Vipassana Meditation Day 24

am 1hr

Different every time. Awake at 4-something. At just before five in the house in Alresford, I got the thick blanket around me, sat on some cushions, feet on a sheepskin, wrapped in another blanket against the minus five air beyond the window. Mostly in my head the hour long, some problems presented themselves clearly, and otherwise often half dreamed the time by.

pm 1hr

The feeling of reaching out to something else, somewhere I think I’d rather be. The anxiety and instability this causes! Unsettled and grasping, desperate. In awareness, this feeling of ‘elsewhere’ was negated and suddenly here I am, right in the present. Time to breathe, time to move in a very different way, through the body. A feeling that I need infinite time for this, give me more than an hour. For what? Across the tingly scalp and into the deader forehead, eyebrows, bridge of the nose. The nose! Suddenly I am in my nose. I am my nose. It’s become very tense. The entire nose has elongated, seemingly and tightened. A little into the area below the nostrils but mainly the fleshier parts of the nose. OK then. That lasted a wile and then I’m in the lips, and moving into an extreme pout of sorts. This moves and changes, each time ending in the thousand needles feeling. This time the tension/release reached into the gums and deep into the jaws. Then an full open mouth, but not a yawn. Wider. Rounder. Then a kind of Stephen Hawkins thing with the lower jaw. Here, the shoulders hunched and the back arched and the body started tilting forward, forward until the top of the head met the floor. Oh. OK then. And there I stayed, mouth relaxing out, feeling the upper back, breathing deep and fast and full in a kind of exhaustion. Eventually it felt there was a possibility of coming back upright without forcing it, so slowly I came up. What a novelty to be straight again! It had only been some minutes but it felt so new. Soon afterwards it was all over.