Vipassana Meditation Feb 9

The pain takes me to the edge of what I can stand, the edge of myself even. I suspect this is what karma really is: the actions of the past are right here, embedded within us, locked in as stuckness, as ache, stiffness, tension. What goes around comes around, or maybe never left. We cannot get away with anything. But give it space and dare to feel and pay attention, in an atmosphere of awareness and equanimity and it starts to change, unfold, disperse. This is a right action, a karma undoer. You can’t will a pain to disperse, that’s furthering the same action that got you in this situation in the first place, but you can listen, feel, see, and the purity of that attention determines the rate of change. I just made that rate bit up; it’s not clear to me, but it does seem more instant in more complete awareness and slower in partial attention. Take a simple pain in my jaw. If I’m off somewhere else, thinking about last or this evening. In daily life I might not even notice it. In sitting, the experience is of pain, a bother, nothing much. Hone in on it, and allow it to have an expression, reveal itself and it grows and grows in severity. Keeping calm, watching, it gets so strong, overwhelming almost and then *!* it’s over. No pain. I suspect without the watcher experiencing it’s over in a flash, but in this dualistic game this is how it’s playing out.