Tag: The Body

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414. Space

The physicist David Bohm said that matter was condensed light. Frozen light.

In Sanskrit the word for space is Akasha.

Akasha also means ‘sky’ and ‘ether’. In Hindu philosophy it is one of the elements. It’s positive, not negative.

When we think of space however,  we’re likely to see it in abstract,  Newtonian terms. We’ll think of space, as we think of time, as a kind of container that we live within, rather than something that lives within us. And we’ll think of it in terms of absence, vacuity. A negative.

Zazen is a way to recover an embodied, felt sense of space. And that’s important, because if we don’t have that, we’re liable to construe meditation and Buddhism in purely psychological terms.  While we tend not to talk of space much, a word that we talk about ad nauseam, awareness, is very often expressed in spatial terms: the space of awareness. But this is often collapsed into something psychological or internal.

But because when we’re meditating we’re not crumpled around the sense of self, an embodied sense of spaciousness becomes eminently achievable. Which has a number of implications. Firstly,  the boundary between body and world becomes much more fluid. Secondly, the connection between space and breath – breath as activated space; breath as energetic space – repatriates space from its false mental home. And thus we can see that underlying our mental chatter, our thoughts, our emotions, our sensations is something very very subtle.  It feels  tremulous, a sort of vibratory aliveness. Like condensed light.

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404. The Missing Body

When you ask people about their experience when they start practising zazen, they’ll generally talk about their internal dialogue. This seemingly endless compulsive chatter.

After a while they might also talk about more enduring negative emotional states which they often find disturbing and which they generally repress in the busyness of everyday life.

If you ask them what they experience somatically you’re not likely to get much of an answer.  The somatic experiencing of the body generally seems fairly invisible to practitioners except when the body is experiencing pain or where there’s some obvious manifestation of an emotional state like the heart racing or the palms  sweating, or something like that.

The problem is that the lack of somatic awareness and the missing language to describe somatic experiencing  are obviously related. If you turn your attention to, for example, what you’re experiencing at this moment at the back of your throat, there isn’t a language to describe that.  And because there’s not a language to describe it, there isn’t a language to retain it. And so the bulk of our lived life passes from present obscurity to past obscurity, like a vast hidden river underneath the debris of our mind.

Why is it difficult for us to have a somatic language? You can say that it’s because we have a quite intellectual culture that privileges thought, but I think there’s another reason:  if you pay careful attention to somatic experience it’s not one thing after another—the experience is fluid, dynamic, changeable and continuous. It’s like a four dimensional kaleidoscope of feeling rather than a selection of objects and events arranged in time.

It’s as if our evolutionary development has privileged  formulating the world – and ourselves – in terms of discrete things, objects or events, with these then interrelating in a particular way. Perhaps it helped us survive. 

But it doesn’t help us now. 

What we would need to properly describe somatic language is basically a language of process—words like surging, or declining, or bursting; all very different from how we habitually language the world and ourselves.

We’ve been experiencing quite strong storms for the past few days which have blasted the eastern coast of Scotland. When we think of storms we’re likely to think of rain, of wind, of cold. In other words, concrete manifestations of underlying, vaster, dynamic weather patterns. So we are aware of the visible in so far as we can formulate it into discrete things but we’re much, much less aware of underlying processes.

This is very relevant to practise for several reasons. Firstly, if we aren’t somatically aware, then really we’re disconnected from our body. Which also means that we’re disconnected from ourselves. And in consequence, our meditation will be a practice of frustrated reachings for  tranquillity.

On the one hand we’ll have all these thoughts and emotions and on the other we’ll have a sense of spacious awareness which is sometimes concretely manifested in the breath and in a momentary stillness. But the body is missing.      

And so, somehow that spacious awareness is always, as it were, being polluted by the thoughts and emotions and the sense of self that we naturally experience, like the serpent farting in the Garden of Eden.

We feel that way because the whole experience isn’t grounded within what’s actually going on in our life and in our body. 

It’s important for us because if we understand the aliveness of this body then we can understand the aliveness of the body of everything.

 Because they’re not separate.

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398. The two meanings of ‘Body’

The relationship between mind and body in our society is like the relationship between nobles and peasants just prior to a revolution.

Nobles are oblivious or ignorant or filled with fear even if the peasants do what they’re supposed to do, which they rarely do, and with surly resentment. There’s something about them. The nobles can feel something is in the air, but they dismiss it. They might, Antoinette like, play at being peasants with their dear friends the psychotherapists.

