This week I have been fixated on the body, which has been in pain. Last week it was emotional pain. As I discovered there’s no difference really. Both are very visceral experiences actually.I tweaked my back on Sunday and by Wednesday I was unable to find a comfortable position. Laying on my left side for 24 hours seemed to bring the most temporary relief. I felt like a wounded animal in survival mode, needing to find a safe place to heal. In the pain it was noticed that both emotionally and physically I felt a sense of “disconnect” from my “core” – by that I mean that I felt unable to be in the “core” of Self. I became fixated on the pain – both emotionally and physically. Although I was conscious that I didn’t want to wallow in the experience of pain, admittedly I got sucked in by the vortex of pain and there was “suffering.” No real drama, no spiraling out of control, just an experience of pain and suffering – in form.
Yesterday I found respite sitting in my “meditation chair” in “the Cave” (my meditation space). It is a small, old swivel-rocker chair that I can tilt back with the help of a foot stool, which allows my back to be fully supported so that the muscles can relax. Ahhhh – sweet relief. This became my healing space yesterday and today – my “womb cave” while I was held captive by my predicament of pain.
As I deeply relaxed, an “opening” occurred in body, mind and spirit, and it became apparent that in both cases – with emotional pain and physical pain – there was a fixation on form; especially with physical pain. The emotional pain was able to slip through this realization last week. But they are both the same really. When there is pain of any kind it is difficult to be aware of anything else. The mind fixates, awareness fixates on the pain, the discomfort, and needs to find relief, which is obviously part of the body-mind mechanism. But I was surprised at how quickly I lost awareness of the context of Spaciousness and became narrowly fixated on form; how easily I began to feel separate from the Space of Awareness (the “core”). And in *feeling* separate I fixated more on the pain, the body, the feeling, etc., which kept me solidified in a separate sense of self – hurt and wounded.
As I sat there, my back fully supported by the chair, hot pack at my back, I found myself experiencing a sense of fluidity, a sense of the “liquidity” of Life: every sound I heard was liquid, every thought and feeling were liquid-like vibrations – ripples of liquid; even the pain and the body had become quivery liquid gel. And no, I was not taking pain medication. :) In a sense, once the *fixation* with pain, with form, had subsided, I could remember that this life, this experience of pain is just an occurrence *within* the Liquid Pool of Existence; that Liquid Life morphs itself into these forms we call body-minds with its pains and frustrations, physically, mentally and emotionally. This sense of me is really Liquid Life from which I cannot separate. This “me” arises as a liquid story that occurs in the Liquid Womb of The Beloved. We arise, have form, and melt back into Liquid Life again and again… Our thoughts and feelings and pain are liquid as well – gelatinous “mutations” if you will, suspended in a Womb of Living Liquid… Yet we take ownership of the thoughts, the feelings, the lives that we live and fixate on them as if they exist independently of the Liquid Life from which they arise – but from which they can never be “disconnected…”
And in this liquid story the pain becomes a messenger. Like the little brown duck in the photo above, pain comes and disturbs our idea of what form is supposed to look like and how we are supposed to experience it, reminding us not to fall back to sleep in form. In her own way, pain wakes us up from our fixations on form and calls us back to the fluid liquidness of Life…
In deep gratitude to the “pain ducks"…
~*~
