Descend into Your Body and Wake Up

Cross-posted today at the ID Project.


Lately I've been seeing more and more meditators and teachers talking about Mindfulness of Body -- which makes me very happy. Last month, Kate Johnson published a thoughtful piece at the ID Project blog called "Mindfulness of Bodies." Will Johnson had a fantastic article, "Full Body, Empty Mind," at Tricycle. A little further back, in November, I published (also at the ID Project blog) "You Are Not a Brain on a Stick (Or Are You?)".

In that piece, I wrote:

"...We modern people have become tragically disembodied, alienated from the most basic level of our own experience as human beings.... Most of us have lost the felt sense of what it is to be embodied, to experience the world in and through the medium of this material and energetic body into which we have been born.

"We think about the body a great deal, sometimes obsessively, but this is not the same as being in and with the body on its own terms. Our allegiance to thinking about everything -- mediating and managing our experience and our lives through the conceptual thought function -- is the very root of our disembodiment in the first place. For the most part, we think of our bodies as mere tools (and sometimes obstacles) to serve our ambitions and our ego's goals of attaining happiness and comfort; we rarely descend into the darkness of the body itself and witness, without an agenda, the naked experience that arises there."

As Reggie Ray says in his book Touching Enlightenment, it's not simply that we can find realization and awakening in the body -- there is actually no other place to find it.

But it would be just like us (wouldn't it?) to sit here in cyberspace and chit-chat and theorize about Mindfulness of Body, without actually doing it. So -- enough talk. Embedded below is a simple, 20-minute guided meditation on Mindfulness of Body that I led about a year ago at Nalandabodhi New York. You can download the MP3, or listen in streaming audio online. Close your Facebook and Twitter windows, silence your mobile phone, sit down in a comfortable meditation posture, click "Play," and explore the mystery of being alive in a human body. There is a world of somatic experience unfolding in your being at this very moment -- just waiting for you to notice it.






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Seeing What Wants to Be Seen

Human beings these days are disembodied and ethereal. Our ancestors lived close to the land; they knew where their food came from because they planted and harvested it with their own hands, and they knew where the heat in the fireplace came from because they chopped the wood themselves. Today most of us live in cities or in suburbs, far-removed from the sources of our food and energy. We buy it in units or packages, and couldn't care less where it comes from or how it's made. Many of us sit all day in an office cubicle, staring at a computer screen, while others sit all day on a sofa, staring at a TV screen or playing video games. When we leave the house or the office, we carry a portable device with us so that we are never cut off from the stream of information for more than a few minutes, as if we are uncertain what might happen to us if we don’t have constant input and output.

We live most of our lives from the neck up — constantly spinning in a mental hurricane of thoughts, ideas, commentary, story-lines, images, songs, memories, fantasies, emotions, daydreams, hopes, fears, judgments, strategies, and plans. The hurricane never seems to slow down for very long, because the wind of new information and fresh stimuli always keeps it turning. And with today’s mobile and social networking technologies, we’ve adopted the philosophy that almost every thought or idea that passes through our minds is important enough to share with the entire world, and should be injected into the minds of everyone else we know or have virtual contact with. A song plays on our iPod, and we quickly log on to Facebook to tell all our friends what we're listening to at this moment, as if they should care. And this unceasing ebb and flow of information into and out of our minds must not be interrupted at any hour of the day, no matter where we go or what we are doing. I heard about a man who took his mobile phone into the meditation hall at a weekend retreat, and was posting updates to his Twitter account during walking meditation: The person in front of me is walking WAY too slow.

Our attention is hypnotized and dazzled by this unceasing bombardment of information, and we spend all our time awash in it. As a consequence, it happens only rarely that our attention descends down out of the maelstrom of thoughts whirling in our brains and into the world of experience that is happening down below, in the rest of our bodies. We have, by and large, lost touch with what it means and what it feels like to be embodied — to experience the world and our own existence in and through the medium of this physical body made of matter and energy, alive with sensations, intimately connected to the world around it, and pulsing with information that has nothing to do with the realm of ideas and thoughts and stories. The average person today has become “a brain on a stick.”

Our habit of living all the time in our heads is toxic to our well-being, and a major stumbling block on the spiritual path. But it is an enormously seductive habit, reinforced by appearances. Of our six consciousnesses — sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and the mental consciousness that perceives thoughts — at least four of them, and possibly five, seem to be concentrated in the head, where our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and brain are all housed. This results in a strong, felt sense that our “self” exists in the head. It’s little wonder, then, that we spend most of our time living from the neck up.

