When the Internal Environment Became a Place I Could Work With

For a long time, I tended to notice whichever thing inside me was loudest.

If I was thinking, thought had the room. If I was emotional, the emotion had the room. If meditation became particularly still, there was stillness.

Later, if energy became active, that could become the entire experience.

Whatever was most prominent seemed to define what was happening internally.

Years of practice gradually complicated that.

I began noticing something that seems obvious now…

more than one thing could be happening at the same time.

The loudest thing wasn’t necessarily everything

Emotion probably made this easiest to recognize.

If anxiety became strong, the natural description was:

I am anxious.

And of course, I was experiencing anxiety.

But with greater awareness I sometimes noticed other things still present around it.

The body was doing one thing. Thought was doing another. Breathing had changed.

There might still be some degree of stillness underneath the activity.

Attention was focused heavily on one part of the experience.

Suddenly anxiety wasn’t necessarily the entire internal condition.

It was something very real occurring within a larger condition.

That distinction gave me room I hadn’t known was there.

Atmosphere became useful language

Eventually I started thinking about some of these experiences as atmospheres.

An anxious atmosphere is present.

An unsettled atmosphere is present.

A peaceful atmosphere is present.

I liked the word because an atmosphere can fill a place without becoming the place itself.

It can arrive. Change. Become dominant. Affect everything happening within it. And eventually leave.

That felt surprisingly close to how some emotional and energetic conditions behaved in my experience.

Saying:

An anxious atmosphere is present

didn’t make the anxiety less real.

It simply changed my relationship with it.

There was the atmosphere…

and there was also the larger environment in which I was recognizing it.

Energy gave the environment geography

Kundalini added another dimension entirely.

Internal experience began having location.

The crown. The head. The spine. The chest. The feet.

Different regions became active at different times.

There was pressure. Movement. Heat. Lines and routes that gradually became familiar.

Attention could move between regions.

Sometimes energetic activity appeared to move too.

I wasn’t simply experiencing:

energy.

I was beginning to experience an internal landscape with differences inside it.

Again, I don’t mean that as a claim about undiscovered anatomy.

I’m describing what the experience felt like from inside.

It had geography.

And the more familiar I became with that geography, the more precisely I could relate to it.

Then routes appeared within the geography

One of the relationships that became particularly important began around the crown and the middle of my head.

Over time, I began recognizing something more extensive.

A route that seemed to continue further through the body and into the spine.

Attention could follow it.

Eventually intention seemed capable of participating with it.

The relationship repeated enough that it became increasingly recognizable.

Years later, I would need language for this.

It became part of what I called Internal Transit.

But once again, I didn’t begin with the term and go looking for the experience.

The experience repeated until I needed a term.

Stillness wasn’t always gone when activity appeared

This may have been one of the stranger discoveries.

Earlier in meditation, I tended to think of stillness as something that replaced activity.

Thought quieted…

stillness appeared.

But eventually I began noticing stillness while other things were still happening.

Thought could be present. The body could be active. Energy could move. The outside world could certainly be noisy.

And somewhere within all of that, stillness could occasionally remain recognizable.

That made me question the way I had been thinking about internal states.

Perhaps they didn’t always replace one another.

Perhaps some of them could coexist.

Attention wasn’t necessarily showing me the whole room

This led to another important distinction.

What I was paying attention to wasn’t necessarily everything that was happening.

That sounds incredibly simple.

Externally, we understand it immediately.

If I’m looking at one person in a crowded room, the other people don’t disappear.

Internally, I hadn’t always thought that way.

Thought could occupy attention so completely that nothing else seemed present.

Then attention shifted…

and there was the body. Or stillness. Or an atmosphere. Or energetic activity I hadn’t previously noticed.

Had those things been there the whole time?

Sometimes I don’t know.

But I became increasingly interested in the difference between:

what is present

and

what is currently prominent.

Gestures made that distinction even clearer

My later work with gestures added another clue.

Sometimes taking a particular form seemed to make one aspect of the internal experience easier to recognize.

I’ve described this like a string within an instrument.

The whole instrument remains…

but one string becomes easier to hear.

The gesture might highlight an atmosphere. A bodily relationship. An energetic condition.

Something becomes foreground.

That doesn’t prove it was sitting there unchanged before I noticed it.

But it does show me that changing how I participate can change what becomes recognizable.

That became extremely useful.

“Give it the floor” only made sense because there was a room

Eventually I began using the phrase:

Give it the floor.

When something became strongly recognizable, I could sometimes allow it to become the primary experience and see what happened.

