What has your attention?
What you pay attention to will become your experience.I once suggested to a client that she write down all of the different qualities of pain she felt in her body. I also asked her to make a list of all the different qualities of pleasure that she could feel. A week later we got together.
She gave me a list of 32 different kinds of pain she could identify. There were sharp pains, edgy pains, throbbing pains, and prickly pains. It was an impressive list that demonstrated that she had a lot of sensitivity and awareness of her body. I was eager to see her list of pleasurable qualities.
Her list consisted of one word: pleasure. That is all she could come up with.
Pain is compelling. When we are uncomfortable it can be hard to notice anything else. She was a great example of this.
She was as surprised as I was by her lopsided list.
Her discomfort constantly commanded her attention and dominated her experience of her body. She had spent so much time focusing on her pain that she habitually noticed only what made her uncomfortable.
We need new habits of noticing.
Many years ago I was participating in a program called Conscious Embodiment. We took principles of aikido and applied them to relationships. Through that process we practiced particular aikido movements - again and again and again.
Wendy Palmer, the founder of this work, described a study conducted by the military. The army wanted to know how many times a soldier needed to repeat a task in order to perform it under pressure.
They discovered something very interesting. They concluded that it took 300 repetitions to become very competent at a task. That may seem like a lot.
But the stunner is the next finding. It took 3,000 repetitions to perform the task under pressure.
Under pressure, we go back to what we've practiced the most. If we have habitually focused on our pain, our experience of pleasure begins to wane.
What we pay attention to becomes our experience. So why not give our attention to pleasurable sensations?
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You might enjoy the following awareness exercise.
1. Find a place where you can be comfortable without too many distractions.
2. Choose a word from the list below.
3. When you read the word, see if you can sense that quality somewhere in your body. Along the way you may notice many sensations that are new to you.
For example, let's experiment with the idea of "bubbly". Explore what bubbly might feel like.
Perhaps you feel a sense of lightness. There may be a sense of movement. You might feel a buzzing sensation. There are no right or wrong answers.
Right now I feel a sense of bubbly in my heart area. I notice a sense of quickness, weightlessness and upward movement. For me, that qualifies as bubbly.
The object is to broaden our experience of pleasurable sensations.
Here are some other words to play with:
* Moist
* Flowing
* Expanding
* Soft
* Buoyant
* Slow
Have fun with this and I hope you learn something new about yourself.
Send me an e-mail to let me know how it goes.
Wishing you all the best,
Kaiopa Stage
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