I have always been what can be described as ‘sensitive’. This is shorthand for, literally, some days I can’t get out of bed because the Amazon is burning, or I have to recover each time I remember that Selena is no longer alive. Another way of describing it is my diagnosis of anxiety and depression.

There is a disconnect in these instances, between what I know and what I feel. While I recognize the complex structures and causes behind these feelings, I still struggle painfully not to see them as failures or weaknesses. I shame myself thinking of how many people do not have the luxury to shut down like I do, which only worsens things. Until now, I have only devised ways to survive these periods, and every time I return to this state, I struggle anew.

My inherited faith prescribes plenty of solutions for what I experience, plenty of explanations for its occurrence. When I have dared to share my struggles, the well-meaning and serotonin-privileged, in a special kind of irony, suggest meditation or yoga.

So far, excluding a brief run of antidepressants, the feelings always return—an undeniable fact, an unstoppable force. Here, I attempt to derive logic, to find a thread that connects a new way to understand what happens to me. 

*** 

This essay began when I learned the name Ahmaud Arbery, the twenty-five-year-old Black man killed by three white men in Georgia while jogging, about his life and those who love him, and the horrific circumstances of his murder. I felt sickening, devastating, exhausting grief and rage, and a twinge of horrible recognition as the murderers were shielded by the very institutions that are supposed to uphold justice. I felt it spread through individual cells, communities, planes of spirit and ancestors. I knew, too, that this rage never really left. For far too long, the story has been the same.

As the summer of 2020 boiled into a global uprising, distractions kept me functional, until they didn’t. For days, I was moody, irritable and quick to anger or dissolve into tears. I could not focus on anything. I stopped and started two yoga videos in a row. I left the grocery store with none of the items on my shopping list. I sat still, seized by mounting anxiety, rising dread, rushed to distraction, and the cycle repeated itself. My mind darted around my brain, desperately avoiding something.

It remains alarming that it requires years of unlearning for non-Black people to acknowledge the wrongness that pervades our world. It remains alarming how unwilling we are to change, with each instance of mass rebellion against these systems of murder, of absolute violence and immense, oceanic pain.

There exists some rage that cannot be fixed by breathing. Some things are felt through the body. 

At some point in this writing process, sometime in the interminable summer of rebellion and uprising and liberation, I recognized that I could not bring my world back into order. The bad feelings were not internal failures, they were indicators. I cannot cut the threat down any further. I confront it at its true size. 

*** 

When anxiety begins, I cycle through a brutal, exhausting mental list: potential antidotes, reasons to not be anxious, and reasons I am a let-down to myself and the world. If I am lucky, the solution is simple: I am over-caffeinated and have forgotten to eat, a biological force-quit. Maybe I’ve been on a search engine or feed too long, and I shut them off and go outside. If I am unlucky, I fall into a depleted, empty state and remain there for days.

Anxiety is a disproportionate reaction to a perceived threat, so if I guide my body to perform actions that slow the spiral, my perception shifts, and the threat fades. What if you have assessed the threat correctly? I had not devised this protocol, and my body was sounding the alarm. 

***

The problem is trying to fix an experience of the body with a solution of the mind.

I am a writer. I wholeheartedly believe in the power of words to make and change worlds. But I also have a literal, whole heart that pumps life through my literal body. Our bodies hold what we ask of them, but they are not infinite. They are the most finite. Bodies crumble, contradict themselves, get sick, age, and die. Things like epigenetic trauma and myofascial release therapy show us that bodies hold and can pass on trauma.

I miss Tibet through my body. I do everything I can to feel close, but the loss feels immense as the sky, wide as the grasslands.    

There is nothing like being on the land. So, nothing I have done is like being on the land. There are things I may never get to feel. There are things I may always feel. I cannot think my way out of this. Some things are felt through the body.

No matter how much I love reading writer Robin Wall Kimmerer’s world-altering words on planting corn, I have not yet planted corn. To reap the benefits, I must actually eat tsampa, not just rhapsodize about its many virtues, its centrality to Tibetan ancestral lineage and living tradition and survivance.

This is embodiment: there is an unbreachable distance between the intellectually known and the physically, materially felt.

Land is a body. I am a body. My body is land.

We attempt to discipline, control and marshal the body because we don’t like what it tells us. We do not want what it offers, terrified of the poison or medicine. We try to outrun the terror or the pain to which it alerts us, and in these attempts at control, we miss the joy or the possibility of love. 

***

Any measure of success I have attained has been through betrayals of my body.

Foregoing sleep, exercise, food, and other fundamental needs, I have moved mountains and performed miracles. Once, during a particularly stressful period, I developed an ulcer. Consuming coffee threw my body into incapacitating nausea. Deprived of its usual fuel, my body, ever faithful, pushed through on pure adrenaline.

Afterwards, ensconced safely at home, I sobbed so violently that my terrified family members could not understand me. I fell into a deep sleep listening to the Heart Sutra. My body, having served so well in the heat of battle, had finally come to collect the many debts I owed. Some things are felt through the body. 

I cannot help but think of these feelings as results of the struggle against deep colonial structures of violence. Maybe practising the truth of having a body will allow me to slowly disentangle the structures of ableism, colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy that my wise body rejects, even as my mind tries again and again to force her into acceptance.

*** 

I wonder if I write because of the feelings of my body. I have learned—or learned how to make it so—that grief can be generative. Sometimes it comes out of the body and creates things. And so, I am grateful to the grief, for what it has spurred me to create. I am trying to let the grief move, hear it say: ‘I am alive, and it hurts.’

Here are three elements: pain, joy, and the body. The first two deepening the other; the third, the conduit, the vessel, the barometer of it all.

What I have gleaned from my inherited, patchwork understanding of Buddhism—to grossly oversimplify—is that pleasure and suffering, joy, and pain, are two sides of the same coin. One hollows out space for the other, an immutable bond. The path out of this cycle, we are taught, is to recognize their connection, and to sever our attachment to both.

Perhaps this is the link I so often miss. We are taught that as we attune to our own experience of suffering, it enhances our ability to empathize with others and recognize our inextricable connection with them. We should allow this to increase our desire to end the suffering of all beings. Isn’t this, the heart that breaks with grief at the horror of the present, the beginning of the desire for a better world?

Feeling things through the body, especially when unaccustomed to doing so, is near unbearable. Perhaps I am learning to be a body in the struggle. Perhaps I am learning, for the first time in this life, to have a body. I am learning how not to think, but to pray and use my body to access the sacred; to locate the sacred of my own body.

Perhaps my body is the intermediary for my existence on this earth, the vessel through which I receive the message. Perhaps I need to stop thinking, even listening, and start feeling. 

⧫

Excerpted from The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays with permission from Penguin Random House India. Listen to a conversation with editor Tenzin Dickie about the book on a recent episode of  Tricycle Talks here. 

The post Some Things Are Felt Through The Body appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Pus, boogers, peepee, poopoo. Would you believe that there is a meditation practice based on contemplating these items? It isn’t for two-year-olds, it’s for adults. And it is intended to lead to peace of mind, not agitation, amusement and disgust. It’s one of the classic meditation practices of the Theravada tradition, an orderly contemplation of the thirty-two parts of the body, starting with hair of the head and ending with urine.

