What does the best feeling spot in your body feel like right now?

We often notice when our body doesn’t feel great, when there’s outright pain or uncomfortable stiffness–but what does good feeling in the body feel like?  If you were to close your eyes right now and find someplace in your own body that feels good, how would you describe it?  What words come to mind?

Feeling good is more than the absence of being in pain.

In fact there is a whole spectrum of sensation on the way from feeling good, in the direction of  being in pain.

Feeling good can feel like; aliveness, vibration, ease, lightness, joy, bigness, heaviness, dynamic, enthusiastic, full of energy.  It’s interesting how many of these sensations are feelings that we can feel both physically and emotionally.  I can feel a sense of lightness in my shoulders and somehow that sensation crosses easily into changing my outlook on my day and on my circumstances.  How does that happen?

Since feeling good is more than just the absence of pain, then what does the absence of feeling good feel like–just the very first stage of moving away from feeling good?  We can all create our own vocabulary.  There are no wrong descriptive words.  I find it easiest to describe it in terms of what it’s not, but I like to make an attempt to describe what it is.  

I notice a sense of blankness, not yet stiffness or tension, just a sense of there not being anything there, like a chunk of my body has gone dark to my awareness.

As we continue on this spectrum I think it becomes more familiar.  The body part moves from blankness to a vague sense of stiffness or tension.  And from that stiffness or tension into diffuse and shifting pain, then from there to moments of sharp pain that cause fear/avoidance of movement.

It would be cool if we could notice the body right when it moves away from feeling good.  The answers would be simple and straightforward and not full of several hundred years of our Cartesian legacy.  

When it feels blank, we would just move back in.

If there’s no sense of ease, etc. then we could bring our awareness back into that part of the body until we could “see” it again.  We would literally move back in by moving, in awareness, that part of the body that we started to lose.  

But it starts by knowing what feeling good feels like, and preferring it to other feelings.

So let’s make a practice of feeling the good feeling places in the body and getting to know them, so they can teach us what we want all of the body to feel like.