Shadow Visitor and an Addiction · 6 September 2007

A migraine woke me at four in the morning last Saturday, three days into silence. The headaches started two years ago and I take them like the scrappy little Rocky Mountain pioneer my dad raised, but this time the entire tone of the thing was different. Intense. Hard-edged.

Guess that’s what it feels when you have zero options for migraine-distraction. Not even mental options.

I could feel the thing’s specific location in the physical brain, and the pain was both more intense and less horrible—the latter because this time I wasn’t angry at it for interrupting my day. What did I have to interrupt?

I usually take control by creating distraction. It’s a competition for which one of us—me or it—will determine the day’s activity. I win if I get on with it, even if I move around like the hunchback of Notre Dame and have to call my brother for sympathy. When I start losing, I fortify my position with Excedrin. Other women in my family bypass this stupid struggle and automatically drug up the first day of the month. They’re smart. But it was the men who taught me how to relate to my body, so I’m stubborn.

By 9 am, I had spent five hours in the fetal position, exploring the sharp edges of the pain but afraid to just go into it and know it fully. Hello, fear. That resistance was building up all over my body. The sensation was coming in waves, but the fear just kept getting harder and thicker brick by brick. No way was I going to sit my body upright and take my attention to the center of that space behind my right eye.

Admitting that, I hunchbacked down the hill to the kitchen, and asked if there were any caffeine on the premises. Yes, contraband was available, said the big angelic chef, but would I like to try some ginger tea first?

Here is what I thought: I want DRUGS, not SYMPATHY! Said: Thank you. I will sit over there.

She cut up a whole root and boiled it. A half hour later, still hunched over a table, I told her that I was probably hallucinating, but I could feel a blood vessel in the front of my head dilate and move the pain around. She said I wasn’t hallucinating.

I still didn’t have much awareness of anything except the place behind my eye, but after the ginger took the fear out of the pain, I felt interested in checking it out. So I went back to the cushion and mildly hallucinated for the rest of the day.

God it was trippy. Enough physical “pain” to keep me oblivious to the outside world, and so much inner entertainment that I got lost in it. For hours.

When I’m quiet enough not to need the anchors of breath or mantra to keep my insane mind from writing novels, I like to watch the light play on the backs of my eyelids. But this time it was a whole show. A little hawk or comet or dandelion fuzz—some kind of flying shadow—appeared and swooped all over. A shadow dervish. I had wild dreams that night—so much for Patanjali’s dreamless sleep—and then the dervish came back the next day and stayed until evening.

Sitting there out of time, watching it, had nothing to do with nothingness. There was a stable emotional tone of absorbed amusement. It didn’t feel profound or important: it just felt fun, like an innocuous game.

I didn’t want it to end.

Which must have been obvious, because on Sunday night an instructor climbed on the dais, before the pair of Buddhas (a dark male one and light female one) and said teasingly, “Well aren’t you good meditators! Let go of the sitting posture. Let go of the activity of medititating. Just be mindful. Just get up and leave.”

I went to bed scheming about how I have to do a month-long or more. And laughing at myself for the reaching: literally, this time, a reaching for nothingness. Is that why we invest all this time in sitting practice, for the bliss payoff? Maybe we’re just addicted to a mental state—and contemplation is just our method for getting there.

I don’t know. If my deepest motives are just so much spiritual materialism, though, I’m not ready to dismiss them as bad unholy desire. I am hungry for insight and pleasure. In love with the journey, seduced by the grail quest. All of it. Badly.

So I get attached to mental sates. If I didn’t, I’d have quit the astanga practice years ago. At least you can’t make too much trouble when you’re in a trance.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , morality , power of suggestion , sound , spirituality

Comment

1. Migraines are interesting. I’ve been into exploring them lately, which is better than fighting (which gets me nowhere, except perhaps in more pain).

   Maybe with meditation practice, motive isn’t all that important, because we are changed just by doing it (I know that’s not your goal). I mean, the results are a good thing, no matter why we do it, right?

   Posted by: gartenfische · Sep 6, 08:00 AM · #

2. Yeah, I’m part of the club, also. Oliver Sacks has a great book on migraines (he, too, is a sufferer — and a terrific writer).

   Pleasure, huh? I don’t know that I feel pleasure in meditation (and I’m thinking both zazen and Ashtanga practice here). I’ll have to pay attention more & figure out what it is.

   PS: I bring caffeine tablets to retreats. Only took one of those retreat migraines to seal the habit. I’m not as patient nor as scientific as you are!

   Posted by: karen · Sep 6, 10:27 AM · #

3. There is a relatively new medical approach to migraine control involving going off all caffeine plus botox injections in the forehead and base of skull in the back. Not cheap, not covered by insurance. When it works it seems to really work very well. One of the Neurologist developers of this treatment is in Encinitas, not far from Tim Miller’s studio. BGE is on this program and it is working very well for her. Email me for more information.

   Posted by: laproxdoc · Sep 6, 03:07 PM · #

4. i can’t even imagine not treating my migraines immediately. they are few and far between, but who knows…next time maybe i will try to enjoy it :)

   Posted by: cranky housefrau · Sep 6, 07:47 PM · #

5. I agree with both of you, G and K.

   It’s difficult to find language that carries an implication of the “why” of practice without resorting to words that connote (1) discipline and (2) asceticism. I am often misunderstood as a perfectionist, but can only WISH I had some of that in me. It would improve my work. In truth, I am extremely undisciplined and very devoted to sense pleasure, and both lament this childishness and revel in it.

   But now that I think it though, it’s too reactionary to claim I’m not at all interested in self-transformation or that it’s about “pleasure” if that means sensory stimulation. As pious as this sounds to me, it’s more that I’m interested in the present moment and experience joy when I find it.

   I want to find a way of communicating that it’s led by intuition more than discipline or rationality. And that while choice and will are involved, unlike in most aspects of our culture, they aren’t the most important forces.
   It’s a recursive process that happens inside of itself.

   But I agree with GF about effects: the evidence that practice changes a person is a kind of proof of its goodness. It also helps me justify it to others. :)

   Posted by: (0v0) · Sep 7, 01:35 AM · #

6. Funny thing about pain. Mostly, we run from it. Most of our culture is about running from it. Like, everything.

   On the other end, I think the approach I learned from my dad was equal parts stubborn frontier settler and Opus Dei. Stubbornness can be useful, though it usually just feeds my pride. But choosing pain just in order to suffer, as if pain itself can purify you like some kind if hair shirt, well, I actually think I got off on that when I was younger. So much fire and brimstone in those days, and I was a preacher’s kid.

   Choosing pain for its own sake is really stupid. It’s just as likely to be degrading as refining. I say reach for the drugs when there is pain. Unless you’re in a place where you can experience it as something other than pain, and really use it as an exploratory too. For me, that was a surprising new experience, probably because it was one I’d been so assiduously avoiding until then. It’s worth checking out, but I don’t know if I’d be able to do it without taking a palliative first (as I did); and I wouldn’t try it if I had something else to accomplish that day.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Sep 7, 01:45 AM · #

7. I just want to be here. I guess that’s my only rationale for practicing my practices. Generally I feel not-entirely-present, having been brought up in a family of nervous people.

   I just want to be here. Now.

   Posted by: karen · Sep 9, 11:21 AM · #

8. I went to an Opus Dei school.

   Posted by: The Mindbender · Sep 10, 02:25 AM · #

9. Aaah! That is so frightening.

   No wonder you breezed through Cambridge.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Sep 10, 04:05 AM · #

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