If this sounds gruesome, consider that life is gruesome: no one survives. Our opinions and beliefs about life and death won’t offer us any special privileges. Worse yet, it’s the nature of all bodies not only to die, but to rot, crumble, shiver, itch, and to display various forms of ugliness. Yet the extra pain that all of us give ourselves over this entire situation seems, on reflection, unnecessary.

Buddhism offers a number of practices designed specifically to cut through our delusions about the body—charnel ground meditations, contemplations of death and loathsomeness. They are meant to undermine our normal relationship with our bodies. They ease the moment of death, and the moments before death. They don’t aim to ruin our happiness; instead, they expand the scope of love. If taken to heart, they exhaust the source of our greatest terrors.

The sheer volume of thoughts we devote to the body is dismaying. If we look closely at our moment-to-moment experiences, our thoughts, our wishes and feelings, we will see that we constantly strain for more pleasure and beauty. We feel that we should be immersed in a constant orgasm of satisfaction and attractiveness.

Meanwhile, our elderly and uncompromising tradition asks us to recognize the pain involved in carting our body around; to look directly at what goes into keeping the body together. As long as we’re healthy adults, we ignore it as much as we can, denying the amount of work it takes to keep it clean, fed and exercised; submitting without a second thought to the pressures to create for ourselves a super-bionic, pleasure-giving, pleasure-attracting, never-sick body. Then we’re trying to lift a heavy box and suddenly—Spang!— there’s a muscle spasm in the lower back and we fall to the floor wondering if we’ll ever walk again. Or, trying on jeans, in the ugly light of the changing room, we see ten pounds of clabber hanging off the backs of our thighs. Or, sitting in the car, waiting for a train to go by, suddenly a black amoeba crosses the lower corner of one eye. As the sky goes dark, a shaft of the pure terror of death bolts us to the driver’s seat.

And that dauntless, unstoppable little commentator that lies inside us utters a peep of shock. This fear that is so overwhelming: where was it stored? Up to a second ago we thought we knew all the cozy rooms of our body’s mansion; now we suddenly find ourselves alone and frightened, as if we were stranded on a high crag in a thunderstorm. Indeed, we may be passing into the dreaded kingdom of the ill, where we are no longer the persons we wanted to be, no longer able to become what we wanted to become, do what we wanted to do. We will be ruled by unwanted problems: pain and exhaustion, obsession and fear. We may feel that we have failed—failed to eat properly, failed to be tranquil enough—as if a life properly lived would never end.

The source of our terror is attachment: the feeling that our bodies are the most precious possessions we have. It is within this attachment and all of its associated assumptions that we live most unquestioningly. The body: what is it really? Do we actually possess it? Is it really precious and beautiful?

The good news is that even the bodies of Arnold Schwarzenneger and Cindy Crawford are transitory. Besides, they require eight hour workouts on top of genetic endowment. After meditating even a little on the thirty-two parts of the body, we have a different feeling about seeing Cindy Crawford’s bone structure—we see bones, not a cultural value.

In contemplations of the loathsome, we are asked to examine carefully all parts of the body, their actual qualities, and to ask ourselves whether we should value it the way we do. What is a human face? It is a piece of skin full of holes, “like an insect’s nest,” the Visuddhimagga says. The brain “… is the lumps of marrow bound inside the skull. [I]t is the colour of the flesh of a toadstool; …the colour of turned milk…” All of the body parts are visualized specifically, in detail. The twenty nail plates. The skeleton, with many bones. Imagine, as you walk along, the movements of your tiny toe bones inside your shoes; take a few minutes to remember the skull behind every face.

Do you feel horror, or a kind of relieved and interested recognition, or both? If it’s horror, is it to the same degree as your denial?

It’s crucial to the success of foulness practices not to get sidetracked by psychological defense systems. Remember that the small mind pursues an ostrich strategy, as if not thinking about bad things would cause them to disappear. Death and decay are the worst things, so all resources will be deployed to forget about them. One defense can be humor. You might feel highly amused by the solemnity of the creepy language in the classic meditation texts, imagining them being read in the voice of Lon Chaney. “Just as duckweed and green scum on the surface of the water divided when a stick . . . is dropped into the water and then spread together again, so too, at the time of eating and drinking, etc., when the food, drink, etc. fall into the stomach, the phlegm divides and then spreads together again . . .” (Visuddhimagga, Nanamoli, p. 280). UUUGGHH!!! you say. Those guys could really dish it out!!!

The mind defends itself, too, by fascination and curiosity. A friend who went to the morgue in Bangkok reported that she could feel her mind developing a sense of fascination to cover up her fear. Eventually, however, nausea overtook her and she tried to escape through the back door—only to find a courtyard full of rotting body parts and pools of blood swarming with flies.

Yet another defense can be pride in what we see as our spiritual progress through contemplating the repulsive. During one three-month course at the Insight Meditation Society, yogis were passing around photographs of three corpses. “Wow,” we said, peering at the bloated face of a young woman who had drowned. It was kind of scary, kind of fun, like a game at a slumber party. Most of all, we felt we had in our hands a special means to meditational success—not an image of what we would surely, one day, become.

It’s easy to dismiss and denigrate these loathsomeness practices. With yet one more line of defense we protest: Why not deny the truth as long as we can? Why dwell on the horrible side of life when, after all, we can put the same amount of energy into distracting ourselves and pursuing pleasure? Do we want to become inhuman beings who don’t care whether we live or die?

But we might just as well ask if the result of loathsomeness practice might be a profound and subtle, wild, and fearless joy. Perhaps, through this practice, we will come to really love life without holding back from any part of it, including the infirmities and decay of sickness and old age. Perhaps we will even be able to develop a mind that laughs at death. Why not begin to free ourselves from attachment to the body, which is disappearing anyway? We don’t have to be so bound by these meat puppets that we drag around.

⧫

The title of this article was inspired by the band Meat Puppets.

From the Fall 1994 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 11, No. 1) Text © 1994-2020 by Kate Lila Wheeler and Inquiring Mind

Related Inquiring Mind articles:

https://inquiringmind.com/article/2501_6_rand/

https://inquiringmind.com/article/2501_w_sumedho-its-like-this/

https://inquiringmind.com/article/2801_41_stahl/

The post Meat Puppets appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

It’s early morning and the sky, colorless, reflects my mood. Not too long ago I wrote confidently about the moment’s perfection, about the fundamental rightness of life as it is, but today that perfection eludes me. Today I skirt along the moment’s edges, feeling the friction of this body and mind as they plod from one moment to the next, every task a burden.

I’ve felt this tired before, I’m sure of it. But never so relentlessly or for so long. A battery of tests tells me there’s nothing medically wrong with me. Friends think I’m depressed. I can list all the reasons why I think neither of these is true, but after months spent coaxing my boulder up the hill like Sisyphus without even the respite of watching it roll down, I’ve come to the conclusion that the what is less important than the then.

Suppose this is just the way it is from now on, I’ve told myself, not once or twice but often. After all, there’s always a shred of hope that things will change for the better. Impermanence has other plans, it seems, but this doesn’t keep me from hoping, even though in my mind I can hear my first teacher, John Daido Loori Roshi, say in his booming voice, “The whole thing is hopeless! Zen has nothing to do with hope.” Hope is the other face of fear, he’d say, and in a moment of total presence there’s no room for either. All right then, no hope, no fear. So if this is how it is, I tell myself again, then how will you live? This, after all, is the relevant question and always has been, whether the bed I’m lying on is made of daisies or nails.

