Latest Training

 Long time, no write. Let's just say messing with your dietary restriction too much can really mess with your life. Thankfully I've come out and away from that with a better appreciation for living with a little more vitality and energy. It's easier when you're eating. That's one part of why I haven't been able to bring myself to write, not having enough energy to get to it on top of all the other things going on. Additionally, I would blame a circuitous buddhist rabbit hole for keeping me away from the keyboard. I've been through a lot of different experiences that may be too hard to put into words at this point, especially as they fade and distort in my memory. I feel a little sad that those experiences weren't put down along the way so i could process things a bit better but better late than never. I've also gotten married! And I'm working a pretty physical job so that has definitely put me in a place where I just wanna rest when I get home.

Now for training updates:

Working back into my climb ups but level 2 is very dependent upon wall grip. I would love to get a solid level 3 again but it will be awhile.

I've touched on my acro skills consistently in the last 3 years such that I've been able to maintain most of my skills but not push beyond them really.

Here's my list of fitness/flexibility goals from a year or so ago:

Strength/Strength Endurance
20 pulls
20 dips
20 pistols with kettlebell
20 HSPU
10 HSPRSU
LSIT 1 min
V-sit
front lever 30 sec
back lever 30 sec
Planche 30 sec (straddle)
straight arm press

Aerobic
Run 5-6 miles regularly
bike8-10 regularly

Flexibility
Frontsplits
Middle splits
Pancake
needle
back bend
kick over
front walkover
backwalkover
split planche

Parkour
9 foot broad jump
belly button box jump
basic flips and acro back. Set goals based on location/routes/video"

Okay so some of these things are ridiculous but a lot of it is just stuff I had in the past but lost after hormones/ not eating right/ not training. At some point I lost the will to interact with any of these kinds of goals and got into a more ephemeral spur of the moment style of parkour.

Anyways, i'm excited to start writing a little again just to start tracking my progress and making the best of where I am currently at. Honestly though I'm in a pretty good place mentally/physically but it also feels like I'm just sort of waking up again.

How to Be a Stoic (by Massimo Pigliucci) Review

I found this to be an enjoyable introduction to stoic philosophy. I came back to stoic thought through buddhism and its connection to cognitive behavioral therapy. CBT has helped me manage my food issues and I couldn't believe that its basis was actually in stoic philosophy. Even though I majored in philosophy in college, we somehow managed to skip stoicism altogether. I think this has something to to with the winnowing effect in philosophy where disciplines that started in philosophy go on to be redefined and specialized. At any rate, over the years I have become enamored by lived philosophies over purely academic ones and stoicism is incredible for this.

Massimo delivers his intro to the subject in a wonderfully candid and personal way. He provides anecdotes from his own life to illustrate stoic concepts. It doesn't feel preachy, however, as he often mentions how he is struggling to hold up to the standards of the ancients. In demonstrating his humility, he appears as merely a knowledgeable companion to world of the stoics. He also manages to hold a sort of dialogue with Epictetus throughout the book which is reminiscent of other ancient philosophical texts. 

My favorite part of the book is actually the practical exercises at the end. Stoicism asks us to actively practice its precepts, not merely to read them and have done with it. This is a refreshing call to action that is actually the attitude which turned me away from academic philosophy and into buddhist meditation practices. To find a rich tradition with similar but differently arrived at practices within western philosophy has been a nice treat and it feels like my exploration is just beginning.

Learning Improvisation, Inducing Flow

At the risk of sounding like a "porthole"- a nickname I lovingly apply to the followers of the movement guru, Ido Portal- one way to think about line/skill development is to go through these three stages:

Isolation-> Integration->Improvisation


With isolation we drill a specific movement pattern over and over again until it's smooth. That's our vault practice, for example, but any single movement counts. With integration, we chain together our repertoire of pre-practiced movements into a continuous line. Since we have cleaned up our single movements so well, the task is to put together smooth transitions between one movement to the next. No excess energy is wasted. Finally we have the improvisation part where we move continuously through our environment, mixing up the routes we've drilled in a spontaneous manner such that new sets of movements and lines are discovered rather than just pre-planned from the get go.

At any stage along the path, we can randomly drop into the coveted "flow state" of mind. Time may slow down or speed up. We become highly concentrated, forgetting everything else in our lives except what is happening right here, right now. The act of putting ourselves in situations where we must be so highly concentrated (to make a rail pre, to avoid falling on our head when tumbling) induces this flow state. This state feels so good and so meaningful, I think it's secretly the reason a lot of us are doing parkour at all, regardless of what our stated reasons may be.

