Can you bare the moment to moment life in your body? Are you open to it?
Or are you turned off by your body’s sensations? Do you hate them or want to run away?
It’s not just the painful sensations we humans don’t want to feel, like aversion, or hatred or repulsion. Interestingly enough we actually have trouble experiencing the pleasurable sensations as well, like wanting or craving or attracting.
In the world of sensation, we tend to move toward what we like to get more of it and away from what we don’t like to get less, all the hopes of hanging on to the ebb and flow of sensation.
And you know what? We can’t hold on. The natural ebb and flow of sensation is beyond our reach. In fact the wise ones would say the ebb and flow of sensation is actually out of control. But we try to hold on anyway.
When we try to hold on, we perpetuate our suffering and increase our tendency to react to sensation.
In reacting, we get caught in the urgency of taking action to “get rid” of what we’re feeling. But getting rid of what we’re feeling is in fact an illusion that leads to unforeseen entanglements.
As a result, when we reach out to control the ebb and flow of sensation we end up diminishing our equilibrium, our serenity, our peace.
So what’s the alternative?
There is a way where we’re not splitting the world into pain and pleasure, right and wrong, good and bad, that doesn’t suppress the pleasurable energy of desire, but allows us to experience it fully.
The alternative has to do with the cultivation of an attitude of neutrality, of patience and endurance towards the pairs of opposites that ebb and flow in our experience.
We do not need to push away any one sensation in favor of another. Actually, they cannot be separated anyway. They go together like a hand in a glove.
Simply acknowledging what we’re feeling, experiencing it, and then baring the moment to moment life in our body, just as it is, whatever it may be, is enough.
In so doing, we develop our ability to experience things just as they are.
Some would say this is what it means to live life fully.
We do not select out any one aspect of our human experience, we welcome it all in.
