If it comes into your awareness, it’s coming to be integrated and absorbed, not avoided.In that crucible moment when the suck of discomfort starts to rise into your thoughts, it is your moment for either acceptance or resistance.
Much of our response to pain is conditioned and automatic. As the pace goes up and the pain starts to really bite, your mind is already pregnant with a thought of resistance. The tagging and labelling is so well entrenched that the thought is in your mind before you have the real chance to allow the pain to be there.
Each time you respond with dissociation from the pain, you strengthen your inner resistance, which takes us away from our pain and our chance to sit in it rather than waste energy trying to get away from it.
Every single session you line up for is another chance to invite whatever comes with it to be there.
Here are the keys to the practice:
Can I feel this rising discomfort and not try to get relief from it?
Can I work with this as it is right now and not resist it?
Can I allow myself to be the conduit to whatever comes?
Because you see, it goes through you, you are not going through it. We make mental choices about what is happening based on nothing more than mental habitual patterning.
Next time the burn starts to bite, flip the script, allow yourself to feel it.
Imagine you are a big sponge and just let it soak in. Do the opposite of what that tired old voice in your head is saying and allow yourself to realise that the pain is actually why you are doing this.
Oh my god, this actually feels good! Give up the disempowering mental responses and move directly into your own athletic power.
Don’t think it, feel it!
Gilesy