I've learned that this state of mind comes up in most disciplines requiring us to pay close attention. In meditation, it can be induced simply by sitting down and following the breath! When I learned that little tidbit, I had a little crisis. Why bother risking my body throwing it around on metal,trees, and concrete when I can just sit and breathe? Well I chose both, and it seems that both practices are mutually beneficial. If we train inducing the flow state on the cushion, we can use it in daily life for the mundane things too. Additionally, we can apply the flow state to the entire skill development process from isolation up to improvisation instead of just waiting for it to happen randomly. Flow state and improvisation go hand in hand. Done right, the mover will drop in and out of the known movement patterns and the unknown just on the edge of their abilities. Some people live for that feeling, some people dive out of planes in wing suits for that feeling.

Wait a second, does anybody ever get to the improvisation part? Probably lots of people do, but it might be hard to find a video of it.  Usually someone builds a line, drills it a ton until it is smooth enough to put up on instagram, then wipes their hands clean of it and moves on to the next clip. The improvisation aspect is one of the most important parts to me and most often happens when the camera is off. Once you become familiar with a location from training there so often, you can spend most of your time in improvisation mode, spontaneously discovering new routes. Your ability to improvise determines your adaptability to new environments as well. Flow and improv are the keys to making every session valuable regardless of whether or not you got the clip for the next video.

Finally once you've been training for awhile, the 3 stage distinction tends to blend together. Just drilling one movement can become an exercise in flow because every aspect of the way you move between the reps of drilling a new movement become part of the continuous "line" that you're doing. In a sense, every movement you do is part of one continuous line and you're always "training" so to speak. Of course, when you get distracted and stub your toe on a curb, you might not feel so flowy anymore. But seriously, even bails can become part of the process. Apply the the skill development process, orient your practice around inducing flow, and you'll never have a bad session.

Counting Apples and Refined Emotions

I heard a talk from a peculiar monk named Ajahn Sona about lovingkindness that has opened a door in my mind for something very interesting. In order to explain how a person can cultivate positive emotional states in meditation, he gave an analogy: We teach children how to count by using familiar objects like apples. We say, "1 apple plus 2 apples makes 3 apples". Eventually we take away the apples and they can just understand "1 + 2 = 3". Similarly we have emotional reactions to situations, people, our own behaviors, and our conditions. We feel love, anger, joy, sadness, etc. in response to all of this stimulus. But just like when we take away the apples and just work with the numbers, we can drop the conditions that cause emotions to arise and just work with the emotional states. We can combine, increase, or decrease our emotional experience without the outside stimulus that was required to initially experience these things.

This is an emotional shortcut. Instead of waiting for the right situation to arise or the right outcome, we can just evoke the emotional experiences we want to have. It's as if, for our entire lives, we have been playing a strict game with rules like "you are only allowed to laugh in situation x, y, z, or only feel appreciative about this thing if this, this, and this happens". And most of our behavior is actually driven by trying to achieve these emotional states. There's nothing wrong with seeking out pleasurable experiences but the unfortunate part is that things don't always go so well. In fact, there are times when some things just can't go well, and can never be better. Life can be terribly tragic in that way. If our emotional dispositions are entirely based on things "going our way" we will be fraught with dissapointment. 

So what if we deliberately detach our emotional structures from the world around us and reconnect them in a completely different way? It's possible to eliminate deep seated behavioral structures that cause us and other people harm in our lives. This skill of emotional flexibility could help us to adapt to any situation. It's clear that the default emotional structures we have (the factory settings) have helped us to survive and flourish in a completely different environment than the ones we currently inhabit. Why be a slave to this evolutionary hangover? Furthermore, why be a slave to our particular cultural/social upbringing which puts limits on our ability to feel? Why not experience our emotional life in a refined way just as we do with our intellectual life?

Anyways I know this all sounds a little bit out there, but I have personally experienced some of this "emotional decoupling" with the world. There is a pretty straightforward procedure for acquiring this kind of emotional flexibility. Here are a few basic ideas:

1. Ping your emotional structures. Use imagery or mental talk to evoke an emotional response. A cherished memory or recent experience can trigger a positive emotional response. I will even use the feeling of hugging someone as a way to induce lovingkindness. As a meditation, you could "ring your emotional bell" hundreds of times in a session. That is, you can repeat and essentially practice an emotion more in meditation than the arena of daily life will ever allow you.

