I’m participating in Sharon Salzberg’s 28-Day Real Happiness Meditation Challenge again this year, and my plan for this blog series is to write a poem or reflection on each day’s practice. You can find all the responses on the landing page.
Meditation Response:
I rested on the sectional, eyes lightly closed, and the cat, sunning himself all squirming and satisfied on the carpet, didn’t climb on me.
Head to foot, through face, shoulders, arms. back, chest, pelvis, thighs, knees, calves, I felt no sensations. Or as Sharon calls it, an absence of sensation. No tingling. No tightness, no soreness, shakiness, itching, constriction, pulsing, pressure, coolness or warmth. Or perhaps I felt something but no words attached to the feeling? I don’t think so.
I realised, as I hadn’t consciously until then, that no part of my body hurt. No muscle aches, back ache, nerve pain, joint pain, headache, clenched jaw, sore neck, discomfited abdomen, cramps, queasiness. My circulation flowed. My airways were open. There was no resistance. I felt thankful. It could be otherwise.
The sensations I most noticed were not in my body — there, only a slowness, a sense of slowed breathing, slowed time, and feeling like undisturbed satin, viscose — but in the environment external to me: the loudly ticking wall clock, rhythmic, on my right, and the whipping wind, sometimes howling, erratic, outside on my left. Along with the wind, an unpredictable shadow-and-light dappling my lightly closed eyes as the sun and clouds traded places. Brightness, then welcome shadow, then welcome brightness, and the dancing penumbra, almost palpable. between.
10 out of 10. I’d recommend.
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