Had an interesting sit last night, followed by an interesting day of active mindfulness.
Place: The Nook
Circumstances: in the evening, before bed
Practice: T and H exercise #13
Started to sit with the things in my mind that were coming up: desire, distraction, and anxiety were the three big ones. Labeling was a useful act to bring my attention back to the neutral feelings: the here...
and that practice felt pretty great.
And then I started to live my life the next day (today) and had a tough case of "first day of my period-itis" and brought that same awareness from last night to my throbbing abdomen. "MY UTERUS IS KILLING ME" morphed into "I am noticing that my pain is arising as a habit of mind", which felt a little funny, because I felt it in my uterus, not my mind, but this somehow softened it a bit. And then I would invite the pain along with me: "Oh hi pain. Welcome to my day". Nothing brings up the need to be mindful quite like a little pain.
1 comment:
Ah yes, there is little -- if anything -- like pain to concentrate one's attention!
And just to clarify, in case I was misunderstood. Yes, the pain is experienced as being in your uterus. The point of all things being an object of mind is that if you were drugged for an operation, for instance, what would happen to the pain? Your still having your period, but there is no experience of the pain because there is no consciousness.
If a nerve were severed connecting the uterus to the brain, you'd not experience pain. In this sense, pain is an object of mind -- a mental phenomena. This is also why the subjective experience of pain can be modified through 'mental control,' so to speak.
Finally, there was the example of an amputee's 'phantom pain.' Even though the limb is gone, s/he feels pain because pain is a mental phenomena.
And all this does not negate the fact that a warm water bottle placed on the lower abdomen may provide some relief. :-)
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