What is the unconscious?
Something that lies dormant most of the time?
That from time to time manifests itself in a dream, in a slip-of-the-tongue, but which generally leads a slumbering existence without making much of a fuss? Is the impact of the unconscious so limited and infrequent that we may put it aside as insignificant? Or does our unconscious take an active part in everything we do, in all our thinking, and in all our activities?
Most people probably do not give their unconscious much thought. Our assumption might easily be that the unconscious does not play that much of a role in our lives.
However, viewed from the perspective of Acem Meditation, we may reach a different conclusion: The unconscious is very active and dynamic. It is not dormant. It continuously influences our choices, experiences and personality in hidden ways by acting through processes that may well for ever remain unconscious.
The importance of empathy
Currently, all psychotherapy-oriented schools stress the importance of empathy. Being empathic means being autonomous and at the same time to have the capacity to identify emotionally with another person, and understand the other person on her or his own terms. This is the opposite of egocentricity. It implies the ability to see a situation from standpoints different from one’s own. Empathy is important. All good relationships between people are in part based on empathy. Being a good leader of an organisation, an institution or a company, or being a good mother or father, requires the ability to be empathic.
How is the ability to empathy developed? The most important factor seems to be the early relationship between the child and its parents. The basics of empathy are formed here. If the mother or father only interprets their child’s crying or pain from within her or his own perspective, and not in accordance with the child’s real needs, they do not relate to their child in an empathic manner. When the child is very young, it has no capacity to speak up and say: “No, this is not what I want!” Before it has learnt to use language to express its needs, the infant is totally dependent on its parents. But by the time it can communicate through language, the child has in part made its parents’ perspective its own.
On the contrary, if a child has been met with empathy, it may also show empathy to others. However, empathy may also to some extent be developed later in life through deeper relationships and/or through self exploration.
For psychologists and therapists, cultivating empathy is important . Therapists can learn certain manoeuvres and platitudes that may well have some effect on others, yet may not reach very deep. In other words, one can master a certain “rhetoric of understanding”, a kind of psycholanguage or jargon. For instance, one may frequently use words like “experience” or “feel” etc.
Introspection - empathy turned inwards
Empathy is about relations, directed outwards to an individual, one’s family or a group. However, we may also turn its process the other way around. We are then dealing with a kind of adequate sensitivity towards ourselves. This is introspection or intuition, the ability to understand oneself genuinely.
Introspection, then, may be described as “empathy turned inwards”. On a deeper level, the foundation of empathy lies in one’s capacity for introspection. Without introspection, empathy is severely limited. In contemporary society, introspection seems less emphasised than empathy.
Therapies based on relationships are preoccupied with the element of empathy. While recognising its importance, methods like Acem Meditation focus more on the introspective element. Introspection involves the capacity to work with one’s unconscious. At the same time, introspection is also regarded as the foundation of the development of empathy in adult years. Without an introspective capacity, no deeper empathy is possible.
Acem Meditation and introspection
To be able to engage actively in a working relationship with one’s unconscious, the ability to be introspective is decisive. In Acem Meditation you are introspective, working with your relationship to yourself and your unconscious. This is something you need to work with over time to develop further.
Acem Meditation may be looked at in different ways. On one level, it is a straightforward method of relaxation. Period. However, on closer examination, it becomes evident that this method may also provide a change or renewal of our emotional basis. During meditation, we may to some degree uncouple from the habitual structures of tension which usually characterise our view of our self and the world around us. We become mentally somewhat more detached, or free. Through the free mental attitude of Acem Meditation, underlying, limiting and controlling structures of the mind may find their ways into our performance of meditation. Furthermore, a process called “actualisation” may start, and after a while we may find ourselves in seemingly inextricable tangles. By working with this in a processual manner, i.e., by observing regular meditation habits and by discussing one’s meditation during guidance, we may gradually understand that something limits our perception and performance during meditation, and also our life in general.
Provided we manage to loosen parts of this “meditational tangle”, we have taken a first, important step towards changing something within ourselves. We become more sensitive to a non-verbal dialogue with something within ourselves and we may after a while find a solution.
Gradually, we may engage in subtle, yet substantial modifications of the ways we live our lives. These basic changes do not primarily occur within an empathic relation, but in an introspective dimension - in our relation to ourselves by means of Acem Meditation.
Longer meditations may unravel inner tangles
During longer meditations, our deeper, more lasting psychological structures have an opportunity for restructuring. What has come to be something persistently unfinished or unlived, misplaced or distorted, gets a renewed chance to go through liberating change. Something deep within us seeks fulfilment, manifestation of our deeper self in outer life and through wisdom. If we do not give this some kind of expression, we will become dissatisfied. Our life may end up troubled. What is unused and unlived will occupy much “space”. When we relax and open up for a free mental attitude, as we do whilst meditating, we give more latitude to inner strengths that seek balance between inner possibilities and outer form.
The potentials that reside within us are something we may either repress and restrain, or deal with, do something about, give expression or space in our lives. A significant path to change begins in Acem Meditation as well as in highly empathic relations that are becoming internalised. In all our thoughts during meditation, although they may only be scattered fragments, lie structures that are influential and seek completion beyond the chaotic and dispersed. From these fragments, the separate pieces may gradually come together to form significant themes of our existence. We may now start to recognise similarities between who we are during meditation and who we are in the rest of our lives.
Acem Meditation - process rather than answer
This form of self exploration is enriching and fascinating. It satisfies parts of our seeking selves which may otherwise not find much opportunity for fulfilment, something that seeks reconciliation and anchoring to wisdom. The psychologist Jung spoke of realising the archetype of the self. Acem Meditation is a way of achieving a more living relationship to the unconscious and to the self; it makes both more accessible for realisation. By meditating regularly, we embark on a process. Not that we ultimately will find THE ANSWER. To obtain benefits from meditation, you need to be oriented towards process, constantly allowing further progress. Aiming at final or fundamentalist solutions will only impede results. In its essence Acem Meditation is not intellectual, philosophical, nor psychological. Rather, it entails an intuitive grasping of the nature of self, others and the world of things, and it implies an alliance with the deepest and wisest parts of us.
Thus, Acem Meditation is an explorative meeting with our selves by way of non-verbal introspection.
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Article by Are Holen MD PhD
Acem International Newsletter no 1 1998