2. Once you get a feeling, drop the stimulus and just hold onto the emotional feelings that come up. Let the feeling spread and move, morph and increase.

3. Spend time actively making positive associations. For any given postive thing that happens in life, we can contrast it with something negative, or we can use it as a reminder of other postive things to appreciate and dwell on. Often our default habit is to dwell on what's going wrong but it's possible to see what's going right more and more of the time, with practice. People tend to think that seeing what is wrong with something makes them smart or informed. The reality is they're only seeing half of the story.

4. If you suffer from excessive negativity, practice deconstructing your thoughts and emotions by noting them mindfully as they come up. Divide and conquer until you can have enough calm and equanimity with your inner experience.

Finally, another piece of wisdom from an old monk: once you lay the emotional ground for positive emotional states, good speech and action can follow. A mind coming from a place of love motivates completely different behaviors than one coming from distress.

My first meditation "retreat"

Not According to Plan
So I did a home retreat over the course of the weekend beginning friday through to Sunday. I had intended to do saturday and sunday as full 18 hour days of meditation but I hit a hiccup along the way that completely derailed me. By home retreat, I mean that I was to spend all of my time meditating in my room only taking breaks to go to the bathroom. Eating and stretching between bouts of sitting and walking were also to be done in a meditative manner. I also had contact with a teacher (Shinzen Young) on the phone during part of the process. His home practice program is only supposed to go for 4 hours but I wanted to do a longer retreat. He gave instructions and answered questions at certain periods. This is a very valuable resource to have considering that I was mostly on my own. I succeeded with this up to the 2nd day for quite some time but had very powerfully disorienting experiences that made me afraid to continue with the practice. What was supposed to be about a 40 hour retreat experience dropped down to about 17 hours. That's still more than I have ever done though and the results were ultimately pretty amazing.

Day 1: Easy and Enjoyable
The first night was quite nice, mindfulness of breathing exercises, expansion and contraction. We ran through a few different basic breathing practices and chose to work on whichever we felt was best for us. After the guided portion, I completed 4 more sessions of alternating 30 minutes sitting and walking meditation.

Day 2: Disorientation, Distrust, and a Hint of Ego Death
The second day I started with a walking meditation outside and then alternated sitting, walking, stretching and laying down meditation. Yes I learned to meditate laying down without falling asleep! That was a nice way to take a lot of the difficulty out of holding a posture for awhile. I ultimately wanted to break through the pain of posture at some point but the longest sit that I did was about 45 minutes. If I experienced too much difficulty, I switched to a laying down mode. If too sleepy, walking. If too stiff, stretching. It was nice to use my options and not be too dogmatic about it. I was mostly doing a choiceless awareness technique that had me noting my inner and outer sensations. I experienced the world as a set of vast, changing sensations. Honestly though I spend most of time focusing out rather than in and I knew that was a weak point for me so by the end of this period I started restricting my focus to inner sensations, creating equanimity there.

When the guided session rolled around, we did a sort of twist on the usualy mindfulness technique. We used a zen koan idea to turn our awareness back on itself. I usually am using my attention to attend to objects but the instruction was to turn back when I noticed the intention to turn toward any sensory experience. I did this probably 100s or more more times for all my different sense categories, turning awareness back on itself. The usual sense of self as being in the head somewhere behind the eyes was starting to be slowly picked at. Thus my disorientation and fear of ego death arose. It just freaked me out. We alternated with the normal see hear feel technique, then went back to self enquiry. Again, profound confusion. There is really nowhere to turn to to find a self when one really looks, it's just sensations all the way down. The technique is supposed to bring confusion and disorientation and we are supposed to have equanimity with those feelings. I, however, did not trust my meditation technique anymore because it seemed to be causing some distress, I felt like I needed to get out and just be done with the whole process, to go back to the normal way of feeling like the decider and doer of my own actions, of having a complete sense of self, not a partially degraded one. So I stopped that night and went to my partner's house for comfort and solace, and something normal but I didn't feel normal at all. Just scared and slightly unhinged. I thought I had maybe bitten off more than I could chew.

