For those reading this that aren't diabetic imagine that you have an important meeting tomorrow morning. You go to bed early so that you can get a satisfactory amount of sleep so that you can be fresh for the morning and ready to go. Now as you lay in bed you start to feel a bit weak in the body, you don't feel all here, you are kinda dislocated from your body and are more in your mind. Now you realize that this may be a low but you are weary of whether or not you should eat because when sleeping the blood sugar rises and it may correct itself during the night, so you breathe for a bit, close your eyes and try to sleep. After an hour or so you still feel weak, your now a bit agitated because you weren't able to get to sleep in time so that you could be fresh for the meeting in the morning, so you get yourself out of bed, you walk down to the kitchen, you grab some juice drink it and head back up to bed to wait for a while until the sugar kicks in and you feel strong enough to go to sleep. Now the middle of the night comes and you are in and out of consciousness for a while. You wake up for a few moments, not completely conscious of what's going on but fall back to the edge of sleep, not completely immersed in sleep and not completely awake. You're telling yourself to just go back to sleep because you need a good nights sleep but the feeling just keeps coming back. After a while of coming in and out of consciousness you finally decide within yourself to wake up and go get something to eat again. Now it is well past the point of getting a good nights rest in order to be fresh for the morning, so you bite the bullet in that moment, accept the fact that tomorrow your going to be tired and will give it your best during the meeting. This is what is common for diabetics. I remember times when this same example would happen but there would be an exam in the morning, and I desperately wanted to get some sleep but going low throughout the night made it impossible to do so. I would get incredibly frustrated when these moments occur, because the body would not go the way that I wanted it to go.
I still experience this today and I have not corrected the relationship to the body which is the reason why I am writing this blog at the moment. I say corrected the relationship to the body because I still react in frustration and, almost like a form of disappointment, when this point occurs in my life. Within reading the second paragraph you may note that a point of frustration was coming through in the writing which shows the relationship that I am creating towards the body within this pattern. What I am saying to the body in these moments is that I care more about the experience of sleeping than I do about the health of the body and thus I am stating that I do not care about the body.
A feeling of weakness will come up in the middle of the night, but I won’t be sure of whether or not it is a momentary weakness or if it is an actual hypoglycemic episode. Once the feeling comes on, and once I decide that I am not sure about what it is, I will breathe and take a moment to close my eyes so that I can see if it is possible to fall back asleep. For the most part I do fall back asleep for a little while, but only on the edge of consciousness which means that I am still quite aware of what is going on. I will sit in this feeling until either it goes away or it becomes too strong for me to ignore. While this is happening I am becoming more frustrated with not being able to sleep the way I would like to; uninterrupted.
I am telling the body that I have more interest in sleeping than taking proper care of the body, but the body is going to need continual management because it is not going to `go` any time soon lol. Since I have placed more interest in sleeping than in support and care for the body in times of being low while in the midst of sleeping the frustration comes up. The frustration comes up because I am not getting what I want - uninterrupted sleep - and it is because of a point that I have defined within myself as a nuisance (hypoglycemia). This is not cool because I am stating that the experience of sleeping and the experience of not being aware or awake is much more pleasurable than taking practical physical care of the body. So this is certainly not how I want to treat myself in relationship to the body, I would much rather take care of the body and show it that I do need it to last a bit longer and do need it to maintain itself as best as possible - because like what am I telling the body as I react in this manner? I am telling the body that I do not want it, I am telling the body that I do not care for the physical functions and necessities of itself I am telling it that I just want to use it for the experiences that can be created here in the physical reality and that the physical functions of it come second to the experiences that are able to be created. If I continue to accept this from myself then a fucked up relationship to the body will exist.
The change here is to let go of the frustration and annoyance and/or any reaction that comes up when I feel low at night or when I am awoken from feeling weak and hypoglycemic, and rather than trying to fall back asleep and ignore what is going on, change that point into consideration of the body in that moment, and simply move myself to correct the low - the same point from the frustration when working applies here.
In the next post I will write SF and SCS on the experience of being frustrated when being low and corrections on how to approach points of being low from hereon.
