WHAT IS A STARE DOWN?
A Stare Down is a specific and non-spiritual meditation practice that focuses on the sensations in your body. As a form of interoception (the awareness of your internal physical state), the Stare Down is about looking inward at your bodily functions, but requires that you specifically notice the activation of your nervous system in an effort to calm it.
Stare Down meditation is a strenuous practice that directs your attention away from thinking and towards the simple sensations of your nervous system. This allows you to experience, appreciate and become acquainted with the basic functioning of your emotional process, and by doing so, help regulate it.
When you are “on animal” your instinct has been activated to defend your physical state. This energetic pulse (experienced as “feeling”) is accompanied by ruminative and obsessive thinking (“feel-thoughts”). Instinctive energy is meant for survival in the wild, but our civilized life regularly uses it for non life-threatening things—just in case. This cyclical phenomenon of emotion is a suffering state that is challenging to regulate, since it stems from an energetic source that is meant to keep you alive and as such, does not remit easily. A Stare Down will allow you break this cycle of overprotection (meant for the wild, not the living room) by refocusing your attention away from triggering thoughts that signal perceived, rather than actual threat, and ultimately, breaking the feel-thought cycle.
A Stare Down is different from other meditations and grounding techniques in that it expressly requires your attention to be directed away from thoughts (as opposed to simply allowing them to pass non-judgementally) and towards not just any sensation in your body, but the particular activations of your nervous system (“gurgle, bubble, tight, hot”). Becoming aware of these sensations provides you with the key to your emotional regulation: when you’re “on animal”, you are simply engaging an energetic survival system that literally gets your heart pumping and gastric juices flowing. When this happens, your evolved mind—too complex for this basic system— is queued up with protective thoughts that spiral needlessly. When you’re “on animal”, the best thing to do it get “off animal”. The Stare Down can get you from thinking your “not ok” to knowing that you are ok by reducing the feel-thoughts that naturally, but unnecessarily occur as a function of being “on animal”.
Getting “off animal” with a Stare Down is the best and most effective way to change the negative thought process, that is there for your protection, but is always an exaggerated effect that has you thinking you’re not ok even though, the fact that you’re alive means, fundamentally, that you are. Your animal instinct is for physical survival in the wild, and unless you are in need of staying alive, you are far better navigating your life with reason, that instinct. With the Stare Down, you can access your rational process, know you’re ok, and optimize your living.