Navel gazing

After Friday night's frustration I noticed a slight irritation in my navel. I am keeping an eye on this and recon it could be either a fungal infection or a recurrence of the cyst that caused bother over ten years ago. A friend pointed out the timing; mother trouble, navel. The all too obvious navel gazing jokes will no doubt follow. This is not the only minor body irritation at present and I'll need to watch for signs of hypochondria... And of course as I am now middle aged there is a sense of not being in the first flush of youth; although I seem to age slower than most I have definitely started to feel and look post youth! Not looking my years caused me a lot of discomfort in my younger years. Also, although I've generally had good health and energy I never really had that sense of being immortal that so many have in their youth. I guess that was related to the feelings of venerability that came with the discomfort of not looking my years; that sense of not having the robustness of a certain kind of body. And my mother's health problems probably did not help. That said I am not convinced that my feelings of physical inadequacy and/or venerability were too closely related to her health. No, my guess is that from very young, and I am talking preschool here, I sensed the void. Apparently I was reluctant to be born; I was probably quite happy to stay put in the womb, but this was causing problems and so it was decided that I should be assisted to avoid distress to mother and baby. Needless to say I needed no assistance to start crying, unlike my brother who apparently would have turned blue had his heal not been flicked. And the story goes that I was cautious about the world from the start. But this looking back is always to invent a story; we never have full and accurate recollection of the past. We don't even have the full picture at the time.

Navel gazing weather in the form of hypochondria or psychological probing (is this not just an other form of hypochondria) is unproductive an re-enforces what it looks at. Which is all about self construction I guess. Moving on, seeing the old patterns and opening to new ones is to accept change and the emptiness of self. But we are human and the extent to which we are bounded by our body is great, maybe not total but great. And of course the body is dependently originated and might be regarded as a series of semipermeable membranes which are all subject to the flow of everything else. To see that and to hold on to self is to see vulnerability. I am nowhere near being able to give up myself so I see vulnerability. But that's ok, it's about balance; protection v stuckness. I was wondering about being stuck a few days ago but I feel I am moving now, at least a bit; it's not just the same patterns.

I suppose that we never get stuck; the world moves on and we can't stay put. It's just that we don't have our eye in the place where the action is or can't accept what we see. I think that it's easy to want to look at the historical self and want to go back and 'fix' any aspects we think are where trouble started. But we can't. And to want to move to a better self is surely to get caught up in some further fantasy. No, for me the better self can only grow out of working with the images of self I have so again I need to balance introspection with navel gazing.