A client who came to class today had this image of climbing up and up during an 18 minute exercise that looked like reaching up to grab thick rope and pulling down on it as if to ring church bells, alternating hands each time. At the end of it, her image turned into falling down bottomless. Her translation of this last image was of failure, and her reaction was something like “no!” She was fighting the idea of failure after having accomplished the 18 minute climb.
She had resistance against her own thoughts: a visceral reaction against the idea of falling and failing.
I asked, “What if you just said ‘so what if I failed?’ or just looked at your visual with curiosity, without conclusion? Or what if you embraced what you perceived as failure? After all, failure could only follow having tried, and trying isn’t failing.”
The point is, why judge and resist a thought that comes up when you can simply look at it as a release?
Especially during meditation: things bubble up from the past. And they simply need letting go. No judgment. Just compassion.
Savitree Kaur 