The most challenging channel to open is the non-registering or non-confronting channel. This type of stroke is one we cannot track, but we know it by the irritation and confusion it leaves in its wake. Perhaps it’s too subtle or in a direction we have never attended to. It may be on an inactive spot. In OM, the aim is to awaken 360-degree attention, including all spots, all directions, all speeds, and all pressures. Waking up means finding fluency and resonance with each and all.
An uncomfortable truth beneath not tuning into a stroke: every stroke registers in the body whether or not it registers in the attention. The stroke is happening, being felt and experienced, but it is simply not being tracked; information is entering but is being filtered out before we can register it. This gap is the result of the tumescent mind believing itself to be separate and isolated, wanting to maintain its dominion, and thus filtering out anything that would threaten it, or at the very least not support it.
The filtering process can then run amok to the point where we have absolutely no idea what’s happening in our own internal world. What we don’t address controls us. The whole world is still happening, but we are not there for it. Still the body remembers everything.
To the extent we fail to confront a stroke, a choice that takes more energy than actually confronting the stroke, an “ignore” charge builds up. The charge may build to the point where there is such a fog that when we get up from an OM, we can scarcely remember one stroke. Or in the midst of the OM, we may find ourselves so locked out of the body we don’t register any sensation.
This non-registering attention is a means of protection, a mistaken idea that the way not to feel discomfort is to disconnect from the body— like anesthesia, where surgery happens and the body remembers but the mind does not. Then the whole process of recovery (which is happening in the body) makes no sense, and we have a feeling of always being out of step with reality, as though something is going to come and get us.
Our life continues to happen, but we aren’t going along with it. We wake up in shock at all that has happened. In this scenario, we feel as though life is happening to us, but if we would have stayed with it, it would have happened in direct proportion to what we were capable of knowing.
