What I do with difficult feelings
A short piece on the small private practice for the days when something heavy has landed — and how the cushion is the wrong tool for some of these days.
Most days the practice is the practice. I sit on the cushion, the timer runs, I get up, the day continues. The practice is a small steady support that runs alongside everything else.
But there are days, perhaps once a month, when something has happened — a difficult phone call, a piece of bad news, a small grief — and the cushion is the wrong tool. On those days, going to the cushion produces, not the settled mind, but a kind of forced confrontation with the difficult feeling, in a space too small to hold it. The practice, on those days, is not what is needed.
What I do instead
I walk. Specifically, I walk slowly along the river, for somewhere between forty minutes and an hour, with no destination. The river is fifteen minutes from the flat. The path along it is wide and largely empty in the mid-afternoon, which is when these walks usually happen.
The walking is the practice. The feet on the path. The body moving forward at a steady slow pace. The river to one side. The trees to the other. The mind is allowed to do whatever it is doing, but the body is given a job, and the job is to walk.
Why this works when the cushion does not
Difficult feelings, in my experience, need movement. The body, when it is sitting still on a cushion, can become a kind of pressure container for the feeling, and the pressure can build rather than ease. The walking gives the body something to do, and the feeling, which had been concentrated in the body's stillness, redistributes through the small steady motion.
By the end of an hour the feeling has not been solved. The phone call has still happened. The bad news is still bad. But the feeling has, somehow, become carriable. The body is steadier than it was. The mind is steadier than it was. The next move is, slightly, available.
The smaller point
Contemplative practice is not a single tool. The cushion is one tool. The walk is another. The cup of tea by the window is another. The conversation with a trusted friend is another. The lying down for an hour in a quiet room is another. The right tool for a given day is whichever tool fits what the day has brought, and the wisdom of the practice is, increasingly, knowing which tool the day needs.
If you have a meditation practice and you have ever found yourself unable to use it on a hard day, you are not failing the practice. The practice is not the only thing the practice has to offer. The other tools are also part of it.