The body exists in two senses: one is as an object of the Mind. That’s our usual sense and when psychotherapists and similarly minded people say they’re interested in the body that’s really what they mean. 

The other, largely hidden sense is that the body is the heart of the world.

In practice we are required to endure the noise of the Mind: sinking through this first sense like a bird slowly diving through an oil slick, finally dropping into the clear water of the second sense.

When we drop into that second sense, we understand there is nothing that is missing.

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365. Embodiment

In Buddhism two of the ideas most distant from our rational western perspective are the Tathāgatagarbha and the Dharmakaya.

The Tathagatagarbha is the faith that, at our core – not just our core, but at the core of all living beings –  is an embryo or womb of Buddhahood: a Buddha potentiality or actuality, which is covered over by our karma. It’s a very positive way of seeing: our essence is Buddha and our coverings, our karma is accidental. 

The Dharmakaya is the idea that the whole universe, seen correctly, is the body of the Buddha. The Chinese integrated those two ideas by saying that the Dharmakaya was what the Tathāgatagarbha became when those karmic obstructions were removed. 

Those two ideas are a bit of an embarrassment to the no-nonsense, modern idea of Zen. It’s hard to see, at least at first blush, how they’re related to practice at all: but actually they’re intimately related to practice. Specifically, they’re very related to embodiment.

When we think of ‘embodiment’ we often think that we’ll just physically become more vivid, like feeling our blood coursing in our veins, for instance. We’ll still be, as it were, an object in the world, but illuminated, special.

But in truth, what we notice when we become more embodied is, in a way that’s hard to describe, that we become less physical. We become more aware of ourselves as spacious and energetic.

One of the reasons why we place such an emphasis on sitting in a balanced posture is that that posture enables us to feel, at our core, something like the Tathāgatagarbha: a spacious and dynamic emptiness which, in its nature, is not distinct to others. 

It’s not individual to us in its nature—it’s universal. And when we directly see ourselves in terms of presence, energy, spaciousness and dynamic process, the boundaries which we impose between ourselves as conceived and the rest of creation become far more porous.

That’s a gradual process. The metaphor – not just metaphor – for all of this is the breath. When we’re sitting, breathing fully, our breath is one of the correlates to this dynamic spaciousness that we feel inside us. The breath that’s inside us and outside us is really the same breath: the space inside us and the space outside us is the same spaciousness.   

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358. The hands of Avolakitesvara

Just as a doctor palpates the body for what they cannot see directly, in Buddhism, teachers persistently palpate with words that which cannot be directly spoken of, or, to use the traditional language, that which is ‘inconceivable’. And palpating is an appropriate metaphor, because, even although we cannot trap it within language, we are always intimate with it.

The endless activity of expression of teachers is not pointless, it’s essential. Their effort begins to illuminate. It illuminates the teacher. It illuminates the student. It illuminates a tiny part of a vast land. It illuminates the light. It illuminates the darkness. Most importantly, it disrupts the pictures we create.

It is not that one effort supersedes another, but rather, each effort is the effort of all Buddhists, a billion little candles on a dark hill.

In meditation we are palpating the body, this body. Not of course just our body of bones and flesh and pictures, but the whole body of our experience. We are palpating this body, not with our tiny arthritic karmic hands, but with the hands of Avalokitesvara.

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343. Vitality

The non-duality that Buddhists talk about is not healing the mind body split. It is healing the self world split. But obviously, healing the mind body split is a necessary prerequisite to that.

When the Tang Dynasty Chinese wrote about meditation they generally talked about two aspects. One was Samatha —calming the mind—and the other was Vipassana—insight. 

If we think of meditation primarily in terms of consciousness, then we’re liable to interpret both of those phrases in terms of our individual psychology. 

We will think that calming is making my mind peaceful and empty. We will think of insight in terms of my seeing. We may think of it in terms of a special kind of seeing that I can have. 

This is wrongheaded.

Calming is the calming of our whole body mind. And Insight isn’t really seeing. It is a direct experiencing of non-separation; not some woo-woo mystical stuff but gradual and progressive and real.

There is a modern tendency to think of meditation in terms of consciousness alone. Often the body is disregarded or minimised. This ignores the other fundamental pole of meditation.

That other  pole is Vitality. Aliveness.

If you ask what distinguishes living beings, you would answer: consciousness of some sort, and aliveness. 

But Vitality has not had a very prominent place in the history of modern western thought. It tends to be largely ignored. 

