Wildly fascinating post, thank you. I look forward to reading Natural Pain Relief. I have practiced a very similar format for dealing with ultramarathons, and look forward to learning more. I also recently got a Shakti mat and have been using breathwork to manage the initial pain.
So, after reading this, I tried to examine my own emotions using the technique you describe, and I found something that actually made me very concerned.
> I’ve heard one advanced meditator claim that every feeling and emotion has a tactile correlate, and that you can dissolve it using Shinzen’s techniques.
It has to do with this. I turned to a few of the emotions that were bothering me, and when I really examined them, I found a tactical correlate... and nothing else. All I could think of to identify these emotions were physical sensations. I thought, wait, that can't be right? I have always been on the very low end of emotional sensitivity, so maybe the fundamental qualia of these emotions, the ones that define the experience beyond just a package of bodily sensations, just eluded me. But that's not the case.
I remember from my neuroscience textbooks that one theory of emotion is that they begin and end with bodily sensations, some scientists going so far as to say that emotions are just a reasonable deduction to make from your bodily state. You glimpse a stalking tiger out of the corner of your eye, you run for your life, your heart rate and breathing spikes as a result, and from the sensations of suddenly being wired up you conclude that you feel afraid. I've always dismissed that as a stupid argument because I thought, surely there's a unique sensation called 'fear' that you can point to! But I can't. So I have to give that theory at least some credence.
I don't think emotions are entirely downstream from bodily sensations, but I do believe that emotions play a role in involuntary signaling, probably having evolved to quickly communicate important information between people about danger and social interactions. If that is the case, then it makes sense that emotions are lacking entirely in unique qualia, because those are useless for signaling purposes. Instead, there is a very specific set of behaviors that is involuntarily displayed when we describe someone as e.g. sad (frowning, tightness in the throat, tearing up) and we learn to identify the pattern of bodily sensations this causes as representing this specific emotion. In this way, the involuntary behavior is a signal not just to other people but also to ourselves.
So, assuming it works like this, how can I productively examine my own emotions? I have feelings of shame that I'm struggling with, so I sat down and thought, okay, let's get to the bottom of this. And I look inside, finding... bodily sensations. Those shame-causing thoughts and memories don't actually make me feel anything if I call them up in the absence of the physical sensations. The cause of the physical sensations is something I can't access consciously. So... now what?
I think this is what the Buddhists call "insight" :)
I've heard some say that "enlightenment" isn't about never feeling bad emotions; it's about not getting _stuck_ in them. If you're able to see your emotions as nothing but physiological responses, you can (a) understand that the feeling is impermanent and (b) work on relaxing that part of your body--which is much closer to the root cause of the emotion than the narratives in your head saying *why* you should feel sad/scared/ashamed. I often get stuck on that last part--part of me wants to keep jumping back to the "why" and fix the external cause, rather than work on the internal one.
"Now what?" is a common refrain I hear from people who click into a new mode of consciousness, e.g. via meditation or psychedelics. It's not an easy question to answer! There's often a sense of newfound freedom, and total bewilderment about what one might do with that freedom. As the old Zen saying goes: "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water"
I'm not sure 'freedom' is the result of this insight, it's mainly that the thing I found unpleasant turns out to be a different thing than I thought, but that didn't really change how unpleasant it is. It's not even something I get stuck in, just an annoying automatic response I periodically have to endure for a moment and then it's gone again. Well, I guess it's not supposed to be a catch-all form of therapy, and maybe I can do something with it down the line anyway.
I love my Shakti mat! I’ve been using it regularly for a year now, and it’s amazing how my body craves it when I’m using it a lot--it seems to know it needs something I’m less conscious of.
Also interesting is breaking down the dichotomy of “pleasure, good; pain, bad”. I’ve had moments of intense emotion, for example, where I wasn’t sure whether it was painful or pleasurable. It just was.
This topic reminds me of, “pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.” Especially with emotional pain, it’s so obvious how thoughts about it easily turn pain to suffering.
