Subjective Experience Mastery: Trigger Practice

[ardacigin]

Media induced trigger practice is a way to develop your meditation skills in challenging sensory experiences. 

Our inner subjective experience can be described as various interactions of these three modalities:

1- Mental Thought

2- Mental Image

3- Emotional Body Sensations

All hell and bliss in a human being's life will occur in these 3 sensory modalities. Regardless of the intensity of the experience, if you get a handle on dealing with these modalities, you'll have the master key to life.

Now for formal sessions, strong determination sits are great. And for most people, these sits involve rest in these 3 modalities for a significant portion of the session. Generally, as time goes on, challenging material tends to arise. 

But the problem is, we are already rather expecting them. In formal meditation, we are also ready to work with them. We are also neurologically in a state of equanimity prior to the extreme sensations.

This helps us develop skills but not necessarily help us apply them in daily life.

We don't always have time to focus on our breaths for 20 mins and then have that challenging talk with our partner. Sometimes we need to work with the arising sensory experience with very little concentration, awareness and equanimity. 

You develop these skills in trigger practice. This practice tends to evoke intermediate-advanced levels of extremities in sensory experience. Mostly painful emotional sensations.

Here is how to do the technique:

1- Pick an emotionally difficult media content of your choice. You can pick ANY kind of media that tends to induce fear, terror, anger, sadness, frustration, boredom, loneliness or anxiety. 

I'm personally HIGHLY triggered in sadness inducing TV Shows. Show me any drama, where I connect with the characters, start crying, having traffic accidents, going through break ups and experiencing misfortune. I immediately start to feel challenging emotional sensations. It tends to affect my emotional circuits. 

So for this practice, pick a media you are triggered by. Most people tend to choose the news as well.

2- Wait until the challenging content arises in these 3 modalities in subjective experience.

This probably won't be a long wait. If it is, then you haven't chosen media that triggers challenging sensations in you. In that case, pick a different media content.

3- Develop sensory clarity and equanimity with your existing levels of concentration/awareness.

This is not a practice to develop concentration and awareness per se. You want to master a different skill set. You want to do 2 main things here:

- Sensory clarity: Clarify what is going on these 3 inner sensory modalities as you watch the media content. Don't miss anything and be as precise as you can.

- Equanimity: Regardless of the type or kind of experiences, apply equanimity as much as possible. Equanimity is non-reactivity to pleasure and pain.

4- After it is over, do few minutes of formal session before wrapping up.

This is important. Now you want to force the vulnerable nervous system which is already challenged to do one final push. Do a high quality formal meditation sit for about 5 mins. Do this closed eyes.

Make sure to emphasize concentration and awareness with body relaxation. Really apply yourself and see how you can deal with the drip down effect of trigger practice. 

You are done!

Great work.

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After doing this practice, you can gauge your meditation level expertise. I'd say that even advanced practitioners will feel VERY challenging sensations with this technique. Not the usual bliss, jhana and absorption states Samatha meditators tend to talk about in formal sessions.

But if you are truly a master, then you'll definitely work with these sensations much more effectively. You'll actually experience these 'challenging' circumstances in a state of bliss.

That is when you know if you are a committed practitioner or a dabbler. 

So if you want to work smart and have faster progress, this should be your go-to technique for daily life practice. 

Let me know your comments down below.

 

Edited July 9, 2019 by ardacigin

[Pure Imagination]

Thank you for this! I’m personally very triggered by movies/shows where a character suffers immense physical pain. So much so that I pass out sometimes. I’ll give this a shot and maybe I’ll be able to work through those fears ❤️

[ardacigin]

9 hours ago, Pure Imagination said:

Thank you for this! I’m personally very triggered by movies/shows where a character suffers immense physical pain. So much so that I pass out sometimes. I’ll give this a shot and maybe I’ll be able to work through those fears ❤️

Yes. Give it a go and let me know your experiences. It is not easy but this is a very important training method for life integration.