Of course, we think about the body a great deal — in fact, many of us think about our bodies obsessively — but this is very different from being in and with the body on its own terms. It is our very allegiance to thinking and strategizing about everything — mediating and managing our experience and our lives through conceptual thought — that is the root of our disembodiment in the first place. For the most part, we think of our bodies as mere tools (or sometimes obstacles) that serve our ambitions and our ego’s goals of attaining happiness and comfort. We rarely descend into the darkness of the body itself and witness, on its own terms, without an agenda, the naked experience that arises there.

In his book Touching Enlightenment: Finding Realization in the Body, the American Buddhist teacher Reggie Ray shares a story that comes from the African spiritual guide, Malidoma Somé. Somé once moved to a West African village where there was no electricity. When he wanted to light some lamps at night to see better, he encountered strong resistance among the village elders, who told him, “If we light the lamps, we won’t be able to see.” The elders explained to him: “You can’t see anything real in the daylight. The only thing you see in the daylight is what you want to see. When you turn the lights off in the night, you see what wants to be seen, which is a whole different story.”

Descending out of our heads and the thinking mind and down into our bodies, says Ray, is like turning off the lights in order to see better. In the “darkness” of the body’s own perpetual unfolding of experience, we see not what we want to see, but what wants to be seen.

Psychology speaks of the mind’s conscious and unconscious aspects, with the conscious being likened to the small part of an iceberg that sits above the surface of the water and the unconscious being likened to that far more vast part of the iceberg that is hidden and submerged beneath the surface. This is also how we relate to our bodies, concentrating so much of our attention on that small and limited part of our experience that unfolds above the neck. Only rarely does our awareness descend into the vast regions of bodily experience that lurk, unexplored, beneath the surface. But it is impossible to be really present and aware of our human life if we are ignoring 95% of our embodied experience in every moment. All of that experience, whether it is pleasant, unpleasant or neutral, exciting or boring, painful or pleasurable, is a vital part of the total mystery that is human existence.

The human mind is, to use a strong word, a liar. The mind is always time-traveling into the past and into the future; it is forever fantasizing about things that don’t exist, trying to relive moments and experiences that are over and gone, and plotting to control situations that have not yet arisen and may never do so. The mind is very rarely satisfied with simply being here and now, in a naked and unfabricated way: it is always projecting onto its own internal screen what it wants to see.

But the body is incapable of deceit. It is always right here, right now; it cannot be elsewhere, or elsewhen. The body puts on no airs, and makes no pretense of being anything other than what it is or feeling anything other than what it feels. Upon the internal screen of the body, there is always and only projected that which wants to be seen. If what is projected there happens to also be what we want to see, that’s nice — but the body doesn’t particularly give a damn. So, when we are grounded and mindful of the body, we cannot help but be present and awake to our actual experience, here and now. As Reggie Ray says, “We are not only able to touch enlightenment with our bodies...there is actually no other way to do so.”


Making a Bad Situation Worse

Our disembodiment and our addiction to thinking can create huge obstacles for us on the spiritual path. If we practice meditation, for example, we might do so under the mistaken belief that meditation is all about working with the thinking mind and that it has nothing to do with the body. This can be worse for us than not practicing meditation at all, since in reality meditation has a tremendous amount to do with the body. From the time we first sit down to meditate, we are working with our posture and with the restless and uncomfortable sensations that arise in our bodies. And as we continue to practice meditation, we begin to discover more and more profound depths of insight and realization within the body’s own unfolding of experience, moment to moment. This is why Saraha, the 8th-century Indian Buddhist saint and meditation master, said: “There is no place of pilgrimage as fabulous and open as this body of mine, no place more worth exploring.”

Because of our sworn allegiance to thinking, we may see our bodies, at best, as tools to be utilized to achieve the spiritual aims and ambitions of our minds — and, at worst, as pain-producing obstacles that prevent us from getting where we want to go on the spiritual path. We may, for instance, imagine that samadhi, or very deep meditation, is some kind of alternate, disembodied state, an ethereal nirvana-realm that exists somewhere other than where our asses happen to be sitting right now. Surely, we think, samadhi is something holy and pure, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the body’s aches and pains and farts. But time and again, the great masters of meditation have told us that meditation actually begins with the body and unfolds in the body, with open and mindful and unbiased awareness of our precise situation in the present moment. The Buddha’s teachings on meditation in the early scriptures began with developing a profound mindfulness of the body, and this is one of the meditations that the Buddha continued practicing even after he attained enlightenment. So why, then, do we often regard our own bodies as little more than irritating hindrances to meditation? Where do we suppose realization is going to take place, if not in and through the body?