“All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens,” Woolf says in her magnificent essay “On Being Ill.” All day, every day, the dis-eased body intervenes in a way it doesn’t do in health. And depending on how we choose to respond, we’ll experience this intervention either as yet another source of suffering or as fuel for tremendous spiritual change.

Reading one morning Antonio Damasio’s The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures, I find in his words a neuroscientist’s confirmation of Woolf’s insight into the transformational power of illness. Our feelings about pleasure and pain, illness and well-being, Damasio says, are the very catalysts for the kind of questioning, reflection, and understanding that distinguish humans from other species. It’s because we feel uncomfortable that we inquire into the nature of pain or illness, looking for ways to work with them more skillfully in our lives.

This is something the Buddha was doing from the beginning. In the Sallatha Sutta (Samyutta Nikaya 36.6, The Dart), he said that a person who grieves and laments over a painful physical feeling follows the dart of pain with the dart of suffering. But one who’s able to remain present with the sensation without resistance or complaint will only feel the pain of one dart. In other words, pain and illness are not the problem. It’s our reaction to them that causes us distress. Remember that famous quote “Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional”? Echoing the Buddha, Damasio would probably say that the only thing separating inevitable pain from discretionary suffering is the way we feel about what we feel.

Anyone who has practiced with pain or discomfort knows this, of course. Anyone who has read the Buddhist teachings knows that acceptance is key. But as all of us also know, the gap between wish and reality can be wide and steep, especially when the landscape is so much more appealing on the side of what we wish for. So I can’t claim I haven’t tried to bargain with the universe, especially on days like today, when a bit more energy would be just the thing.

I long for those mornings when I could jump out of bed as soon as my eyes opened, days when I’d move seamlessly from one task to the next. Now I seem perpetually stuck in a slow-motion setting, my body blunt and feeling much heavier than it really is. My thoughts, on the other hand, are sharp and spiny. They snag on the most insignificant things, accumulating like burrs on a hiker’s pant cuffs. The overall effect is not unlike a cartoon someone sent me recently: a little blobby creature, weighed down by several burdens labeled “stress” and “past karma” and “pandemic fatigue,” trips on a tiny step called “minor inconvenience” and falls to its knees sobbing, while another creature looking on says, “I think you’re overreacting.”

I know this kind of fatigue is difficult to explain to someone who has never felt it, especially when it’s the only thing that ails you, because, well, maybe it’s all in your mind. Of course it’s all in my mind! I want to say. As a Buddhist, I know it is. I also know better than to draw a distinct line between it and my body. But I still have to live with this body, this mind, so there it is again, the insistent then how?

Once, the 10th-century Zen master Fayan Wenyi asked his dharma brother, Xiushan, “A hair’s breadth of difference is like the distance between heaven and earth. How do you understand this?” Xiushan said, “A hair’s breadth of difference is like the distance between heaven and earth.” Not satisfied with this answer, Fayan pressed him:

“How can you understand it this way?”

Xiushan said, “I am just thus—what about you?”

Fayan said, “A hairsbreadth’s difference is as the distance between heaven and earth.”

Xiushan thereupon bowed.

–The Book of Serenity, case 17, trans. Thomas Cleary

In this koan, Fayan is quoting from the poem “Faith in Mind,” attributed to the Third Zen Ancestor, Master Jianzhi Sengcan. Four hundred years after Sengcan’s death, Fayan very simply and elegantly uses this teaching to show Xiushan how a crack becomes a chasm through no other means but the way we use our minds.

Zen constantly insists that we get close to our experience, because the moment we start evaluating, judging, rejecting, or grasping, a crack appears. Given enough time and energy, this hairline fracture becomes a gap, then a gorge, then an abyss—an ever-widening space between what I want and what is. But the irony is that this distance doesn’t actually exist. It’s an illusion conjured up by the dissatisfied mind, the confused mind, the discriminating mind. So even though this gap is the place where suffering takes root, it’s also the space where practice becomes possible and real. When we’re able to see the crack for what it is, wish and reality merge, and we realize that what we saw as a problem is actually no problem at all.

I wish I could say in my case that this insight came after long and diligent practice, but in reality it was more a matter of giving up. Or giving in. Whenever my thoughts began to spiral down a hole, whenever they bounced around madly looking for something to grab onto, my body stepped up. I’d be getting ready to jump on Google to search for diagnoses and treatments, or I’d start to worry about how long this flare-up would last, or I’d feel the first blooming of frustration and self-pity, and my body would assert itself gently but firmly. “Oh no, you don’t,” it would say to my mind. “You don’t have the energy to worry about this, so clear your mind of all this debris.” Then the same fatigue acted like a thick layer of mud on a dirt road. Just as my thoughts started to rev up, my own tiredness caused them to spin in place without gaining purchase. Without anywhere to go, they settled and stopped, robbed of the energy that usually keeps them going.

That’s why, when it comes down to it, even I can’t deny the advantage of this tiredness. Whereas before I’d muscle my way through any problem I came across, now my body isn’t willing to even stumble along. It’s clear that I go at its pace or not at all, and thankfully, I don’t have the energy to argue anymore. So the light comment I made to a friend, “This fatigue may be the only thing that will stop me from overworking,” may turn out to be not so light after all. I have no choice but to slow down and watch, intrigued, as my body works hard to protect itself and my mind with a wisdom that’s far beyond the knowledge I turn to for refuge when I’m under stress. Damasio would say it’s the wisdom of a body finely tuned to homeostasis—a body that knows perfectly well how to maintain a balanced state without the meddling mind. So maybe it’s a sign of my stubbornness that I still need to be reminded of this after all my years of practice. Yet I also recognize that at least some of my willfulness I’ve dutifully learned over just as many years.

I’m deeply embedded in a culture that routinely sacrifices the body to work, and early on I learned that in order to get anywhere, to do anything meaningful, I was going to have to work hard. That in itself isn’t a problem. It’s the closed system that equates work with self-worth that has so many of us trapped. And even though in my twenties I went off to live in a Zen monastery, I brought all my habits with me, and these were both implicitly and explicitly reinforced by many of Zen’s forms.

Now my body isn’t willing to even stumble along. I go at its pace or not at all, and thankfully, I don’t have the energy to argue anymore.

For many years, I believed that practicing Zen meant I had to tame my unruly body and quiet my fickle mind—and the way to do both was through rigorous effort and discipline. Zen isn’t known for its gentleness (though I believe that’s slowly changing) and the classical literature doesn’t always encourage awareness of the body and its many needs. Bodhidharma, our revered First Ancestor, ripped off his eyelids to stay awake during meditation. His disciple Huike cut off his arm to show his zeal. The nun and artist Ryonen Genso disfigured herself to enter a temple (she previously had been denied entry because a priest deemed her too beautiful and said she would distract the monks). In the koans, monk after monk routinely gets slapped, kicked, punched, and beaten up. Some of the stories are most likely apocryphal, yet their message is clear: you must be ready to do whatever it takes to realize yourself, even if it means ignoring, harming, or giving up your body.

