisty, and we relax and feel like we don’t have to work so hard at control, because we discover a part of us that actually understands more about what’s going on.

There are other levels beyond this one. As we become better at observing our mental activity and more insightful about what’s going on, we become more aware. As fear, anger and pain recede, our minds and senses can interpret everything — the material world around us, our inner landscapes, our history, whatever interests us — with less emotional bias. The breadth and depth of what we see expands. It’s not like we’re seeing anything new, but we feel like we’re awakening to what’s been in front of us all the time.

This goes on. Meditation can introduce us to layers of our own consciousness that go all the way to an understanding of the great connectedness of everything, and a great peace in knowing that we are part of it all. That is also part of our consciousness. But you don’t have to go this far to get valuable results from meditation.

One of the reasons I’m writing this is in response to style1’s concerns about entities and influences attaching themselves to you when you’re “in the energy.” The form of meditation I’m describing is designed both for stress reduction and self-knowledge.

Earlier in my life, I was a working psychic and healer, and studied under some very gifted people. I ultimately rejected a lot of what they taught about dimensions and entities, because I found it to be unnecessarily arcane, complicated and unhelpful in dealing with the everyday challenges people face. We are influenced by entities, but those entities are right out in the real world where we can see them. And in my view, the challenges they present to us are concrete and real, and that includes making choices of how much we want to be influenced by people who don’t have our best interests at heart.

In meditation as in life, you’re going to find what you believe in. The universe is quite accommodating that way, because our beliefs shape how we interpret the world, including our inner world.

So as in everything else, you have to make your own choices about what is safe for you. But I can tell you from my own experience that giving time, maybe a half hour a day, to doing this type of meditation really helped with stress and accelerated my healing.

Kathy