There is a curious feedback loop between mind and body that we can begin to discover in meditation. We might notice, for example, that at times when we are lost in discursiveness and mental chatter, we also tend to be very absorbed in that level of experience that happens from the neck up. The further we go into discursiveness and mental chatter, the more we begin to physically slouch and lose touch with what’s going on in the rest of our bodies, below the surface of the iceberg. By contrast, at times when we are particularly mindful and undistracted, we tend to be more grounded in the dimensions of experience that happen below the neck, in the dark regions of the body where energy ebbs and flows according to its own patterns, beyond the control of our conscious minds. By staying with that experience, we are able to abide in a more present and relaxed way. And that, I'm increasingly convinced, is the key to unlocking every door to realization that we might encounter on the spiritual path.

Bodies (Cont'd)

Among meditators, there is a common misconception that "meditation" means working with the mind, while there is something else called "mind-body practice" that involves working with both mind and body. The reality, whether we acknowledge it or not, is that all meditation practice is mind-body practice.

A couple of weeks ago in this blog, I wrote about Reggie Ray's book "Touching Enlightenment: Finding Realization in the Body," and how Ray's iconoclastic work on meditating with the body has been reshaping my own thinking and approach to meditation. I have to confess that I have only scratched the mere surface of Ray's training -- I've taken a couple of workshops with him and read parts of his book -- but even this limited exposure to his basic philosophy about the body and spiritual practice has resonated deeply with me. I find myself contemplating Ray's approach and bringing it into my meditations again and again.

Ray says that enlightenment and realization can only happen in and through the body, through a process of returning to complete "embodiment" -- and that it is, in fact, our profound "disembodiment" and alienation from the body's own self-arising truth and wisdom that has placed us in our current predicament.

The problem as Ray sees it is that most people "are born, live, and die entirely in their heads, believing that what they think is reality and that their own feeling of complete disconnection is what life is all about."

"Those of us who live in the modern world generally exist in a state of extreme disembodiment. Most of us spend our lives with very little actual awareness of our bodies. In some cases, we seem to feel and act as if we were divested of our bodies entirely. It is not that we don't *think* we have a body. In fact, many people spend a great deal of time *thinking* about their bodies, in a self-congratulatory, apprehensive, self-deprecating, or even self-destructive way. However, even when we are supposedly attending to our bodies, we are usually still in our heads. We are not in contact with our actual bodies. We have *thoughts about* our body, but very little direct experience of the body itself. In this way, in relation to the body, we modern people are narcissistic: we are so enamored of our ideas about the body, our concepts of it and designs on it, that we have little awareness of the body or relationship to the body as an actual reality in our lives, independent of what we think."

-- Reggie Ray, "Touching Enlightenment: Finding Realization in the Body"

This habit of living all the time "in our heads" is toxic to our well-being and a major stumbling block on the spiritual path. But it is enormously seductive. Of our six sense consciousnesses -- sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and the mental consciousness that perceives thoughts -- at least four of them, and possibly five, seem to be concentrated in the head, where our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and brain are all housed. This results in a strong felt sense that our "self" resides in the head, and we therefore spend most of our time living "from the neck up."



The image that occurs to me here is that of an iceberg, where you see only perhaps five percent of the mass of the iceberg above the surface. Similarly, with our bodies, there is a vast, unexplored region of experience unfolding, at every moment, below the neck, and all of that experience is a vital part of the total mystery that is a human embodiment.

"Does the body rule the mind?
Or does the mind rule the body?
I don't know...."

-- The Smiths, "Still Ill"

As meditators, we can labor for years (or for decades) under the misconception that meditation is something that takes place primarily or exclusively in the head, in the mind -- completely leaving aside and dismissing the wisdom of experience that arises spontaneously in and through the body. Ray says that such efforts are doomed to failure because we can only touch enlightenment with the body. As Ray points out, this is why Dogen, the founder of the Soto school of Japanese Zen, "spoke of the body as the gateway to ultimate realization." And it is why Saraha, the great Indian mahasiddha, said: "There is no place of pilgrimage as fabulous and open as this body of mine, no place more worth exploring."

