Hey, welcome to Stuck Not Broken.
I am Justin Sunseri.
I'm a licensed therapist and a self-regulation coach, and this
episode is a little different.
My third book is out.
It's called Stuck Not Broken Book Three.
It's available right now.
You can grab it at stucknotbroken.com/books.
Rather than tell you about the book, I wanna show you.
I'm gonna read you a section from it.
This one is about meditation, specifically why I think you're meditating wrong,
and I know how that sounds, but hear me out before you come for me, please.
This section, um, gets into what meditation actually is when you look
at it through a nervous system lens, what it means to connect with your
present moment experience instead of rejecting it, why clearing your mind
misses the point, and why quality matters way more than quantity.
If you've ever sat down to meditate and felt like you were failing at
it, or if you're well-versed in meditation and just open to new
ideas, then this episode's for you.
So let's get into it.
You're meditating wrong.
I know it's almost sacrilege to say that you're meditating wrong.
It's a very personal experience, right?
It's highly individualized, different from person to person, I totally agree, and
yet I also think you're meditating wrong.
Can we agree on this simple, simple definition of meditation?
Meditation is connecting with your internal experience of the present moment.
Meditation is more than mindfulness of your senses.
Meditation brings your conscious awareness to your felt
experience of the present moment.
The felt experience of the present moment includes what your senses
tell you, yes, but meditation also includes the other felt experiences
within you that you typically neglect.
These include the body-level sensations of your emotions, such as
heaviness when sad or heat when angry.
Meditation can also reveal your polyvagal state's impulses, like
collapsing from shutdown or tightening your fists from sympathetic activation.
Meditation is about anchoring into safety, staying connected to the
present moment, and consciously allowing your body's experience.
So perhaps we need to extend our simple definition of
meditation with this agreement.
Meditation is connecting with your internal experience of the
present moment, whatever it brings.
That's the addition, whatever it brings.
At least we can agree that this is an ideal of meditation that you and
I will constantly fall short of.
As a friend once told me, "The present moment is not always a pleasant moment."
Okay, so let's get back to why I think you're meditating incorrectly.
Rejecting the present moment.
When you meditate, I assume you're rejecting what comes
up in the present moment.
I assume you reject loneliness or regret, for example, when they arise.
When you feel the impulse to clench your fist, you tell yourself that
you shouldn't do so or feel that way.
When you feel the heaviness of shutdown, you tell yourself to get over it.
This is not meditation.
Excuse me.
It's not our... It's not the ideal version of meditation.
It's a start, a fantastic start, and we can build from there, no doubt.
Not thinking.
I also bet you think meditation means not thinking.
Do you think meditation involves clearing your mind?
This is a common misunderstanding in the meditation world, in my opinion.
According to our ideal definition of meditation, clearing your mind
would be a rejection of what arises cognitively in the present moment.
And if you're rejecting an internal experience, that's
not really meditation, is it?
Well, Justin, how can I connect with my internal experiences
if my thoughts won't shut up?
That's a great question.
It's a valid question.
Your thoughts quieting down are a result of connecting to the present moment.
Your thoughts are not the problem.
The problem is rejecting your thoughts and trying to control them.
When you allow and witness your thoughts, you reduce the friction
of fighting them, and they will naturally calm down as a result.
Have you heard the meditative invitation to watch your thoughts
as they- Float through your mind.
I like that, that idea a lot more than stopping your
thinking or clearing your mind.
But again, watching them float through your mind is a result of
connecting to the present moment, not a skill in and of itself.
When you're anchored enough in safety, your thoughts will calm and float on.
You'll watch them out of curiosity without judging or banishing them.
We are thinking beings, so let's not reject that.
Allow your brain to have words and images and memories and logic
and calculation and creativity.
Yes, even when you meditate.
In my deepest meditative experiences, I've found that my cognition, my thinking,
is still fully functional but different.
It's calmer, it's more open, more curious.
As I lead clients through the upcoming sequential skills in book three,
they can still think and talk to me while they deeply explore the inner
experience of the present moment.
The words don't go away, nor do I believe we should try to force them to go away.
Quality over quantity.
When one meditates, they often do so for a set amount of time,
perhaps as a daily ritual.
A daily ritual.
Excuse me.
Time is not our concern.
It doesn't matter to me whether you meditate for thirty
seconds or thirty minutes.
The quantity of meditation is not important.
However, the quality is highly important.
Our meditation goal is to connect honestly with the present
moment, whatever it brings.
So, if you genuinely connect with your inner, inner world for thirty
seconds, you have met the goal.
If you sit and try to block your thoughts or feelings for thirty
minutes, you have not met the goal.
The skills in this book, Stuck Not Broken Book Three, are sequential.
It doesn't matter to me how long it takes you to execute them.
If you try today, it'll probably take longer, and you may not
get very far, in all honesty.
If you practice the same sequence of skills each day,
you'll get further and further.
Some days it will take longer, some days it'll go quicker, and that's, that's okay.
It doesn't matter to me, or it also doesn't matter to me, how many skills
you use during a meditation practice.
If you try a new skill today, you'll probably only get a couple
of steps down the sequence.
