The first drop just rolls off. Then another. Still nothing. Then another, and another. Eventually — slowly — one drop soaks in

By Amma Thanasanti

It’s deep. So deep, I can’t see the bottom of it.

When I’m in it, all I know is the taste of suffering. I don’t want to be there. I move from one kind of wanting to another: the desire to distract myself with something pleasurable, the urge to prove that I matter, the impulse to run away — or just stop existing for a while.

Old memories surface — moments when I was erased. They flicker in my awareness like short clips from different movies. My attention locks onto trying to name the reasons why these things happened. The pain runs deep. I find myself preoccupied with wanting to tell my side of the story. I turn my thoughts toward someone I care deeply about. I don’t feel like I matter to them in the way I long to. That hurts too.

At some point, I shift. I go to my meditation cushion and sit. For three hours, I just sit. I don’t let myself follow every thought or story that my mind spins. It’s hard to feel my body fully — like I’m only half here. And what is here feels more concrete than fleshy aliveness. But even with the pull to escape or distract, I gently keep turning toward the pain. I notice its texture, where it shows up in my body, how it moves, how it doesn’t.

It’s like water on sunbaked earth. The first drop just rolls off. Then another. Still nothing. Then another, and another. Eventually — slowly — one drop soaks in. The moist soil touches the dry earth beside it. Three hours Friday night. Three more Saturday night. Another three Sunday morning. Somewhere in there, I notice: the ground has changed.

The first real shift is this: I realize I’m not the pain. There’s something in me that’s aware of the pain. That awareness is not pain itself. I begin to feel my whole body again. My body shifts. It no longer feels like concrete. I have a lot of sensations and notice them changing. Awareness returns to the center of my experience.

Then another shift: instead of getting caught up in what I’m feeling — my thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations — I begin to rest more in the awareness of those things. The awareness itself becomes a kind of anchor. It’s steady. Spacious.

Awareness is like a wide, open sky — able to hold everything. Presence is here too. Presence has a kind of immediacy, a hereness. Where awareness surrounds experience, presence meets it directly. With awareness and presence both available, I’m no longer in the trench. The pain that felt all-consuming not long ago isn’t here now.

I’m not chasing validation. I’m not rehearsing my story. I’m thinking about the board meeting later today.

My mother was born three months premature, weighing just 3.5 pounds. The hospital in Chicago did what they could to keep her alive. But 95 years ago, they didn’t understand the importance of holding, cradling, bonding. She didn’t get that.

And yet, my mom’s passion for life was unmistakable. You could feel it in the bright colors she wore, her love of travel and dancing, the salads she made, and the way she talked to every single person at a party.

But eventually I saw it. Her passion for life was also her way of avoiding her own Mariana Trench.

I use the Mariana Trench to name the deep, painful wound that comes from not being seen or validated — what’s often called a narcissistic wound. It’s the ache of not having someone attune to you, of not mattering. The pain goes so far back and is so pervasive, it’s hard to tell where it begins or ends.

In my case, like my mother’s, it started very early. It makes sense that identifying with the pain — letting it define me — has been more familiar than resting in awareness.

But here is what I need to say clearly: those nine hours of sitting didn’t work because meditation is enough.

They worked because of 46 years of preparation.

Forty-six years of meditation practice, yes — but also trauma therapy, attachment repair work, and the slow, relational rebuilding of a nervous system that had learned very early that it wasn’t safe to be seen. The ground had been prepared over decades. The three hours on the cushion Friday night worked because of everything that came before it — not instead of it.

This is the distinction that matters. Meditation can reach the narcissistic wound. In my experience, it reaches it last — and only after the nervous system has enough safety, and the relational field enough repair, to make that depth of turning toward possible. Without that preparation, sitting with a wound this deep doesn’t transform it. It either bypasses it or retraumatizes it.

My mother never did that preparatory work. Her passion for life was real — and it was also a way of staying above the trench rather than descending into it. The wound remained intact, passed forward in the ways these things get passed forward, showing up in me and requiring its own decades of tending.

What’s becoming clear is that the way through isn’t to keep repeating the thought patterns that circle the wound. It’s to turn toward the pain, again and again — but from a nervous system that has enough support to make that turning survivable. And then, eventually, transformative.

I come out the other side more willing to let awareness and presence be what holds me. Not because meditation finally worked. Because everything else finally made it possible for meditation to work.

Photo Credit: Red Charlie on Unsplash