(Enlightenment as full embodiment, not transcendence of it)
To be awake, to be enlightened, is to be fully and completely embodied. To be fully embodied means to be at one with who we are, in every respect, including our physical being, our emotions, and the totality of our karmic situation. It is to be entirely present to who we are and to the journey of our own becoming. It is to inhabit, completely, our relative reality, with no speck of ourselves left over, no external observer waiting for something else or something better. In this sense, this book explores what it might mean to be fully embodied and, as such, what it might mean to be an enlightened or completely realized being, for they are one and the same.
Also nourishing and deepening my understanding of the body as a spiritual reality has been the exploration of several Western modalities (the Alexander technique, Rolfing), fruitful studies with several Zen teachers, and contact with the Theravadin tradition.
These include the native traditions of both North and South America and, most impactfully, several years of intensive work with my friend and heart brother Malidoma Somé, the gifted African spiritual teacher. Of particular impact in my study with Malidoma was an all-night “earth burial,” which, through its initiatory death and rebirth process, allowed my life to crumble and then arise in a way that established the earth and the “body work,” once and for all, as the core of my spiritual life.
As Thrangu Rinpoche once said in another context, surely it cannot be wrong to encourage people, however we may do so, to meet their uttermost depths, their ultimate self.
It was of this ever unbounded and unknown body that the great siddha Saraha spoke when he said, “There is no place of pilgrimage as fabulous and as open as this body of mine, no place more worth exploring.”
According to the teachings of buddha nature, each of us possesses, at our very root and core, a profound and irresistible longing. This is nothing other than a longing to become fully and completely who we are, to experience ourselves and our lives, fully and freely, without doubt, reservation, or holding back. This final realization of ourselves is described as all-loving and powerful—we discover ourselves as everything that we need to be and, because of that, we become completely available to the world and its suffering beings, and discover utter trust and confidence in life.
Buddhism, in its most subtle and sophisticated expression, is not a tradition that seeks to provide answers to life’s questions or to dispense “wisdom” to allay our fundamental angst. Rather, it challenges us to look beyond any and all answers that we may have found along the way, to meet ourselves in a naked, direct, and fearless fashion.
In fact, it challenges us to question everything that we think and feel about ourselves and our reality—all our most basic beliefs, all our assumptions and preconceptions, even the way we habitually see, hear, and sense the world. We must be willing to let go of everything we have believed—every answer that we have come up with down to this moment—in order to find out the final truth of who we are.
In this, Buddhism invites us to take seriously our entire human existence, to take everything in our life “as the path.” It proposes that everything that ever happens to us is part of our journey toward realization. There is finally nothing that leads us away, no possibility of true regression, no actual mistake; everything is learning, opening, and moving forward, even when the opposite seems to be the case. This leads to a kind of fundamental and boundless optimism about what human life is and why we are here, and an underlying trust that runs through life’s most difficult circumstances.
The journey to ourselves is truly a journey into the unknown, a setting forth onto a sea that has never before been sailed and never before been fathomed or mapped.
The role of tradition, at least according to Buddhism, is thus not to limit the search, the experience, the journey, but to open us to it—tradition here is inspiration, challenge, and provocation, and some helpful practices, not a set of answers.
And yet, as noted, it is something that is written within us from the very beginning, in our genes and in our bones. As we shall see, this journey is written in the body itself, in its deepest levels and its most subtle layers. In journeying into the body, we are making a voyage toward our deepest selves. When we do so, we not only find ourselves more and more drawn to the possibility of realizing who we are, we find ourselves already deeply engaged in the journey itself.
(Modern disembodiment and the search for substitutes)
Having lost any sense of what a truly fulfilling life might look like, we search here and there for temporary fixes and satisfactions. Acquisition substitutes for the nourishment of the soul. Spectator sports stand in for the challenge and excitement of a life lived on the edge. We go on vacation to try to find experiences of freshness and surprise that we have lost in our ordinary existence.
