This technique is specifically useful for people who experience a high degree of aversion to particular recurring tasks, and who have some experience with meditation.
When you’re experiencing a pattern of aversion to a task, that generally has two components:
- Some initial aversion to some aspect of the task itself
- Aversion to the feeling of aversion itself
The point of this activity is to build up your capacity to be with the feeling of aversion. Rather than skipping over it, avoiding it, or pushing through it, you’re sitting at the edge of the aversion, allowing yourself to feel it as a body sensation, a little bit at a time, in a way that feels safe.
The intended outcome of this practice is that it allows a significant amount of that meta-level aversion, the aversion-to-aversion, to move through the body and dissipate. By dispelling that extra aversion, you can have a much clearer perspective on what remains, in terms of signal and noise. Maybe there’s some signal remaining in the aversion, some specific way you need to adjust the task or the way you’re going about it, or maybe it was really just static and the clear choice is to start engaging with the task.
The practice
When you start working on a task, spend the first 5-25 minutes sitting on the edge of beginning to work on it.
During this time you are not working on the thing or thinking about any specific content related to the thing
Things you are doing during this time:
- Bringing up the idea of the thing (at a high level). Keeping yourself focused on being about to work on the thing.
- Noticing what sensations come up in your body.
- Allowing these sensations to be just as they are.
- Noticing things like anxiety, aversion, tension.
- Noticing things like excitement, attraction.
- If the sensations feel dense, knotted, concentrated: bringing your awareness to the rest of your body, and gently inviting that sensation to expand into a larger space of your body.
- Breathing deeply and allowing your system to relax.
- Make note of anything you find insightful.
When you are finished, begin to work as usual.