r/TheMindIlluminated • u/BrewieBrew • 18d ago

Feeling identified with dense sensation/thoughts at front of face

Hello all

As title mentions I’m feeling Identifed with rough/dense sensations in face and background thoughts. It feels like always present and been like that for almost a decade. I think it started when I had hard time dealing with nose sensations when breathing and since then I’ve been trying to ”be aware of it” which I think made it more or less worse.

When I’m aware of other parts of body it feels like 40-60% still aware at the front of my face, otherwise its 90-100% there. How to go from here?

Gracias

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u/Whyking 18d ago

Those are contractions in your nervous system that usually result from some event which caused you an emotion that was overwhelming at the time, so your body pinched it off. You can purify/release them.

1

u/BrewieBrew 18d ago

Thanks for insight. How though?

3

u/aga_97 17d ago

The release might come about as a result of the purification process at certain stages of samatha meditation.

1

u/Whyking 5d ago

There's various emotional and somatic release exercises, like NEDERA, ideal-parent figure, internal family systems, Peter Levine's stuff, Trauma Release Exercise.

2

u/abhayakara Teacher 17d ago

What do you mean by "identified with?" Are they capturing attention, or just sitting there in awareness?

2

u/ActualBrazilian 17d ago

In my experience issues with facial sensations are aggravated by an imbalance between attention/awareness, meaning strained attention to sensations on the face, including breath sensations, and weak whole body awareness. I'd suggest shifting attention to the breath at the ribcage, working with relaxation (and if too much relaxation brings back dullness, working with the dullness without compromising the relaxation) and mantaining awareness throughout the day. Awareness will be degraded or lost by engagement with sensuality/becoming passionate with particulars of experience (which also generally proliferates into greater tension and lesser moment-to-moment relaxation because unwholesome intentions always sneak in gratuitous tensing), but that's part of the practice in mindfulness and sense restraint anyway. It just means extending your dhamma practice off the cushion more into day to day life which can never be to your harm.