How is it possible to experience such massive swings of emotion? This is how Brandt Passalacqua explains why the mind can move from one polarity to another in a moment and how an advanced meditation practice can put that into perspective.
The third level of the Breathing Deeply meditation practice – Samadhi and Surrender – can reveal a lot about your thinking and about who you are.
As you do these practices you will notice a lot of things you may or may not have known about yourself. In particular, how your perspective can fluctuate from almost polar opposites rather quickly.
In my own experience, I’ve observed that my mind can fluctuate between deep empathy and compassion to not caring at all – and it is pretty striking. My natural way of thinking doesn’t seem to have a lot of middle ground. I have to cultivate it.
Sometimes my thinking will tell me to abandon humanity and never look back. Other times my thinking will cause me to feel deeply connected to humanity. I’ve observed that my mind seems to be very comfortable existing in the spaces of polarity.
A big benefit of my own meditation practice has been to not only observe those patterns but also experiment using the observations.
Through the meditative practice I’m able to really dive deep into compassion – where the compassion is in my system…
And then also dive deep into where it isn’t – where it doesn’t naturally inform me.
It is neither a matter of trying to get away from something nor is it going toward something. Instead, it’s a path of discovery.
We can immerse ourselves into the concept of Maya/not Maya system. [Maya – Sanskrit: “magic” or “illusion”] and ask ourselves: “Who am I? Am I a member of the global community? Or not at all?”
Some people like the monkish approach of “this is illusion”.
Focussing on a greater truth and a refusal to play a game where we pretend that all of this (everyday life) is super important.
This can be both appealing and offensive, but it’s a way to work with yourself and you learn a lot that way.
We can ask ourselves:
And then, on the other side:
These are kinds of things that can come up in the third part of our meditative process when you have the structure and support to work with them correctly. It helps your brain not get stuck.
Try our 30 day free trial to begin the experience for yourself of meditation within a container of structure and support.
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