I’m sick.
Sore throat, stuffy nose, pressure headache, cough, fatigue. You know.
When I realized this wasn’t “just allergies,” the first feeling I felt was gratitude. No joke! I was tremendously grateful for the opportunity this bout of illness would provide me to practice leaning into feeling without condition.
Before immediately turning to medication and distraction, what is it actually like to sit in this type of physical discomfort for a bit?
What are the sensations showing up that don’t require an overlay of the obligatory “Poor me, I can’t believe I got sick!” narrative?
To me, the biggest source of suffering is wallowing in that scripted sickness story. Believing the victimhood of it is so heavy. I understand why that story creates itself. It’s very familiar. We have to tell some version of it to the well meaning people who inquire after us. It’s part of the social etiquette of being sick.
But when it’s just you and your lived experience, what is it like to stay out of the story? What is it like to dip into feeling all of it without judging whether you like it or not?
Well, I’m experimenting with that.
Here are my observations:
🔸 The pull toward the narrative is really strong. The mind is very adept at yoinking attention away from feeling. When I notice that attention is hanging out there (which can take a long time!), I chuckle, cough, and come back to sensation. It kind of feels like when you’re pushing a wonky shopping cart that keeps drifting to the right and you have to correct it over and over to get it to go straight.
🔸 Focusing attention on the breath feels harder when you can’t breathe! At the moment, my breathing is much more labored and shallow than it usually is. I find it’s taking a lot of energy to keep my attention there, and even when I can, I don’t seem to be able to sustain it for very long.
🔸 There are swaths of time where, despite my best intentions, I find myself mindlessly engaging in distracting old habits and reaching for external pacifiers. There is absolutely no judgment surrounding this. It is completely understandable, and it is all part of what is unfolding. Grace is given without effort, because it is plainly obvious that this is part of the experience. It is required. I know this to be true, because it is happening.
🔸 It is good to know when I’ve reached the time when I can no longer sit with the discomfort, and I reach for medicine. I know that this is coming from a place of response as opposed to reaction, because I’ve given myself that precious time to be in the experience fully. I’m intensely grateful that I have access to medications that can help to soothe some of these symptoms. Whether I take them or not means nothing about me one way or another.
There is such immense value in practicing unconditional feeling. There is even greater value in recognizing my humanness within this endeavor. I can't get it wrong.
It is genuinely soothing to know that there is always a home to return to–the present moment–even if my experience in that placeless place is not one that my body-mind prefers. Peace and contentment live there, though, and they’re a constant, felt hum beneath the dissonant vibrations of physical sickness and its resulting stories. I’m discovering that it is indeed possible to be tuned into this frequency all the time, even if it’s being superimposed with a cacophony of other vibrations. We just have to get to know the feeling of it. The resonance of it. The purr of it. It’s always there. It has always been there. It’s simply waiting for us to notice...