What to do when you're stuck in the muck, Part 1

In this week’s message I want to start a 3-week series on how to use the Self Salutation to get out of a funk when negative feelings cloud your consciousness.

I’ll give you a high-level overview of how the process works this week. Next week I’ll take you through the process step by step. The week after that, I’ll go through the process with a practical example.

The 30,000 foot view of the Self Salutation

As I’ve often explained, I spent 16 years as a Hindu monk before I realized that I was using meditation as a form of escapism.

Oof. That was a painful discovery.

Trust me—I have no complaints about the fact that I learned to lift up to a place of peace and harmony through meditation.

But unfortunately I used that experience to help me avoid the negative feelings that accumulated when I wasn’t meditating.

When I was finally forced to confront the fact that I was burying my feelings rather than processing them, I entered therapy and embarked on a journey of healing.

As I began my process of transformation, I discovered that the powerful space you enter in meditation could also be use to resolve negative emotions—not just rise above them.

That method is what I now call the Self Salutation.

Two ways to practice the meditations

A lot of the time when I speak about the Self Salutation meditations, I talk about them as intention-setting meditations—which they can be.

Such meditations have great power because when you plant an intention in the psyche—in the state you enter in meditation—it takes root in a powerful way.

Using this method, you can use the Self Salutation meditations as a way to solidify your commitment to accept yourself, for example. Or your commitment to be honest with yourself.

Those are powerful and important goals worth returning to again and again because genuine, deep, transformative self-acceptance is not attainable through a one-time event, like at a workshop or a retreat.

But—and this is the important thing I want to stress here—the point of the Self Salutation is not just to help you strengthen these valuable qualities.

The point of the Self Salutation is to help you resolve negative feelings.

So the second way the meditations in this series work is that when you’re in a cloud of negative feelings, which I have categorized into what I call the Syndromes of the Lost Self, you can use the the meditations to extricate yourself from that negativity.

In fact, it might amaze you how quickly the shift out of negativity can happen!

Uncovering & resolving negative feelings

Now, I should let you know from the onset that in this second approach to the Self Salutation things can get a little bit messy.

What I mean is that you won’t always be able to remain in a detached, meditative space. After all, you’re utilizing meditation for the purpose of surfacing and resolving your feelings.

You’re uncovering real emotions here.

At the same time, the practice can give you an experience of mastery over your emotions because after all, you are the one who called the emotion forward.

There’s a difference between experiencing a negative emotion when it hits you unbidden and feeling that same emotion in a meditative state when you have summoned it.

That doesn’t mean the emotions won’t be challenging. They will be. But the more you practice, the bearable you will find them.

As you practice the Self Salutation, you will develop your ability to become fluid with feelings, allowing them have their moment of expression.

You come to know that experiencing fear, anger, or even shame is not the end of the world. You can let these feelings pass through you and move on.

The three central meditations to the Self Salutation

There a number of meditations in the Self Salutation series, but just three of them are critical to the process of resolving negative emotions.

I’ve named all the meditations in the series after animals that embody the qualities, FYI, so the three we’ll look at are the Eagle, the Moose, and the Lion.

1. The Eagle Meditation - this is the meditation that establishes a meditative space. In the Eagle meditation, you set the intention to lift yourself to highest state of consciousness you are capable of attaining at this point in time. With every breath, you lift yourself higher and higher.

2. The Moose Meditation - this meditation is focused on self-acceptance, self-love. As I have explained more thoroughly here, self-acceptance is the all-important foundation for this process, and is the gateway to personal transformation. In the Moose Meditation, you learn to fill your heart with a felt experience of love and acceptance. This is not an intellectual exercise!

3. The Lion Meditation - This meditation is focused on filling your heart with all the courage you need to feel whatever feelings are there. Unfortunately, we bury emotions in our heart because they they suck. We’re hardwired to go after happiness, not suffering.In order to see what is truly going on, you must have courage.

How it works when you’re stuck in the muck

As I mentioned in the opening, I’ll be sharing in more detail how the process works in my next message. But I want to give you at least a sense of it here.

The basic gist is that as you sort your way through your feelings, you turn to one of the above meditations according to your need.

It looks like this:

• Utilize the Eagle Meditation when you need to establish or re-establish a meditative space.

• Utilize the Lion Meditation when you feel stuck and need to probe within your heart to find the deeper truth of what is going on within you.

• Utilize the Moose Meditation when you need to soothe your heart because you’ve tapped into raw feelings that need healing—or when you’re in a state of frustration with yourself.

Now there’s one more important component to the Self Salutation without which those meditations would only be somewhat helpful: the map.

Next week I’ll explain the map I’m speaking of and take you through the process. If you can’t wait until then, you can always pick up a copy of my book here.

Peace,
Simon

P.S. ICYMI here’s the link to a recent video interview I did on a Podcast called The Empath And the Narcissist: You can find it here.