From the 8/23/2019 post in this blog:
In "Breath by Breath", Larry Rosenberg tried to avoid fidgeting in a group meditation when he was bitten by a mosquito. The bite itched but he didn't want to move or scratch. He found that if he attended to the exact sensations that darned bite produced, they were surprisingly complex, unstable and interesting. The itch comes and goes. It waxes and wanes but it is not steady or unchanging. Quite surprisingly varied. It is easy to say "I was bitten and it itched" but the reality was much more complicated.
Different pictures of many things can emerge when we attend carefully to what we see, experience and feel about the sights and sensations. It is like we have a zoom feature on our minds. We can zoom in on our toes and gently and fully attend to what we feel as we press our toes into the floor. We can sloooowly lift our toes up. We can rapidly lift our toes up. When sloooowly lifting our toes, can we clearly remember the sensations, the experience of lifting them very quickly? If not, try again.
See? We can put our minds into a zoom on our toes. Toes, legs, breath, taxes, tomorrow - we can put our minds in tiny places and in large, long, lovely places.
When we think of how sad it was that Aunt Rosie died, how irritating that we stupidly lost so much money in the casino, how much Uncle Gene bugs us, we can make a note to return to those difficult subjects later when we are in a better mood and are more capable of dealing. But in the meantime, let's deeply concentrate on each breath, on each note, on each scent. As the modern advocate of meditation, Jon Kabat-Zinn, advocates, we can actually, carefully nibble a single raisin, paying deep attention to each movement, each micro-movement and its result. We will get back to Gene and Rosie and our money later.
