Moments of anger are common in our experience when things doesn´t flow like they should. It is like to surf in a smooth and flowing wave and all of a sudden a rock appears and the flux is interrupted abruptly. A sharp change from one moment to another. Intense energy. The focus on the surroundings fades to focus on the content the mind. Many complaints about what just took place. To include more focal points in the same moment helps to fade this resistant moment of intense energy. One moment of anger happened after a nasty conversation on the phone. It was like a rock blocking the flow of energy that only changed after my awareness focused on a music with a nice rhythm playing on the radio. The soft transitions within the sound of the music were like a huge wave that raised me above the rock and all began to flow again.
It seems that the rational mind, together with the self, transform transitions into painful changes. And when we let it flow again the changes lose their solidity and melt like ice on spring.
Last night I was watching a news program on television and tried to practice with the breath: breath in and then the breath out. If the content of the news were chosen as focal point, the experience became more solid and the changes more visible. But if I tried to marry sound of the voice of the reporter with my breath, more openness was invited and the transitions prevail.
In the morning I tried to practice in the gym. One moment listening to the fast music in the background, other doing the exercises. Then I tried to find the space between moments and realized that my awareness was very mobile, always trying to find a point to make contact. There was a drive in my mind stimulating it to move and react to each sound, each sensation. Â Each point of contact was a new transition. As I touched my body and mind with awareness and made contact with this drive, this density softened and awareness opened its focus becoming more inclusive more intimate.
Mind can transcend in being always transient, ever awakening to the light of knowledge. VOK 148
PS: music is always a good choice to work with transitions
Eliana,
Your observation about how music facilitates transitions brings to mind a famous neurologist/psychiatrist, Oliver Sachs. His work is the subject of the film “Awakenings” and he also wrote about his own severe accident in a piece called “A Leg to Stand on.” There he descirbes the amazing therapeutic role of music in his own healing. His accident to his leg was so neurologically extreme that his mind no longer could sense his leg as being part of his own emb0diment. Patients who suffer from this condition have been know to try to throw their own leg off the bed, deeply repulsed by this alien attachment. Physical therapy did nothing for him. Then one day a favorite peice of music was playing on the radio and it provided a larger integrating reality into which he was able to incorporate a kinescetic sense of his own leg. Perhaps the TSK “Field Communique” does that for our ordinary sense of being embodied in a world, and music can facilitate a new vision of our experience? — Michael