As a young practitioner full of drive and love for the dharma, I too routinely ignored my body for the sake of waking up. I’d regularly forgo food and sleep in order to sit longer hours, and when I got sick—which happened often—I simply waited to recover so I could do it all over again. Now, with a bit of time and perspective, I can see that the way I practiced was based on a false dichotomy that pitted body against mind. For a long time, I couldn’t read the wisdom my cells are programmed with. I didn’t know how to trust the unknowing mind. And I didn’t have the stories of practitioners grappling with sick bodies (Hakuin’s description of Zen sickness and his “melting butter” visualization is an exception), ailing bodies, or just run-of-the-mill bodies doing the messy things that bodies do.

“Why don’t nuns ever write about their periods?” A fellow monastic said to me many years ago. We were talking about the demands of Zen practice and the ways in which it failed to take into account the female body and experience. She was hungry, she said, to read accounts of women’s real-life experience, no matter how mundane. She wanted to hear about the body intervening, because it inevitably does.

“People write always of the doings of the mind,” says Woolf in “On Being Ill,”

the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how the mind has civilised the universe. They show it ignoring the body in the philosopher’s turret; or kicking the body, like an old leather football, across leagues of snow and desert in the pursuit of conquest or discovery.

The story of Huike standing knee-deep in snow, sword in hand and hacked stump bleeding, may make for better reading than a nun’s struggles with premenstrual brain fog, but it doesn’t make the latter any less relevant. When it comes down to it, none of us can jettison the body or turn a deaf ear to its wishes for long.

Fortunately, more and more teachers are recognizing the need to make explicit what Buddhism has known all along: body and mind aren’t separate from one another, and we disregard either—whether in formal practice or in any other aspect of our lives—at great cost. The body isn’t just a vehicle for realization, or for getting things done. It’s the root of wisdom—its very source. Sometimes we need to be nudged to remember this. Sometimes the reminder is a bit more blunt. But at the end of the day, the body will have the last word. Mindful of this, I decided it was time to pay closer attention, and to create the conditions that would allow me to better hear what it had to say.

“Inside is made of outside,” says Thich Nhat Hanh in Understanding Our Mind, a commentary on Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses and Thirty Verses. Thinking of this, I resolved to change the outside so I could better understand the inside. Last summer I packed all my belongings, put them in storage, and with nothing but a couple of suitcases moved back to Mexico, where I was born. I chose a place I’d never been to, a fast-growing city called Playa del Carmen about an hour south of Cancún, on the Caribbean coast. I came here drawn by my love of water and hot weather, as well as by the promise of a simpler, slower life.

A few months into the trip, I can already feel the effects of this displacement—or rather, re-placement, since I’m deliberately placing myself back at the center of my own life.

Most days the thermometer edges close to 90, but far from being oppressive, the heat is like a balm. It softens and blurs all the edges, so I have a hard time discerning where I end and the rest of the world begins. I move through the still, damp air slowly and without friction, allowing my body to move at the speed it needs to heal itself. Long walks and long swims now break up my work hours, and as much as possible I’ve tilted the balance to spend more time outdoors than in. Ideally I’d have been able to slow down just as easily in New York City, but there’s no question that the body responds to the healing properties of wind and sun much more readily than it does to those of brick and cement blocks.

None of us can jettison the body or turn a deaf ear to its wishes for long. The body will have the last word.

The other morning I went for a swim as the sun was rising, the Caribbean at low tide streaked with bands of turquoise and cerulean blue. That day the water was free of the sargassum that has covered these beaches in the last couple of years, and in shallow waters I could clearly see all the way down to the white sand.

I dove in and swam steadily for a while, the gentle splash of my hands and feet the only sound. Suddenly, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. I stopped mid-stroke and submerged myself so that I could see what I was facing. And there, swimming about two feet from me, was a hawksbill turtle, its mottled amber and brown shell dazzling even underwater. It swam very slowly toward me with what I took to be curiosity and, after taking a good look, just as slowly swam away.

In that moment I understood why I was there. The last couple of years had widened the gap between my body and my mind—not just for me, but for everyone. Too much time spent indoors. Too many hours staring at a screen. And even though I myself was doing work I loved, it wasn’t enough. The animal body needs more of its own kind of nourishment.

I turned and swam toward shore, letting my senses drench me in their song. The taste of salt water in my mouth. The sun seeping through my foggy goggles. The muffled cry of a seagull overhead.

It works perfectly, this body, I thought as I turned my head to breathe, my legs kicking effortlessly behind me. It works harmoniously, seamlessly, and largely without complaint. It’s only my mind that finds fault, constantly sweeping the territory for mines, falling into potholes, focusing on what it thinks it lacks rather than what it’s always had.

A few minutes later I walked out of the ocean, and as my feet touched the sand I saw clearly what I’d only glimpsed before and hadn’t wanted to accept. I can no longer shape reality in my own image. I’m no longer able to force things into being. They’ll happen as they will and in their own time, and it’s completely my choice whether to resist or accept, to live in I want or This is.

So that’s what I’m doing now—gentling myself back into the soft center of each moment, the spaciousness at the heart of everything. Here, there’s neither fatigue nor vitality, neither illness nor health, neither work nor rest. Here, what I have is what I want, and there’s simply and always my life as it is: perfect and whole.

The post Stuck in Slow Motion appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When Willa Blythe Baker first began meditating, she spent many years on the cushion trying to wake up. During her first retreat at the age of 15, she sat in anticipation with a sense that, at any moment, she would miraculously wake up and transcend the current moment. It wasn’t until Baker encountered yogic Buddhism in Nepal many years later that she realized the path was not about transcendence or waking up at all. Rather, the teachings invited her to “wake down,” to explore the wisdom of one’s embodied experience in the present. 

In her new book The Wakeful Body: Somatic Mindfulness as a Path to Freedom, Baker addresses the problem of body-mind dualism and invites readers to connect with the natural wisdom of the body as a path to awakening. (You can read a teaching from the book here, in the most recent issue of Tricycle.) 

Tricycle recently spoke with Baker about the process of writing the book, somatic bypassing, her pandemic practice, and why she leads wilderness retreats. 

What led you to write this book on the body? My meditation practice has taken me on a trajectory away from the body and then back home to the body. When I first met Buddhism, I encountered the word mind a lot. There was so much talk about the mind and the nature of the mind. As Westerners, I think we have an unconscious bias towards elevating the mind above the body. This probably comes from this long history of Cartesian dualism, so we believe that somehow the body and the mind are separate. The contemplative traditions of the East teach that body and mind are not separate as long as we are alive—they are actually an inseparable whole. And even if the physical body is left behind at death, some dimensions of embodiment (consciousness and energy) continue. 

I had kind of assumed that the mind was something separate from, and maybe even better than, the body. But slowly, as I practiced meditation more over the years, I began to see that actually, the body is the key to a deep, stable, profound, and joyful meditation practice. I wanted to share the spirit of the body’s potential with other meditation practitioners. 

Did you discover anything new about your relationship with your body through the process of writing this book? I started the book because I knew already that I’m in the most joyful place of practice when I’m in my body. There’s something about being embodied that brings out the bliss of my practice and the bliss of my life. So actually writing the book was this process of sitting down every day and asking my body to write the book. That’s when I found my best writing place—when I asked my body to express itself through the typewriter keys. “What does my body have to say?” That was the question I would sit down with, and I learned that the body knows how to write. It has unexpected wisdom to share in the present moment. If I ask my body what it has to convey, it’s always unfolding another layer of insight.

