Shower Thoughts
Jul. 22nd, 2024 10:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jakebeI picked up a "meditation game" on Steam sometime ago called PLAYNE. It's a neat little thing; you meet a Sensei Fox out in the wilderness who drip-feeds lore about the realm you're in, but it's really a thinly-veiled way to get you to build the meditation habit. As your streak grows, nature heals around your campfire and eventually you get to plant trees, invite birds, all that stuff.
But it's all centered around the core mechanic, teaching you how to meditate and encouraging you to build the habit of it. The basic meditation gives you a visual cue to time deep breaths, then tell you to just click the mouse when you notice a thought. Sensei Fox tells us that our thoughts are...anything that takes us away from the physical sensation of our breaths.
"I am cold." That's a thought. Click the mouse.
"I wonder if my breath still follows the timer." That's a thought. Click the mouse.
My brain serves a memory of my childhood. That's a thought. Click the mouse.
It's a very good re-centering process. The breath provides a space for me to actually watch my thoughts and notice what they are, what they're about.
I traditionally meditate with Insight Timer, an iOS app for my iPhone. It's simple enough and has a solid community with a large library of spiritual talks and guided meditations. Before, I don't think I was holding space to be truly aware of my thoughts; I was just...allowing myself to sit with them. But when the final bell rings and I'm off the bench, if you'd ask me what I had been thinking about I would have no idea.
With PLAYNE, the small shift of remembering to pay attention to my thoughts changes the energy I bring in to the meditation.
Yesterday, I was noting the usual cluster of thoughts that happen, but one kept rising up in various forms: "I am dirty." I noticed that each time this thought would arise, I'd feel an increasing need to flinch from the shame it generated. The night before, Sneppers recommended I shower before bed -- but I was so tired, I just fell asleep anyway.
But the shame felt...bigger than the circumstances warranted. I showered on Saturday and not Sunday, so why did I feel so bad about this?
I remembered this time from my childhood when I was riding the bus home from school. It had been...an active day and my deodorant had failed, so my armpits were pretty ripe. It was a full bus, standing room only, so I had to lift my arm to hold on to the pole that keeps you from falling all over. This girl next to me could smell me easily, and talked loudly to her friend about how bad I smelled. But, you know, it's a full bus and I'm on my way home; there's nothing I can do but stand there and pretend I can't hear her next to me.
Is that the moment when I internalized this...idea? "I am a dirty person." I'm learning now that I was raised with different grooming standards than most; we didn't have showers, so we washed up at the sink three times a week, then took a bath every week. It seemed OK to me, but it wasn't the first time I had been called out for smelling bad.
Exploring that a bit, I made the mindful decision to let go of that shame. I acknowledged I smelled bad, told myself I would take a shower when I was done with meditation, and looked forward to being clean. That's all it had to be.
It felt like this weird breakthrough to realize how much I had been...reinforcing this subconscious narrative that locked me into shame-bound behavior. I'd feel bad about not showering, and...to avoid feeling bad about it I would just...not think about it, distract myself with something else. I guess because the emotion was so hard to feel I couldn't...move into the other part of the process, putting on my big-boy pants, swallowing the discomfort, doing it anyway.
But now I can feel my feelings AND be clean!
I'm not sure other folks get this way, where the emotions around some simple thing become so intense you just can't do it. But learning where they come from so you can let that shit go feels...pretty amazing.
And I know this is a process. I'm not going to suddenly have the consistency to shower every day. But at least for now, it's easier to acknowledge and respond to the knotty feelings that arise whenever I think about grooming. It's a small victory, but a win is a win.
But it's all centered around the core mechanic, teaching you how to meditate and encouraging you to build the habit of it. The basic meditation gives you a visual cue to time deep breaths, then tell you to just click the mouse when you notice a thought. Sensei Fox tells us that our thoughts are...anything that takes us away from the physical sensation of our breaths.
"I am cold." That's a thought. Click the mouse.
"I wonder if my breath still follows the timer." That's a thought. Click the mouse.
My brain serves a memory of my childhood. That's a thought. Click the mouse.
It's a very good re-centering process. The breath provides a space for me to actually watch my thoughts and notice what they are, what they're about.
I traditionally meditate with Insight Timer, an iOS app for my iPhone. It's simple enough and has a solid community with a large library of spiritual talks and guided meditations. Before, I don't think I was holding space to be truly aware of my thoughts; I was just...allowing myself to sit with them. But when the final bell rings and I'm off the bench, if you'd ask me what I had been thinking about I would have no idea.
With PLAYNE, the small shift of remembering to pay attention to my thoughts changes the energy I bring in to the meditation.
Yesterday, I was noting the usual cluster of thoughts that happen, but one kept rising up in various forms: "I am dirty." I noticed that each time this thought would arise, I'd feel an increasing need to flinch from the shame it generated. The night before, Sneppers recommended I shower before bed -- but I was so tired, I just fell asleep anyway.
But the shame felt...bigger than the circumstances warranted. I showered on Saturday and not Sunday, so why did I feel so bad about this?
I remembered this time from my childhood when I was riding the bus home from school. It had been...an active day and my deodorant had failed, so my armpits were pretty ripe. It was a full bus, standing room only, so I had to lift my arm to hold on to the pole that keeps you from falling all over. This girl next to me could smell me easily, and talked loudly to her friend about how bad I smelled. But, you know, it's a full bus and I'm on my way home; there's nothing I can do but stand there and pretend I can't hear her next to me.
Is that the moment when I internalized this...idea? "I am a dirty person." I'm learning now that I was raised with different grooming standards than most; we didn't have showers, so we washed up at the sink three times a week, then took a bath every week. It seemed OK to me, but it wasn't the first time I had been called out for smelling bad.
Exploring that a bit, I made the mindful decision to let go of that shame. I acknowledged I smelled bad, told myself I would take a shower when I was done with meditation, and looked forward to being clean. That's all it had to be.
It felt like this weird breakthrough to realize how much I had been...reinforcing this subconscious narrative that locked me into shame-bound behavior. I'd feel bad about not showering, and...to avoid feeling bad about it I would just...not think about it, distract myself with something else. I guess because the emotion was so hard to feel I couldn't...move into the other part of the process, putting on my big-boy pants, swallowing the discomfort, doing it anyway.
But now I can feel my feelings AND be clean!
I'm not sure other folks get this way, where the emotions around some simple thing become so intense you just can't do it. But learning where they come from so you can let that shit go feels...pretty amazing.
And I know this is a process. I'm not going to suddenly have the consistency to shower every day. But at least for now, it's easier to acknowledge and respond to the knotty feelings that arise whenever I think about grooming. It's a small victory, but a win is a win.
