This is one of 12 artifacts from season 2 of Labyrinth Library. This is an excerpted sample of the full artifact, which is 13 minutes long.
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Purpose:
to notice your relationship with pain — and to bring awareness to the different ways in which you hold it, interpret it, and respond to it. to be with your felt sensations of pain, and create spaciousness between the experience of it — and your response.
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Guiding Question:
how can you practice presence with pain — by creating space around it, and allowing it to reveal itself to you?
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Excerpt of Artifact (5 min)
blood in the mouth - excerpt.mp3
Practice Guidelines
included in the full artifact
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Hi friends, the third artifact of Aries season is Blood in the Mouth. This is the first artifact I've created inside Labyrinth that is of the body and about the body.
This artifact is about the question of how we metabolize pain — especially if it's a visceral, private pain that only you can taste.
Blood in the mouth is interesting in that it's very different than sweat, which is a sign of exertion, or tears as emotional release. Blood is an alarm of a different order. Seeing the red of blood signals danger. The smell and the taste of blood, of iron, has a visceral response.
I specifically chose blood in the mouth instead of external cuts or wounds because it's something that feels very private, secret, internal — only you know that it's happening. It comes as a sudden arrival rather than dull aches or pains. There's a sharpness to it and an aftertaste.
For the purpose of this artifact, we'll be focusing mostly on metabolizing emotional and psychic pain rather than physical.
The purpose: is to notice your relationship with pain and how we interpret pain — as a signal to listen to, as a threshold or limit to honor, as a pathway to move through, as a form or structure to inhabit, or as a presence to be with.
The guiding question: how do we bring awareness to the different ways in which we hold pain — and consider possibilities for being with it, and moving with it?
How do we practice presence with pain, and create spaciousness between the experience — and our response?
To begin, I want to ground us in considering pain science.
There's a difference between nociception — which is the nerve signal that happens in the body — versus pain experienced as the brain's interpretation of that signal. An example is how patients under anesthesia will experience nociception, but without the experience of pain.
In that way, we can think about pain as a subjective signal in which the body is announcing itself — a sign of a threshold or a limit that is being crossed. Oftentimes, we immediately interpret that signal as a sign of danger. At the same time, it's also a sign of aliveness.
That brings us to an existential question (which I have no answer for): is there a purpose to pain? Is it — like for many people in our world — being born in the wrong place or the wrong time, inside systems, bodies, and environments or circumstances out of our control? Is it something we create and choose, or exacerbate? Is it something that chooses us — to hold it? Does pain ask something of us, to do something with it, much like our creative impulses and urges do?
What happens in our body — versus our minds — in response to pain?
Blood in the mouth is a metaphor for describing how the body produces immediate, undeniable evidence of its own existence. The body signaling something before the mind can stop it, or censor it.
An example of this happening is — as you’re going about your day, experiencing or hearing something that touches a part of you that feels tender or vulnerable. What happens in your body? What happens in your mind in that moment?
In the past, I used to describe this sensation as stepping on a shard of glass, almost by accident. But somehow, blood in the mouth feels like a metaphor that is more internal, more intimate, more accurate — to describe the nearness of grief.
In this framing, pain is a private chamber — a place where no one else can enter or fully understand. No one else can taste what you're tasting. To be with your own blood is an intimate, secret relationship with yourself. You are being forced to feel it before you can fully look at it from the outside.
The question this artifact holds:
What do you do when you're alone in that private corridor of pain? What do you feel compelled to do? And what are the other possibilities?
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This is an excerpt of this artifact.