“What does my body have to say?” That was the question I would sit down with, and I learned that the body knows how to write.

In the book, you discuss your time studying abroad in Nepal and this shift from living in a body of self-denigrating concepts to realizing your body was part of a larger whole. Can you tell me more about how this time in Nepal transformed your relationship with your body? I encountered a thickly interdependent community of human beings in Nepal. Generations would all be living within a single, family compound—grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, and cousins. There was this sense of a deeply connected community where family lives close together with a lot of support for one another. And there was something about that web of support that helped my body relax. I felt myself letting go of this idea that my body is just mine alone. I began to have this sense that my body is part of an interdependent web, and this web is beautiful and has its own life. 

Being in that social environment, embedded in a community, gave me a sense that I was a part of a communal body. And there was dignity and beauty and support in that. This communal body allowed those self-denigrating concepts, which were very self-focused, to dissolve. There was much less of a sense of the individual self in that community and much more a sense of the we. 

I also had no exposure to media where I was staying, and that had an impact on me as well. There were no radios, televisions, or newspapers that I could read. In the West, we are bombarded with imagery of the ideal body in media and advertisements, but that did not exist at all there—at least back then. I was able to be free of the Western construct of the ideal body. 

Do you have any meditation practices for someone who is struggling with a negative relationship to their body? For someone who is struggling with their beliefs about their body, or with body image, or with denigrating concepts about the body, the most immediate way to move away from that is to simply drop down from the headspace, the thinking space, into the groundedness of the feeling body. That means letting go of the idea of what your body is and actually feeling your present body. Sometimes the mind is flying into the past, flying into the future, or it’s grasping onto concepts of who and what we think we are. Closing your eyes and feeling your body’s groundedness can be a way to discover that there’s something else there that has nothing to do with our thoughts about the body. There is a living, breathing miracle down there, and we can float down to the base of the body to help ground our flighty minds. 

And if you are experiencing chronic pain or some discomfort in the body, you can still contact that groundedness as a place of refuge. Even when we’re feeling discomfort, say in a knee or in our stomach, we can discover that the groundedness is still there.

You introduce the term somatic bypass in the book. Can you explain what that is? Somatic bypass is this tendency to numb out what is happening from the neck down. Somatic bypass happens when we neglect awareness of what’s happening in the present moment and in the body. This can be applied to our experience as meditators. We can often live up in our heads when developing a mindfulness practice, and we start to conceptualize all the dimensions of that practice. We grasp onto ideas of peace or the nature of the mind, or we think we’re becoming more compassionate by having loving thoughts. We can do all of that without actually going down and checking in on the body’s experience. What is the body’s experience of peace? Of compassion?

When we start to include the body in our meditation practice, we discover that all of these words—peace, freedom, mindfulness, compassion, ease—have an embodied expression. And until we experience and become intimate with these bodily expressions, our practice of meditation will remain conceptual. If we bypass the body and just go straight to what we think of as mental states, then we miss the full richness of a meditation practice. 

Shifting away from the book now, has your practice changed at all during the pandemic? Yes. The pandemic has been such a reminder of what we’ve been practicing for—to become more resilient. Difficulty helps bring us closer to practice. For me, the pandemic has turned me toward my sources of refuge, and it has helped me land on what my resources are, like loving connection. Loving connection is not only a support for our spiritual practice, but it is a spiritual practice. It is the practice of friendship and connection. So the pandemic helped me begin to honor my relationships with family and friends as a deep spiritual commitment and practice in and of itself. 

Another refuge has been the present moment. I think what happened in the pandemic for many people, and certainly what happened for me, was this collective trauma of waking up anxious. Especially in the early days of the pandemic, there would be a sense of waking up and not knowing—having no idea whether we’re safe. This collective anxiety that we were living in individually, but also collectively, reminded me of the refuge of the present moment and being able to rest in not knowing. The pandemic helped teach me about being comfortable with uncertainty. It also taught me that nature is such a profound resource. When everything else seemed crazy, I would take long walks in the woods. The woods would remind me that they, too, are expressing resilience and beauty and providing refuge. 

Difficulty helps bring us closer to practice.

Can you tell me more about your recent decision to omit “lama” from your title? I still use the title in my own sangha, so I haven’t stopped using it entirely. But I stopped using it outside of the context of my own immediate sangha because it seems to me that a title can elicit projections, perhaps of accomplishment or spiritual maturity. I don’t know that those projections help much. I’m just a human being. But within my own sangha, where the context is clear and I’m in the role of a Buddhist teacher, I don’t think it’s harmful for the title to be present. Still, I only ask people in my sangha to call me Lama Willa if they’re moved to. If it seems useful or helpful for someone to use that title out of an act of respect or feelings of love, then that seems okay. But outside of that, I don’t know that it’s useful.

I want to close by asking about the Natural Dharma Fellowship retreat, “Listening for Liberation: Hearing the Wisdom of the Wild,” that you and Lama Liz Monsoon recently led. What are the benefits of a wilderness retreat? The wilderness is a natural dharma teacher. From the time of the Buddha until now, practitioners throughout the world have been leaning on the wilderness. I love to guide retreats in wild spaces because there’s no effort to meditate in those wild spaces. They’re a place of freedom. The vastness of untamed spaces brings us into contact with our own innate wildness, with our own inner nature that is also untamed and spontaneous. In some ways, what we’re really invoking on the meditation cushion is our true nature or our natural state. When we’re in a wild space we don’t have to try for our own inner nature to be evoked. It just comes alive.  

I’ll also add that we need sources of resilience in a time of eco-anxiety, and the wilderness is such a source of resilience. Being in the wild allows us to connect to the planet as sentient beings, and the more we can form a relationship with untamed spaces, the more we will advocate for their health and well-being. I see wilderness practice as a form of activism that changes us. By being outside we change within. That change can be a support for taking action on behalf of the planet. This is a big motivation for me to lead these retreats. 

The post Let the Body Lead appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Insight meditation is explicitly designed to expose (and explode!) our habitual self-images, challenging them directly, experientially, and fundamentally, even, for example, in the very basic practice of giving mindful attention to one’s breathing body.

At first we have the impression that the body is an object—these three cubic feet (as songwriter Rufus Wainwright says) of bone and flesh—in which we place our meditative attention. This body has a shape, a gender, an age. These are my hands, these are my feet—this is my breath. But as our sensitivity grows, this sense of the body softens. The hard edges of the body stand out less. Attending to the sensations of bodily life directly, moment by moment, we don’t find hands and feet or even inside and outside. We cannot really find where our folded legs end and the cushion—the world—begins. Our self-image idea will tell us, but our direct experience neither knows nor cares. Instead it settles into an intimacy with experience where body and world meet. Where sensation dances. Where we no longer mark where the sound of birdsong ends and the hearing of it begins. The body feels fluid and alive. Sensitive. Intimate with all experience. Truly sentient.

Try this: While you are here reading, tense your arms and legs and belly. Hold it a few moments and notice the density in your sensations. Feel how solid and real the boundary between inner and outer seems, and how strong the sense of being a self is.