This isn't because you're doing anything wrong.
It's perhaps because the skills further down the skill sequence are just
too difficult for you as of today.
Just, just for now.
I prefer that you be honest with yourself about what you can handle.
If you can handle only the first couple of skills, then that's fine.
Embrace it.
Master those.
Focus your efforts on those skills and master them.
As you do, the skills further down the sequence become much more possible.
Let's not worry so much about how meditation should or should not be.
Let's focus on what is.
Instead of saying, "I should be clear-minded," what if you thought,
"My thoughts are scattered"?
You just told the truth.
One statement is a reject-- is a should and a rejection.
The other is an acknowledgment of the truth in the present moment.
We don't fight it.
We let it be while staying anchored in safety and asking what our felt
experience is in the present moment.
It's far more beneficial to inquire about the internal experience
driving scattered thoughts than to try to force clear-mindedness.
As you anchor in a, into, if you, as you anchor into and build safety,
excuse me, this way of thinking spontaneously emerges, by the way.
To sum it up, when I say you're meditating wrong, I mean you're
trying to make it a certain way.
You're, you're rejecting the present moment.
You're cutting off internal avenues of connection.
You're more focused on the time spent meditating or on using more skills
than on the quality of the experience.
But Justin, aren't you giving us a bunch of shoulds in your
sequential skills approach?
A fair question, uh, that you ask skeptically, and no,
the answer is no, not really.
You can do whatever you want.
Uh, I'm gonna give you answers to the questions of what, how, and why.
The skill sequence and the book and everything we do inside of the academy
is really built on answering these questions that people have asked over
and over again, uh, trying to bring, bring clarity to the experience of or
the process of, uh, self-regulation.
So I'm not saying you should do it this way or that way.
I'm saying that the upcoming blueprint in book three is more effective at
achieving the idealized version of meditation that we agreed on earlier.
And it's probably more beneficial than what you're probably doing, such as
rejecting your thoughts and feelings or trying to shut your thoughts up
for thirty minutes every morning.
Realistic incremental progress.
I'm not expecting you to achieve our idealized version of meditation today.
I don't even expect you to sit silently and close your eyes.
That might be too much, and it's very common for someone
stuck in a defensive state.
The moment they immobilize and close their eyes, they're open to
danger, or at least experientially.
Or when they look inward, they're immediately met with
the pains waiting inside.
Realistically, this won't be a home run for you in your first at-bat.
You won't get unstuck by doing just one meditative session.
Realistically, it'll be challenging.
Realistically, it might even be triggering.
Realistically, you're gonna feel like you're failing.
So let's validate all of that right now and normalize it.
Heck, we'll even eventually allow those experiences to exist.
Instead of expecting to nail it on the first go or the second or the third, fully
expect to try, pause, then try again.
You're not failing.
The fact that you're learning and attempting and practicing is a huge win.
Huge.
Every attempt builds or reinforces a skill, just like practicing anything else.
You can't hit a baseball without missing a lot of times, right?
As you swing and miss, you'll eventually hit the ball a little, and even if it
goes behind you or off to the side.
As you keep practicing, you'll eventually hit the ball forward
within the field's, uh, boundaries.
Eventually, you may even hit the ball over the fence for a home run.
The same idea applies to drawing a portrait, playing a ukulele,
scrambling an egg, and writing a haiku.
No matter what you're learning to do, you'll quickly realize that to
get better, you'll need to make minor adjustments to the individual acts.
So back to hitting a baseball.
It's not enough to just swing.
You need to adjust your stance.
You need to step forward appropriately and angle your body as you swing the bat.
Hitting a baseball isn't a skill.
It's the result of an accumulation of much smaller skills plus practice.
And before practicing, you gotta, you gotta learn.
Unstucking is no different.
It's not a skill that you use today.
It's the result of practicing several smaller skills that you learn first,
which will eventually lead to unstucking your defensive state through practice.
You're not gonna get unstuck today, sorry to say, but can you learn something new?
Yeah, you're doing it right now by reading this book or listening to this podcast.
Can you practice one of the upcoming skills?
No doubt you can.
As you practice these skills, you're not gonna fail, b- uh, but you
might decide to stop or to pause.
You can stop and come back whenever you're ready, whenever you're ready to, which
I will describe in the next section.
Do you risk overwhelm?
Yeah, you do, in all honesty, but, um, the priority is staying
anchored in safety, which should redis- reduce the risk of overwhelm.
And, and there are some guardrails built into book three and its
practices, uh, to prevent overwhelm.
Even if you do experience overwhelm, that's not a failure though.
It's an opportunity to learn and to make an adjustment to
your next intentional practice.
Okay, that is it.
That's the section.
And if that landed for you, there's a lot more where it came from.
Stuck Not Broken Book Three is available now.
The book walks you through a sequential skills approach to
getting unstuck from a defensive state step by step, skill by skill.
It's not about doing it perfectly.
It's about learning and practicing and building from
where you actually are right now.
You can get the book at stucknotbroken.com/books,
along with the first two as well, stucknotbroken.com/books.
Thank you so much for listening.
Bye.