Looking at it now, that phrase reveals something about how my internal model had already changed.

For something to have the floor…

there has to be a larger room.

There is the thing becoming prominent.

And there are the peripherals.

The body. Thought. Stillness. Other sensations. The wider atmosphere.

I had stopped experiencing internal life only as one thing replacing another.

There was an environment.

The peripherals became interesting too

Once I began thinking this way, I became less interested only in the central event.

What was happening around it?

If energy was strongly active somewhere, what else remained?

If an emotion became dominant, what was the body doing?

If thought became loud, was there anything underneath it?

If a gesture highlighted one condition, what moved into the background?

Sometimes the peripheral information told me as much as the thing I had originally been watching.

The whole relationship became more dimensional.

I could work with the relationship instead of only the state

This changed the questions I asked.

Instead of only:

How do I get rid of this feeling?

I could ask:

Where is it? What else is present? What is the body doing? Is thought joining it? Is attention feeding it? Does it move?

What happens if I don’t interfere? Does anything remain underneath it? Does it actually need something from me?

That didn’t mean every experience required an investigation.

Sometimes I’m angry because something made me angry.

Sometimes I’m tired because I need sleep.

Sometimes the answer is wonderfully ordinary.

But I now had another way of meeting the experience when it was useful.

I wasn’t trying to become detached from myself

There is a distinction here that matters to me.

Thinking in terms of an internal environment isn’t a way of avoiding emotion.

If I’m sad, I want to be capable of being sad.

If I’m hurt, that matters.

If something makes me angry, I don’t need to turn the anger into an interesting object of meditation so I don’t have to feel it.

The point isn’t distance.

It’s relationship.

I can experience something deeply and still recognize that it may not be the only thing present.

Those are very different ideas.

Practice stopped requiring the right internal condition

This may have been one of the biggest consequences.

If practice means entering a particular state, then some days are naturally better practice days than others.

Still. Clear. Open. Connected.

But if practice means developing a relationship with the internal environment…

then the environment can be whatever it actually is.

Restless. Emotional. Quiet. Energetically active. Distracted. Still.

Nothing particularly interesting happening at all.

I don’t need to create the correct environment before I can meet it.

The relationship can begin with what is already there.

That became enormously important.

Eventually I needed different language

For years, I had been talking about internal experiences.

Eventually that didn’t seem large enough.

An experience sounded like something happening.

Then another thing happening. Then another.

What I was beginning to recognize had relationships within it.

Foreground. Background. Regions. Movement. Atmosphere. Attention. Stillness. The body.

Things arriving and leaving. Things becoming recognizable again.

I needed language spacious enough to hold all of that.

I began thinking of it as an:

internal environment.

Looking back at Arrival Field

There is probably no phrase that sits closer to the center of Arrival Field now than:

Arrival Field is a place for developing a living relationship with your internal environment.

That sentence took years to earn.

I don’t think I could have written it near the beginning of my meditation practice.

I wouldn’t have known what I meant by internal environment.

And I certainly wouldn’t have understood why the word relationship mattered so much.

Now I do.

The environment changes.

So the relationship has to be living.

Things become recognizable. They move. Disappear. Return.

Sometimes I participate. Sometimes I wait. Sometimes something needs action.

Sometimes Presence intact is enough.

The point isn’t to permanently arrange the environment into some ideal condition.

It’s to become capable of meeting what is there.

Arrival Field is still only a map

This also helped me understand what Arrival Field shouldn’t become.

I don’t believe I’ve mapped the human internal environment.

I have mapped relationships I’ve repeatedly encountered within my own experience and developed structures that may help other people explore what they recognize within theirs.

There is an important difference.

The person’s experience remains larger than the architecture.

That is why another Arrival Field phrase became so important:

A map for what you’re already noticing.

The map comes second.

What you notice comes first.

Looking back

It took me years to realize that much of what I had been exploring wasn’t a collection of unrelated internal events.

Thought was there. Emotion. The body. Stillness. Attention. Energy. Movement. Atmosphere.

Sometimes one became so loud that it seemed to be everything.

Then awareness widened…

and something else was still there.

I began to recognize an environment.

Not a fixed place.

Certainly not a place I completely understood.

A changing one. A living one.

One I could sometimes navigate, sometimes influence, sometimes simply observe.

And perhaps most importantly…

one I didn’t need to control in order to have a relationship with it.

That changed the question I carried into practice.

Instead of always asking:

How do I feel?

I began asking something a little wider:

What is present?

And sometimes that one small change in language opened an entire room.

— Jason