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.

In reflecting on how my practice has evolved over the years, I look back over my life and remember quite vividly the first Buddhist retreat I ever attended almost exactly fifty years ago. It was taught by a wonderful Thai monk, Koon Kum Heng, who presented a classical Theravada practice that he called rising and falling. For seven long days I did nothing but observe how my breath caused my front belly wall to rise and fall on the inhalation and exhalation. With each inhalation the belly could be observed, and eventually be felt, expanding outward. On the ensuing exhalation it would contract back in. The movement never stopped. Over and over and over again while sitting in an upright meditation posture, standing, lying down, and walking slowly from place to place, I did my best to focus my entire attention on my belly as it rose and fell on the breath.  

Such simple instructions, but like everything that first appears simple, it was far easier said than done as inevitably I’d find that my mind would wander off on a parade of errant thoughts that with uncanny success would hijack my awareness and leave me oblivious to the rising and falling of my belly. The practice only became somewhat stabilized toward the end of the retreat when I realized I was no longer observing the rising and falling action from the safe distance of my mind but was actually feeling the expansion and retraction of the belly and grounding myself there.  

At one point during that retreat I recall chuckling to myself over a reminiscence about a phrase that would not infrequently come up in conversations with friends of my parents. Oriented toward succeeding in life (which to them mostly meant going into medicine, law, or business), they would often remark when I told them as a teenager that I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with my life: “Well, you’re not going to just sit around and contemplate your navel, are you?” 

During the retreat I realized that they really had no idea about the source from which that phrase—which they viewed pejoratively—had arisen. To them it meant not committing to anything and wasting away your life. Yet here I was, hour after hour, day after day, doing nothing but “contemplating my navel,” and I loved it! By the end of the retreat I felt that my center of gravity had dropped down out of the thoughts in my head into the felt presence in my belly. Thought would appear and evaporate so effortlessly that I had my first clear awareness that I was not my thoughts. I was not the mind that thinks and the speaker of those thoughts. Instead, I was the grounded feeling of presence emanating out of my belly. It felt so relieving and wholesome. Endlessly rising and falling, rising and falling, and I loved going along for the ride.  

Only many years later did I understand that this practice of observing the rising and falling of the belly in response to the breath draws on the opening instructions on breathing as recorded in the Satipatthana Sutta, one of Buddhism’s earliest texts whose words have been attributed by some scholars to the Buddha himself. After telling us to sit down in a posture of meditation with the spine erect and upright, he instructs us to become aware of the breath as it enters and leaves the body, and he goes on to tell us to conduct this examination at the front of the body.  

Throughout the long history of Buddhism, the two most popular places at the front of the body to explore these instructions have been the nostrils, where breath can be felt to go in and out, and the front belly wall that can be felt to rise and fall unceasingly in response to the breath. Constant observation of the breath can be so potent and effective that many Buddhist traditions understandably focus exclusively on this opening instruction. But this is not where the instructions end. Just a few short sentences later, in a completely remarkable statement, the Buddha suggests that we no longer just focus our awareness narrowly on one small place at the front of the body but instead breathe through the whole body. 

I’ve wrestled and danced and struggled and played with that culminating instruction for the better part of my life on the cushion. What could it possibly be pointing to? Over the long years I’ve come to realize that the initial instruction to become aware of breath at the front of the body refers to the classical practice of mindfulness but that the culminating instruction to breathe through the whole body takes us into the world of bodyfullness. 

What might rising and falling mean to the exploration of bodyfullness?  

To breathe through the whole body you have to do two things. First, you need to awaken the felt, shimmering presence of the entire body. How could you breathe through the whole body if you’re unable to feel it? On every part of the body, down to the smallest cell, minute, tingling, buzzing, carbonating, pulsating sensations can be felt to exist. But, deep in our own thoughts, we have little awareness of their vibratory presence. In fact, we have to blanket them over to be able to function in the quality of consciousness that passes as normal in the world that is so often, as Thich Nhat Hanh famously observed, lost in thought. Experiencing the entire body, from toe to head and everywhere in between, as a unified field of felt vibratory presence, is the first step in the awakening of a bodyfullness that can experience breath interacting with the whole of the body.  

