If you are struggling with any difficulty in your life, especially vaginismus, then what you need to understand is, such difficulties can help you learn the skills to remain balanced.  

Why I say here “especially vaginismus” is because I have been STRUGGLING with this condition for ages and eventually cured it. 

At the time my dominant attitude towards my condition was to take it very personally which led to me avoiding it as best I could. That avoidance made it harder to bear the struggles and suffering of. I won’t dive into details but you can find my story here. 

Here in this post, I’ll focus on how mindfulness practices help us work with our vaginismus rather than fight against it and eventually avoid it, as cultivating a quality of curiosity that we’ve already had from the very beginning of our lives.

So let’s begin😊

Now, I want you to focus and imagine a playing baby sitting in front of you: what would you notice at first? Maybe how cute they are, how small, how playful, how happy they are? What else?

When you look carefully, you will see how curious they are about EVERY SINGLE THING! They discover something new at each look, each touch, each smell, each taste. There is a tremendous amount of discovery at whatever they see or feel or touch, isn’t there?

What that means is that we have this skill too. No worries, stay calm😊

It is in all of us, deep down, and it needs to be awakened. The skill of discovering things with curiosity, including curiosity around unpleasant experiences.

How can we be curious about the unpleasant experiences as well as pleasant ones too?

What a great question 😊

Cause the answer brings us to our inner compass: remain balanced!

Are we holding onto the idea that pleasure is good and we need it all the time to remain balanced or we need to focus on just joyful times in our lives but the pain is bad and we should get rid of it as fast as possible?

Can this way of thinking lead to our inner compass?

If the guideline for remaining balanced is based on whether the experience feels good or bad, then it would be the feeling itself as a measure, right? But our feelings are all changing. So how can we remain balanced if our guide is our changing feelings?

Sometimes those pleasant moments in our lives that we look back at, don’t hold a purpose. They may have made you feel good, but, what did they do for your personal growth? Often, the painful and difficult moments we wanted to avoid, are the ones that sparked deeper insight into our potential.

So why do we label difficult experiences as bad?

Because that is what we are used to, and everyone around us agrees, avoiding difficulties are repeated over and over, reinforcing a neuro pathway that creates our habitual behavior. The more we label them as bad, the more we try to avoid them, and that my dear reader is the reason why we suffer from them! If you want more details on how this process works, click here.

So how can I reinforce the quality of embracing the pleasant and unpleasant?

Another meaningful question! 😊

With mindfulness practices.

When we practice mindfulness we learn how to allow and open ourselves to the pleasant and unpleasant experiences so we expand our capacity to accept and see them as they are.

What do I mean “accept things” as they are?

Learning how to feel fear for instance; 

• fear of having sex, 
• fear of pain, 
• fear of having a romantic relationship, 
• fear of being sick, 
• fear of failure, 
• fear of losing your beloved ones

Do you relate to any of those fears? I bet you do, especially if you have vaginismus.

You know what? It’s ok to feel fear. It’s there, no need to avoid it. What matters is what we develop when we have this feeling. Are we strengthening avoidance, resistance as labeling the experience as “bad” or are we seeing the experience as it is and strengthening the quality of acceptance?

There is a beautiful line from Joseph Goldstein: “When we accept fear, it’s no longer our limitation”.

And here is the irony; the more we don’t want to have it, the more it stays, in fact, more powerfully.

So how are we going to cultivate “acceptance” with mindfulness practices?

What we need to cultivate is the commitment to be mindful of whatever happens. If you experience sex painfully for instance or any penetration attempt is almost impossible, being very mindful of what you say in conversations is the key to get to know yourself better. 

Look at how we talk about it, what adjectives we use to describe the condition, then where it leads us emotionally.

This is the first step of acceptance; “the awareness” itself.

When we see things as they are, with feelings and thoughts included, then we’ll experience that quality of acceptance naturally. This is how we experience “mindfully”.

There is a calmness in being mindful; accepting things for how they are.

People tend to be too caught up in the idea of pain and fear to force themselves to accept things as they are, which again, not leading us to genuine acceptance. We need to create an attitude towards acceptance. 

Here are two steps I want you to take towards acceptance:

#1 Labeling whatever emotion rises

#2 Noticing how feels to have that in your body

Let’s begin with the first one: 

Difficult thoughts and emotions can be: 

• I feel hopeless now
• I judge myself/others now
• I compare myself to others now

Instead of saying I am hopeless, label it as I feel hopeless. This separates you from the emotion and takes away its power to define you.

Do you remember my previous post which talks about how “everything is impermanent”? You can find it here.

Using this mindset, everything that rises now just represents NOW. Not the future, and it doesn’t represent your whole identity. It is just a thought in your mind, nothing more.

Now let’s look at the second step:

Pay attention to how your body feels. When you label these feelings where do you feel it most? What sensations have attached themselves to this thought?

So as you can see, there is the common key quality here; curiosity. 

Investigating 

• what I think now, 
• how I feel emotionally now 
• how I feel in my body now

So instead of turning my back against the sadness itself or condition, I’m coming closer to myself and seeing the reflection of whatever happens at the moment.

So if you have vaginismus for instance, instead of fighting with the condition itself, you accept the condition as it is. I don’t mean that you are not going to have to do something to cure it; I’m just saying that by seeing it as a condition instead of your identity you will be able to take action to cure it. 

If you have vaginismus, then the fact is YOU JUST HAVE vaginismus, so YOU ARE NOT what you associated with vaginismus. It’s one of the conditions in life which can give you unpleasant feelings which is totally ok. 

There is a beautiful metaphor from Shaila Catherine which is that the sailors don’t fight against the wind, they work with it. Isn’t it a beautiful metaphor? I love it!

By being mindful of the existence of vaginismus or whatever difficulty that we are dealing with;  instead of fighting against it (against ourselves), we work with it; by seeing and accepting it as it is. 

Therefore, we won’t take it personally and then we can actually take action to cure it, be more balanced and get closer to our SELF. 

The energy we spread in us and around us will be more delightful, more attractive. So it is definitely worth getting closer to ourselves cause what we’ll find and notice within us will lead us to TREASURE our lives.

 

“Instead of getting better and better at avoiding, we can learn to accept the present moment as if we had invited it, and work with it instead of against it, making it our ally rather than our enemy.” Pema Chödron

 

 

If you found this article helpful, then join our free online community for people like us. I will talk more about these topics and in more detail. 

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If you want to get to know more about the cure itself, then you can download my free cure guide from here.

E-mail: petek@yeswecancure.com