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Both in week 1 and 2, the most annoying part for me has been itches, which crop up as soon as I’m still. Of course scratching them doesn’t help, they just reappear someplace else! Does anyone else have this issue, and how do you deal with it?
Certainly physical pain and some sort of threat to your making it through your meditation session are valid reasons to respond immediately to a distraction (a fire alarm, unbearable pain or numbness in a limb, an asthma attack, etc.), but you may be able to treat the itches as physical distractions. Acknowledge them and let them go. Since the itches keep reappearing, I would assume that they are distractions you are noticing because you have quieted down. If the itches are there outside of meditation, you may not be aware of them because your mind is occupied elsewhere. If they are not there outside of meditation, then the itches may be physical distractions to be dealt with in the same way as other distractions.
I used to constantly readjust because I felt my posture wasn’t correct, yet every time I shifted position, another twinge of misalignment would pop up. I eventually told myself that I had the first minute or so of my session to get my posture correct, and from that point on I had to trust my alignment and assume that the constant twinges were a result of the difficulty of quieting down and becoming present. I am now much better at acknowledging when I am truly falling out of alignment because I am not holding my posture and when my mind is just picking up on each and every physical sensation in my back and interpreting them as misalignments that require immediate attention, the latter being distractions that I let pass by just like distracting thoughts.
Ah, yes – I get problems with itches sometimes, too. To expand on what Joseph said, you might want to take a moment to notice your mind when the itches occur. You will notice that there are two things involved: the physical sensation of the itch itself, and the mind’s reaction to it. When I notice my mind, I notice it recoil, squirm, and send signals that say, “Do something!! Do something!!” All this is usually disproportional to the actual intensity of the itch. By itself, it is just a sensation, and if you try to open your mind a bit like we’ve been doing, often it will just eventually fade away. If it lasts too long, or gets too intense, I will usually just give in and scratch it.
I noticed at one point in my inner dissolving practice, that I would get itches in very inconvenient places, like the bottom of my foot, or on my butt right where I’m sitting, at points where I would start to go deeper in my dissolving. I wondered if this was some subconscious reaction trying to say, “Don’t go there!” – so I started to ignore the itches and just focus on the blockage. Has anyone else noticed that…?
Anyway, learning to deal with small uncomfortable sensations while meditating has some practicality. Sometimes we can deal with these sensations immediately, but from time to time we have situations in life where we can’t get rid of something, and we have to learn to deal with it. Learning to separate the sensation from the mind’s reaction to it can be a very useful tool.
Itching is sometimes a problem but usually by observing it, it simply goes away. Sometimes I will scratch and then go back to meditation, sort of start over because it usually happens right at the beginning. I also find that this tends to be more of a problem when I don’t meditate regularly.
I do get numb sometimes and this always occurs when I have gone like 5 to 10 minutes longer than what is my normal meditation time and so I usually quit at this point. If I meditate regularly this doesn’t seem to happen. I find it happens, for me, when I have been missing meditation for several weeks and I go back to it, then it will happen because I tend to go for to long a stretch the first few times.
The first week when I was doing the observing I developed a pain in my shoulder region and it really hurt. I stayed with it and observed it and got a very good sense of what the problem was. This has been with me since my daughter was born many years ago. The doctor literally pulled my arm out of the joint and I had it put back in then but it was never the same. Then I was in a car accident and the seat belt caused more problems with it but I was told there really wasn’t much that could be done. X-rays didn’t show anything, etc. So the pain would come and go. I have done other work with it, like hypnosis, and from this I found that the doctor who pulled it out in this life had also pulled this same arm out in a life many centuries ago. That time he saved my life since I had been shot with an arrow in this spot. At any rate when I stayed with it during meditation I found that there was a black spot in my shoulder and it was shaped like an arrow head. I continued to observe it and after a time it seemed to soften and the pain went away. So then I finished the meditation and the pain was nearly gone. The next night I meditated as usual and within a few minutes of becoming centered and beginning the observing I felt something like a fizzing, can’t really describe the feeling, in this same spot in my back and at that point I knew that it was all cleared. It has been a couple of weeks now and it has not returned in any way. At any rate I don’t exactly know if this is what dissolving a block is but I am very happy that by just observing this and staying with it I was finally able to have it heal.
I’ve had a few bouts of serious itching. The itches seem to be the only distraction I’ve been able to try the opening up around the distraction that Bruce suggested. The other kinds of distractions seem to move too quickly and take me over or just go away on their own. The itches lasted long enough to try out the opening, its pretty interesting! I think it must be the first time I’ve felt an itch in 3D, instead of on the surface of my skin like 2D. It did work to dissipate the itches all but one time, which was a maddening itch and I scratched my ear like a dog scratches a flea.
When i first started meditating, i would invariably always have an itch to scrath. it really bothered me, that i couldn’t keep it together. the itch was distracting me, the intense desire to scratch was distracting me. so then i came up with a risk-benefit ratio thing. i considered that even though it would mean that i would move, a big no no for some people in meditating, i came up with the idea that perhaps the desire to scratch was more distracting than breaking stillness would be. so if the itch came to mind and the thought “i am present to the itch” wasn’t enough, then i would just immediately scratch it and be done with whole debacle and move on.
much like getting distracted by ambient noise and getting sleepy. the longer i had this policy, and didn’t beat myself up about breaking stillness and moving, the more frequently the statement “i am present to the itch” would work. so now i very rarely stratch an itch (which i still invariably get)
keeping myself from sneezing, however, is a different thing….
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