Bringing awareness to compulsive energy
As I continue to practice bringing awareness into my daily life, I’ve been noticing often there’s a compulsive energy in me. I can feel it even now. I’m both excited to write and feel this internal push to do more after I completed a coding project I was proud of yesterday. As I wake up part of me wants more of those endorphins. This energy affects my body in a few noticeable ways today: a tightness in my gut, my jaw, and surges of energy pushing me to do more.
The energy feels familiar, an old habit of mine repeated thousands of times. I recall it often leads to a big energy dip after the spike, more physical tightness, and sometimes anger too. Experiment time! This morning instead of rejecting it or just acting on it mindlessly, I’m using it as an object of my awareness and self acceptance practice. As I bring my awareness to it I can accept it just as it is. Then it takes up less space, so I can see what else is there. “Why else could I write or not write this article?” I ask myself? I feel another energy, a desire to share, hopefully to inspire, also emerging.
I continue to write, but not from the compulsion but in fact as a meditation itself. I feel my fingers typing these words, my jaw unhinging, my gut relaxing, and my energy settling. I’m not rejecting the energy, the idea to write, to share. Rejecting the thing is a very common practice of mine too, which leads me to a type of self judgement and usually creates more knots inside me.
This may be my first article I’ve ever published while meditating! So this experiment is something I will try again. Acceptance + awareness when I notice compulsive energy arising and if there are good underlying intentions I will continue to do the activity as a meditation itself. I’m excited to continue to see if this compulsive habit I have will shift with these new conditions and curious to hear about the role compulsion plays for you.