We are constantly on the move, never finding roots or ground anywhere. The icon of our culture is the jetliner, where we are flying at a tremendous rate of speed but, in a very real sense, going nowhere, a million miles from the earth, inhumanly trapped in intimacy for hours with strangers as troubled as we, against a backdrop of lurking dread that maybe we are going to die. We watch television and keep busy with ultimately meaningless activities to try to avoid, anesthetize, or forget the meaninglessness of our lives. In the end, of course, it doesn’t work and we only end up feeling more unfulfilled and more hopeless. We are searching, searching, searching, but somehow we never arrive. And because of the big “lie” of modern culture—of the possibility of ultimate fulfillment through entertainment, distraction, or materialism—and because of how tightly and stubbornly it is clung to—we can’t really talk to anyone about what is actually going on.
As I see it, the root cause of impending global catastrophe is the fact that we have completely lost our connection with our bodies and our physical existence. For reasons we shall presently explore, we have come to think that our lives, our fulfillment, lie somewhere other than where we are—in some other body, some other emotional makeup, some other age group, some other personality, with some other family, some other friends, some other job, some other city, street, and house, some other world, some other life.
Is it that we lose our sense of connection with the “others” and then feel justified in turning them into objects to exploit? Or is it that we fall into a pattern of exploitation toward our world and therefore lose our sense of connection? Either way, we find ourselves in a pattern whereby every person, every thing, every situation, and every occurrence in our life, even the earth itself, is viewed as an object that could serve or thwart our interests, our ambitions, for fulfillment. Nothing has any value on its own, but only insofar as it “serves” us. Rather than being a subject with its own integrity, it falls into the category of an object to be manipulated, used, and abused, to be exploited in order to satisfy our misplaced cravings for comfort, security, self-aggrandizement, and fulfillment.
Many modern 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.
To approach the world by objectifying it, to reside mainly in the head, is to put ourselves in a position of domination, mastery, and control. We domesticate the world by filtering it through our concepts, and this enables us to own and possess it, to make it subservient to our agendas and wants.
The tradition shows us how to burn through the dehumanizing, objectifying tendency of human thinking, so rampant today, and how to recover a life that is indeed open to the knowledge of reality that arises in and through the body, wherein we see others as subjects, as coinhabitants of this world, as “all our relations,” as the Lakota Sioux say.
Buddhist spirituality than in the past, because to succeed in the modern marketplace, as Buddhism is trying to do, there is an almost irresistible temptation to become one of the oppressors, one of the exploiters, one of the utterly disembodied.
Or, if our goal is to avoid genuine human contact and commitment, we may engage in compulsive, random sexuality to distract ourselves from our own loneliness or spend our free time “vegging out” in front of the TV. In all these cases, the body is the vehicle and the body is the victim.
If we feel unwilling to tolerate emotional pain, always somatically located, we may smoke, drink heavily, imbibe marijuana or other similar illegal substances, or resort to our psychiatrist.
(Emotions as somatic events; modern suppression patterns)
Emotions are, at root, a somatic experience: they arise out of the darkness of the body, they are felt intensely in the body, and they call us—sometimes with great insistence and even grisly intensity—back into the body. To be fully embodied involves an unconditional presence to our emotional life, not separating and not distancing ourselves by retreating into our heads into judgments, recriminations, or self-loathing.
Why do so many modern Western people feel uneasy in the face of strong emotion? Is it because our highly structured and rationalized mode of existence simply requires that we ignore the unpredictable and potentially disruptive and destabilizing energy of emotion? Or has our highly routinized way of life itself developed as a fear response to emotions and to their inherent power and compelling nature, a kind of unconscious defense mechanism against their non-scripted reality?
Be that as it may, many of the major realities and trends of modern life may be seen as attempts to override emotions and even eliminate them from human experience. The frenetic speed and “busyness” of modern culture—its reliance on work habits where there is literally no unstructured time as well as on entertainment by distraction, such as TV, videos, sports events, compulsive shopping, and so on—can be seen as attempts to keep emotions at a distance or even negate them completely. In a similar vein, the vast array of psychiatric medications seem designed to limit and control the emotional states that people go through, reflecting a medical environment in which any strong emotion is likely to be viewed as pathological and in need of “treatment.”
is a vicious cycle, then, in which our fear of emotions and our physical disembodiment fuel, reinforce, and exacerbate one another. In the following chapters, we shall consider the way in which reclaiming our human embodiment enables us to reconnect with our emotions and reenter the warmth, richness, and subtlety of a full emotional life that many of us thought we had lost forever.
we take as a benchmark the inception of stone tools over two and a half million years ago, the period of time since the discovery of agriculture represents.04 percent of our evolutionary history. From an evolutionary standpoint, this is a very small period of time, a tiny fraction of the blink of the evolutionary eye.