I don't know enough about calculus to know if this is really possible, but I have long held a secret belief that calculus (i.e. "approaching" math, cause you're always in relation to a moving target...I think) *will* actually work with/on sufficiently well defined phenomena. I would LOVE LOVE LOVE for someone to figure that out.
The single most important thing that you can tell us about meditation is an easy technique. Something that any fool can do that delivers quick results. Something we can do in a weekend.
Then we have something better than words to refer to. We have a real experience.
A real experience is more impressive than any words. A real experience guides you better than a mountain of words.
Brevity is definitely golden here. Here's my attempt (sans footnotes).
---
Sit down in your special sitting place. Back straight. Breathe from your belly. Eyes closed. Relax.
Put your attention on the feeling of breath in the tip of your nose.
(Give the end of your nose a little pinch. Feel that? That's where you put it).
The game is to hold your attention on the tip of your nose without moving it.
You will get distracted. Your attention will get drawn to other things. You will have all kinds of interesting thoughts, feelings, etc. You will daydream.
Whenever you catch yourself doing that, put your attention right back on the tip of your nose again.
This thing has been advocated a lot around childbirth. My impression is that the failure rate is high: People intend to give birth naturally without suffering, but suffer nonetheless.
I think what you are talking about works for lesser states of pain. Also without special techniques - just seeing the situation constructively gives the same result, in my experience. Pain from pregnancy is one example. Although I find the ideal of natural childbirth without suffering laughably overambitious, I think the usually considerably weaker pain from pregnancy can often be endured without suffering.
Yeah I don't think I'd recommend these techniques for natural childbirth, unless you were *very* familiar with them, and had applied them in a lot of different and extreme circumstances.
New sorts of pains take time to examine and get used to. E.g. I was already experienced with these techniques, but my first time on the Shakti mat was still very rough.
If you gave birth every day for a year (thankfully not a thing!) you could probably use these tools effectively. But for something that will only happen a few times in your life (and where there's well-documented amnesia about the pain!) it's extremely difficult to mentally reorient around the pain.
As a skateboarder I’ve had many opportunities to get well aquatinted with pain. So much so that after enough I was kinda forced by the pain to realise that the suffering part is optional. And it is only recently that I have started incorporating this idea into my mediation. But Shinzen’s ideas are on a whole other level — so thank you so much for shining a light on them :)
So we want to convert from a measure of Resistance/Grasping (i.e. Willfulness) to a measure of Equanimity, its opposite. To do that, we need to invert the scale that has Equanimity at 0, and Resistance/Grasping at +/- infinity. In the converted scale, we'll have Equanimity at infinity, and Resistance/Grasping at 0.
You could do this with the transformation y=1/x, but that has this weird discontinuity at 0: https://www.google.com/search?q=1%2Fx. A tiny amount of Resistance becomes hugely negative Equanimity, and a tiny amount of Grasping becomes hugely positive Equanimity.
This means that Equanimity is always positive (I'm not sure what "negative equanimity" would even mean), and has all the properties we wanted above (zero Resistance/Grasping maps to infinite Equanimity; high Resistance/Grasping maps to zero Equanimity)
I like this idea of "just invert", (especially the "just" part), but I am suspicious of the math.
An alternative is "just" putting a minus sign in front, this seems much more powerful to me, but I haven't put very much thought into it yet.
More important I think is the point of contention over whether it is *valid* to violate mathematical principles wrt to reality...many people will passionately say NO IT IS NOT.. but follow them home from the meeting and watch them do it over and over with no concern for their "principles".
Just between you and me: I am rather suspicious that not everything on this planet adds up, despite our relative(!) proficiency at math. One can perfect at math, but if you are bad at ontology, you're fooked....and unlikely be able to realize it....one may not be able to even TRY to not be bad at is, due to the nature of conditioned consciousness.
Wildly fascinating post, thank you. I look forward to reading Natural Pain Relief. I have practiced a very similar format for dealing with ultramarathons, and look forward to learning more. I also recently got a Shakti mat and have been using breathwork to manage the initial pain.
