It’s rare for me to have a headache. When I noticed this one I started toward the kitchen for a glass of water and a pill. As I passed by Aladdin’s closet I decided to go in, sit down and see what might happen. As soon as I was inside and closed the door the sounds from outside started to fade and I became intrigued by a faint hum I could now hear. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light my entire body adjusted to the cave like peacefulness buffered from the outside energies and desire for interesting activity.
A few minutes later I noticed that my headache was gone. I do not know when it stopped just that I felt light and awake with no lingering sensation anywhere near my head. Not only had my headache faded but I had settled into a new activity. Also, I was amazed with the ease that my mind had let go of the activity I was involved in before going into Aladdin’s closet and my present interest.
Here was a perfect personal example of the impermanence I have been reading and contemplating. Things change on their own. Like magic the older thoughts were gone and were replaced by these new ones. Just as I had without conscious effort let go of the headache I had let go of the lingering thoughts of the activity I had before.
What were you doing before you started to read this blog? Have your thoughts shifted completely to this blog or are there still lingering thoughts of what you had been planning to continue doing? How quickly do you shift from activity to activity? Do
you find yourself doing one thing and thinking about something else that you were just doing?
Getting settled into your seat on a plane, changing gears on a stick shift transmission, listening to someone telling you things you do not want to hear all require a fading into the present moment. Think about music changing from one track to the next. Too abrupt a change is jarring. A nice smooth fading out and fading back in allows not only for an enjoyable transition but avoids the tension
created by your mind being pulled between the old and the new. Maybe that is where my headache came from. Are the actions of my body in tune with the thinking in my mind?
The breath is always happening in the now. Return to awareness of your breath as an anchor, watch the detail of whatever your hands are doing. Your hands as is your breath is only happening in the now Fade into the middle of what you are doing right now and let everything else fade away.
I started to watch what I was doing as different activities filled my day. I found periods of activity separated by periods of transition as I moved from sitting to walking the dog, driving to the market, walking to prepare food in the kitchen. Even the transitions became an individual activity. Each activity had a short feeling of beginning a long middle and a short felling of ending. There were some lingering thoughts but I often I noticed somewhere in the middle of activity that I had shifted. The old had faded out and the new faded in. There seemed to be a revelation in this awareness of, “ I was there doing that and now I am here doing this.” Like getting in a plane in West Palm Beach sitting for a time and then getting out in Charlottesville.
Like a magic act did the ground move or the plane?
Spiritual Gravity 