Sitting with intense tension

[rara]

Sounds like you're naturally highly strung or that when you sit, you have other responsibilities on your mind. If your body is screaming at you, it must be for a reason...and maybe it has been conditioned this way.

Explore the tension, best you can. Treat it like a screaming baby...what can you tell it or provide to calm it down?

[LucidMind]

Wanted to give an update,

Since I created this thread I have been doing a 45 minute guided body scan meditation. When I previously had done mindfulness of breath for 30 minutes it seemed like forever. 30 minutes seemed to take 3 hours. However, the 45 minute body scan goes by extremely fast. When Jon Kabat-Zinn explains that the tape is over, it feels like I have only been doing it for a few minutes! Body scan is actual much easier and more pleasant for me to do than mindfulness of breath. I wonder why there is such a big difference

[BioSattva]

Wanted to give an update,

Since I created this thread I have been doing a 45 minute guided body scan meditation. When I previously had done mindfulness of breath for 30 minutes it seemed like forever. 30 minutes seemed to take 3 hours. However, the 45 minute body scan goes by extremely fast. When Jon Kabat-Zinn explains that the tape is over, it feels like I have only been doing it for a few minutes! Body scan is actual much easier and more pleasant for me to do than mindfulness of breath. I wonder why there is such a big difference

I love body scan more than mindfulness of breath too! Actually (as I've just posted on your other thread) it appears that the body scan is mindfulness of breath PLUS the body. It seems to root our whole organism more deeply. This is probably due to a Western 'mis-take', and thus habitual 'dis-ease', requiring us to 're-member'/'re-body' ourselves (those are all JKZ wordplays I have picked up from him). Here's JKZ, in Full Catastrophe Living (2005), p191:

...it had been recognized since the days of Hippocrates that the mind plays a major and sometimes primary role in disease and health. The virtual exclusion of the domain of the mind from the major currents in medical education was due mainly to the fact that, since the time of Descartes in the seventeenth century, Western scientific thinking has divided the intrinsic wholeness of being into separate, essentially noninteracting domains of soma (body) and psyche (mind). While these are convenient categories for facilitating understanding on one level, the tendency has been to forget that mind and body are separate in thought only. This dualistic way of thinking and seeing has so permeated Western culture that it had closed off the entire realm of mind-body interactions in health as a legitimate domain of scientific inquiry. Only very recently has this begun to change, as the major weaknesses of this dualistic paradigm have become apparent.

It seems we are so subconsciously thirsty for healing this divided mind/body problem that when we get into the bodyscan, it's like we've been on a desert island as a castaway and now we are back in civilisation and all the body wants to do is gorge itself on sandwiches - in the case of the bodyscan it is wholeness. All the limbs/members of our body are woken up again and joined together - re-membered! Time flies when we're enjoying ourselves eating sandwiches .

[LucidMind]

I love body scan more than mindfulness of breath too! Actually (as I've just posted on your other thread) it appears that the body scan is mindfulness of breath PLUS the body. It seems to root our whole organism more deeply. This is probably due to a Western 'mis-take', and thus habitual 'dis-ease', requiring us to 're-member'/'re-body' ourselves (those are all JKZ wordplays I have picked up from him). Here's JKZ, in Full Catastrophe Living (2005), p191:

It seems we are so subconsciously thirsty for healing this divided mind/body problem that when we get into the bodyscan, it's like we've been on a desert island as a castaway and now we are back in civilisation and all the body wants to do is gorge itself on sandwiches - in the case of the bodyscan it is wholeness. All the limbs/members of our body are woken up again and joined together - re-membered! Time flies when we're enjoying ourselves eating sandwiches .

Wow...that's exactly how I feel! It's like "ohhh, there's my body! Hello there old friend". I really like your desert island metaphor, it's so true. I'm p lanning on continuing practicing body scan for a few more weeks, and then throwing in mindfulness of breath again