I haven't felt motivated to post lately because meditation has become a much more ordinary experience than it had been during the three months after my Forest Refuge rereat.
I think I've written before about unusual sensations in the right side of my body. These sensations are uncomfortably strong today. I would say that I don't feel well, but I wouldn't say it to many people, because it seems unlike what people usually mean when they say they aren't feeling well. It's a set of physical sensations for which the physical cause is not apparent. The sensations themselves are not painful, but somehow they are quite distracting and seem to trigger pessimism and an urge to make them go away, to squeeze them out or cry them out. The most prominent sensations are tension in the right jaw, a mildly pulsing pressure throughout the right side of my throat and upper chest, and a tension in the right trapezius that I can only describe as an urge to bring my head toward my right shoulder. There is also mild tingling and tension over a broad region of my right abdomen.
Often, I can alleviate pain and other physical discomforts by putting my attention upon them in meditation. This allows me to see the sensations in fine detail. They are seen to be a series of distinct sensations, several per second, rather than a single uninterrupted sensation, and one notices that the distinct sensations take up less than 50% of the time (this is often called noticing the "spaciousness" of the pain). The theory is that pain is magnified by fear and other aversive emotions, but that when the pain is seen to be discontinuous, much of the fear dissipates and the pain becomes less bothersome.
But these sensations are not yielding to this approach. I think it is because there are several neighboring centers of sensation. I can place my focus on only one at a time. The others are so physically proximal that neighboring ones continue to bother me while I am trying to focus on just one.
I've had days like this several times over the past several weeks.
Although meditation feels ordinary and often uninteresting, I still meditate every day, although frequently now I will meditate less than an hour in a day. A week ago I was inspired to practice disciplined noting, and I did so with enthusiasm for several days, but now I feel unenthused about that.