And now . . . relax. Let go of that tension—allow your muscles to soften, breathe out, and notice how the sense of boundary also relaxes. Feel how the sense of self becomes more diffuse, the edges less defined.

This is just the gross layer of muscular relaxation. Most people are carrying all kinds of other tension patterns of which they are not even aware, as they are so habitually ingrained. Meditation teaches us to settle more and more deeply into our direct bodily experience, where the body as object gives way to an ever-changing dynamic flow of sensation and vibration, a constant streaming of felt experience through awareness. Present within this fluid bodily dance, we notice subtle layers of tension, numbness, and resistance and in turn give them the opportunity to move, open up, and soften. Then, however deeply we go into a particular sensation, we find no center. And however much we sense outward through the layers of sensation, we find no edge.

This profoundly affects our sense of what the body is and of how to inhabit it. Even when the experience isn’t as tangible as described above, we begin to recognize the body as having neither edge nor center—as being a vast theater of experience, sensitive and responsive.

Becoming familiar with this dimension, we see how our psychological patterning informs our tension patterns, and these too begin to open up. We discover a natural ease that underpins physical existence, the more our physical defenses and imagined deficiencies get resolved.

In the process of the body opening up in this way, it is common to have various kinds of nonordinary bodily perceptions, especially during meditation practice. These can show up as extremes of temperature, density, or size. One might feel as if one’s body is expanding hugely—as if the room cannot contain your physical form. The impression can be so strong that you are tempted to open your eyes and check! It equally can happen in the other direction, feeling as if the body is shrinking . . . vanishing even. Changes in the density of sensation can make you feel as if the body is becoming extremely light. If you open your eyes at this moment, you may be disappointed to find you’re not actually levitating, though it can feel very much that way. Or the opposite can happen, in which the body feels incredibly dense, and the idea of moving even a finger seems like it would both take colossal effort and cause ripples throughout the universe.

It can feel as if your nervous system is reconfiguring itself, and in many ways that is exactly what is happening. Patterning that has been held rigidly, perhaps for decades, is starting to open up, and it is this energetic unwinding that causes the unusual perceptions, which can also include swaying or shaking, or occasional sudden spasms of movement.

These experiences are a natural part of an evolving capacity to inhabit this body more fully and freely. They are not particularly significant in themselves. Some find them exhilarating, exciting—others find them a little frightening and disorienting. What’s significant is the insight—knowing the body can appear in many different ways, so that the usual psychological identification with our various self-images as being “who I am” just seems more and more limited, narrow, false, and unnecessary.

Increasingly, our reliance on self-images thins out and can completely disappear. Notice I didn’t say the images themselves, but the reliance on them. You will still show up in the world as if you are this body, or as if it is yours, but it is no longer a source of seeming truth for the sense of who I am. You might go to the doctor for a pain in your arm, but even while explaining it and rolling up your sleeve to be examined, a freer relationship is clear to you. There is a close, caring relationship to this physicality, but without ownership and identification. 

Ultimately, all our self-images are partial at best—caricatures of how we imagine and describe ourselves, distorted in the hall of mirrors of the self describing the self to the self. We investigate these self-images in order to understand them and see through them, for that which you become familiar with no longer fools you—that which you see through becomes transparent.

♦

Adapted from Awake Where You Are by Martin Aylward, Wisdom Publications, November 2021

The post Neither Edge Nor Center  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Mindfulness of the body is a beautiful practice for cultivating loyalty, the quality we need to stay in relationships even through ups and downs. When we practice awareness of breath or body, our loyalty is to sensation itself. The practice is to stay with the sensations even as they change.

Mindfulness isn’t a thought. It’s a full-bodied sensory experience. The language of the body is sensation, and feeling is the way we listen. Showing up for the pulsing and tingling, the numbness, the heat, the heaviness, the expansiveness, and all the rest of it is a way of embodying loyalty at the most granular level.

Feel the moment when a new breath enters the nostrils. Cool, maybe a bit dry. The chest rises, a sense of fullness. The sensation of the spine rocking forward slightly. The back ribs expanding, the belly extending, and the throat opening. Lightness, space, length, pressure—and then, in an instant, the inhalation turns. Breathing out, feel the warmth of the exhalation. Just a thin stream at first, and then a rush. Softening, deepening, emptying out. A pause before the lungs open up again.

At Spirit Rock Meditation Center, on the unceded Ohlone territory known as Woodacre, California, there’s a gratitude hut that is filled with pictures of revered teachers and bits of wisdom from their teachings. Under a photograph of the Thai meditation master Ajahn Mun are these words from him: “In your investigation of the world, never let the mind desert the body.”

I can’t imagine that any of us intend to desert our bodies. But while developing a meditation practice, many of us discover that we’ve partially evacuated our bodies somewhere along the way. Traumatic experiences stored in the tissues of the body can make it feel like an unsafe place. Our bodies may have been subjected to impossible standards of beauty, desexualized, oversexualized, or pathologized in the gaze of the dominant culture. As we pay attention to the dance of sensation across the field of our awareness from moment to moment, fear and sadness sometimes present themselves to be known and healed—whether or not we have invited them.

Our bodies are innocent. They want to be as healthy, happy, and whole as they can be. They want to expand into the fullest expressions of themselves. They want to be free, unencumbered by judgments, restrictions, and impossible standards. And if we turn away from them, overwhelmed by the multitudes they contain, we will miss the wisdom they have to share with us about how freedom happens at the cellular level, at the level of muscle and bone. They won’t talk to us at all unless we love them enough not to leave when they start to tell us their stories.

We can make friends with our bodies by approaching them with gentleness. With our loyal awareness, we can demonstrate our commitment to our somatic experiences. By paying attention moment by moment, it is as if we are saying to our bodies: I’m not going to abandon you. For this period of time that I’m practicing mindfulness of body, you can be however you need to be, and I’m going to stay right here with you, no matter what. I won’t judge you. I won’t compare you to how you used to be, and I sure won’t make plans to fix you. If you have something to say, I’ll listen. If you don’t, I’ll still be right here.

Our bodies receive our attention as love, and under the soft glow of loving awareness, knots start to unwind and deep holdings start to release. We don’t do it—the body does it on its own. And the body has its own timing, so it will take as long as it takes.

If we find that when we return our attention to the body there’s a lot of intense sensation, resistance, or fear, we can start with just one minute of practicing this way. One minute of bringing awareness to bodily or breath sensations, and then moving our attention to something outside our bodies that feels less activating and more concrete: the ground, the sky, a flower blooming. Our practice then is to come back when we can and, over time, stay a little longer when we are able.

It’s amazing how much can be revealed through this simple practice of loyalty by feeling whatever is unfolding right now, and learning to stay with it, moment after moment. In the process, we become more gathered, collected, and sure in our ability to meet whatever arises internally without flinching or turning away. Nurtured by unwavering commitment, the body learns that it can trust the mind and heart, and we can walk in the world with unconditional confidence, the foundation of which is love.

♦

From Radical Friendship: Seven Ways to Love Yourself and Find Your People in an Unjust World by Kate Johnson © 2021 Kate Johnson. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. www.shambhala.com

The post Loyalty to Sensation  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In this series, you’ll learn techniques to restore the nervous system’s innate strength and resilience. As founding member and meditation teacher at DharmaPunx NYC and practitioner of Somatic Experiencing, Kathy Cherry offers a body-based approach to the mindfulness of the buddhadharma. “When we can be attentive and curious, the body has a tremendous amount of information it can share with us,” says Kathy.

