The Art of Meditation
Bliss-state, joy and how addiction and meditation are intertwined.
Sh*t, I’m closer to 40 than 30! This thunderous message came to me at a time when I was living in a state of chaos. I was overwhelmed, juggling children and living in chaos. Ever had that feeling?
Not all of this article will resonate with you. But I KNOW, some of it will. Because you and I, and anyone reading this is living their human life experience. And that includes elements of what I’m going to share with you for all of us. It might even change your life!
I felt on the edge of panic but just kept pushing. Even after the clear message to change. Sometimes I felt out of my body. It was scary and I didn’t think anyone would understand.
Rather than hearing the call for change I “pushed on”. I was distracted with screens, alcohol, and opiate pain killers. Creating ever intense cycles of doing. I felt on the edge of panic, almost all the time.
Keeping my best face on.
The only escape I found was through substances. Must “push on”.
The first epiphany was that I noticed I was mindlessly feeding my face with self-soothing foods. This first change, changing my body and how I treated it, drew me to study breathwork. Thankfully, pattern breakers through breathwork began in my early forties so I avoided the “Oh shit I’m closer to 50 than 40 moment”.
Wherever you are in your own journey, epiphanies will come and go as you travel through your years in this life, presenting opportunities to move from false bliss to true bliss-states.
At times, I could feel completely outside of my body and like being truly connected to myself was a distant unattainable dream. It’s scary and you can feel like no one will understand your despair or dilemma, and maybe you believe that there’s no way out.
Being in the treacly mess that is the addict state is a form of bliss. You can feel yourself overwhelmed and purely within the dopamine soup of joy and happiness. But the feelings before it are deeply uncomfortable. The self-sabotaging patterns butt up against the deeper knowledge that what you are about to do is not in your best interest or against what you believe.
The feeling after the bliss-state of addiction can crash down around you, because of the unbalanced nature of the manufactured joy. If it is achieved with chemicals, then it can be made even worse during a detoxification process.
The euphoria of being present in the moment is far greater and sustainable.
You may have experienced the euphoria of a mental and physical sweet spot. It might have been when you come out of a connected breathwork! (Click here to sign up if you aren’t already part of the community)
Bliss is a state of being, a moment in space and time when your mind is completely clear. You can also feel an absence of any pain in the body of any aches or pains, and you can just be with your expanded yet embodied experience.
Mmmm yummy. The dopamine soup of joy and bliss, created by the addict state.
Like I’ve outlined above, some people have mistaken the highs of substance addiction or emotional distraction as that euphoric point. But it’s not. It’s very different and true euphoria lives within you, regardless of anything else external or consumed.
Oh, it doesn’t mean that I can simply flick a switch and be in a state of euphoria, no matter where I am. But you can beclose. You can have daily practices that help to guide you into a way of being where cortisol levels are low, you feel relaxed, and dopamine can flow more easily, living with less uncontrollable highs and devastating lows.
Of course, it would be a form of escapism in itself to live in a euphoric state at all times, avoidant of important and intrinsic human emotions like grief, fear and sadness. But true health is to be able to access a wide range of feelings without losing contact with ourselves and the present moment.
2016 vs 2020
Huge shifts were happening within me, yet the deeper work was still to come.
Don’t let this photo fool you. I was still suffering from addiction. But it was far less pronounced, and I was able to become aware of and release a lot of the patterns rather than get stuck in them.
Accepting everything that you receive from a sensory point of view can become a trigger for automatic patterns of distraction, and this process can be a large part of your personal story of transformation.
I used to be enormously susceptible to advertising. I remember that when I’d see someone smoking I’d want to smoke too. It was only up until a couple of years ago, bearing in mind that I gave up smoking 20 years ago, that I still would feel this draw. That’s how powerful embedded sensory triggered patterns can be.
You know when you walk into supermarkets and they’re pumping out the smells of freshly baked bread and cooking chicken, this is a clever ploy to sell more by simply triggering your sense of smell. (Lots of sugar is added to that smelly mix too – a direct trigger for the brain).
Pictures of food are lethal, it’s not like we can block out the need to eat. And when we see certain foods, the patterns and the dopamine response messages in the brain start turning over.
And some of the patterns can be a bit like this:
- You HEAR someone say something judgmental. You take it on board, and it goes up into your head.
- You start to believe what you’ve heard, and it creates self-criticism. You start to SEE things that enforce this belief.
- This belief is counter to what you’re manifesting in your life and you start to FEEL an impostor syndrome.
So, you can see how connecting with your senses is so important. Being able to guide yourself to a place where you can simply receive what you: see, hear, taste, touch and smell as elements of your present moment experience and not stories in the mind is where you can move more into being in a bliss-state.
You might be thinking to yourself that this sounds much easier said than done. But when you have personalised practices of meditation, using the breath as an anchor, you can change your life.
Once the mind has become quiet when you’re sitting in silence with your eyes closed then you can begin to integrate outwards what you receive from your senses in the rest of your life.
What you sense is received and observed and doesn’t create internal dialogues.
So, what you see from your senses doesn’t create automatic reactions. It took me years to understand that this is the art of meditation. The art of meditation is not simply what you do on the mat but how you integrate it into the rest of your life. So that you can take a state of quiet mind into all that you do.
When you have a quiet mind and meet the world as it is it results in a bliss-state. A way of being in joy throughout most of your life. I’m still on my journey and deepen my practices all the time. I share with you that journey so that you can see that there is hope, and hope may help to bring you peace of mind. Allowing you to manifest your dreams and desires into reality.
This can be greatly guided when someone is there to really listen and hear you and then hold you accountable to keeping to those routines.
For me, being able to be in that sweet spot requires several practices that I follow during my day. Sometimes, I don’t need to follow the practices, I can be carried by the fortification of my practice. But it’s having daily practice rituals that allows me to live more in a state of bliss, or ease.
The Art of Meditation
There is no “one size fits all”, a personalised meditation practice is essential.
You are going to need to find your own way to a personalised approach to something that’s tailor-made for you.
There is so much in the world that is extremely fast paced at the moment: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, all trying to garner your attention.
There is no magic pill or wham, bam and done way to transform your life. That’s not to say that there are not going to be great, magnificent epiphany moments that offer you quantum leaps along the way.
Most people that I work with start their journey gently, with a free consultation. This allows you to really understand if Holistic Shadow Work is for you and how I can support you on your journey, how it can lead almost inevitably to living with peace of mind, calm, and freedom.
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