The problem with ignoring it is if we’re just thinking of meditation in terms of consciousness, what we will give attention to is the ‘contents’ of consciousness, primarily thoughts and emotions.  We think that’s what our experience is. We ignore or misunderstand the aliveness of the body. 

Dōgen didn’t misunderstand, which is why he referred to “ the vital matter of letting the body leap”

We might just pass over that as poetic effervescence  if we don’t understand the centrality of vitality, of aliveness. If so, we’ll misunderstand the purpose of meditation. We’ll essentially see it in terms of emptiness, stillness, vacuity and space. We’ll misunderstand the ‘contents’ of our experience. We will bracket all of these contents as being that which needs to be eradicated or, at least, set to one side. We will overemphasise equanimity and miss joy.

There’s all the difference in the world between, for example, persecuting voices or persistent, unpleasant emotions or habitual banal patterns of thought and the natural aliveness which our body has. This aliveness shows itself at the level of sensation, which goes ‘upwards’, becoming emotions, becoming thoughts. It will also show itself as an energetic patterning underneath our emotions. 

If we’re not aware of that, then what we’ll see is simply the top layers.

It’s as if we have a landscape where the deeper half is missing. To use another metaphor; it’s as if, when we focus on consciousness alone, we’re like a magician. One who can go anywhere, who can see anything, but who’s suspended a short distance above the ground. The magician cannot fall onto the ground of all being. The reason why he can’t is that he can only fall that short distance through the alive body.   

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319. Experiencing Emptiness in Zazen

If we practice Zazen with a purely psychological or consciousness focus, it’s very difficult to overcome the sense that the contents of our mind come in pre-formed thoughts and emotions. Although we might understand intellectually that those are constructions, they can often prove very difficult to either dissolve or to embody (in embodiment, we are aware of the roots, as it were, in our body, in our senses, of what we’re choosing to describe as a thought or an emotion). That being the case, with this psychological focus, our practice is often primarily an exercise in stoicism and resistance. We’re trying to avoid being taken somewhere by the emotion which arises, being taken somewhere by the thought which arises, being drawn into interpretation, being carried away by a network of related thoughts and suchlike. The two pillars of practice are equanimity and joy. With this focus, equanimity is paramount, but joy is nowhere to be found.

Because our bodily feelings – our sensations – are far less seductive than our thoughts and emotions, it is much easier to experience their dissolution. Not though for pain. With pain, it is difficult not to collapse the awareness around that pain. If we practice with a psychological focus, the body is largely invisible until we feel pain. But once we do, it is all too visible, but in a way which is cramped around that experience of pain, and the anxious thoughts that come bounding along with it.

However, if we just give our attention to non-pain sensations that we are experiencing in the body – a slight tightness in the shoulders, heat in the palms of the hands, and so on – which are emotionally neutral and lacking in the significance which thoughts and emotions appear to have for us, we can hold those sensations in our awareness, but not contract around them. Our awareness doesn’t collapse around the sensation, so we’re able to feel it within a wide, spacious awareness. And if we’re able to do that, we’ll notice that what initially  we think of as something fixed and physical  is quite diffuse and indeterminate. Something that starts out by being a some-thing (this tightness in my shoulders) loses its shape and boundaries. And rather than remaining like a thing, it becomes more like an energetic pattern which changes, merges, appears, disappears. 

With body sensation we can have a direct experience of the emptiness of that sensation. And on the back of that, a felt experience of the emptiness of the form of this body.

The purpose of Zazen is not to pacify or still the mind, but pacifying the mind is a necessary prerequisite for enlivening the body, and it is that which is required to overcome duality. We need to understand that stilling the mind does not mean eradicating thoughts; it means to make the mind vast, not silent. In order to do that we require to, as it were,  drop the mind both into the enlivened body and thence release both into  the greater alive awareness, which includes this being, and all beings.

When I started practising Zazen, we were given an instruction that if our attention wandered we should bring it back to our breath, and to the various aspects of our posture. And, for me at least, that second instruction induced a kind of picturing of my posture. So I would think, “Am I balanced correctly? Are my shoulders tight?” and so on, almost as if either me, or someone like me, was looking from outside. We can see this strange picturing activity of our body going on all the time. For instance, if you say to someone, “Pick this up with your left hand,” the person will very often look at their hand and then pick it up, so the hand is existing in two ways: in an object way, like a seen object existing as an image, but also existing from the inside, in a felt way. But in our culture, the first sense is very often dominant, with all the attendant splitting and alienation.

