23 July

Exercise in un-narrowing (I just made up that word). Do you ever get pains while sitting at a desk, in your back or neck for example? Or pains while doing physical work of some kind? Our very common response to that is to narrow into the pain and treat it as a separate thing - we stretch or massage that spot, for example, as the woman in the picture is doing. Try going in the opposite direction. Broaden your awareness, so that this pain becomes a part of your broader awareness of that activity. That pain will then be 'legible' to you, you will start to feel it in context, "oh, I'm staring at this screen here, narrowing and blocking everything else out, and hunched right over the keyboard". A bit like the sort of awareness you'd have if you were sitting there chatting with friends instead, chances are you narrowed into the work activity and zoned out of the space around you, and that's what caused the pain in the first place.