The Hevajra Tantra (quoted in the Ninth Karmapa's "Ocean of Definitive Meaning") says:

"Great wisdom abides in the body.
It has perfectly relinquished all thoughts,
Is what pervades all things, and
Abides in the body, [but] does not arise from the body."

I think that at the core of our disembodiment is the dualistic notion that body and mind are fundamentally two different things, or that they have different natures. In the "Guru Rinpoche Prayer" that we sing in the Kagyu and Nyingma traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, it says:

"Grant your blessing that purifies appearance
Of objects perceived as being outside.
Grant your blessing that liberates perceiving mind,
The mental operation seeming inside."

In other words, it *seems* or appears to us that there is some kind of "mental operation" or mind going on "inside," and that this "mental operation" is distinct and separate from the body and the realm of form and objects of which the body is a part. It's as if we think there is some kind of homunculus of empty, formless mind hidden within our corporeal body (probably somewhere in our head, since that's where we spend most of our time).

But the Heart Sutra does not tell us that emptiness is somehow "hidden within" form. It tells us: "Form *is* emptiness, emptiness also *is* form. Emptiness is no other than form, form is no other than emptiness."

One possible way of interpreting this ever-puzzling line of the sutra would be: "Body is mind, mind also is body. Mind is no other than body, body is no other than mind."

To demonstrate this, we need only look at our emotions. Take an experience of anger or lust, for example. Is it in the body, or in the mind? The answer seems to be both, or neither (or somehow beyond both and neither). Something (a perception or a thought) triggers our karmic propensity towards that emotion, and then the experience arises. It manifests simultaneously as a mental event (with associated thoughts and concepts), and also as a physical event with a tangible bodily reaction (if it's anger, we get hot under the collar and want to dispel or push away the object of our anger; if it's lust, we also get hot under the collar and want to consume or merge with the object of our lust).

Over his several decades as a meditation teacher, Ray writes that he has frequently observed longtime meditators who seem to lose traction after a couple of years and fail to continue growing and progressing along the path. In most cases, says Ray, it is because "we are attempting to practice meditation in a disembodied state, and this is inevitably doomed to failure."

"To put it simply, the full benefits and fruition of meditation cannot be experienced or enjoyed when we are not grounded in our bodies. The phrase "touching enlightenment with the body," then, when understood fully, doesn't just imply that we are *able* to touch enlightenment with our bodies; beyond that, it suggests that -- except in an through our bodies -- there is actually no other way to do so."

-- Reggie Ray, "Touching Enlightenment: Finding Realization in the Body"

This must be why the Buddha taught Mindfulness of Body before all the others, and why he continued to practice it intensively, himself, even after attaining enlightenment.

Bodies

I'm currently reading Dr. Reginald Ray's "Touching Enlightenment: Finding Realization in the Body," which is based on the "Meditating with the Body" teachings he's been presenting for the past several years. I've twice taken weekend workshops with him on this topic, and highly recommend both this book and his workshops.

Reggie Ray writes that we modern people -- especially in the West -- have become tragically disembodied, alienated from the most basic level of our own experience as human beings: what it is to be embodied, to experience the world in and through the medium of this material and energetic body into which we have incarnated in this lifetime. The body is, literally, our karma made manifest.

We *think* about the body a great deal, sometimes obsessively, but this is not the same as being in and with the body on its own terms. In fact, it is our allegiance to *thinking* about everything -- mediating and managing our experience and our lives through the conceptual thought function -- that is at the root of our disembodiment in the first place. For the most part, we think of our bodies as mere tools (or sometimes obstacles) to serve our ambitions and our ego's goals of attaining happiness and comfort; we rarely descend into the darkness of the body itself and witness the naked experience that arises there. In his "Meditating with the Body" work, Dr. Ray presents a range of methods for helping us learn to do exactly that, drawn primarily from the esoteric (and usually quite strictly held in secret) teachings of Tibetan Yoga (presented in the most advanced practices of Tantric Buddhism such as those found in the Six Yogas of Naropa practiced by three-year retreatants in the Kagyu tradition). These esoteric teachings, says Ray, are all directed fundamentally at attaining enlightenment through the body, completely eradicating our preconceptions about the body and leading us to a state of total embodiment.



