Sitting in the Fire

Here is a technique that I have been using for over three years in my personal work and also shared with clients and students and watched them use it with great success. I call it “Sitting in the Fire.” While I arrived at this technique semi-independently, I have found similar examples of this particular method blossoming all over the world and it is certainly echoed in ancient meditative and contemplative traditions. This makes me feel that I am in some way connected to a larger field of conscious emergence, and that feels pretty good.

I won’t get into a scholarly diatribe on the different versions of this technique, but will focus on the technique itself. (Okay, I’ll name a few: Buddhism, Contemplative Christianity, Christian Meyer, The Sedona Method, Ken Wilber, et al. I hope I didn’t miss anyone. Love you all.)

Let me give a simple, hypothetical example of how this works. A client contacts me and says they are really stuck or suffering anxiety, fear, depression, whatever, related to such and such a thing that happened. I instruct them using Holosync™ or an equivalent technology (if you have no clue what I’m talking about here, go to my website at www.integralrecovery.com) to go inside and look at the feeling, the hurt, identify the thought, let go of the thoughts associated with the feeling, as focusing on the thoughts and the associated feelings will only keep you stuck, and stick with the feelings for at least two hours while doing the binaural Holosync™ meditation. If you are using Holosync™, do the first half hour track (the Dive) once and the second half hour track 3 times for a total of two hours (I’ve been known to do it longer in my personal work, but I’m sort of a meditation marathoner). As Christian Meyer told me, “You don’t have to do anything with the feeling, just let the feeling do whatever it wants.”

You can actually watch your typical ego-defense mechanisms try to do their thing, such as rationalizing the hurt, pushing it away, projecting it out on others, or craving some nacoticizing strategy such as drugs, alcohol, sex, work, or TV, or whatever version/s thereof you employ. The practice is just to keep breathing into the feeling, welcoming it, even with gratitude, and eventually it will start to shift and transmute into something better, deeper, higher.

In place of monkey mind, we find stillness and spaciousness; instead of hatred, compassion; instead of fear, faith; instead of anxiety, peace; instead of depression and darkness, the penetrating light of God. And remarkably, there almost always arises a deeper understanding and a new transformed narrative that can best be described as a deeper wisdom.

I know that this same technique will also work without Holosync™, but Holosync™ just seems to get you out of the little league into the majors so much more quickly. And that, my friends, is the goal of Integral Recovery and all true spiritual practice: to alleviate needless suffering and enlighten the self. Try it. Let me know how it goes.