Day 3: Reconstruction
The next day I felt much better, much more calm about things. The official program that day was all about reconstructing oneself with positive emotions and resful states in the body. I still felt distrustful of meditation in general but I finally came around to understanding that I needed to trust the technique to find solace in my own mind, that I could deal with bouts of fear and ego death with equanimity if I could just continue to apply the technique correctly. Also I probably needed to spend some more time with reconstructive techniques in order to balance out all the hours of deconstructive techniques I had done. So that's what we did, I found rest and profound comfort, love, appreciation over the course of about 4 hours. I also got to speak with the teacher. He reminded me that I am in control and that the fear was to be expected, and more importantly, not to take on more than one can handle. I was trying to lift way heavier weights than I was ready for just yet. I feel like such a noob with all of this but I know if I had been at a residential retreat where I could speak with a teacher one a one a little more regularly, I would have gotten through my crisis much faster. Such is learning and the pitfalls of the DIY approach. But I have come back with experience!

Also I forgot to mention I learned a new walking meditation technique that had to do with 'moving without intention" which is something I have been working on with parkour pretty regularly so it felt very natural and freeing compared to the Mahasi style walking I have been getting used to.

Learning
The main resulting effects over the last few days have been a much deeper sense of ease and fulfillment with life. My mind has felt less sticky, less prone to getting perturbed by anything at all. Also the habit of meditating starts to do itself whenever I am not directly attending to something which is nice because it means I am not just ruminating randomly. But I can feel the effects starting to wear off, the mind attaching to things more often, getting caught up. It's pretty fascinating to see the differences and it motivates me to continue to turn these state changes into full-on trait changes.

Other things I learned and re-emphasized:

Try to find a comfortable place to do your retreat, no point in making it more uncomfortable than it needs to be. My room got very hot at during the middle of the day and added some unnecessary difficulty. That said, it is wonderful to have a place of my own to train my mind. I feel very lucky to have it.

Be willing to change posture, position as needed to facilitate technique (unless breaking through a posture is your specific goal).

Laying down is a wonderfully restful technique that can be done without falling asleep.

There are many different styles of walking meditation, it just depends on what you are trying to do

Having options to change technique on the fly makes the practice more interesting and dynamic. One can proceed based off of "Interest, opportunity, or necessity" as Shinzen says

Anything can be a meditation! Being mindful is a certain way to pay attention and my goal is to get myself to a place where mindful awareness is my default, while discursive thought is optional.

Trust the technique. It has worked for me in the past, to create peace and equanimity in my body/mind especially in the midst of powerful emotions. It just takes time.

Meditation is a numbers game!

Keep the momentum going, concentration can fade quickly if fragmented by daily life stuff or whatever

Don't freak out, a vast resevoir of peace and joy is always on tap if need be

It's worth every second to help make oneself a little less sticky, a lot less crazy.

Also just because I know I used some confusing terminology, I mostly drawing from the Unified Mindfulness system of meditation by Shinzen Young  and some things from The Mind Illuminated by Culadasa which is a shamatha-vipassana type of approach. Both systems are but Shinzen's is a little more updated/easier to understand while Culadasa's is a little more traditional.

Divide and Conquer Strategy

This is coming straight out of the Unified Mindfulness practice. Something I posted in the some weight loss forums I have been visiting.

Another meditation technique.

This one requires focusing in and labeling 3 different strands of inner sensory activity

“See” will note mental imagery

“Feel” will note emotional body sensations

“Hear” will note mental talk

As sensations arise in these three different categories, note them by mentally saying these labels with a gentle, matter of fact inner voice. If they are really intense, focus on just one category for a little bit: just see, just, feel, or just hear. Dividing them up makes them more manageable and you’re less likely to get overwhelmed. Do this before, after, or even during a meal and it can make the cravings dissolve right away (depending on how much you practice). Let me know what you guys think about this. It works incredibly well for me. Hope it can help others  

