This last while I have often found myself wondering: how on earth did I end up here?
Here I am, creating a new wellbeing inquiry system. I’ve been sharing it with people and it has been well received. And the most weird thing to me is that it has been well received by some of the people I most respect - to the point where they want to join the effort.
Why exactly, though, would this be weird, rather than, simply, great? To answer this, I need to explore some of my life history, and how I got here.
Having worked for a long time as a software engineer, in startups, I’ve met plenty of successful startup types: met their business partners in college, first business idea did well, now onto their second. I’m not one of these people. My life did not work coming out of college/university. In My first job, I remember sitting in a toilet cubicle attempting to get my head together enough to be able to think: an important prerequisite for a software engineer.
At this time I was just beginning to explore Buddhism. I could also say, there’s a type of person for whom meditation, therapy, etc, seem to just work. Again, I was not one of these people. I remember in my first or second meditation class being told that emotions drive us, and thinking, “really??” I spent my first ten years as a meditator deeply confused and feeling extremely inadequate. The practices I was being taught simply didn’t work for me. This was clearly because I was inadequate.
In this time, however, some friends were sharing a different, kinder approach to meditation. A strong influence here was Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing, which introduces the “felt sense”. Focusing gives us a deeply valuable, meaningful language with which to explore our lived experience in a kindly and curious way.
Into my second decade as a meditator, this started to flourish. This was perhaps best captured in a chance meeting with a Benedictine monk. I told him of my meditation practice, and how inadequate it was: he responded by saying, “Sounds like you are doing Dzogchen meditation” - Dzogchen being a deep form of Tibetan meditation. Was I? Really? Was I possibly doing something right after all?
A few years later, during a four month period of deliberate homelessness (couch and office floor surfing), something changed. I quietly realised that this worked. I didn’t need to rely on others for surety. I knew, basically, what I was doing.
Yet, at the same time, I was still deeply insecure and anxious. We’re now 20 years in: my manager invites me to a meeting in four months time. Two weeks later I realise I can’t make it. It took me three months to summon the courage to say that I couldn’t make it (I should say, my manager was a lovely guy, no fear was needed). Eventually, while meditating, it occurred to me I could email him. He quickly replied, “ok”. What on earth had the worry been about then??
Soon after this, I started hearing about an online community that was doing very innovative Buddhist inquiry work. Eventually I summoned the courage to try it. It didn’t seem to work. Again, what seemed to work for people around me, just didn’t for me. Again, is there something unusual, something inadequate about me??
This online community spawned another, taking inquiry much deeper. Through a conversation with a friend, I began a new and extremely rich period of inquiry. This went to the heart of things: to the core of my anxious ways. After some engagement, instead of experiencing anxiety, I found myself experiencing, “the sensations I used to call anxiety”. This may sound like a linguistic trick, but it wasn’t. It was a deep seeing of how I had been misinterpreting my experience.
For a few years, this community, happening in a Facebook group of all places, was alive and vibrant. But, with my software engineer hat on and my tech community building experience, I could see flaws. Not in the practices, but just the way the community was organised. Also, it used Buddhist language, but it was clear to me that there was nothing exclusively Buddhist here: this was simply human experience being explored.
After perhaps 18 months or two years of this practice, my experience of life was fundamentally different. I was no longer anxious. People seemed interested in what I had to say, they seemed interested in me. This, shocking as it might sound, was, for me in my 40s, novel.
But something wasn’t complete. I wanted to share this, but the language around it was wrong. It was Buddhist language, and I couldn’t share it with the non-Buddhists around me, as they wouldn’t understand the language. I slowly researched other teachers to see how they were expressing their work. If not Buddhist, it was still, generally, “spiritual”. Again, this didn’t seem necessary to me.
It was reading, “How Emotions are Made” by Lisa Feldman Barrett that landed the final piece. She presents predictive processing and explains that this doesn’t just apply to the visual field, but also to our emotional lives. I was deeply struck by this. Not just by what she said, but by the further implications that she didn’t say: it was clear to me that predictive processing fundamentally explained the inquiry practices I had been engaging in a few years before.
My next year or two were spent trying to find others, likely neuroscientists, who shared this perspective. I found it pretty baffling that I couldn’t find any. I found some going in a similar direction, but not seeing the same mechanics as I was. This didn’t line up with my prior view of myself as being fundamentally inadequate.
And now we find ourselves back in the present day. Being lucky enough to give my time to this work full time now, I find myself explaining this synthesis of influences to people from many walks of life, be they Buddhists, geeks, psychologists, neuroscientists or simply ordinary people, and am enjoying seeing that it needn’t take 30 years to learn - in fact big changes can actually happen fast. I’m having to get used to the possibility that a deep seated sense of inadequacy is, too, just a misinterpretation of my experience.
Malcoln Holmes