Filmed at the Williamsburg Therapy Group’s office in Brooklyn, New York.

Kathy Cherry is a Brooklyn-based meditation teacher, coach and a founding member of DharmaPunx NYC. In her work as a Somatic Experiencing® practitioner, she blends this modality with Mindfulness and Buddhist teachings, connecting the intellect, body and senses to facilitate psycho-spiritual growth and wellbeing.  Her style emphasizes embodiment, compassion, and practical wisdom both on and off the cushion.

The post The Wisdom of the Body: Connecting with Your Inner Resilience appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Willa Blythe Baker helps us access the body’s wisdom through an exploration of the four layers of embodiment: the physical, energetic, mental, and integrative. These layers are increasingly subtle, and Willa explains how we can develop our awareness as we attune to them. By learning to listen more closely to our bodies, we can open our hearts and liberate our minds, opening the door to a deeper engagement with the world. 

Willa Blythe Baker is a dharma teacher and lineage holder in the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism and the founder and spiritual codirector of Natural Dharma Fellowship in Boston, and its retreat center Wonderwell Mountain Refuge in Springfield, New Hampshire. She holds a doctorate in religious studies from Harvard University, was a visiting lecturer in Buddhist ministry at Harvard Divinity School from 2013 to 2017, and has completed twelve years of monastic training and two consecutive three-year retreats. She is also the editor, author, and translator (respectively) of The Arts of Contemplative Care: Pioneering Voices in Buddhist Chaplaincy and Pastoral Work, Everyday Dharma, and Essence of Ambrosia.

Learn more about Willa in our Visiting Teacher profile, and watch the recording of her live meditation, dharma talk, and Q&A session on January 14, 2021 here.

The post The Art of Somatic Mindfulness appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

From the outside, Buddhist meditation can seem like it is all about the mind, overlooking the body, which remains seated and still. Those looking for body-centered practices are more likely to look to the t’ai chi or hatha yoga traditions. But Buddhism does place the body at the center of its methods for meditative cultivation. (In fact, hatha yoga was first developed by Tantric Buddhists.) This is true across Buddhist traditions, though they approach the realities of the body and its transformative potential in different ways. I spoke to three Buddhist teachers from the Zen, Tibetan, and Theravada traditions to get a sense of where the body fits in Buddhist practice.

***

Zen is known for its focus on the practice of zazen, in which one “just sits” (Jpn., shikantaza) in a precise physical posture and enacts one’s enlightened nature by resting as non-grasping, spacious awareness of the body-mind. Zen is also known for its precise rituals—formalized ways of walking, kneeling, bowing, eating, drinking, cooking, and cleaning. For Grace Shireson, a Soto Zen teacher and president of the Shogaku Institute who studied in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, these practices are about vivifying our awareness. 

“Zazen amplifies the spacious awareness that we already have … by sitting [and] by letting go of thinking,” Shireson explained. “In embodied Zen activities we feel awareness as it moves through the body, which is also what we do in ritual, in samu [work practice]—we let that awareness express itself. In fact, the body is already saturated with awareness, and the activities we do in Zen help us to experience this awareness and let it become more vivid.” 

“I tell beginning students,” said Shireson, “that there are three prongs, body, breath and mind. It’s like putting a plug into the wall, and when we do that then that’s where the power surge is. Awareness is circling in the body; the rituals help us connect with that awareness.”

***

When I asked Judith Simmer-Brown—a long time practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism and Distinguished Professor of Contemplative and Religious Studies at Naropa University, where she has taught as a founding faculty member since 1978—how the body is used in Vajrayana practice she corrected me: “We don’t ‘use’ the body: mind and body are inseparable,” she said. “In Tibetan Buddhist practice, we learn to relate to the subtle body—the link between body and mind, which is made up of energy channels—by relating to our direct experience of ourselves non-conceptually. There is a distinction between the way we normally think about the objectified body and the sacred view we develop of the body as an energetic flow.” 

Simmer-Brown explained that cultivation of the subtle energy body entails both purifying obstacles and shifting the flow of energy—with the goal of attaining “nonconceptual wisdom,” or the direct experience of awakened awareness.The process Simmer-Brown described uses an array of practices: breath, mantra, chant, visualization, ritual, meditation, and sacred movement. Receiving transmission from a teacher also plays an important role. “In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, you wouldn’t do it without transmission, you can mess up your health by not knowing what you’re doing or not having the proper motivation. A teacher needs to assess [your preparation] and help you identify the best set of tools for you.”

Simmer-Brown acknowledged that working with the body can be challenging: “It’s not easy to embrace the body and deal with all the aspects of the body that sometimes make our existence really confusing and difficult.” Nevertheless, she explained, this work is crucial. “Any spirituality that does not embrace every aspect of our existence is not a very powerful one. The relation to the body is embedded in every practice in Tibetan Buddhism.” 

***

“The body plays several roles in meditation,” said Thanissaro Bhikkhu, a teacher in the Thai Forest Tradition of Theravada Buddhism and abbot of Metta Forest Monastery near San Diego, California. “To begin with, it’s an object of mindfulness with the purpose of giving rise to concentration. In concentration, you develop a sense of pleasure and allow it to fill the body. That gives you an alternative source of well-being, so that you’re not always going for pleasure from the outside in order to escape pain. You’ve got a better escape. The Buddha compares it to food—nourishment for your efforts in the practice. 

“Second, to watch feelings and the mind, you need to have a firm post in the present. Otherwise, your desires can pull you in all directions. The body is what provides that post, from which you can begin to understand the mind to the point where you can penetrate to something timeless.”

The body is central to the meditation the Buddha recommended most often—mindfulness of breathing. “In breath meditation, the Buddha recommends developing a full-body awareness that provides the foundation for developing all the factors needed for awakening,” Thanissaro Bhikkhu said. 

***

These practices show a rich spectrum of practices that emphasize attentiveness to our bodies. In Buddhist training, the body may become a source of inner nourishment, stabilize mindfulness, or amplify our innate spacious awareness. The subtle body of energy may be explored and healed in order to attain wisdom, and we may embody awareness in all of our movements and activities with precision to connect to the body’s intelligence. Through the lens of the dharma, the body is revealed to be a precious gift with which we may pursue the great opportunity of awakening. 

As Grace Schireson told me, “The only place we get to practice is in this body, we might get to practice after we die, but who knows?” 

She then shared an expression spoken during a dharma transmission ceremony, when a longtime student is authorized to teach.  It goes, “Save the body; it is the fruit of many lifetimes.”

The post The Body in Buddhadharma: Three Perspectives appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

My 20th high school reunion is coming up next week.

How did THAT happen? More importantly: Should I go?

It’s in Nebraska, so I’d have to book a flight (with connections), rent a car, haul my kid across time zones, and find something decent to wear. Not to mention all that torturous small talk once I actually get there. As an introvert, trying to catch up on two decades of relative strangers’ lives over cocktail weenies and cheap wine is perhaps my worst nightmare.

There are a million reasons to just blow it off, not the least of which being that reunions in a post-Facebook world yield fewer surprises than they did before. Most of us are familiar with some version of one another’s lives, even if it’s a glossily curated edition.