How I got into mindfulness practice

This is an exercise I did for a teacher training course I am taking but it was a lot of writing and thinking so I feel like I should put it up: ● Why did you start practicing mindfulness? Were there problems you were hoping it would solve? I started practicing for a variety of reasons. I have always been inspired by Shaolin monks from old kung fu movies and the Jedi from star wars so my interest in meditation started very early in my life. I always knew it was something important even if I didn't fully understand it. It became something I naturally gravitated to as I got older and some of the "adult problems" set in. I wanted to lose weight but was having issues with controlling my behavior and emotions around food. I am a transgender woman and have persistent gender dysphoria. I needed something to help me be emotionally stable so I could progress with all the other things I had going on. I had issues focusing on prep work for grad school and the writing projects/interests I wanted to pursue. My attention felt split and I wanted the control, precision, and concentration that I had when I did my parkour practice. I wanted to experience spontaneous states of flow and calm arising without it being dependent on throwing my body around on concrete. I work as a caregiver and needed to have more compassion for the person I was taking care of in order to not give into frustration or boredom with simple tasks. My second job is as a parkour/gymnastics instructor mostly with children and I needed to have a lot of patience to overcome frustration there too. Looking back it seems that I have a sort of complicated life but all of these things have been massively improved and made manageable with mindfulness practice. ● How did you learn to practice mindfulness? A course? Working with a teacher one on one? So not counting my random misguided attempts as a teenager, I started actually practicing concentration meditation on the breath after reading B. Alan Wallace's books on shamatha and watching his videos on youtube a few years ago. I would do it before and during work to keep calm and patience. I was inspired by the idea of having strong directed attention abilities, a "mind like a laser" as he says. I have always been inspired by the idea of having above average mental/physical abilities, like a superhero or Jedi or a monk. Why merely settle for being an average human when you could be super? My pursuit of self actualization was mostly in the physical realm and intellectual sphere but I was just starting to get an inkling of the the contemplative life. I went to school for philosophy but found that the intellectual pursuit didn't help me solve my problems with gender dysphoria or food related issues. In fact, I just became more confused and helpless by the endless intellectualization and doubt. I wanted to live a philosopher's life, not just read about one. Still I kept consuming podcasts and watched videos on Buddhist meditation practice. Stuff from Buddhist Geeks and the Secular Buddhist Podcast. I found some of Daniel Ingram's work on Dharma Overground. I listened to dhamma talks by Gil Fronsdale, Bhikkhu Bodhi, Ajahn Brahm, and Ajahn Amaro explaining Buddhist doctrine. I somehow came across Shinzen's "5 Ways to Know Yourself", a precursor to UM. It made so much sense because it perfectly encompassed the various strands of Buddhist philosophy and practice I had spent so much time studying. He took all those strands and made them very clear. I listened to his "Science of Enlightenment" audiobook several times over and did the same with the "5 Ways". I alternated back and forth between Shinzen's work and the early sources of Buddhist wisdom in the Pali Canon. "In the Buddha's Words" by Bhikkhu Bodhi, the "Guide to the Bodhisattva's way of life by Shantideva, and "Old Path White Clouds" by Thich Nhat Hanh are just a few among countless books I keep sucking up like a sponge. Concentration practice was nice and made me feel good but didn't last very long or help with deeper issues. I knew I was supposed to do more insight practices eventually so I climbed up into a tree one day and decided to give vipassana meditation a try. I was immediately overwhelmed with sensations, like I was being rained on. I didn't really know what to do with that until I found Shinzen's work. My practice was sporadic for a year or two until finally a more consistent practice with mindfulness became a thing. I started practicing with one of my housemates just 10 minutes per night and I learned that I could use micro-hits during all the deadspaces in my day (waiting in line at the store, sitting at the doctor's office, etc.) I at some point realized that my progress is really just a numbers game and have sought to up my amount of daily practice by getting as much in when and wherever I can. I have actually been tracking my time and I average about 30 minutes a day currently but some days will be two hours of formal practice, other days not so much. The more I do, the better I feel. ● What were some of the challenges you faced and how did you overcome them? Boredom and impatience came pretty quickly in the beginning. A part of me could not see how practicing meditation was going to make me happier or better at anything. A part of me thought it was just a waste of time. I got over these issues by, as Gil Fronsdale would say "becoming really interested in them". So I recognized the resistance I had to meditation could immediately give me feedback on the nature of that resistance and just being uncomfortable in general. Seeing how my mind would resist helped to dissolve the resistance and help me continue without any problems. Now I rarely feel bored or impatient with the practice. Consistency was difficult for me because I felt like there was so much to "figure out" and I could be spending time on intellectual understanding instead of just groping around in the dark, gazing