Gineen Roth's book, Women, Food, and God, talks about noticing the sensations in the body. One chapter near the center of the book spoke to me in a way I was particularly receptive to yesterday, and I spent yesterday delving deeply into awareness of body sensations.
Misophonia is a recently coined term to refer to a condition wherein certain noises, usually human-generated and usually bodily, trigger rage in certain people. I've had misophonia since I was 8 or 10. I'd noticed some weeks or months ago that the sounds that trigger anger for me--eating noises in particular--are, at a more fundamental level, triggering very primal body sensations. The sensations are so powerful, so unfamiliar, change so fast, and are so out of my control, that until now they have utterly distracted me from anything else I wanted to do: work, read, talk, think. Thus, anger.
Yesterday, as a result of hard work inspired by Roth's book, I was so in touch with my core bodily sensations that I actually enjoyed and welcomed what arose when my housemates were eating in the kitchen next to me. The sensations didn't seem like an unwelcome intrusion, but rather an extension and intensification of what I'd been focusing on, and directing friendliness toward, all day. In fact, I welcomed these intense sensations, because it was easier to pay attention to bodily sensations when they were so very compelling. Of course, I've been doing body-awareness practices since I began Vipassana meditation 15 years ago, and had not before today found the misophonia-associated sensations welcome. The past 15 years have been a long, slow process of becoming aware of, and friendly with, sensations on a deeper and deeper level. Finally, early in the day yesterday, I had apparently extended friendliness to sensations close to the very primal level of those that arise when I hear eating noises. Then, when those noises happened later in the day, the sensations that arose were, for the first time in decades, tolerable, even enjoyable.
And just now, as I wrote all of the above, Z has been eating noisily behind me, and the sensations it's triggered haven't distracted me from my writing. It seems that, for now anyway, I've developed enough friendliness with these sensations that they are not, at the moment, distracting.
On one of my first meditation retreats, about ten years ago, I struggled mightily with misophonia. At that time I did not allow myself to use earplugs in the meditation hall unless I was utterly miserable. A heavy breather sat near me in the hall and the entire retreat I was working with the rage that arose. I told myself, and told others on retreat, that I was pretty sure my sensitivity to such sounds was a gift that would ultimately be part of my path to freedom.
Several years later, not noticing much of a shift in my ability to tolerate the sounds, I decided the kindest thing to do for myself was to allow myself to use earplugs whenever and wherever I desired, on retreat or off. I think this was a very good decision.
And now, finally, a taste of real freedom in my relationship to these sounds.
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