Traveling to the Inner Mountain, Coming Face to Face with the Strangest Part of Myself, Part I

In a book of daily meditations called 365 Tao by Deng Ming-Dao, I read: 

“The scriptures say that the mountains contain the answers.  Generations of seekers have gone into the wilderness and have encountered spirits both benevolent and terrible.  Though the possibility of great discovery is mixed with the threat of misadventure, we must all go into the mountains to seek these answers.  We should understand that these mountains represent the unknown aspects of our minds….  Through walking in the vastness of this land, you can resolve the problems of your psyche and seek the treasures buried in your soul.”

The reading says that following a regular meditation practice is the way to explore the hidden mountains inside yourself and I don’t disagree with that – I meditate a little bit every day and I do find things I didn’t consciously know were there, and maybe if I meditated longer I’d find out even more about what goes on in the hidden depths of myself.  (The reading talks about mountains but I tend to think of what’s inside me as more like an ocean, a vast ever-changing body of airy water or maybe watery air, more than anything as solid as a mountain.)

When I read the reading about going into the metaphorical mountains searching for the unknown aspects of our minds I immediately thought of EMDR.  The daily reading goes on to say that “mere introspection is not deep enough, and psychological counseling will not necessarily bring you face to face with all the parts of yourself.”  And, I would add, at the peril of insulting meditators everywhere including the author of 365 Tao, neither will meditation.  Maybe there are other ways to get there, maybe you can even get there through meditation, but in my experience there’s nothing that will get you to the hidden mountains, the wide deep endlessly mutable ocean, the vast airy place inside yourself, as deeply and as quickly and directly as EMDR.  Nothing else that will bring you face to face with all the parts of yourself. 

I’ve been doing Internal Family Systems therapy in EMDR with a friend, as I said in an earlier blog, and there you really do meet up with your various parts, not literally because they don’t exactly exist in a literal sense, but as close to literally as you can get.  You find the part of you that was afraid of your mother when you were ten, the part of you that felt like an outsider in high school, the part of you that’s trying to get that part of you that’s afraid of your mother or feels like an outsider to shut up and grow up and man up and be normal.  All those parts exist inside you like a shadowy non-physical non-literal family, old versions of yourself, children made of emotion and memories, with thoughts and desires and feelings – sort of -- trapped in some mysterious alembic of time and energy.  And when the magic of EMDR takes you down there, when you get lowered into your own deep ocean in the EMDR submarine, when you go exploring in the airy underwater mountains of yourself, you find that internal family; those parts come forward if you ask them to – and if you talk to them they’ll tell you things about yourself.  Things you couldn’t possibly find out any other way.  

            Mostly who you find inside yourself is children, but the strangest part – the most surprising thing I’ve discovered inside myself, to date – is an old woman.