I have a lump in my throat.  Like one gets when Dumbo visits his mom in elephant jail.*  My lump decided to visit my throat a week and a half ago and, except for a few hours of respite here and there, refuses to leave.  It is a very annoying sensation – like there’s a small hardened chick pea stuck beneath my larynx or a persistent phantom pill scratch scar that no hot liquid can soothe.

It’s a real physical sensation, but I know that its cause is psychological.  I’ve got a lot on my plate these days and multi-tasking is really not my forte.  I remember once I was discussing busy-ness and Buddhism with the sagacious Greg Zwahlen.  Ambitiously I said, “if one has a strong mindfulness practice then one should be able to handle an insane schedule” and he said, “Well – you know – it’s a practice – it’s not an antidote.”  House.** I agree – mindfulness is not an antidote for an untenable schedule.  Yet schedule or not I’m always disappointed when I have physiological reactions to stress because I start feeling that I AM A BUDDHIST AND SHOULD BE MORE AWARE! It kind of bothers me that there are obviously some pockets of anxiety I am not ‘awake’ to.  But I will admit that the lump-in-my-throat mystery provoked some reasonably interesting investigation of my oppressively boring discursive mind.  God I bore myself.  How is it that thinking can seem so interesting while you’re caught up in it and then be revealed as so incredibly lame  when you have the slightest bit of distance? 

This is how it went down.  Yesterday I had more time to meditate in the morning and as a result a stronger commitment to objectively seeing what was going on in my mind for a few hours.  While my throat lump is back in business today, for the few hours that I really, with a steady mind, paid attention to that sucker I was able to see some physical links.  Vague, discursive worries about money led to a greater feeling of the lump’s prominence.  I realized that when I turned to seemingly benign thoughts about my appearance (considering my date outfit or rearranging the bobby pins in my hair) I nearly started gagging.  Checking my email or facebook page increased the sensation as did any thoughts about meals.  The sensation lessened while I was paying attention at rehearsal, visually absorbing the big blue sky or watching Rambo Solo, which is awesome and you should go see.

Talk about a physical barometer.  There was actually so much less tension around the issues I thought I was tense about.  The anxiety, rather, clung to and flamed the fire of the most pedestrian of my mental activity. These oppressively boring thought patterns crowded my brain like those air-filled plastic packing sacks in a package of dharma books from Amazon.com.  Once I acknowledged, noted and let the air out of the intense “scarf or no-scarf”, “what will be my protein source at lunch” and “who’s that woman who commented on my boyfriend’s facebook profile” conversations that were fascinatingly raging in my mind, I found I was totally able to handle or plan for all the to-dos on my list with far more ease and grace.

Thank you adversity with providing me with greater insight, I begrudgingly mumble.  Do other folks have physical responses that reveal when they may not be as beginner’s mind as they had suspected?   Also, Hardcore Dharma tested last week, but Julia May Jonas had rehearsal and could not be there.  Did anything interesting go down?  Comment for me below. 

*If you have watched this scene and do not know what I mean, then you are either a robot or made of stone and you frighten me.
**’House’ is a term used by anyone who grew up in n New Jersey in the 1990s.  When combined with ducking under a triangle formation created with the hands, it is synonymous with gotcha congratulation-esque terms like ‘snap.’