The second requirement—and this is the most radical piece I bring to the dharma conversation—is that we need to allow subtle, continuous, amoeba-like motions to occur throughout the entire body in resilient response to the force of the breath that wants to make its transmitted way through a relaxed and awakened body—not unlike how a wave moves through a body of water. In most presentations of meditation, we’re instructed to sit completely still, like a stone garden statue of the Buddha. But this frozen stillness not only doesn’t allow the breath to move through the body, but it also causes so many of us so much pain and discomfort in long retreat.  

Over the decades, as my awareness expanded naturally from an exclusive observational focus on my belly to an inclusive felt awareness of the whole of the body, I’ve come to realize that these altogether natural motions in my body start with giving my entire spine permission to rise and fall on the breath. The joints in the spine are no different from joints anywhere in the body. They’re there for one purpose and one purpose only: to move. In a deeply relaxed state I can feel my entire spine lengthening as I inhale and shortening back down as I exhale. In other words, I can feel the entire spine rising and falling. What I’ve found over all these long years of fascination with sitting down on my cushions is that, when I enter into bodyfullness and experience how breath can be felt to interact with, stimulate, and move through the whole body, a plug gets pulled on the consciousness of “lost in thought,” and the altogether natural dimensions of awakened body and mind, which “lost in thought” keeps us forever removed from, are revealed effortlessly and spontaneously.  

***

sit down in a posture of meditation
just feel yourself sitting there
as tall as you can be
but as relaxed as you can be

focus your attention
on your belly

even in the stillest of bodies
your belly can be observed and felt
to rise and fall
expand and contract
on the inhalation and exhalation of breath

rising and falling
rising and falling

observe the motions
feel the motions
become the motions

***

now broaden your focus
to include a felt awareness
of your entire body
leaving nothing out

pass your awareness
slowly through your body
from head to foot
awakening felt shimmer
through the simple act
of focusing your attention
on a part of the body
like shining a flashlight
into a dark corner of a basement

***

relax as you inhale
and feel your entire spine lengthen

your lumbar spine moves and lengthens
your thoracic spine moves and lengthens
your cervical spine moves and lengthens

as you exhale
feel the entire body shorten back down

inhale fully and deeply
down from your diaphragm
down through your pelvis and legs
into the earth

simultaneously
feel how the breath can be felt
to lift the entire body upward

rising and falling
through the entire long shaft
of the upright body

***

breathing down into the earth
grounds and stabilizes clarity of mind

as it initiates the rise
stay grounded in the earth

when you feel the breath
causing the head to lift
let go and soften
the top of the head
the muscles around the eyes
and both sides of the cranium

feel the energies
in these three places in the cranium
billowing open
let vision and sound
replace thought

explore the rising and falling practice of bodyfullness
while you’re sitting formally in meditation
while you’re standing and walking
and making your way through your life

◆

Try Will Johnson’s Tricycle online course, “The Posture of Meditation,” at learn.tricycle.org.

The post Rising and Falling: From Mindfulness to ‘Bodyfullness’ 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

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Meditation happens in the body. I think we can mostly all agree on that. For a wide variety of Buddhist meditation practices, our embodied experience is the object of our meditation—be it the rise and fall of the breath, the sound that hits our ears, or the sensations on our skin. Yet when we sit down to meditate, we often end up trying to catch and subdue an out-of-control mind, apparently forgetting about the body’s role in the practice. Why does this happen? Part of the reason is that being in the body is hard.

For many of us, our bodies can be a painful and confusing place because our feelings reside there, according to the Buddhist understanding. The Buddha did not break up human experience into a simple duality of the psyche (immaterial) and physical (material). Rather, he taught that our experiences can be classified into five categories called the skandhas, or aggregates: form, meaning the physical world; sensation; our perception of those sensations; mental formations or actions; and consciousness. In this framework, an emotion is not a singular cognitive event, but rather a series of dependently arising phenomena that the mind perceives and mistakes to be independent.

The moments between perception and conditioned response can happen so quickly that we do not make a distinction between our initial experience and our reaction to it.  This begins to change when we develop a regular meditation practice. Since meditation involves accessing and deepening our awareness, eventually (whether we like it or not) we will begin to notice aspects of what can be called our body-mind that had been previously dormant.

