Shenpa, Stuttering, and Me

[ Contents | Search | Next | Previous | Up ]


Re: Common Thread

From: Ellen-Marie Silverman
Date: 12 Oct 2005
Time: 08:03:18 -0500
Remote Name: 152.163.100.197

Comments

Dear Victoria, meditating is learning to be present. It is about being aware of thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations without judgment, noticing their appearance, character, and disappearance. It is about being aware of experience without judging experience. Judging leads to labeling, which I sense from your apt comment related to the Loretta LaRoche story you realize can lead to big problems. When we label experience, we establish some experience as good and some experience as bad. Then we resist what we consider to be bad. We struggle to avoid it. And we struggle to quell it. And so, if a person with a stuttering problem labeled tightness in their throat, as one example of experience, as bad because for them that sensation was associated with stuttering, they would instinctively begin to struggle against that sensation. This would not be helpful for many reasons; one apparent one is that it could reinforce clinical stuttering which many define as avoidance behavior. So, learning to meditate is not learning about controlling stuttering. It is about learning to attend to experience in the moment without attachment and without resistance. Pema Chodron shows how what psychologist call paradoxical intention can somehow allow us to successfully manage the urge to resist an uncomfortable sensation: Suppose during meditation you felt the urge to scratch. You remembered what I wrote and decided you would not scratch; you would endure the urge until it disappeared. But, after a while, you thought you would go crazy if you did not scratch that itch. You were certain you would go stark, raving mad! If at that moment, the person leading the meditation session said, "If you must scratch, then wait until you have slowly count to 10 and then do so very, very slowly." Upon receiving permission to scratch, you would feel relieved. You probably would begin counting slowly. Chancdes are before you reached 10, you would no longer have the urge to scratch. What itch? you might say to yourself. What happened to the itch? What happened was that somehow, when you released your negative judgment about the actual experience of the sensation of needing to scratch, you no longer struggled with scratchig, and the feeling of needing to scratch disappeared naturally. That is a hoped for benefit for people with stuttering problems --- that by learning to attend to the sensations associated with stuttering and by not judging them as bad and, therefore, not resisting and struggling with them, the sensations themselves will naturally recede. With this in mind, you may want to re-read Shenpa, Stuttering, and Me and see if it makes more sense to you. Thank you, Victoria, for sharing your thoughts. Sincerely, Ellen-Marie Silverman


Last changed: 10/24/05