An Alex Gray painting I had hanging on my wall for several years.


In the workshops I took with Dr. Ray, he led us through a series of experiential exercises in which we progressively trained in bringing more and more subtle and open levels of awareness to previously unseen layers of somatic experience. One such exercise involved lying on our backs on a cushion with our knees lightly bound by a yoga belt so that our leg muscles could completely relax. Slowly -- very slowly -- sometimes excruciatingly slowly -- we scanned our bodies from toe to head, bringing our attention fully to each part of the body and taking time to experience whatever sensations were present there. Both times I took the workshop, I remember being especially amazed when we got to the face; as I dwelled with the sensations and energy in my face -- especially around my eyes -- I began to realize how much subtle tension I carry there, as if my face were almost imperceptibly contorted into a slight grimace at all times. As I became aware of this tension, I realized how painful it was to carry that tension around, and how deeply embedded this habitual pattern is for me. Each time I became aware of the mask of tension on my face, I could consciously relax it for a few seconds, but then it would slowly, insidiously reassert itself according to habit. Ray says that recognizing such patterns of holding and blocking in the body is the first step to transcending habitual patterns and becoming more embodied.

One manifestation of our disembodiment that Dr. Ray writes about is our tendency to live from the neck up -- in our heads and in our thinking mind, which we associate with the brain and the perceptual organs that are centered in the head. This is especially problematic for meditation practitioners because we can get very stuck in the misconception that meditation is primarily a mental and conceptual activity that happens -- where else? -- in the head. This problem can be exacerbated, Ray points out, if the meditation technique we are taught is one that further centralizes our attention in our heads by telling us to concentrate on the sensations of the breath passing through our nostrils; this would be like giving drugs to an addict and telling him to meditate on the sensation of the drugs in order to free himself from addiction. It only makes the situation worse.

We may see our bodies, at best, as tools to be utilized to achieve the meditative aims and ambitions of our mind, and, at worst, as pain-producing obstacles that stand in the way of getting where we want to go in meditation -- which in point of fact may be some kind of imaginary, totally disembodied nirvana-realm that lies somewhere other than where we happen to be right now. Somehow it never quite seems to dawn on us that meditation begins with the body and takes place in the body, with open and mindful awareness of our total, embodied situation in the present moment. We know that the Buddha's teachings on meditation began with mindfulness of body and that this is one of the main meditations that even the Buddha himself continued to practice in the 40 or so years *after* he attained enlightenment -- yet we still regard our own bodies, often, as little more than irritating hindrances to samadhi. But where do we think samadhi is going to take place, if not in and through the body?

In my work with my meditation instructor lately, I've been looking at the difference between mindfulness and distraction -- how the two states actually look and feel. One thing I've noticed is that at times when I'm lost in discursiveness, I also tend to be very absorbed in the level of experience that happens from the neck up; and the further I go into discursiveness, the more I begin to physically slouch and lose touch with what's going on in the rest of my body. By contrast, at times when I'm particularly mindful, I tend to be more grounded in the level of experience that happens below the neck, in the dark regions of the body where energy ebbs and flows according to its own patterns, beyond the control of my conscious mind; and by staying with that experience, I'm able to abide in a more present and relaxed way.

Traditional Western psychology speaks of the mind's conscious and unconscious aspects, with the conscious aspect being likened to the small part of an iceberg that sits above the surface of the water and the unconscious being likened to that far more vast part of the iceberg that is hidden and submerged beneath the surface. In a way, this is how we relate to our bodies, concentrating so much of our attention on that small and limited part of our experience that unfolds above the neck. Only rarely does our awareness descend into the vast regions of bodily experience that exist beneath the surface.

Ray cites a beautiful example from one of his own teachers, Malidoma Some, who moved to a West African village where there was no electricity. When he wanted to light some lamps at night to see better, he met with strong resistance among the village elders, who told him, "If we light the lamps, we won't be able to see." The elders explained to him: "You can't see anything real in the daylight. The only thing you see in the daylight is what you want to see. When you turn the lights off in the night, you see what wants to be seen, which is a whole different story."

Descending out of our heads and our thinking mind and down into our bodies is like turning off the lights in order to see better. In the "darkness" of the body's own perpetual unfolding of experience, we see not what we want to see, but what wants to be seen.