Further exploration of body and mind
The thing I forgot to mention in my last post is to recognise the quality of experience when you are paying attention to the body or doing the normal mind thing.
You might also like to try this exercise. Calculate:
((15 x 2) + 10 ) / 4 - 9 = ?
As you did the sum, were you worried about the past or future? Were you anxious? Probably not. This way of using the mind to solve things or fix things is one of the ways we avoid facing the difficulties that may be in our lives. In my last post, I suggested that putting awareness into the body had much the same effect. However, being in the body cultivates a spacious sense of awareness and the sensation of letting go, whereas distracting ourselves with focused thought has the tendency to contract our field of awareness and bunch our muscles up. It seems easier to the bunching up, but this uses energy and relies on us having resources to feed this habit. Over time this becomes habituated and drives other behaviours such as eating and drinking the wrong things or acting out.
So then, being in the body opens things out and leads us to self reliance. It's not a trivial thing to cultivate but if you do it now it will be there when you need it most.
You might also like to try this exercise. Calculate:
((15 x 2) + 10 ) / 4 - 9 = ?
As you did the sum, were you worried about the past or future? Were you anxious? Probably not. This way of using the mind to solve things or fix things is one of the ways we avoid facing the difficulties that may be in our lives. In my last post, I suggested that putting awareness into the body had much the same effect. However, being in the body cultivates a spacious sense of awareness and the sensation of letting go, whereas distracting ourselves with focused thought has the tendency to contract our field of awareness and bunch our muscles up. It seems easier to the bunching up, but this uses energy and relies on us having resources to feed this habit. Over time this becomes habituated and drives other behaviours such as eating and drinking the wrong things or acting out.
So then, being in the body opens things out and leads us to self reliance. It's not a trivial thing to cultivate but if you do it now it will be there when you need it most.
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