Before naming experience, can we meet it?

Its most often the case that when seeking support, we are driven by a conviction that something is wrong with our current experience – with ourself and our situation. The assumption of 'what my experience is' is fortified to the point of its concealment. The conviction that 'I know' leaves little scope for the possibility that I don't. The question of 'what this current experiencing actually is' is way off radar. From here, it naturally follows that the solution lies not in seeing what it actually is, but in putting what I think it is right.

The problems we are so troubled by, inside and out, must cease, or reduce at least. People should be different. Relationships should be different. Work should be different. The world should should be different. I conclude that life must be changed.

If my current life situation is causing me discomfort or dissatisfaction, and I find that I am not able to change it to the degree that such dissatisfaction or discomfort is eliminated (or satiated), since I can't fix then

'I' must be fixed - and someone 'out there' knows how.

Why aren’t others struggling like me? What is wrong with me? I need this experience of myself to go away so that I can be free, loved, happy….These wishes are completely reasonable, and very heavily reinforced by cultural consensus.

When we look at the bigger picture it isn’t difficult to recognise that they are the driving force of western society’s dominant ideologies and institutions across home, work, and play. Things should look a certain way for life to be okay.

We are kept very busy in our attempts to maintain this. When things don’t feel okay, we must either work to change such things, or distance ourselves from them.

Either way we keep what’s really needed, our immediate, infinite nature, miraculously out of reach.

How do you know that things aren't okay?

There’s something in our experience, or some way that our experience is being right now, that we believe is wrong. We live the echo of ‘this shouldn’t be this way’, and so life becomes organised around the next better moment. Some idea of what ‘fixed’ or ‘right’ will look like.

This isn’t just the case for those of us who recognise that we are suffering and so seek support.  This is the normal mode of human experiencing – in the western world at least. That inner voice that we take ourself to be echoes the inherited message that we will finally be all right when we understand enough, heal enough, achieve enough or become a different version of ourselves.

This is everywhere. A life of ideals that are never reached – always slipping away, never offering the satisfaction that we perpetually seek.

But what is that? What is that something in your experience, the way that experience is being right now that you believe is wrong?

What is it really? Have you ever truly looked into it? What if it’s the doorway, the way through, and out, of the perpetual feedback loop of dissatisfaction and not enoughness?

What if you have been suffering at the hands of an innocent misperception and misunderstanding about what that something is that you believe must be eliminated?

What if there is, hidden here in plain sight, a direct recognition of who and what you really are? About what life really is?

What if its’ not about fixing what’s broken – but seeing what’s real?

Before naming the experience, can we meet it? - Radical empiricism in nondual therapy

Suppose anxiety is present. Usually the word arrives so quickly that it seems to tell us what the experience is: anxiety, danger, evidence that I am not coping. The label may be useful, but it can also become fused with the living experience.

We might pause and ask a different question: what is actually here, before I conclude what it means? Perhaps there is tightness in the chest, heat in the face, rapid thought, an urge to leave, or a trembling energy moving through the body. When we come close to the experience itself, it is often more fluid and less solid than the story about it.

This is not a way of denying anxiety or pretending that distress does not matter. It is a way of making room around the conclusion that the feeling is a fixed thing, that it defines us, or that it proves something has gone wrong.

Reparenting as presence

Reparenting is sometimes understood as learning to give ourselves what was missing in childhood: reassurance, protection, tenderness, encouragement or dependable care. Reparenting as presence includes this, but goes deeper. It asks whether the most reliable parent is not another perfected voice in the mind, but the unceasingly available presence already here not with but as every experience.

This presence does not withdraw when sadness comes. It does not shame fear, reject anger or demand that confusion become clarity. It is unceasingly available. In compassionate attunement, we begin to recognise this availability and to relate to ourselves from it.

The frightened or striving part of us - the Child Mind - no longer has to manage the whole of life alone. It can be felt, listened to and included within a wider field of care. The Radiant Parent is not a stern inner supervisor instructing us to calm down. It is the open, aware presence in which agitation is already being held.

A gentle enquiry

The next time you notice the thought, I need to fix myself, you might pause. Feel the contact of your feet with the floor. Let your attention include sound, breath and the sensations in your body. Then ask, without demanding an answer: What is here before I call it a problem?

Notice whether the experience is completely captured by its label. Notice, too, that something is already present with it. You do not have to manufacture this presence or become good at it.

Change may still be needed. A boundary may need to be set, a conversation held, support requested or a decision made. Compassionate attunement as this living presence does not make us passive. It allows action to arise without first turning our humanity into some kind of mistake that must be rectified. It is already the livingness of life's radical inclusivity.

Healing and therapy is then revealed as less like a war against ourselves and life and more like an intimate meeting and ongoing enquiry with and as life as it is.

A note for readers

These reflections are offered as gentle invitations and are not a substitute for individual medical or mental-health care. If you are struggling or feel unsafe, please seek appropriate professional support. If you would like to explore your experience from a nondual perspective – you can book a session with Amy here.