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Writer's pictureLeslie Quigless

Gift #1 the January Adventures in Being Triggered have given me


(See my posts #1-9 with the above title for reference. They’re all 2-min reads, except for Post #9, which is 5 minutes.)

 

 

Gift #1: more language for nondoing.

 


What I do in sessions can be hard to describe because it’s not mental. It’s a felt bodily experience.

 

Felt bodily experiences are profound.

 

And they typically read as underwhelming when you put them into words. (Because these experiences are beyond the grasp of the mind.)

 

But, here we go.

 

If nondoing is the “negative,” what we’re not doing...then the “affirmative” action (and yay for affirmative action all damn day) that we are “doing” is…

 

Wait for it…


Beingwithness.

 

We're actively being with ourselves.

 

See? Sounds underwhelming.

 

And yet beingwithness is the thing. It cures, heals, gives us, reminds us we already have, reminds us we already are, everything.

 

***


The closest comparison I can draw is how we are with little children for whom we feel great affection.

 

We might be playing with blocks. Relatively speaking, we don’t care about the blocks themselves. We don’t mind the blocks. But they are a means of being with, of showing affection and love and warmth for and toward, the little child.

 

We don’t want something from the child. We’re not being with them so that, ultimately, they’ll go away or get into a great school or become famous or even make us feel good. So: we’re not doing something to or about the child via the blocks. We have no agenda.

 

We’re simply being with the child for themselves. We love them for them.  

 

It’s not really about the action itself. It’s about your intention: you love the child for herself/themselves/himself. The child doesn’t have to do something for you to want to be around them. We have no agenda.

 

Agenda-free-ness--another word for beingwithness, for nondoing--is the thing. It’s the thing.  


***

 

In Inquiry Meditation, this is what we are “doing.”


We are being with ourselves agenda-free and with more and more affection, and then with more and more great affection.

 

If we will welcome our triggers, our bodily upsets…if we will be with them instead of trying to make them go away: they will bless us—they will reveal themselves as the blessings they indeed are—and they will direct us far better, far more elegantly and intelligently, than we could ever direct ourselves.

 

Our triggers are blessings because they are our inner child parts, our inner child powers, that, at some point, we had to repress to survive.

 

And yes, this is true of healing trauma as well. The principle of beingwithness means that healing from trauma doesn’t have to be horrible and awful and gutting.


The trauma itself is, yes.


But the healing process doesn’t have to be.


It can, it would love to be, quite the opposite, actually.


***

 

When we “be with” our triggers, and yes, our trauma, too, agenda-free: then we integrate our repressed power—or rather, this is what happens. We don’t do it. It just—“just”—happens. We are returned to our power. Our wholeness.

 

This is what we’re up to in Inquiry Meditation.

 

Session by session, we engage in beingwithness. And we become evermore ourselves.

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