The impact and the implications of such a recovery are nothing less than revolutionary. For to recover our original or primary body as our own involves experiencing the totality of oneself, without judgment; living with a directness that is not filtered or distorted by the thinking mind; rediscovering ourselves within the network of relations with others; coming to awareness again of the primordiality of the natural world as a subject; and, perhaps most surprising, beginning to sense and see what has been called the “unseen world,” the “other world,” the world of “others”
Accompanying these changes, people were already becoming increasingly disembodied and were coming to view spirituality as a process of overcoming, dominating, and subduing “nature” and the human body.
somatic—as bursts of energy experienced in the body, rather than nonphysical phenomena that disconnect us from our soma.
We often approach it as a way to fulfill yet another agenda or project—that of attempting to become “spiritual,” according to whatever we happen to think that is. We may try to use meditation to become peaceful, less confused, sharper and more clear, more “sane,” more effective in our lives, even more conceptually adroit. The problem with this is that we are, once again, attempting to be managers, to supersede what is given, to control the “other.” In this case, the “other” is ourselves, our bodies, and our own experience. Ultimately, in our meditation practice, it is often our own somatic experience of reality that we are trying to override in the attempt to fulfill, once again, our ego aim.
And this is what Trungpa Rinpoche called “spiritual materialism,” using spiritual practice to reinforce existing, neurotic ego strategies for sealing ourselves off from our actual lives in the pursuit of survival, comfort, and security.
The more we analyze the situation, the more trapped we feel; the harder we work at our practice, the more we feel the whole thing closing in on us. We feel desperate, that we have to get out, but we can’t see how to do it.
(Tibetan yoga: stripping mental pictures to meet the body directly)
The first step on the Tibetan yoga path is to progressively strip away everything we think about what our body is. Eventually, we arrive at a point where we have no mental picture left and we actually know nothing of what or how the body may be. Now we are ready to take a look and see what our body actually is, as revealed to the eye of direct experience.
5 In Tibetan yoga, this process takes us through many stages and levels of increasing realization. Toward the end, so we are told, we make the astounding discovery that even the appearance of physicality that our body has for other people is itself dependent on our own incomplete embodiment, our inability to identify fully with our body’s ultimate experiential truth. When we do finally let go of any and all ideas of our body as something that is solid and conceptually identifiable, so it is said, our body simply dissolves into light, the famed “rainbow body” described in Dzogchen.
It is all very puzzling, but, with the body as our guide, we begin to feel, perhaps for the first time in our lives, that with our body, we are in the presence of a force and intelligence that is filled with wisdom, that is loving, flawlessly reliable, and, strange to say, worthy of our deepest devotion.
memories that we are now recycling as “us.” That’s why it’s such a problem. It’s coming from the past. We’ve picked it up from here, there, and everywhere. The only thing that is truly ours is the life that’s in our body that wants to unfold. Everything that we think, all our plans and all our values, all our projects, our self-image, our sense of personal identity—all of that is beside the point of what needs to happen right now.
Sometimes letting go in this way can seem risky and engender fear. We may feel that, through the work, we are going to lose something essential, even lose our self. But losing our solid and continuous sense of self—our ego—is what this journey is about. It can be helpful to contemplate the fact that we are eventually going to die. Once we realize this and the fact that our death is obviously going to involve ego death and completely losing our hold on the past—then there’s really nothing to lose.
In undertaking this practice, it is initially very much as if we were looking at the body from the outside. For example, we might direct our attention to our hand or our foot. We are a somewhat removed observer attempting to discern what might be there.
As we proceed, we come to realize that virtually anyplace we look within the body, we are going to find an open field to explore.
Initially it feels as if we are putting our awareness into those places. But as time goes on, we sense that what is really happening is that those places themselves are already aware.
In time, we find ourselves knowing our world not so much through thinking about it, but by sensing it and feeling it, not just as the body does, but as the body. We begin to experience moments when we realize that, fundamentally, “we” are the body. As we find ourselves in greater and greater somatic embodiment, we discover deeper and deeper contact with the world. At this point, our conclusions about it recede into relative unimportance. Life is then less and less about thinking and more and more about simply being.