So, after reading this, I tried to examine my own emotions using the technique you describe, and I found something that actually made me very concerned.
> I’ve heard one advanced meditator claim that every feeling and emotion has a tactile correlate, and that you can dissolve it using Shinzen’s techniques.
It has to do with this. I turned to a few of the emotions that were bothering me, and when I really examined them, I found a tactical correlate... and nothing else. All I could think of to identify these emotions were physical sensations. I thought, wait, that can't be right? I have always been on the very low end of emotional sensitivity, so maybe the fundamental qualia of these emotions, the ones that define the experience beyond just a package of bodily sensations, just eluded me. But that's not the case.
I remember from my neuroscience textbooks that one theory of emotion is that they begin and end with bodily sensations, some scientists going so far as to say that emotions are just a reasonable deduction to make from your bodily state. You glimpse a stalking tiger out of the corner of your eye, you run for your life, your heart rate and breathing spikes as a result, and from the sensations of suddenly being wired up you conclude that you feel afraid. I've always dismissed that as a stupid argument because I thought, surely there's a unique sensation called 'fear' that you can point to! But I can't. So I have to give that theory at least some credence.
I don't think emotions are entirely downstream from bodily sensations, but I do believe that emotions play a role in involuntary signaling, probably having evolved to quickly communicate important information between people about danger and social interactions. If that is the case, then it makes sense that emotions are lacking entirely in unique qualia, because those are useless for signaling purposes. Instead, there is a very specific set of behaviors that is involuntarily displayed when we describe someone as e.g. sad (frowning, tightness in the throat, tearing up) and we learn to identify the pattern of bodily sensations this causes as representing this specific emotion. In this way, the involuntary behavior is a signal not just to other people but also to ourselves.
So, assuming it works like this, how can I productively examine my own emotions? I have feelings of shame that I'm struggling with, so I sat down and thought, okay, let's get to the bottom of this. And I look inside, finding... bodily sensations. Those shame-causing thoughts and memories don't actually make me feel anything if I call them up in the absence of the physical sensations. The cause of the physical sensations is something I can't access consciously. So... now what?
I think this is what the Buddhists call "insight" :)
I've heard some say that "enlightenment" isn't about never feeling bad emotions; it's about not getting _stuck_ in them. If you're able to see your emotions as nothing but physiological responses, you can (a) understand that the feeling is impermanent and (b) work on relaxing that part of your body--which is much closer to the root cause of the emotion than the narratives in your head saying *why* you should feel sad/scared/ashamed. I often get stuck on that last part--part of me wants to keep jumping back to the "why" and fix the external cause, rather than work on the internal one.
"Now what?" is a common refrain I hear from people who click into a new mode of consciousness, e.g. via meditation or psychedelics. It's not an easy question to answer! There's often a sense of newfound freedom, and total bewilderment about what one might do with that freedom. As the old Zen saying goes: "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water"
I'm not sure 'freedom' is the result of this insight, it's mainly that the thing I found unpleasant turns out to be a different thing than I thought, but that didn't really change how unpleasant it is. It's not even something I get stuck in, just an annoying automatic response I periodically have to endure for a moment and then it's gone again. Well, I guess it's not supposed to be a catch-all form of therapy, and maybe I can do something with it down the line anyway.
Thank you so much for writing this great essay!
I love my Shakti mat! I’ve been using it regularly for a year now, and it’s amazing how my body craves it when I’m using it a lot--it seems to know it needs something I’m less conscious of.
Also interesting is breaking down the dichotomy of “pleasure, good; pain, bad”. I’ve had moments of intense emotion, for example, where I wasn’t sure whether it was painful or pleasurable. It just was.
This topic reminds me of, “pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.” Especially with emotional pain, it’s so obvious how thoughts about it easily turn pain to suffering.
Great essay, thank you.
I don't know enough about calculus to know if this is really possible, but I have long held a secret belief that calculus (i.e. "approaching" math, cause you're always in relation to a moving target...I think) *will* actually work with/on sufficiently well defined phenomena. I would LOVE LOVE LOVE for someone to figure that out.
