Mindfulness of the Body (One of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness)

I don’t know why it is such a surprise to me, but I feel happy and content lately. Aside from the restlessness that pops up again and again with the storyline that I am missing something because I don’t have a mate, my life is working quite well. Maybe that restlessness really isn’t about that. Maybe it is just restlessness.

I used to feel panicky often. I used to wake up in the morning and freak out. I would lie there and analyze, “Why am I feeling this way? There must be a reason! And if I can figure out the reason, maybe I can do something about it.” After many years of that, I realized that the anxiety was just anxiety. The stories were constantly changing but there was always anxiety, no matter what the story about it was. I realized then that it was more just a physical sensation in my body. It had no reasonable explanation whatsoever. It was out of my control.

So I changed my strategy for dealing with it. I stopped looking for an explanation, a story about the anxiety. I stopped trying to do something about it. Instead I would just lie there and say to myself, “Wow, just notice how the body is feeling now. The body is tense and worried.” I let the feeling be and when stories started to try to explain the anxiety, I would remind myself of what I knew to be true, from experience, that there was no real story to explain this. I focused on the sensations in my body – the heart pounding, the sweating, the nausea, the mind racing to pin down what the danger was – and I just let it happen. When it was really bad and my mind got out of control, I would breathe in and say to myself, “Body.” I would breathe out and say to myself, “Calm.” Saying “Body-Calm” gave my mind something to do other than search for an explanation.

Recently I’ve realized that a lot of the time I am catching the panic before it even starts! I suppose I probably practiced this way for a good year before that happened. It did take time and practice. Now I wake up in the morning and I feel that hint of panic start up, but it is immediately crushed by the knowledge that it is just the same ol’. It is nothing new, nothing special, nothing important. It does not have any power over me any more. The mind has been trained not to go there. The mind has less of a compulsion to try to explain it. It has already been explained. Over and over and over. There is nothing new to panic about (well, unless my life was truly in danger for some reason).

Now that I have had some success with working with anxiety, I think it is time to apply this theory to restlessness. Restlessness is not as worried or afraid as anxiety. It is just a nagging sensation of something not being quite right. It is an urge to fill space. It is the feeling that maybe I should be doing something else. It has an element of doubt. It is discontent. It is not being entirely satisfied with the way things are, even when things are going pretty well. Restlessness also has distinct physical sensations, though much more subtle than panic and anxiety. There may be twitchiness, nail biting, the compulsion to move, the compulsion to do, a feeling of heaviness in the body, tightness in the chest, or tightness in the shoulders.

This stuff is subtle. But the key is to focus on the body instead of the story in the mind. The story I hear to explain the restlessness is, “I don’t have a mate.” My goal is to label that as a thought rather than believing the broken record that wants to play over and over. Perhaps another story might try to take its place. That too is just a thought and should be labeled as such.

The mind/ego wants to be real. It can really beat us up in an effort for us to believe it all and believe it is who we are. But the brain is just doing its job. The mind thinks. It isn’t always right and it isn’t me. The mind creates thoughts. The brain is just an organ that sends electrical impulses around. When we look at all the stuff that passes through our minds on a daily basis, we can see how messy it is! Sometimes we might wonder who it is that is thinking all that. Some of it can be really shocking. If I believe it is me thinking such horrible thoughts, I might have a great sense of shame or self-judgment. But the answer is that it is not me thinking all that. It is just my creative brain coming up with this stuff based on what is coming in from the senses: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching. And our minds also react to what the mind creates, resulting in circles of thoughts.

We can’t always stop what is coming in through our senses. But we can recognize that our brains are just reacting to whatever it is that is coming in. It is not personal.

It is all pretty complicated. We have information coming in from our senses that trigger body, mind and emotional responses. Our bodies react to our minds and our minds to our bodies. But the biggest way we get tripped up is in believing everything that happens in the mind. When I focus on the sensations in my body and just feel the physical sensations of what has arisen instead of getting my mind all wrapped up in it, the crisis passes much more quickly.