Now, it is of the nature of prana that, to whatever location in the body we direct our attention, there the prana will go. So when we visualize ourselves bringing our breath into a certain locale, what we are doing is bringing our prana, our inner breath, to that place.
In a sense, we become the energy of the big toe; we are it.
Since the habitual tendency of the ego mind is to seek comfort, ease, and control at all costs, this intense energy can cause us to feel distress. This distress reveals just how much we have marginalized and even completely repressed the actual, markedly intense experience of our body and its energies. Now that intensity is beginning to disclose itself to us, with some force.
Initially, we are aware of a tight part of our body. Later, through practice, we discover that it is actually we who are holding, we who are tensing the body—that there is no tension “out there” in the body independent of us and what we are doing moment by moment.
• Pain is the next step above tightness. It is the first glimpse of specific content—calling to be explored—heretofore trapped in the body, that is now surfacing into our awareness. This content has been dammed up to the breaking point and is now demanding the psychic attention that pain calls forth. All forms of physical pain would be included in this category, whether from illness, old age, or injury.
• The subtle tension we feel when we withdraw from any experience is known, in Buddhist psychology, as the “suffering of conditioned states” and refers to the tension that accompanies our retreating from the things that we experience, not seeing or sensing their freshness, as we fall back to and into our centralized self.
Ultimately, every experience is unique. Whatever category or set of categories we may use to label a form of discomfort, it is always going to transcend those categories, being its own thing above and beyond any term we may apply. It is the recognition of this that makes the body work always fresh and endlessly fascinating.
Whatever its size or location, we feel the tautness and the need to release, but we cannot let go. The discomfort may also be experienced as physical pain, possibly little sharp points of pain, a dull achiness, or something more intense.
Thus, some places may feel very hard and armored; others, incredibly vulnerable, unprotected, shaky, and weak. Some places feel stuffed and bloated; others, starved and emaciated. One side may feel shorter or smaller than the other. One side feels alive; the other, dead. Everything may seem out of kilter, which itself may fill us with distress or even dread. We might want to scream or run, or jump out of our bodies.
Such feelings might include a sense that our heart is very tight, as if encased in armor. We may feel that our throat is constricted and we are gagging or choking, or that our head is dizzy, our belly feels nauseous, or our sexual center is uncomfortably claustrophobic with its energy. There is a feeling of solidity and stuckness, though it may be very subtle. We feel a call to let go, to release, but we cannot do so.
Again, our discomfort may be experienced as painful emotions: We may suddenly feel deep heartache, unpleasant agitation, dreadful anxiety, or extreme nausea. We may feel fear, panic, groundlessness, anger, irritation, paranoia, desire, pride, and so on. The list is endless. These emotions are expressions of tension because we find ourselves locked in them—they won’t move and we are unable to escape.
we are holding on for all we are worth, fearful and paranoid, tensing our body so we won’t have to feel.
(How ego solidifies: shock, freeze, tension layered over tension)
In a teaching known as “the birth of ego,” Buddhism offers a theoretical explanation of discomfort. Initially, discomfort arises on a purely spiritual level: all kinds of phenomena burst upon us in our lives—sense perceptions, feelings, thoughts, people, situations, and so on. In the very first instant of their appearance, they arrive unexpectedly and with much vividness, and our initial experience of them is one of shock.
Fear and these other basic emotions are also, in their turn, challenges to our solid self—they are so distressing and so uncontrollable. We usually resist the intensity of these feeling reactions by solidifying them into more gross and tangible emotions, such as irritation, anger, neediness, pride, desire, paranoia, and so on.
We may further try to deny the intensity of these emotions by tensing or freezing our body against what we are feeling. We freeze so we won’t have to feel the intensity of what is occurring.
We can see exactly how “we” come to be: (1) something disquieting arises; (2) we feel an instant panic; (3) we react with sudden anger, jealousy, pride, etc.; and (4) we tense our body against it—our chest tightens up; we feel our belly drop; our shoulders hunch up. Although all of this happens in a matter of a second or two, the more somatically aware we become, the more we can discern the stages quite clearly.
How do we handle this very unpleasant somatic feeling of freezing up? If we are skilled practitioners, we may know how to read what has happened and to relax through the layers of reactivity that have been building.
