Inside Out: Negatives to Positives and the Scanning Breath

Fever

In the past, I dreaded getting sick. I would feel all the pain and discomfort of the illness. I would be bored silly because I did not have the energy to do anything more than lie still. I would feel sorry for myself. My whole world became darker and darker.

Fever Side Effects

One of the side effects of the fever is the nightmares I seem to experience during this period. I sleep very restlessly. I run horrible dialogs in my head. I imagine everything is going to get worse and worse. A lot of these nightmares are directly connected to my past experiences and it is easy to see which memories they are connected to.

Suffering

As a direct result of doing the scanning breath for years now, I don’t mind pain as much. Sure it hurts. But I don’t add to the pain with the typical “poor me, I am suffering more than anyone else” voice that I used to run in my head before I started the scanning breath. You could say that running that monolog just takes too much energy.

Side Effect Bonus

Now, when I get the fever, I just lie there feeling pain. Then when I try to sleep, some of the nightmarish visions come to me. I can see now that these are giant signboards, pointing me to my emotional baggage. This time around I began to take advantage of this. I started doing the scanning breath despite having this fever. I don’t have much strength to do it for long, but it is also much clearer, and more intense. I feel that I can clear out the emotional baggage in about half the time due to this clarity.

Mixed Blessing

This is not to say that I desire to get sick. I don’t. But if I do happen to get sick, I look forward to the opportunities to clean out the hard to reach corners of my mind. You could say it’s a mixed blessing.