Seeing him walk, I vowed not to push my body past its limits.
During the retreat I was sensitive enough that the difference between “uncomfortable pain” and “injurious pain” was clear.
In day to day life, I’m not so sensitive. I feel blind when choosing how to react to things.
The crucial challenge of spiritual work seems to be working out whether to act on a sensation, or whether to allow it to pass through you without acting.
In my vipassana retreat nearly two years ago now, my teacher had crippled himself by sitting still for too long.
My problem with meditation retreats is the vast majority of progress I’ve made on any problem has been accompanied by some cathartic release of grief.
But in meditation retreats you must be quiet so I end up silently weeping to myself and feeling like I’m breaking the rules.
The result of trauma is lingering unpleasant feelings that can only be managed through actions that are harmful to self or other long-term — self-medication
Healing is finding wholesome actions that actually satisfy and resolve those feelings, to the benefit of self and others
Watched Pillion movie recently and was struck that the dom in a dom/sub relationship is ruled by shame and actually NEEDS the sub just to feel okay.
which doesn’t feel like a very “dominant” position, if the dominance is just an escape from shame.
This feels like exactly the same dynamic as “the adult self sitting with the triggered inner child” of reparenting work, but one level up.
This is boundless awareness sitting with the untriggered but still limited adult self.
I’m jet-lagged atm and my body feels hungry and wired and yet it needs to do nothing and rest.
And rather than contracting to avoid the pain, I can sit in this boundless awareness, as if my body were a child.
The pain of unmet needs can be there, and then go when ready.
One of the simplest signs of wisdom a trustworthiness is when someone says something and then immediately goes “no wait, that’s not true”.
It means they’re constantly checking internally for consistency with their expression, and adjusting when the outer doesn’t match the inner.
It's surprisingly and devastatingly hard to just feel pleasure, without directing or expressing or expelling it!
It's pleasure! It feels good! But so hard to contain and just let be!
It’s also impossible to fight the behavioural change that comes after an insight.
You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
Once the inner structural change has happened, and the insight made conscious, behavioural change is inevitable.
Don’t put effort into fighting it.
When you get an insight from meditation, therapy, whatever…
Relax. Let it go. The work is already done.
Your conscious awareness of an insight is downstream from some inner structural change.
Behavioural change is also downstream from that inner structural change.
Focus your energy on doing whatever produces more insights (ie. more inner structural changes).
These will produce more behavioural changes *without effort*.
Putting effort into implementing this insight is likely wasteful or even detrimental.
Relax. Let go. It’s okay.