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If you have a few minutes, it is well worth deepening your awareness of healthy sensations. The more you can turn on your curiosity and explore the "where" (in 3 dimensions) and the "what" of healthy sensations to get more and more detail, the deeper this "message" goes into the corners and depths of the primitive brain, and the more positive effect it has on your health.
You have to maintain this curiosity for at least 40 seconds to make sure that it reaches deep enough. Then remain aware of and follow the response for another couple of minutes. The whole point of the exercises I describe here is that we are deepening the communication between your conscious mind and the primitive parts of your brain that run your physiology.
It is that high quality communication that does the work. So this is NOT about changing anything by force – rather, we provide new information and your body decides how it is going to use that information.
I cannot have enough hours of silence when nothing happens. When the clouds go by. When the trees say nothing. When the birds sing. I am completely addicted to the realization that just being there is enough, and to add something else is to mess it all up.
Thomas Merton, When the Trees Say Nothing: Writings on Nature.
One of the recurring themes found throughout this book is simplicity. Facile simplicity goes nowhere, and is a convenient jingle. If the simplicity touches something profound, then one sign that it is this kind of simplicity is that - with attention to detail - it unpackages itself recursively, with more and more layers according to the depth of truth it contains, or regulartly invokes an unexpected depth of feeling. Such is a conversation with the Living world - the inner Living world of your body and he outer Living world described by Thomas Merton (above) and by many others. My first exposure to this some 40 years ago was probably "Walden" by Henry David Thoreau.
When you accidentally stumble [1]on that simplicity you will recognise it, and, if you remember to do so, it is well worth marinating in its glow for some minutes or longer, noticing its mental-emotional-somatic texture and geography.
All it takes is genuine interest / curiosity. If you do settle into genuine curiosity then 40 seconds will have come and gone before you know it. This may not be easy at first because of the way that survival physiology gives precedence to the left cortex (or no cortex at all). So as in all of the material I describe here, depth is best first experienced and learned when you are feeling your best. Once the neural pathways have been set up, it then becomes possible to attain when youre feeling less optimum. Which put another way - is to say that it's a skill that grows with attentive and reflective practice.
References & Notes