Notes from 3/25/16 (1 of 3):
In bed, both before going to sleep and after waking up, I find it increasingly easy to let my inner gaze rest on the contours of my resistance, particularly as it appears in the form of a knot in my stomach. It seems I've always got a bit of a stomachache but I don't know it until I sink into it, draping myself over the topography of this resistance. The third eye directs the show, bringing a relaxed but intense, broad but laser-like focus to bear on the little knot. I don't primarily experience this visually; it is rather like a mirrored kinesthetic representation of my whole body in my forehead, e.g. tension in my stomach appears simultaneously as tension in and around my forehead. If as when waking up I am focused and not reactive, then the gaze is allowed to sink more deeply, bringing the stomach tension into clearer "view", often resulting in physical shifts like stomach growling or passing gas.
If I rest there long enough, a transition begins to take place. What I was experiencing as resistance to me shifts into resistance that is me. More concretely, what was a feeling of external resistance (which I drape myself over) becomes a global feeling that floods my body. The resistance penetrates like a knife and fills me. I am now inside the knot. A secretion of lactic acid, or adrenalin (or some other hormone?), emanates from the knot like a slow-motion explosion, or the injection of a gradual but rapid hot flash (at which point I may need to throw the covers off). It is painful and suffocating, but if I remain calmly unflinching it quickly dissipates and a new plateau of resistance—external again—can be experienced.
Mentally, I'm mostly quiet, but I do go back and forth between, on the one hand, showing a humble interest in seeing the resistance, and, on the other hand, wanting to overcome it so as to release it. I find that release is faster when I'm less interested in release and more interested in the nature of the resistance itself, without any agenda. That said, when the third eye is locked on, the descending penetration seems inevitable, suggesting indeed that resistance is futile.
I also sometimes wonder if I'm really doing anything at all, or if I've just discovered a high-maintenance way to digest my food. ;-)