Breathing Water

So last night we went over to my sister's, and I drank a lot of wine and had a big dinner, and wound up getting one of my episodes of nausea.

This time, I tried handling things differently, and it went well. Rather than focusing on taking care of my stomach, I addressed the issue of stress. When I was in Dallas, I learned that laying in the shower and letting the tub fill up around me was an intensely comforting experience. Our tub is such that I can only fit half my body in at one time, and it's pretty uncomfortable, but the flow of warm water soothed me greatly, and as a result the nausea was minimal, and relatively brief-lived. The missus, bless her, kept asking me if there was any blood (no) and did I want her to take me to the hospital (no again).

This morning, I found myself with the chills and shakes, and I returned to the tub. I lay there for a couple of hours, water as hot as it could get, and after a time, I entered into a state of consciousness entirely new to me.

When my counselor read the stream-of-consciousness novel devoted to my experience of life, she was horrified at how painful and demanding it was. I am continually talking to myself, playing or composing mental music, throwing up images -- this is how I go to sleep, is to the continual flow of brain chatter.

But as I lay in the tub, body shifting as my buoyancy changed with my breathing, I went away. I found myself conscious of nothing but the water, and the ripples that ran through it. I was nothing but a tub of hot, cleanish water, and it was terrific.

I had no idea how much of a burden consciousness is.

I've never had any luck with traditional meditation forms due to my over-busy mind, but this struck me as very close to what I'd read about in the works of zazen practitioners, what I had previously failed to achieve.

My basic cycle runs from hysteria to collapse. It's interesting to contemplate the possibility of something gentler, at least here and there... and now? A little broth.