Embracing the Experience of "Cold"

 ...Vulnerabilities are merely the product of the mind, and the body will react to what is held in the mind. 

David. R. Hawkins

D. and I took the dogs for a walk in the woods yesterday.  Looking out the window before we left I had this assumption that it was the same degree of cold as it was the day before.  My mind said so. So I was expecting that. I dressed the way I usually do.    

About five  minutes into the walk , I begin to feel the cold going down my back.  The body's first line of defense kicked in making the skin's surface prickle up in some vain attempt to erect those little hairs all over  to warm me as it once did for my much hairier ancestors so long ago. My fingers went numb inside my mitts ( my mind told me that  would mean pain when I got home ).  I could also feel that wind warning the  exposed skin  of my face to find protection. It seemed that my body ws thinking for itself but it wasn't. The mind was sending a very clear message to the body, "It is cold, a lot colder than yesterday. Resist." 

As I walked on and I love walking in winter...I could  see that I was not truly experiencing the walk .  I could feel my body resisting the cold because my mind was resisting the cold. I was losing touch with the moment.  This awareness of the frigid external temperature and this judgement that it was colder than yesterday, possibly something that "shouldn't be" simply because it was not what I "expected," and the "unpleasant" feeling of it ...lead my mind and body to resist what is. I was as much aware of that resistance as I was of the experience of walking in the cold.  

I kept trying to "shake the feeling" and  bring myself back to  the here and now by observing my breath, listening to the crunch of each step on the frozen earth beneath me, feeling the soft January light pour  through the branches overhead. The physical sensations only progressed. 

It wasn't until I decided to include, allow, embrace the feeling of being cold, however,  that I relaxed into the whole experience.  My body's reaction to the mind's judgement that it was cold became my focus.  It was so cool (puny).  I did not view the experience as  "I am cold".  Instead,  viewed myself as being  inside this body that was contacting the cold. I really do not think, before that point,  I ever truly allowed myself to experience fully what it was like to be in a cold body. There was the situation of cold, the body directed by the mind to react to the cold and then there was this Observer experiencing it all. I was not the situation, the mind, or the body.  I was the Observer. I was experiencing the moment from there. 

It was "cool"to do that...in more ways than one.

All is well.