We begin to see that these feelings don’t just arise in the body; they get stored there. Like an attic that accumulates dust and cobwebs when ignored, our body-mind of sensations, feeling memories, and emotions can “clutter,” resulting in a challenging emotional life. So just as our corporeal body suffers when we don’t take proper care of it, so too does our body-mind. Yet, we are often not taught how to tend to our emotional body-minds, so we are unfortunately left with habits of numbing, avoiding, and suppressing the felt experiences that arise within our bodies. This becomes an even bigger problem when we have unresolved trauma or severe emotional injury.

Developing awareness of the feeling body can have an extraordinary effect on our cluttered emotions as we begin to attune to parts of ourselves that we may have unconsciously suppressed or avoided for years. While it is sometimes necessary to employ a psychotherapist to help us navigate and understand our feelings and behaviors, cultivating more awareness of our sensations, feelings, and emotions as they arise in the body through a consistent meditation practice can be a powerful tool for unpacking the various energetic constrictions that our bodies accumulate. This allows us to safely release some of the physical and emotional tension that we hold in our bodies.

By becoming aware of these feelings more fully, we bring them to the surface. Once at the surface we practice attuning to them and meeting them gently with kindness. In the light of this, we begin to see that the sensations, emotions, and feelings that arise within our bodies also need our attention and care. When we bury a feeling, we hold it inside and it festers, but if we develop our ability and courage to feel, we can come to a recognition that our inner feeling-world is not something we have to fear and run from.

Traditionally, awareness is something we cultivate in steps. The practice starts in the body as we work with bringing awareness to our physical form and breath. By building our practice slowly over time, the conditioned body-mind has a chance to safely catch up.

Yet, even after learning that the body is the starting place for meditation, I have seen many meditators struggle with how to approach a more embodied or felt practice. We  want to get out of our heads, but no matter how hard we try, we just don’t know how.

When we can’t get back into the body, some people quit or find endless excuses not to practice. Others get stuck in a static top-down approach of constant conceptual framing. Either of these approaches basically boils down to a type of anxious/avoidant response and takes us further away from the body.

Instead of reinforcing the body-mind habits that are keeping us stuck in more activated nervous-system patterns, we can gently turn toward the body with inner awareness, growing our ability to know (or feel) and meet our internal experience within the body. Inner awareness is both a quality that comes naturally to us when the body is healthy and one that we can develop through meditation. But just as muscles in the body can atrophy when left unused, our interoceptive awareness can weaken. Fortunately, like other skills, we can pick up our practice and re-learn it.

The following is a short meditation you can work with to attune to the body. I recommend putting aside 5–10 minutes to do the practice:

• Find a quiet place and a comfortable seat to take a relaxed yet alert posture.
• Gently close your eyes or leave them open—whatever feels the most comfortable.
• Begin by gently bringing your awareness directly into the body. This can be as simple as sensing the contact with the seat or floor below you.
• Continue by taking a few breaths, deepening your awareness as you begin to inhabit the body as a whole.
• If you need to spend more time just feeling the floor and earth below you, that’s also fine.
• As the body opens, continue to invite a warm awareness to extend to more and more of your felt experience.
• As you continue to feel the sensations and energies in the body you can gently prompt further exploration by asking “What else?”
• Continue to listen deeply to the body without pushing. Just naturally watch and feel the sensations as they arise.
• When you’re ready, you can close the practice by connecting back to a specific felt presence like the seat or floor below you.

Embodied awareness will naturally grow more with the time and attention you give it. Each time you sit down to practice in this way, simply let yourself open to the body and let it guide you.

As our inner awareness develops in meditation, we become skilled at meeting ever subtler sensations within the body. As this capacity deepens, we notice their changing and transparent nature, and are able to approach them with a more inquisitive and compassionate heart.

♦

This article was originally published on March 14, 2019

The post How to Be in the Body (Without Jumping Out of Your Skin) appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Reginald A. Ray is an American Buddhist scholar and teacher who started practicing Tibetan Buddhism while pursuing his PhD in Religious Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

After years of studying under Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (whom Ray met upon his initial arrival to the United States in 1970), he became a senior teacher in the Kagyu-Nyingma lineage. He assisted Chögyam Trungpa with the founding of Naropa University and taught there for many years.

