1. Meditating Specific Symptoms
- Give yourself time to be aware of your immediate bodily sensations of any state of illness or dis-ease. Ask yourself and become more aware of where and how you feel your dis-ease in your body.
- Remind yourself that the pure awareness of any sensation, emotion or thought – however painful – is not itself a sensation, emotion or thought, and is innately pain free.
- Staying aware of any localised sensation or symptom, remind yourself that it is itself an awareness of some aspect of your life-world and relationships that is a source of unease or ‘dis-ease’.
- Wait until a spontaneous awareness arises of what specific aspect of your life-world it is that the sensation or feeling of dis-ease embodies – and is itself an awareness of.
- Grant awareness to one localised sensation or feeling of dis-ease or discomfort after another, staying with it long enough until it too recalls you to some specific aspect of your life world, present, past or future.
- Take time to follow this process through – making sure you attend to every region of your body in the process – until your overall sense of dis-ease lifts and your overall sense of self and body alters – transformed by the very awareness you are granting it.
2. Cultivating whole-body Awareness
- Remember: only through awareness of your body as a whole can you gain and maintain a sense of your self as a whole – your ‘soul’.
- When you feel ill therefore, do not focus solely on your symptoms – on localised sensations, thoughts or emotions – but instead seek to maintain a sense of your body, self and life as whole.
- If you feel yourself suffering from what you think of as a purely ‘mental’ or emotional state, remember that every such state is always accompanied by a particular bodily sense of yourself.
- Conversely therefore, even if your symptoms seem to be purely bodily, attend also to the thoughts and emotions that tend to accompany them – for these will give you the best clue to the underlying life-problem that they symbolise.
- Understand too, that any mental, emotional and bodily state that you experience when you feel ill is at the same time a ‘self state’ or ‘body identity’ – a particular bodily way of feeling yourself – who you are.
- Attend therefore, not only to the way your symptoms ‘make you feel’ but to the way they make you feel – the overall sense of self or ‘body identity’ that accompanies them.
- If you can, choose to fully feel and indeed even amplify any felt sensations of dis-ease or sickness symptoms rather than seeking to suppress them.
- Trust that any mood or feeling, sense of dis-ease or bodily symptom – if it is given enough time to be fully felt, amplified and inwardly followed – will in time automatically transform itself into a new feeling, a new sense of your body and a new bodily sense of self or ‘body identity’ – one now free of the need to embody or ‘somatise’ itself through symptoms of one sort or another.
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