When the Hands Became Real
Cuando las manos se volvieron reales
A student describes an unexpected shift during a guided meditation, where releasing effort led to an unusually vivid, direct experience of sensation in the hands, including surprising pain.
When the Hands Became Real
A student describes an unexpected shift during a guided meditation, where releasing effort led to an unusually vivid, direct experience of sensation in the hands, including surprising pain.
I want to mention two things. First, you said something similar in a past session, not in the same vein, but it had the same effect on me. Toward the beginning, you said to put the attention on the hand, and then you said something to the effect of, "But the point is that you don't have to keep it there." That single remark lifted the whole mode of me doing the task. It raised some awareness, and I shifted into more of a watching mode. It's amazing how just a few words at the right time can produce that shift. You caught me trying to be the good student.
Then, sometime after that, something happened that rarely happens to me in meditation. I really, truly felt my hands, with no effort, to the point where they were super heavy. It would have been an effort to take my attention off them. It was as though they were weighted down with heavy gloves. Usually I stay in the head, and if I feel something physical, it's very subtle. But this time, it was as if all I was consisted of two big hands. Then something else happened: all of a sudden there was pain in my fingers and joints. I don't experience any pain like that in my life. It was almost a shooting pain, just from attention. I found that fascinating, the sheer power of just paying attention.
On your first point, that is exactly what I was pointing to in the guidance. It's not about the right thing. It's not about keeping your attention on your hand in a focused, effortful way, as though it were a task of right and wrong where the more you achieve, the better. It's more about seeing what happens. When you put your attention in your hand, then what happens? When the intention is to keep your attention in the hand, what happens? The invitation is to notice that whole process, the journey of what's pulling you, what's taking you away, and to have no effort in the noticing.
Effortless attention as a side effect
When that is seen, things are processed naturally. As a side effect, it could happen that the attention on the hand becomes more easeful. Which is what you're describing: you suddenly find yourself with a direct connection to the sensation of the hand, this sense of heaviness and largeness. When you talk about the size, "big hands, heavy," that sounds to me like a raw, unfiltered encounter with raw sensation.
Shifts in the body
That kind of encounter can create quite a lot of changes, because it is also shifting the way your physical body functions. It affects the way your neurons process information, the way energy moves around. I have no idea what that pain could be specifically. It could be that there were simply shifts in energy, or perhaps there is a numbness in the hand and now you're feeling it more directly. I don't really know. Obviously, if you do these exercises and feel more and more pain, that's something to be looked into. But to me it seems like shifts of the kind we were hoping to produce at that level.
Out of the virtual world
What you described as getting "out of the head" is what I'm describing as stepping outside the pull of that virtual world of "me," which is constantly pulling you inward. You're in there, and there's this repetitive processing of information, looping, and we rarely have the actual direct experience of sensation.
The hand and the image of the hand
Jesus said something like, "When you make a hand out of the image of a hand, you will enter the kingdom." The passage is a bit longer and includes a few more examples, but it has to do with this. We rarely actually connect with and experience the hand as a hand. We experience the image of the hand, and it is a mental image.
It really can be a bit like going down a rabbit hole, because that is a metaphor for entering an unknown world where there's magic, there's mystery. There's a reference to Narnia, the land from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, where things could be terrible and wonderful at the same time.