He now acts as President and Spiritual Director of the Dharma Ocean Foundation, a meditation community that he co-founded in 2005. Along the way, he has authored many scholarly publications on the history and traditions of Tibetan Buddhism.

Below is an excerpt from his newest book, The Awakening Body, which focuses on the somatic aspects of Tibetan Buddhist meditation practices.

***

The Awakening Body is about the practice of meditation when it is approached as an essentially somatic discipline—that is, when the body rather than the mind becomes the fundamental arena of meditation practice. What might it mean to engage in this type of “Somatic Meditation”? Most simply put, rather than trying to develop meditation through our left-brain, thinking mind in a “top-down” manner, as is the case with most contemporary approaches, Somatic Meditation involves a bottom-up process. In this bottom-up approach, we are able to connect with the inherent, self-existing wakefulness that is already present within the body itself. In contrast to contrived, conventional approaches that emphasize entry into the meditative state through the intentional thinking of the conscious mind and by following conceptual instructional templates, maps, and techniques, Somatic Meditation develops a meditative consciousness that is accessed through the spontaneous feelings, sensations, visceral intuitions, and felt senses of the body itself. We are simply trying to tune in to the basic awareness of the body. Put in the language of Buddhism, the human body is already and always abiding in the meditative state, the domain of awakening—and we are just trying to gain entry.

This kind of meditation is in many respects quite different from what is conventionally understood as “meditation” in our modern culture. Meditation approached as a somatic practice consists of two aspects. The first involves paying attention to our body, bringing our conscious intention and focus to and into our physical form. Sometimes we pay attention to individual parts of our body, even very minute parts; other times, what we are attending to is our body—or our “soma,” as I prefer to call it—as a whole. Sometimes our attention will be on physical sensations, other times on body-wide events and patterns, others again on the subtle energies that flow through our body, other times the spatial environment of our body, other times still on the physical boundary of our body, the envelope of our skin.

The second aspect of Somatic Meditation is exploring—with openness and acceptance and without any prejudice, judgment, or conscious agenda whatsoever—what we discover when we are paying attention to our body in this manner. This is no simple thing, especially since our entire conscious life as humans is typically maintained and protected by the “ego thing”—by not paying attention in this open and unrestricted way. Rather, we habitually direct our attention away from our body and its raw, infinitely expanding, unprocessed experience to our thinking mind with its labeling, judging, contextualizing, and narrativizing of more or less everything our body knows, thus severely limiting and hiding from our conscious awareness what is actually, somatically there.

So step one in Somatic Meditation is to come to and into the body and attend; and then step two is to open our consciousness into the interior wakefulness that is going on under the surface.

These two aspects of Somatic Meditation I have just described correspond to what are traditionally called “mindfulness” (shamatha) and “awareness” (vipashyana), found in virtually all forms of Buddhist meditation. In most conventional teaching of mindfulness, the body is generally left out, despite some body-focused elements such as attending to the breath or the occasional use of body scans—as in the work of the popular vipashyana meditation teacher S.N. Goenka (1924–2013). While such approaches are helpful up to a point, they are limited because for them the body is typically a stepping stone to something else, rather than being an object of exploration in and of itself. When examined on its own terms, we discover that the body has many internal dimensions that are hidden to the superficial view and many layers or levels of experience beneath the obvious sensations.

The situation in relation to meditation and the body is quite confusing because, given the increasing importance attributed to “the body” in contemporary culture these days, nearly every meditation teacher wants to say they are including the body—but such claims raise some important questions. To what extent is the body included and in what ways? Does the instruction really move us definitively away from the left-brain orientation? And has anything fundamentally changed in the practitioner’s process and maturation? Meditation that is truly somatic always implies radical change and transformation in our state of being.

The unfortunate result of underplaying the body in its totality in much mindfulness and awareness instruction is that we are not really addressing, let alone working through, the pernicious and debilitating disembodiment that afflicts virtually everyone in modern societies, a disembodiment that sabotages our physical, emotional, social, and spiritual well-being. When the meditator does not address his or her disembodiment in a fundamental and decisive way, particularly on the spiritual level, any kind of meditation carried out is more than likely to lead eventually to the complete cul-de-sac of disconnection and disassociation—a dead end from which, because of sophisticated techniques and defensive rationalizations that can be built up in the practice itself, escape is extremely difficult.