Meditation enthusiast here.
The single most important thing that you can tell us about meditation is an easy technique. Something that any fool can do that delivers quick results. Something we can do in a weekend.
Then we have something better than words to refer to. We have a real experience.
A real experience is more impressive than any words. A real experience guides you better than a mountain of words.
Agreed! In case you didn't see this one: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/how-to-start-a-meditation-practice#%C2%A7calisthenics
Brevity is definitely golden here. Here's my attempt (sans footnotes).
---
Sit down in your special sitting place. Back straight. Breathe from your belly. Eyes closed. Relax.
Put your attention on the feeling of breath in the tip of your nose.
(Give the end of your nose a little pinch. Feel that? That's where you put it).
The game is to hold your attention on the tip of your nose without moving it.
You will get distracted. Your attention will get drawn to other things. You will have all kinds of interesting thoughts, feelings, etc. You will daydream.
Whenever you catch yourself doing that, put your attention right back on the tip of your nose again.
Keep it there as perfectly as you can.
That's it. That's the whole technique.
This thing has been advocated a lot around childbirth. My impression is that the failure rate is high: People intend to give birth naturally without suffering, but suffer nonetheless.
I think what you are talking about works for lesser states of pain. Also without special techniques - just seeing the situation constructively gives the same result, in my experience. Pain from pregnancy is one example. Although I find the ideal of natural childbirth without suffering laughably overambitious, I think the usually considerably weaker pain from pregnancy can often be endured without suffering.
Yeah I don't think I'd recommend these techniques for natural childbirth, unless you were *very* familiar with them, and had applied them in a lot of different and extreme circumstances.
New sorts of pains take time to examine and get used to. E.g. I was already experienced with these techniques, but my first time on the Shakti mat was still very rough.
If you gave birth every day for a year (thankfully not a thing!) you could probably use these tools effectively. But for something that will only happen a few times in your life (and where there's well-documented amnesia about the pain!) it's extremely difficult to mentally reorient around the pain.
A super interesting piece, Max!
As a skateboarder I’ve had many opportunities to get well aquatinted with pain. So much so that after enough I was kinda forced by the pain to realise that the suffering part is optional. And it is only recently that I have started incorporating this idea into my mediation. But Shinzen’s ideas are on a whole other level — so thank you so much for shining a light on them :)
Can someone explain the Equanimity = 1/wilfulness^2 part? The math doesn't make sense to me. 🤔
So we want to convert from a measure of Resistance/Grasping (i.e. Willfulness) to a measure of Equanimity, its opposite. To do that, we need to invert the scale that has Equanimity at 0, and Resistance/Grasping at +/- infinity. In the converted scale, we'll have Equanimity at infinity, and Resistance/Grasping at 0.
You could do this with the transformation y=1/x, but that has this weird discontinuity at 0: https://www.google.com/search?q=1%2Fx. A tiny amount of Resistance becomes hugely negative Equanimity, and a tiny amount of Grasping becomes hugely positive Equanimity.
To correct for that, you can make it y=1/x^2: https://www.google.com/search?q=1%2Fx%5E2
This means that Equanimity is always positive (I'm not sure what "negative equanimity" would even mean), and has all the properties we wanted above (zero Resistance/Grasping maps to infinite Equanimity; high Resistance/Grasping maps to zero Equanimity)
Hope that helps!
I still don't understand.
I like this idea of "just invert", (especially the "just" part), but I am suspicious of the math.
An alternative is "just" putting a minus sign in front, this seems much more powerful to me, but I haven't put very much thought into it yet.
More important I think is the point of contention over whether it is *valid* to violate mathematical principles wrt to reality...many people will passionately say NO IT IS NOT.. but follow them home from the meeting and watch them do it over and over with no concern for their "principles".
Just between you and me: I am rather suspicious that not everything on this planet adds up, despite our relative(!) proficiency at math. One can perfect at math, but if you are bad at ontology, you're fooked....and unlikely be able to realize it....one may not be able to even TRY to not be bad at is, due to the nature of conditioned consciousness.