But there’s a reason Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion became a cult hit. It articulated something most of us don’t say out loud: it can be so damn hard to go back.

Social media or not, reunions are charged with existential angst. They leave you acutely aware of the passage of time: the fact that you’re now decidedly middle-aged, sporting gray at your temples, hefting around an extra 15 pounds; and the undeniable truth that somehow, you got kind of old.

That high school promise of what could be has been replaced by the often-ambivalent reality of what is, and death feels so much closer than it did in back when Friends and The Spice Girls reigned supreme.

The movie Grosse Point Blank says it best:

Marcella: You know, when you start getting invited to your 10 year high school reunion, time is catching up.

Martin Q. Blank: Are you talking about a sense of my own mortality or a fear of death?

Marcella: Well, I never really thought about it quite like that.

Martin Q. Blank: Did you go to yours?

Marcella: Yes, I did. It was just as if everyone had swelled.

It’s complicated. So you flirt with the prospect of throwing on a pair of Spanx, buying a new handbag, touching up your roots, and praying for no awkward middle-aged acne to show up, all the while wondering what happened to your sprightly hopeful young self, and feeling insecure about your achievement or lack thereof.

It’s all too much. So then you figure: screw it. I’ll just stay home and avoid the whole awkward thing.

But you should go. Because life is short. We’re lucky to be around at 38. And who knows if we’ll make it to our 30th high school reunion?  

Lewis Richmond, a Buddhist teacher and author of Aging as a Spiritual Practice: A Contemplative Guide to Growing Older and Wiser, uses Zen philosophy to express our inherent connection in a different way.

In a 2010 conversation with Tricycle’s feature editor Andrew Cooper, Richmond said:

Sometimes when I’m asked to describe the Buddhist teachings, I say this: Everything is connected; nothing lasts; you are not alone. This is really just a restatement of the traditional three marks of existence: non-self, impermanence, and suffering. I don’t think I would have expressed the truth of suffering as “you are not alone” before my illnesses, but now I find that talking about it that way gets at something important. The fact that we all suffer means we are all in the same boat, and that’s what allows us to feel compassion.

When sickness and death touch your life—as they inevitably will—they’re an electrical shock waking you up to the fact that you don’t get to keep this body forever. You don’t have time to get an MBA or train for that Ironman before you give yourself permission to be authentic and at ease in your body and your relationships. You begin to realize that tomorrow might be too late.

And those people with whom you shared your teenage years? They’re precious in a way no one else might be.

Sure, maybe they voted for He Who Shall Not Be Named, and maybe you haven’t spoken since the Seinfeld finale. But you sat on the Johnson Gym bleachers and cheered for a goofy chainlink mascot together (Go Links!), and you toilet-papered each other’s houses at 3 a.m., and you “jazz-handed” and grapevined onstage in bad sequined show choir outfits, and you learned to drive beater stick-shifts, and shivered through prairie blizzard football games, and pinned ugly prom corsages on one another. Your lives are forever intertwined. 

The moments you shared didn’t last. They might even be hardly recognizable now. But because of them, you’re a part of something greater.

And when you arrive at the reunion, you’re going walk into that room full of vaguely familiar strangers who look more like their middle-aged parents than the 17-year-olds in your memories, and your classmates will all be trying their damnedest to look put-together and successful and suave, like they haven’t changed a bit, but every person in the room:

• Has had their heart broken by death or loss
  
• Has aged
  
• Feels older and creakier than they did in high school
  
• Wonders if they made all the right choices
  
• Wonders if their life is meaningful
  
• Wants to love and be loved
  
• Will die someday
  

Ideally, we’re coming together not to boast about our McMansions and Teslas (or our student loans and rundown studio apartments). If we’re brave enough, we can cut the bullshit, and drop the facade that everything’s peachy. Compassionate connection comes from letting ourselves be fully vulnerable about our own moments of suffering.

So I challenge you: walk into that hazy room, stick a nametag on, and talk to someone you haven’t seen in ages. And ask them something more meaningful than what they do for work.

In his tremendously popular column for On Being, “The Disease of Being Busy,” Omid Safi writes,

In many Muslim cultures, when you want to ask them how they’re doing, you ask: in Arabic, Kayf haal-ik? or, in Persian, Haal-e shomaa chetoreh? How is your haal?

What is this haal that you inquire about? It is the transient state of one’s heart. In reality, we ask, “How is your heart doing at this very moment, at this breath?” When I ask, “How are you?” that is really what I want to know.

I am not asking how many items are on your to-do list, nor asking how many items are in your inbox. I want to know how your heart is doing, at this very moment. Tell me. Tell me your heart is joyous, tell me your heart is aching, tell me your heart is sad, tell me your heart craves a human touch. Examine your own heart, explore your soul, and then tell me something about your heart and your soul.

We may see one another for just an hour or two at a heartland dive bar, and then not again for decades, or maybe even ever. So let’s not waste this opportunity talking about the weather. I want to hear about your nephew’s battle with cancer, and how you’re managing it with such grace and strength. I want to find out how your parents have aged, or what it was like to lose them; what it means to be the primary caregiver for your grandfather with dementia, or what it feels like to be in your body in your life right now.

If we can empathize, if we’re willing to bring our whole brokenhearted selves to the table, rather than pretending we’ve spent the last 20 years living perfect shiny Pinterest lives, a reunion has the potential to be enormously meaningful.

Let Lewis Richmond’s summation of the three marks of existence help you come home with a heart full of compassion, and remember that:

1. Everything is connected
You have a shared history with these folks that transcends matching letter jackets. You grew one another up. And because our lives are built on relationality, that will never change.

2. Nothing lasts
Not youth. Not beauty. Not relationships. Not childhood homes. Not heartache. Not jobs. It all passes. And sometimes (oftentimes, when we’re attached to them) that passing means suffering. This attachment creates dukkha (often translated as pain, restlessness, or a lingering sense of dissatisfaction).

You’ve changed. I’ve changed. We’ve all changed. Our parents have died, we’ve married, divorced, given birth, raised children. None of us is the same.

If you walk into the room expecting that the beefcake conservative Christian high school quarterback you haven’t seen since graduation may very well be a balding liberal atheist insurance salesman, you will be less shocked.

Trust that you will all be different. Embrace the change. Impermanence is the nature of being. Learn to see the beauty in what the Japanese call wabi-sabi: all that is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.

3. You are not alone
We come together knowing we, too, will not last; that someday we’ll all die, and that proximity to death makes all the trivial stuff just fade away.

Death comes without warning. But you are also not alone in your suffering; we are all due to get sick, age, and die.

I’ve decided that I’m not going to dye my hair or drop 10 pounds for this thing. I’m proud of my grays, proud of my scars, proud of the quiet battles I’ve fought (and won and lost) in these last two decades. They haven’t been easy years, all of them, but some of them have been all grace and mostly joy.

So, please: go to the reunion. Buy the ticket, wear something that makes you feel beautiful and real and at ease in your still-trucking-along body, and then step through that door with gratitude for the fact that you’re living and breathing, you’re thriving amidst inevitable human suffering, and you’re doing the best you can, remembering that everything is connected; nothing lasts; and you are not alone.

The post Go To Your High School Reunion, Dammit appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.