When we approach meditation as an essentially—I would almost say “purely”—somatic discipline, then everything changes. Most important, the spiritual journey is now seen not as separating oneself from “samsara”—from all that is physical, worldly, impure, and problematic—but (quite to the contrary) as a process of deeper and deeper entry into those very domains of our existence. When we do, we discover that it is precisely within the interior reality of those aspects of our fully embodied, visceral life that our most important discoveries occur, our true spiritual journey can unfold, and lasting, all-inclusive transformation is able to come about.

In fact, authentic realization can only happen when we abandon the outside standpoint of our left-brain, judging, ego mind and plunge into the innermost depths of our ordinary, unprocessed human experience. As the realized Indian tantric master Tilopa said to his uptight, ever “correct,” scholarly disciple Naropa a long time ago, “Naropa, your problem is not what you experience; it’s that you are taking the wrong approach to what you experience. You don’t know how to leave it alone.” Naropa, the paragon of all of us left-brain junkies, was trying to get rid of his pain by thinking his way out. He was trying to impose this conceptual map in an attempt to interpret, limit, and control his experience. He was striving for a fanciful nirvana where he wouldn’t have to deal with the messiness of his own life anymore. And so he was running away from the very place where, alone, genuine realization can occur.

From Awakening Body, © 2016 by Reginald A. Ray. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boston, MA. www.shambhala.com.

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Embodiment is:

emerging into this world of light and sound

joy of skin touching skin, mouth on breath, body sliding into/out of body

separateness of playmates teasing, mommy scolding, dog growling, knife cutting

loneliness of being encased in envelope of skin, thoughts and emotions a mystery to others

confinement to body as a constantly changing piece of luggage, always a surprise to look down and it has sprout hair or breasts, become fat, wrinkled, thin, peeling, saggy

becoming afraid that this will end.

         Embodiment is:

frustration of mind-never-still standing square in the way of Mind 

wonder of using mind-that-can-grow-quiet to encounter Mind, body-that-can-sit to realize Body

interpenetration of what I call me and what I call paper just now as I read, interpenetration of what I call me and what I call carpet felt, walls seen, air breathed, trees outside, continuously creating each other, mutual verification, no distance at all. Worm bodies, cloud bodies, toothpaste tube bodies, grass leaf bodies, carpet fiber bodies, Sitka spruce bodies, lumber stack bodies, woman’s body birthing slippery baby body.

struggling through body of gristle, skin, sinew, synapse, eyelash, sweat, breast, penis; struggling through mind of scheming, dreaming, steaming, jealous, rageful, loving, doubting, antsy; struggling through body of zafu, left-foot-on-right-thigh, thumbs touching, breathing counting, seed syllable, moon disk turning; through mind watching Mind watching mind as it opens to no eye ear nose tongue body mind.

Sometimes I think our em-bodies are like clay shaped on a potter’s wheel. Each body is different in form and function, just as pitcher is for pouring, pot for holding, lid for closing. There are man bodies, woman bodies, car, butterfly, radiator, and earthworm bodies. No matter how they are coat, pink slimy, shiny metal, skin, fur, feathers, bark, stone—all are of the same substance.  In this universal potter’s studio everything is made of clay: the floor, the walls, potter’s wheel. Nothing enters and nothing leaves. Being born, clay is formed. Living clay bodies chip and gradually or suddenly! break down. Dying, they disintegrate into clay particles again, are gathered, kneaded, and made into new bodies. In the potter’s studio are millions of vessel-bodies, continuously being formed, functioning according to their purpose, breaking down, being remade as something new. Nothing enters and nothing leaves.

After hundreds of thousands of millions of years, every particle of clay has passed through every kind of vessel. Every body has particles that have “belonged” to every other body. The vessel-bodies are so tightly packed that there is no distance between them, one shape curving into the next, a valley in one is a hill in another. So close that molecules interpenetrate. What is the clay? Who is the potter?

♦

From Being Bodies, edited by Lenore Friedman and Susan Moon. © 2007 by Lenore Friedman and Susan Moon. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications.

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