Focusing Tip #464
“I often feel sensations in the head area when I check in with my body for a feeling.”
Maryanne writes:
You suggest checking in with the throat, chest, and belly area but I often feel sensations in the head area when I check in with my body for a feeling. For example, tightness around the eyes or in the temples, pulsing inside my head, pressure in the upper part of my head. What would you suggest? Saying hello to this and then waiting for a place “more central?” Or staying with these sensations?
Dear Maryanne:
It’s an interesting question and there are several levels to the answer.
The first thing to say is that we accept what comes, in the way it comes, in the place it comes, at the intensity it comes…We respect that this has come this way, and in this place, for a good reason.
So if you invite your body to give you its sense of something going on in your life, or of how you are right now, and what comes is this tightness in the eyes: OK! That is what is coming. You would be with that…describe it further…and so on.
We also know that the location of what comes is changeable — what I feel now in the eyes, I might soon feel in the throat as well (or instead). I am open to that happening, and to be open in that way I need to keep a kind of awareness in more of my body than just the one place I am sensing.
So then we might be asking: If we are open to what comes anywhere in the body, why mention especially the throat, chest, and belly area?
It’s because we do have a bit of a bias toward that middle area. Felt senses are more likely to arise there. So we start by sensing in the middle area — and at the same time we are open to what comes elsewhere.
If you have a choice — if you have a pain in your toe and an aching in your heart — you might want to go with the aching in the heart. It’s more likely to be a felt sense and not just a physical sensation, and so it’s more likely to open up and show you more when you stay with it.