Frustration due to involuntary lip tensing

[G CMember]

Hi everyone! A while back I wrote about problems I was having with my lip muscles tensing involuntarily and making it hard to find breath sensations. For a while this problem abated due to a combination of the tensing going away and following the good advice I was given here to just keep searching for breath sensations whenever I lost them. Unfortunately this problem has come back, but with a new twist.

What has been happening lately is that feeling the tensing of my lip has been causing me to get very frustrated, even when I am trying my best to keep an accepting attitude and to ignore it and focus on breath sensations; this continues even if I switch the focus away from my lip entirely and to my abdoman. The frustration seems to be happening at a deep level that I can’t control. Worse, the effect of it is to transform my meditation from a pleasant peaceful experience to one where I afterward feel on the edge, and I’m worried that if that keeps happening then I will slowly lose my motivation to continue my practice.

Do you all have any advice?

Thanks a lot! 🙂

[Robin CMember]

Hi!
One thing to consider with something that continues to come into attention like that is to let the focus be directly on the tensing, taking that as the meditation object.Giving attention to the tensing can potentially allow it to evolve and eventually feel like it did what it needed to do. Intentionally focusing on the tension can relieve the judgement as well, and allow you to continue the practice of directing the attention, even if it’s on a different object.

If you try it, keep us posted.
Warm blessings,
Robin

[G CMember]

I have spent some time trying your suggestion and I was starting to make progress by examining exactly what is going on with the tensing rather than being bothered by it, but unfortunately I have been starting to get tensing in the same area at other parts of the day which has really been bothering me. This happened a few months ago as well and it went away when I took a break from meditating from a while. This time I think I will also take a break, but only from meditating on the sensations of breath around the nose; instead I will try focusing on sensations of the breath around the abdomen and/or loving-kindness meditation.

Thank you so much for your advice! 😀

Greg

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