One of the fruits of Zazen is that this picturing activity, which we are usually unaware of, and which creates a fundamental dislocation, is gradually reduced. If the instruction that I had been given was, rather than attending to various aspects of my posture, being asked to attend to various sensations which I was experiencing in my body- sensations, for instance, of heat or coldness, of slight tension, of weight – sensations which were emotionally neutral, and which couldn’t easily  be pictured, then those initial years of practice would, I think, have been different. And if I had been instructed to hold an awareness of those sensations, but not to contract the awareness around them, then I think my experience of my body would have changed: less objectified, more energetic, more patterned, more empty.

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318. Letting the body leap

When we start Zazen, what is disconcerting and dispiriting is the torrent of thoughts and emotions which we appear to have. We have an idea of what Zazen should be like, yet our experience is very different. And that’s when most people stop practice; they give up.

If we don’t give up, we gradually come to understand that the problem is not the thoughts and feelings. The problem is that when they arise, our awareness contracts around them. When we realize that, we can start to change our attitude, so rather than will these thoughts and feelings away, or distract ourselves with something else, we open out our awareness. For example, if I’m experiencing an imaginary noise – a tune, say, or a remembered conversation, – I’m not attempting to kill or nullify that. What I’m doing instead is throwing my awareness wide open, so I’m hearing everything.

In this way we gradually learn to develop what Charlotte Joko Beck called ‘A Bigger Container’, within which all that disturbs us can simply come and go within a broader awareness.

We can see a similar process going on with physical phenomena. Often when we’re sitting we’ll experience physical discomfort, or what appears to be physical discomfort. We’ll notice perhaps some disagreeable sensation in our hips, or our knees, or our shoulders, and what will tend to happen is that again we will contract  our awareness, collapsing around the sensation. This contraction is usually accompanied by thoughts, such as “Oh, I wonder if this is getting worse… When’s the bell going to go… What does this mean…  Am I ill in some way…”. 

Just as we can change our attitude to the thoughts and emotions which arise, we can also change our attitude to what appears as physical discomfort. We can experience it, but within a greater awareness.

If we’re able to do that, what seems to happen is that the solidity of the discomfort gradually becomes more diffuse, and rather than being a specifically located thing, it seems to become more like an energetic pattern. And what we also notice is that when we can hold that discomfort in this greater space, then the experience of it is often accompanied by images or emotions. So we discover that our mind isn’t just located in our mind; our mind also appears to be located in our body.

Just as non-attachment to thoughts and emotions changes our idea of what our mind is – our experience of what our mind is – then non-attachment to physical discomfort changes our sense of what our body is. Body is much less a thing, a lump of flesh and bone, and much more a kind of spacious, energetic, interconnectedness.

We don’t just need to apply that to sensations of discomfort, we can apply it generally; to any feelings of, say, tightness in the back of the head, contraction in the belly, tremors in the legs, elation in the chest: any sensations; pleasurable, unpleasurable, neutral. Everything which is going on, which is much more than we had first thought. The body is much more alive than we first thought.

 Practicing in this way gradually changes our sense of our body. I think that’s one of the reasons why some groups – not us, but some groups – insist on very long periods of sitting, almost to cause the crisis which will potentially liberate the practitioner from a habitual way of experiencing body phenomena. 
It’s this which Dogen is referring to when he talks about the body leaping out of itself. It’s not that our heart is leaping out of our chest, but rather our heart is leaping out of our ‘heart’.

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310. The direction of practice

One of the most dispiriting things for people starting practice comes from the idea that practice is the gateway to tranquility and peacefulness. Yet when they start it’s as if there’s this crappy person inside their head talking repetitive, bloviating, interpretative nonsense. And always complaining about what’s going on, about not being enlightened, being bored; nonsense really.

As a preliminary, stabilising step it’s important that we get some distance from this crappy person. So we learn equanimity, non-reactivity, mindful awareness and so on. So, as it were, we’re establishing some space around this crappy person.

But the problem is that we’re still within the room of the self. And if we stay with this self centred perspective, we’re likely to see zazen in terms of equanimity or in terms of consciousness. But either way we’re not going to see zazen in terms of connectedness and joy.

So what we require to do is fall out of this room of the self and into the body. And from there we can experience joy, connection, non-duality and so on.

But when we say ‘body’ we don’t mean your picture of the body because then ‘body’ is just another object in your mind. We mean actual alive, vivid embodiment. This vividness can’t be contained within ourselves; it seeps out. So everything (perhaps starting near to us and gradually percolating outwards) loses its picturedness, its conceptuality and acquires vivid embodiment. 

