What does svabhava-grasping actually feel like?

I was tired. I was uncomfortable. I was removed from the connections and rhythms that made my life joyous. I felt out of place, isolated, and fed up. This might read like an early experience on long meditation retreat. But this was me a month ago, camping at a community festival. This was not a dramatic crisis. But it had all the feeling-tones of one.

What I was doing has a name in madhyamaka: the habit of treating experience as more fixed and solid than it actually is. It is called grasping at svabhava.

What does grasping actually feel like in the body?

On day 3 of 5, I was being pulled into a pit. I felt annoyed that I was ‘wasting’ precious time away from work in a setting that was more stressful than rejuvenating. I also did not want to overreact and ruin the experience for others, so felt I had to process my internal reactions, not drag others into my pit. I also had found a meditation space at the festival, so spent many hours there that day.

Sitting in meditation at a community festival is not the most conducive, but better than nothing. More importantly, I needed the quiet and still space, otherwise the pit would swallow me. I sat down to the emotion of frustration that presented a story of wasted time. This felt like a tightening to my experience that was reflected in my physical body. In the top of my abdomen was a constriction, my heart rate was elevated, my eyes were reaching out and scanning for threats. I tried to notice and allow the emotional narrative, and the physical constriction. Noticing how they kept arising: slightly different emotional or physical sensations; but they had the same flavour of being knotted.

Noticing like this for two hours of sitting meditation was exhausting. Returning for the third hour revealed this knot showed no signs of loosening. The image arose in my mind of putting out spot-fires in an ember shower: just endless. Another wave of feeling, another noticing, another return to the same knot. Noticing what was happening was not the same as it changing.

What happens when you look directly at the solid thing?

So, during that third session, I tried something different.… direct looking. Not at the causes of my feeling, not at the emotional story; but at the whole experience. I looked directly for the origin, the location, the continued tension that was holding the knot. This looking revealed that my physical feelings were different to the emotional story I overlayed. And more importantly, these visceral feelings were changing. I was treating my collection of experiences as solid, and that peace and contentment were wholly outside them. The de-linking of solidity to the physical feelings, and the further de-linking of the physical feelings to the mental story, broke the chain. The constriction in my abdomen was not the wasted time, it was just a constriction. The emotional weight of the story was not the situation, it was just a story.

A fresh view arose: How I spend my time would be different if I had known, but how could I have known? I was treating my uncomfortable experience as something I should (or could) have known beforehand, and it was causing a cascade of emotional friction.

This moment of looking deeply revealed a clarity and lightness. An internal pressure in my skull relieved; a length returned to my body, my breath became deeper, and my heart opened. The collection of experiences that I was treating as solid unknotted. When I saw the solid thing, named the solid thing, and looked directly at the solid thing, it vanished, and left a space for peacefulness to bloom.

If the solid thing dissolves, what have you been protecting?

This is what madhyamaka calls svabhava-grasping. The treating of experience as more solid and fixed than it is.

So here is what I keep returning to: if the solid thing dissolves when you look directly at it… what have you been protecting all this time?