I don’t know about you but my hay fever has been really bad for the last week or two. My face has been swelling up, I’ve been sneezing, my entire head is itchy and my eyes have been swollen. I was on a Zoom call with my mother last Friday and towards the end I had a really violent sneeze, then felt a searing pain in my left eye. I tried to ignore it and go back to the conversation but I was looking at myself in the video call and saw that my left eye was puffing up and closing. So, didn’t want to worry Mama Jean, I finished up the call and went into the bathroom to find out what was going on.
When I looked in the mirror I saw that everything was not as it should be with my face. The lining that's usually behind my eye was now poking out a little on the side of my eye and as if that wasn’t fun enough, the upper left section of my face had swollen up and every time I moved my head it was agony. When my partner got home I pointed it out; I said to her "If I touch my face its really painful!" She’s grabbing my arm, trying to get me to stop poking it.
You’re probably wondering at this point why I’m telling you this - I promise there is a point to it. I went to bed that night, took a couple of ibuprofen to reduce the swelling and, to my relief, the next morning everything was back where it was supposed to be. What I couldn’t help doing was pressing my hand to my face where it had been swollen and feeling grateful and happy and relieved that it was fine and normal again. Just being OK was great.
And in the practice we call this feeling non-toothache. The insight of mindfulness is that the feeling of joy in the normal and the neutral is available to us at any time. Our old friend TNH said ‘When I have a toothache, I discover that not having a toothache is a wonderful thing. I had to have a toothache in order to be enlightened. My non-toothache is peace and joy.’
We can access the feeling of joy and peace just by focusing our awareness on different parts of the body and enjoying the neutral feeling there, the feeling of being alive, the sense of the functions that it provides and feeling grateful. A certain amount of pain in our lives is inevitable, but we can use that experience as a counterfactual to appreciate what we have. We’ve talked about gratitude on the podcast before, the evidence shows its the one common trait of happy people. And so if we feel gratitude and look for joy in the small things, even a face that isn’t swollen up, we’re walking the path of happiness.
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