When I woke up this morning, I noticed a familiar contraction in my chest, belly, and throat. A thought may call it a dull sense of dread and discomfort.
I notice a few options.
JOIN IN OR MAKE GO AWAY
One is to join in with it, to take the dread as saying something true about me and my life, spin stories that match the dread, and create a nightmare for myself that doesn’t help anything.
Another is to wait for it to go away, or do something to make it go away. I know that if I get up and drink water with electrolytes, it tends to shift how my system is. Even more so if I do qigong, and even more so if I do it outside in the early morning sun.
RECOGNIZE FOR WHAT IT IS
There is a third option. I notice the sensations and the way thoughts can interpret them. I know this is old, this is from childhood. (Maybe even older, from past lives and/or epigenetics). It’s a familiar visitor, although it’s always also new. I know what it is telling me is not true. (It’s about how I experienced the world when I was little, a long time ago.) I know it’s a part of me.
I know it’s a scared child, a scared little animal. It wants what all scared beings want – to be seen and understood, to feel safe, loved, and at home.
I connect with it, as I would a frightened child or animal. I lean gently into it.
I love you. You are safe here. Stay as long as you want.
I notice it’s made of the same as everything else in my world, it’s made of awakeness, awake space. The awake space I am forms itself into this contraction, as it forms itself into my whole world.
I rest in and as that noticing. I invite the contraction itself to notice its nature and reorganize – as it wants – within and as that noticing.
HOW IT UNFOLDED
I did notice the options mentioned above and did follow the third option. I took some time with it while still in bed and before moving too much. I got up, drew the curtains, gently petted Simba to say good morning, drank water with electrolytes, and sat down to write this while it’s still alive and fresh.
I am still with the contraction, noticing it, noticing its nature, although it has changed form as it always does.
TWO WAYS
Really, there are two ways to relate to these kinds of things.
One is to take the scary thoughts within it as saying something true and struggle with it… wait for it to go away, try to make it go away, try to make me go away from it by distracting myself, and so on.
The other is to recognize it for what it is… a scared child or animal, something from long ago, something that is born from unexamined scary thoughts, something that wants what we all want – to be loved, safe, home.
In the first way, I am at the mercy of the whims of life, of millions of thoughts and states that come and go on their own.
In the second way, I take charge of how I relate to it and the focus is on how I relate to it.
Instead of millions, it’s one.
It’s simpler, it becomes a new habit with time, and it’s also about how I relate to it when I am unable to relate to something in a more intentional way.
A FEW NOTES
As I mentioned above, I did several things to help myself. I stayed with the contraction for a while, and still do it as I write this and will likely keep doing it this morning as it comes to me. I also got up after a few minutes and drank the water with electrolytes since I could feel my system in a bit of imbalance (common when I wake up since I have CFS) and I know it helps shift things. I also plan to do qigong this morning, since I know that too helps me.
There are two ways to take these kinds of contractions seriously. One is to take the scary stories connected with it seriously as if they are saying something true. The other is to take the phenomenon seriously, explore it, befriend it, get to know it.
There is another aspect to exploring it, which I have written about in other articles, and that is to find curiosity about what’s coming up, allowing it to guide me, follow the process, and see where it leads me. It has medicine in it.
This all happens within and as the awakeness I am – the shifting experiences, this human self relating to it, and so on. The “I” above belongs to this human self, comes and goes as anything else, and is not what I more essentially find myself as.
Also, this awakeness is not a special kind of awakeness. It’s the awakeness we all already are, all of us who are consciousness to ourselves, or tell ourselves we “have” consciousness as a kind of appendix. It’s the awakeness that’s more familiar to us than anything else. It’s really all we have ever known.