at my navel. But I was receiving better calm, focus, and understanding from sporadic bursts of meditation and when I realized how I was being affected in a positive way, that reward gave me the trust that I would receive even more benefits with more practice. Dullness and sleepiness are still problems I am contending with but I seem to be making a lot of progress with them by noticing earlier and earlier when dullness sets in. As soon as I notice, I straighten my spine. If that doesn't work, I open my eyes. I then switch to subvocalizing my labels for noting until the dullness subsides and I am back on track. If all else fails, walking meditation works 100% of the time. ● Before practicing mindfulness did you have ideas about it that later turned out to be inaccurate? Write down what these were and how the discoveries you made through practicing changed your ideas. The Stoic Repression of Emotion Spock, the Jedi, and the stoic greek/roman philosophers all gave me the impression that repressing my emotions was the goal. My choice was to be a cold, unfeeling robot ruled only by reason or a complete emotional wreck, a slave to my passions. Similarly the concept of No-Self in Buddhism had me equating it with "no personality". Any form of aesthetic affectation or personality quirks were to be looked down on and seen as a reflection of my untamed mind or attachment to selfhood. I got over this by seeing the expressiveness of the the Dalai Lama or Thich Naht Hanh or other monks from the various traditions. Clearly there was a middle ground where people were free to express their emotions and personalities but they were also FREE OF the negative aspects of these things. Also Shinzen's conception of radical acceptance of one's emotions giving a person the ability to choose what to express just blew my mind. In my practice, I found this idea to be completely true. I became more honest about my feelings with others, I let myself laugh fully, and I became less caught and therefore more in control of my emotional regulation. I could have my cake and eat it too, so to speak. Mindfulness is not deep enough. I felt that the sentimental sounding mindfulness practices espoused in articles and material coming from the "new age" section was just too shallow compared to the grander claims of Buddhism, of the enlightened sage. B. Alan Wallace and others had me thinking that the basic practices given out in your typical mindfulness program don't really lead into deep insights or massive meditative milestones like stream entry. These practices are just for stress, reduction, just being a little less anxious. I think this is true to some extent still but after investigating the various Buddhist paths and comparing it to the framework of UM, it's easy to see that the shallow end of the pool benefits along with the deep end are both there. UM has something to offer anybody, even those who want to go really deep with their practice. ● What have some of the rewards and benefits of mindfulness been for you? My gender dysphoria has decreased immensely. Being misgendered in public or by my friends and family no longer crushes me like it used to as I now have a strong buffer between others and my reactions to what they say. I have managed to finally have the resolve and control with food craving such that I have been able to lose weight at a steady pace after years of failing. I work with children on a daily basis and the depths of calm and patience I can bring to my instruction has only made me a better, more compassionate teacher. I used to get incredibly frustrated but I now feel privileged to work with children. I am also a caregiver for a quadriplegic man. The job requires a lot of patience, compassion, and somewhat tedious work. I have learned to enjoy every second of it mindfully. My relationships with my parents, friends and partner have all improved dramatically. I am not so caught up in my own problems and can be available for those in need. ● Can you remember 1 to 3 defining moments on your journey with mindfulness? Moments where you had a significant insight, or you made a shift in your relationship to it, or you had a particular experience that brought home the power of practice? It could be as simple as that moment you started practicing consistently or a time you really found yourself able to be in the present moment. Write these down and explore at least one in detail. I often would find that I had solved a problem for myself mentally with UM and it was easy to see how others would have the same problem and be completely lost. Usually it was an emotional regulation problem or an attention issue. This immediately made me feel total compassion for them because I know now intimately what it's like like to be completely caught up and what it's like to not be. As I spend less time in useless rumination or negative ideation, the more I see how others problems stem from there. I take the bus to work every day so this sudden compassion for others who are struggling has become a daily occurence as people on the lowest end of the socioeconomic ladder have endless emotional difficulties. Instead of being annoyed or aversive like I used to be, I have found myself coming to aid other people when I can with hardly a second thought. This is not something I expected at all. My relationship to pain has completely changed. The first time I sat for an hour and felt excruciating pain through my left leg, I stopped to stretch it out only to find that I was perfectly fine! Slowly I learned to be with the pain and experience it as a vibratory, flowing sensation. More importantly it became completely manageable. I would even welcome it since it is such a strong sensory object and it combats dullness. So my relationship to all pain has dramatically changed because I get more interested in it rather than just getting overwhelmed. I'd rather not experience pain, but I know how to deal with it if I have to.