Master Dogen refers to zazen as ‘dropping off body and mind’. Yet body and mind don’t disappear. But they are different, because they’re no longer labouring under the ownership of the self, which is really ownership by a ghost which haunts us. And because that liberation takes place, the body can exist in its power, beauty and expression, because it’s no longer an object within consciousness.
Central to zazen is the enlivening of the spine. Sitting properly, our pelvis in the right position, our spine becomes energised, and we can express that in a number of different ways. So some people have expressed that enlivenment as being like the body is, as it were, suspended in space from above.
That’s personally, not something which I find resonant. My own inclination is to express it as the body in zazen being like a tremulous young tree. So the roots are going down into the ground and there’s this alive upward movement in response. And sometimes people can feel a sense of incipient energy in it, like a cork in a champagne bottle would feel.
These are all figures of speech to try and describe our actual experience. Choosing a variety of figures of speech makes sense because we are then likely to see these as just being provisional attempts to describe experience. Which leaves us free to find our examples which are equally provisional. So we don’t have to be, as it were, hanging about until we feel that our bodies are hanging in space, we’re free to find our own mode of expression.
So in my case, I would say that I experience my base, my pelvic floor as being like the roots of a tree going into the earth. I experience this area around my heart as uncompressing, lengthening, so my heart is no longer squashed, so it can, as it were, come out into the world. And the back of my head experiences widening. And I also experience a line of force like a needle going up in an imaginary space, not a real [physical] space, an imaginary [yet real] space between the crown chakra and the occipital joint. So not trying to push up the top of the head, which just creates tension, but just this effortless, as it were, needle of energy directing upwards.
This is all my language, not yours. And it’s fair to say as well that the aliveness of the spine is the same as the aliveness of the world. If we experience the spine as enlivened, our body is enlivened, and then we likewise experience the world in the same way. And again, we can think of this in figurative terms, so we could think of, as it were this tree being in the forest of beings, you could think of the alive spine as being like a lighthouse amid the glorious storm of creation. You can think of it in a whole number of ways. We just need to let our heart speak.