And it’s in this context that we need to see the descriptive language of the Mahayana sutras. They are not describing something fantastical but the actual experience of zazen. But with these familiar constraints of mind and self and consciousness and separation cast off.

Our ways of describing Zazen are limitless and should be understood as being both partial and limitless. Because the point of a community of practitioners is that the expression of the dharma is never closed, never completed.

It’s as if your spine is a cascade of pearls. It’s as if your rib cage is like a weightless basket moving in emptiness. It’s as if your heart inside that basket is a great light, extending everywhere.

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305. The Unpictured Body

In zazen we talk a great deal about the body but what do we mean by ‘body’?

If you ask someone in the West to point to their body, they’re very likely to point to their torso. They’re unlikely to point to their head. Which is unfortunate, because as soon as you state it, it’s obvious: our head is part of our body.

I find that the easiest way to start to enliven the body is through the sensory awareness that we have here: the feeling of our tongue in our mouth; the tension around our eyes; the weight of our jaw; the awareness of the air in our nostrils.

All of that is readily accessible to us in an immediate way that sensory information elsewhere in the body very often isn’t. So if we have a holistic sense of the body as including the head and all the sensory awareness there, then we can see how that sensory awareness can – as it were – gradually seep downwards. To our throat, our torso; all of us, animating and enlivening the whole body.

There’s an additional benefit. We habitually (in the West at least) identify the head with the mind and with the self, so the mind/body split has a physical counterpart and reinforcement  in the head/body split. Reintegrating the head with the rest of the body starts to undo that primary, unconscious split, relocating the mind within the body, and hence changing our sense of both.

And when we do this, our sense of both ‘mind’ and ‘body’ can change. Our mind is no longer necessarily just located within our head. Our body is no longer an object just located in space. And that starts to undo the self/world split which, in my view at least, is essential.

Turning to the breath, everyone is familiar with the instruction that when we feel distracted, we should give our attention to our breath. 

Why is the breath so fundamental to meditation? Perhaps because it is immediate and difficult to objectify, or straightforwardly conceptualise. We cannot help but notice that when our breath changes, our state changes.

We often talk about being aware of the breath as if the breath and the body are two separate facets of experience. But if we pay careful attention we’ll see that our experience of the breath and our experience of the movement within us (when we take an in-breath, for example) is the one movement. And we can focus on the breath or we can focus on the body which is moving, or alternate. But it’s essentially two aspects of the one experience. It is not like wind blowing through the stiff rock of a cave. It is like two beings dancing.

We are not picturing the body from an imaginary, external vantage point. We place our attention whenever we can immediately feel, and gradually widen and deepen that, from the ‘inside’. 

Additionally, if we can sit in the correct posture, our body is progressively enlivened without conscious effort. If our pelvis is in the right position, our weight dropping down through our sit bones, then we experience an uplift that often feels as if the back of our neck is being stretched and our head is moving upwards. I experience the uplift as originating somewhere in my upper thoracic spine, but you may experience it differently. The key is to experience it, not force it. 

That feeling of uplift is the source of a terrible instruction about tucking your chin in and stretching the back of the neck. It’s terrible because there’s an attempted duplication of something which needs to be non-forced and automatic. If you are sitting correctly, your chin will naturally be slightly tucked in, but you can’t will it, anymore than you can create a joke by forced laughter. 

Your sit bone isn’t a single point, it’s three dimensional, like – say – the elbow, and it’s helpful if you can experience that three dimensionality, that front and back, by touch and movement. And that illustrates a more general point about balance: it is an exquisite aliveness, not a forced absence of movement. We are subtly wobbling around the point of balance, like a tightrope walker.

When you’re sitting correctly – correctly for you – you’ll  also experience a relaxing and widening of the back of the head, specifically around the occipital point, what the Chinese call the Jade Pillow. 

Correct posture also manifests a dynamic relationship with the ground.

Your weight is dropping down into the ground and the ground is pushing up, like two hands pushing gently together. There is something similar, although more subtle, happening with the space around and above us.

When we sit, we are in a dynamic and connected relationship with the environment: through the ground; through the air; through the breath. All of this breaks down the self/world dualism for the benefit of both: the body is no longer spatially imprisoned and disconnected from the world, the world is no longer “out there”, waiting to be done-to, but immediate and alive.

Zazen is not the practice of the self. It is the effort of all beings expressed through this person.