Reverse Meditation: How to Use Your Pain and Most Difficult Emotions as the Doorway to Inner Freedom

In this enlightening entry, meditation teacher Holecek (Dream Yoga) introduces readers to the practice of reverse meditation, so called because it entails “revers[ing] our relationship to unwanted experiences, which means going directly into them.” Holecek opens with the concept of “contraction,” or the tendency to “retreat from reality... when things start to hurt,” positing that “super contractors” such as anger and aggression trigger this reaction to protect the self amid crisis. As a corrective, Holecek outlines three meditation types, beginning with referential meditation (which involves a “hitching post” such as breath or a mantra) and nonreferential meditation (the removal of the hitching post for “formless” mindfulness), followed by reverse meditation. Reverse meditation is broken into four steps: practitioners can observe their pain; be with the pain “without commentary”; analyze the nature of the pain; and finally “yoke or unite with” the pain. In so doing, the author suggests, readers can transform contractions into opportunities to generate compassion for the self and others. Despite drawing on a host of sources in way that can feel rather kitchen sink—within a few pages he cites T.S. Eliot, Jewish scholar Zvi Ish-Shalom and British scientist John Wren-Lewis—Holecek’s plan is grounded in an intuitive logic, and the principles are outlined clearly enough for nonspecialists to grasp. Those looking for a more freeing meditation approach will want to take a look. (July)