Unlearning

Most of what we talk about in meditation is learning: learning to focus, learning a practice, and learning to notice when the mind has wandered.

But some of the most useful work we do is the opposite. It is unlearning.

Unlearning is exactly what it says it is. We have learned something, and over the course of our lives and our development, we unlearn a great many things that are deeply embedded human traits. They were there at the start. We were taught, and mostly without anybody meaning any harm, to suppress them.

The first thing most of us unlearn is our connection to our own body. The technical word for that connection is interoception.

Everything is connected

When a baby is born, everything in the brain is connected.

The development of the brain is largely a pruning process. There is growth, and new connections are being made, but the bulk of what happens is pruning. I use the word connection a lot, and it can sound fluffy, but in this case it is pure, unadulterated, entirely accepted science. In the brain of a baby, everything is connected, and all of the information coming in arrives at once, which is overwhelming. That is why babies so often look overwhelmed. They are.

They are also completely sensory beings. Put a baby down on the grass, and she will crawl along, pull the grass out, eat it, pick up a bit of dirt, taste that too. Everything gets tasted, smelled, touched. Vision is fuzzy for the first six months or so, although one of the first things a baby can see in high definition is the mother’s eyes. Everything else is low resolution to begin with.

As we grow, two processes run side by side. Some things develop. Some things are suppressed.

What we gain, and what we put away

The things that develop are remarkable. Our ability to focus attention develops. Language develops, through a process called neuroplasticity, where new information forges new pathways in the brain. The sounds people make start to mean something. That becomes language, and with it a whole apparatus for interpreting the world.

All the while that is happening, something else is going on quietly underneath. We are suppressing a great many natural behaviours.

Here is a small example. A natural behaviour would be to pick up somebody else’s cup and drink from it. You are thirsty, there is water, you drink. That only stops being normal in cultures that understand how disease is passed on. Someone else might have gingivitis, and you would rather not.

But for most of human history, for most of the development of human beings and their ancestors, water was shared. The impulse to reach for the cup is not rude. It is old. It has been overwritten.

We know which part of the brain does the overwriting, because we can see what happens when it is damaged. People with damage to the prefrontal cortex engage in what are known as utilisation behaviours. They will pick up your cup and drink from it, or pick up your comb and comb their hair with it. The impulse was always there. The lid was just being held down.

And it is not only cups. The way our ancestors lived for millions of years and the way modern humans live could not be more different. Almost everything is different, and to be fair, that has come about through learning. Learning not to drink from somebody else’s cup is adaptive. Most of this suppression is doing a useful job.

What it costs

The trouble is that we are working against a natural drive, and drives push back.

There is a well-known piece of research you can watch on YouTube, from Frans de Waal, usually titled Capuchin Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay. Two monkeys do the same task. One is given a grape, the other a slice of cucumber. The one given a cucumber responds with instant, unmistakable outrage. Whenever I show this there is instant laughter because the behaviour is so human.

What that tells us is that our response to unfairness is shared with a creature whose ancestors parted company with ours around ten million years ago. The unfairness response is not a modern grievance. It is innate. It is part of us.

One of the ways we manage all that suppression is by suppressing how we feel. And that doesn’t stop at emotion. It reaches into the body too. Our interoception, our connection to our own physiology, gets turned down.

The snakes in the bin

If you have been suppressing a great deal, which is not at all unusual, the picture I find most useful is this.

Every feeling you push away is a snake. You put it in a bin. Over the years, the bin fills up with snakes. And you have absolutely no desire to take the lid off.

So you don’t want to connect to your body, because the body is where the bad feelings live. Not because the body is a bad place, but because that is where they arose and that is where they stayed. If you feel a feeling at the time it arrives, and you have a way of processing it in the body, it doesn’t hang around. Unfortunately, most of us were never shown how, so it hangs around. And then it turns up in meditation, which is one of the reasons people find sitting to meditate difficult.

This is why we go slowly.

Why we start with the breath

The tool I use for this is a bit like a tap. We turn the connection up in tiny increments, and we start at the most neutral place in the body: the breath.

I have taught people who suppressed their feelings for most of their lives and who have very limited connection to their physiology. Not only feelings, but unawareness of tension, calmness, warmth, comfort, discomfort, tiredness, alertness, all the things that make up what we call feelings in the body. Switched off, almost completely.

So we reconnect a tiny bit at a time, and we begin with the breath, because the breath is entirely neutral. We can’t distinguish between a good breath and a bad breath.

There are plenty of other things you can use as a single point of focus. A mantra. A mandala. Sound. Any of them will train you to notice that the mind has wandered and to return to the present moment. But the breath does something the others don’t. It is the first step back into your own physiology, and because it’s neutral, it’s not connected to uncomfortable feelings.

Bit by bit, step by step, through gentle repetition, with meditation, we unlearn the suppression of this connection to ourselves, to nature and to others.