Neuroaffective Meditation

Auteur
Marianne Bentzen is a psychotherapist and trainer in neuroaffective development psychology. The author and coauthor of many professional articles and books, including The Neuroaffective Picture Book, she has taught in 17 countries and presented at more than 35 international and national conferences. She lives in Denmark.

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Reveals how meditation can be used for emotional growth, releasing trauma, and accessing inner wisdom

Échantillon de lecture
From Chapter 8. Being in Your body

In this and the following chapters, there is a short overview - a sort of recipe - of the basic structure of the meditation at the end of each guiding. For the adventurous reader, this means that you can cook up your own version of each meditation. Seasoned meditators may prefer to just read the guidings and cherry-pick the parts that they are drawn to, while others - and many who are beginning to explore meditation - will prefer the sound files. You can of course also mix and match transcripts, recordings and recipes as you please or use them as an inspiration for your own personal or professional work. Whatever you choose, I hope you will find it useful to have these different options.

Engaging different levels of ourselves in meditation

It is worth noting again that all meditations train conscious attention, and that conscious attention is a prefrontal skill. Just to give you a short recap from chapter 3: The basic ability to choose to pay attention - rather than having our attention captured - begins to develop around the age of 1 year. Somewhere between the age of 2 and 4, we develop the ability to use symbols, so that we can imagine that a banana is a mobile phone that we can use to have conversations with imaginary friends. During the next years, our imaginative skills can even expand into elaborate fantasy worlds - perhaps cops and robbers or dragons and heroes - that we share with others in pretend play. Slowly, we develop the ability to coordinate our play impulses and imagination with those of other children to create even better games. Finally, usually around the age of 6-8, our brains mature to the level where we can use our imagination to create an inner model of what we look like through the eyes of others, what it is like to be another person or even to find an inner ‘witness’, a more objective perspective of ourselves and others. All of these levels of prefrontal attention are sometimes called mindfulness.

When we get to the first meditations, we will begin, as most meditative practices do, with the most basic kind of attention, noticing what our senses tell us - information from the body and the autonomic nervous system. Those of us in the helping professions that try to integrate the body are also focused on this. However, this can be done in many different ways, and the most common way to do it is by training the ability to control attention, which is a much subtler and more advanced thing to control. In chapter 3, we called it the sixth level of development: a witnessing capacity.

Consider this classic meditation instruction: “Notice your breathing. Whenever you notice your mind wandering, just bring it back to the breath.” This instruction works with the connection between your basic prefrontal attention and inner body sensations coming from your body and organized in your parietal cortex. However, this basic attention is coupled with a subtle control instruction: “… bring your mind back to the breath”. This is much harder to do than, for instance: “Notice your breathing. Now, take a deep breath and hold it … now let go. Notice how your body feels now.” This instruction focuses on basic awareness and willed control of movement, which we learn in the beginning of our second year, while the ability to control our attention develops several years later. The ability to be reasonably quiet and pay attention to inner impulses and feelings when we would rather be talking or running around and playing is a pretty advanced skill. As a therapist, as soon as you ask an adult client or a child (or yourself, for that matter) to pay attention to internal sensations and keep on doing it, you are working with this somewhat advanced prefrontal level: a verbal request or instruction to be followed. If you are fortunate enough to be working with a client or child who has good control - or perhaps even a harmonious connection between the prefrontal to the autonomic levels - this will work out. With many of the most vulnerable or distracted children or adults, you won’t be that lucky and it won’t work out - they are not ready to develop or strengthen that skill. Playing with movement and body sensations together or going for a walk together and exploring interesting things that you see on the way will fit such a developmental learning zone of much better. Sharing with each other what your attention is spontaneously drawn to will activate the playful limbic level along with the earlier prefrontal basic attention. Not everyone is ready to learn and mature at the later prefrontal levels, no matter what age they have or how much they would like to.

After we develop the basic ability to pay attention (but before we develop the ability to control our attention instead of getting distracted), imagination is our next developing prefrontal skill. Many meditations use images and visualizations, just as we will be doing in some of the meditations to come. Imagination can be enormously helpful. We just need to have some clarity about when we are doing what. To use the developmental levels from chapter 3 again - are we using third-level basic attention skills, fourth-level creative imagination or sixth-level witnessing capacity? Once I was listening to a lecture about the importance of being fully present in the here-and-now. After 20 minutes, the inspiring speaker started a guiding with us, and we all settled in anticipation. He began: “Imagine that you are walking on a beautiful, sandy beach in the sunset. Feel the sand between your toes and the wind on your skin. . . .”, and so on. It was a wonderful, inspiring and relaxing guiding, and it had absolutely nothing to do with my actual, physical “here and now” sensations of sitting in a conference chair and breathing the air-conditioned air along with a few hundred other conference participants. Instead, it gave all of us conference participants a lovely shared fantasy journey. I was expecting a guiding in sixth-level witnessing - and what we got was fourth-level creative imagination.

Creative imagination is wonderful - and we can use it to expand our awareness by offering inner alternatives or even training them. For instance, when we are sad, we can practice connecting to a memory of a time when we were happy (and by the way, your memory is another form of imagination), ‘dropping into’ the inner experience of it. We can also use imagination to expand a current experience. For instance, when attending to our breathing, as we feel the air moving in and out with each breath, we can imagine the air surrounding us in the room and in the outdoor spaces around us. When we bring our attention back to our breath, this inner change in our mental ‘frame’ will often expand and change the sensations of our breathing.

Our deeper music is not tame

Despite the fact that meditative practices and many psychotherapies tend to start with the body, the deeper music of the somatic and autonomic systems is frequently overlooked in meditating, as well as in awareness instructions that work with ‘just’ paying deep attention. Going deeper means reconnecting with your most basic inner space on its terms - in other words, surfing your spontaneous autonomic arousal shifts and experience of pleasure and/or discomfort. Eve…