20240903 - Embracing What Is Here

The mind and the body are deeply interconnected and mirror each other in their functioning. When the mind is stressed the body will tense up. When the body is tense it will lead to stressful thoughts. This creates a feedback loop where stress and fear will circle around between body and mind until the cycle is broken in some way. This is quite an uncomfortable state to be in, both mentally and physically and our default way to deal with discomfort is to fix it by thinking our way out of it. However, this is usually not a very good idea because our mental capacity is reduced quite a bit and our perspective is heavily distorted by the stress and fear. Basically, in this state, we are idiots. A much more useful approach is to first meet the discomfort in the body, before trying to deal with the thing that we think is causing the discomfort. When this is done with presence we discover new approaches to deal with the issue that works better or we realise that there is no problem in the first place, that the problem was caused by us trying to avoid the discomfort.