Our way of shutting out our body and its discomfort is, in fact, by retreating into our obsessive thinking process. The more we shut out our body, the more we retreat into thinking. The intensity of our compulsive thinking is in direct proportion to the extent that we are unwilling to experience our body in a full and direct way. We have, in fact, dissociated from it.
Within the framework of the body work, the appearance of discomfort is thus good news. This is because it marks the beginning of reversing the process described above, of the development and fortification of the ego, the ultimate cause of our disembodiment and alienation from the deeper self.
(The release process: peeling layers until the empty core)
The first step in this process is that we move from a state of insentient numbness backward into a state of discomfort. Then, as the work progresses, we move through layer upon layer of discomfort, sometimes feeling great freedom and fulfillment, but often just finding another layer to peel away, as if we were an onion. The discomfort becomes more subtle and transparent as we move deeper and deeper into the body, through each successive level of emotion, feeling, sensation, mood, and felt-sense. Finally, we arrive at our core, the empty space at the center, which is open and free but, at the same time, the basis of our entire being. At that point, our embodiment is complete, our realization is actual, and the solid “ego” has become a distant dream.
Discomfort, then, is always a message—that we are holding on too tightly to our sense of self—and an invitation for us to relax, open, and surrender to the fire of larger experience.
By doing the body work, we start to “feel” some pattern of our investment in the tension, our contribution to it, our maintaining and reinforcing of it. As this sense becomes more and more palpable, we begin to discover that we are coming into the capability to take responsibility for the tension, to enter into it consciously, and to let go.
On one hand, we can’t seem to let go, but at the same time, we feel we have to let go—to open, relax, and surrender. We hover on this excruciating edge for some time, and then—as long as we don’t back off and run away—we find ourselves somehow moving through it and releasing.
The process of release seems to go on and on because the journey into full embodiment, and the accompanying dismantling of the solid, pathological self, offers no endpoint in sight.
When we let go, then, it is thus not just a physical letting go but, at the same time, a letting go of our fixed sense of being. This represents a leap into the unknown.
The moment of release is a leap into the unknown because, in that instant, we can’t take our thinking mind—the mind that objectifies our experience and knows conceptually—with us. When we leap, we just find ourselves there, naked and stripped of any way to conceptualize our body—or anything else—at all.
And, with nowhere to land, nothing to latch on to, our mind falls into a state of utter silence. We may feel relief or freedom—we may burst into laughter or uncontrollable sobbing—to find that there is, in this moment, no longer any sense of “me” at all.
The body doesn’t just know us flawlessly; the body is—as we shall see—nothing other than our own totality. It is our deeper self calling us home, and it knows exactly how this journey needs to unfold, just what we can handle, how the necessary information can best come through, and in what way the needed transformation can best occur.
Because our non-conceptual life is ever unpredictable and open-ended. It can leave us feeling uncertain, insecure, and unprotected. When we are able to “pin things down” and put them in definite and definable terms, we suddenly feel more safe and secure. We know who and what we are—or so we think.
The process of meditation involves gradually shedding our multitude of opinions-built-upon-opinions of how things are, and becoming more and more aware of the literal, non-conceptual substratum of all our thinking—the substratum which is reality itself.
Buddha saw a very long time ago. He saw that while spiritual strategies of disembodiment—such as trying to turn away from the body, the emotions, sexuality, pain—may yield apparent short-term gains, in the long run, these strategies land us right back, and perhaps more deeply, into the confusion and suffering we began with.
In meditating with the body, what’s going on is that the awareness itself is being retrained and reeducated. We begin to live our life as a continual welling up from the depths of our soma, of our cells, our bones, and our tissues. Rather than thinking that the conscious mind is or should be the engineer of our lives, we begin to realize that the conscious mind is actually more appropriately the handmaiden of the body. The body becomes the continual source of our inspiration, creativity, direction, and engagement with others—what we need in order to live authentically. The body itself is the unending font of the water of life.
This is why people who are overcome with strong, habitual aggression so often live in a hellish experience of life and die in misery—they are at deep war with their own physical embodiment.
Thus, perhaps surprisingly, what we fear or are anxious about is never the external world in itself—rather, it is our own body, what it already feels and what it already knows.
Shamatha, the stillness practice, creates an environment, a staging area. It creates a situation in which we will be better able to see. And seeing is the goal of body work, for it is only through seeing that we are able to change, to experience the fundamental human transformation that we seek.