Subtle notes

61 thoughts
last posted Oct. 26, 2019, 4:03 p.m.

39 earlier thoughts

0

One exhilarating and just plain cool thing to do, once I realized I could do it, is "jumping into my bloodstream." This applies whenever I feel my pulse, e.g. while sitting down on a park bench just after a brisk walk. I can distinctly feel my heartbeat. This means that my perspective is stationary; I'm sitting there watching my blood pumping by, like a river surging in spurts. What I found is that quick attunement to a single beat can send me flying down the river and back round again—and that I can stay with the flow, such that I no longer feel the beat. It's like jumping into a game of Double Dutch, or grabbing onto a rope tow at the ski hill. The rope keeps flying by; you wait for your chance to grab on; you finally find your moment, and then you're off to the races, no longer stationary. It's also like the difference, for a surfer, between letting the waves go by and catching one of them.

I've also found that it can be done in layers. I recently felt my pulse in my stomach. I dove into the beat and found that some of my awareness was in the stream and some of my awareness was still feeling the beat. I continued to focus on the stream by jumping into each pulse as it arrived, and soon all my awareness was scooped up into the stream and I no longer felt the beat. Kind of like parents encouraging their kids to join them on the moving merry-go-round until the whole family is spinning. :-)

21 later thoughts