Touching Enlightenment Read online

  One day, while I was receiving another treatment, I suddenly found myself in my crib, as a baby, experiencing the same terrible and hopeless despair that I had previously felt on retreat. On this occasion, however, it wasn’t my adult self experiencing those feelings—it was the infant himself. Although I was not someone comfortable with or accustomed to showing much emotion, especially in front of other people, and especially with my own students, I broke into uncontrollable sobs and wailing, calling for my mother, pleading for her to come, begging her not to leave me alone. For the next two hours, this geyser of emotion continued unabated. The terrible pain of abandonment alternated with intense anger and rage toward my mother for leaving me and not coming to my rescue. My wife and one of my teenage daughters were in the house where we were staying and where I was being treated. My daughter later commented to my wife, “I thought Dad had gone completely insane. It was crazy. I have never seen him express anything like this, and, in fact, I don’t think I have ever seen anyone express such intense pain and anger.”

  The experience of abandonment had somehow been stored in my back. At the time of the original abandonment and in subsequent years, it had not been processed; it was unable to complete its destined circuit of experience. Perhaps it “waited” until after my mother’s death to fully emerge, because my mother was always a somewhat cold and unemotional person, and also quite fragile, and to experience the pain during her lifetime might have disrupted our relationship in a way that was unacceptable to me. Perhaps through the assistance of my chiropractor, in the context of a meditation retreat, with my mother gone, and with strength and confidence coming from many years of meditation, the experience was able to come to the surface and be experienced in all its intensity.

  Things began to move in new ways for me after that. My back was not frozen in the same old way, and a dark shadow that I now saw had been with me all my life, as well as unexplained appearances of sorrow and sadness, now became somehow less threatening, more fluid, transparent, and workable. I also noticed that when feelings of black hopelessness arose, I was able to go fairly directly, and with confidence, back to being that baby in my crib, to stay with the small child’s primordial despair for as long as was needed, until the feelings, in their own time, completed their work and moved on. Always, I found myself emerging refreshed, deepened, and with renewed openness and joy in just being alive.

  This example illustrates the previous discussion in a number of interesting ways. First and most obviously, the terrible experiences of the small child in his crib—and quite likely other similar traumatic experiences of early emotional abandonment—had somehow become buried in my body, making their appearance initially in back pain. Second, this unacknowledged experience, though hidden from conscious awareness, contributed in some major way to a shadow that lay over my whole life. Third, the hidden traumas of emotional deprivation as well as their impact on my conscious experience had remained inaccessible to me: I did not recognize their shadow until I had moved beyond it. Fourth, we can also see here the impeccable timing of the body: my back pain reached an unacceptable level precisely in the context of a meditation retreat, when my mother’s previous death and my own development allowed the buried traumas to be opened to consciousness. In that context, the original traumas could be experienced and lived through, and the emotions of anger and rage against my mother could be fully felt and integrated into my feelings about her, my understanding of our relationship, and my own, ongoing life. Strangely enough, the needed outside resource—my doctor—appeared just at this climactic moment.

  Subsequently, I found myself with much appreciation for what my own journey toward embodiment and my lifelong meditation practice had offered to me in this process. In this regard, I was grateful for the sustained, physically present openness that Tibetan yoga cultivates, as well as the ability, nourished through embodied meditation, to experience very intense emotions and extremely painful mental states in a full and grounded way, not only without being derailed by fear, but with confidence and freedom from judgment. In these ways, I felt that my training and practice had enabled me, once the moment was ripe, to open simply and swiftly into the full chaos and terror of the small child’s limitless despair; to remain in those feelings for as long as was needed; to go through the profound rage against my mother without holding back; and to exit the experience without getting caught by afterthoughts or judgments, but simply letting the whole thing go and moving on with my life.

  TWENTY-THREE: Karma of Cause, Karma of Result

  The concept of karma, the principle of cause and effect, stands as a philosophical centerpiece of Buddhism generally, and more specifically, of Tibetan Buddhist yoga. When the Buddha developed his teaching on karma, he primarily did so not by speculating about it, but by carefully and closely observing exactly how things worked in his life. It continues to be true today that the deepest insights into karma come from inspecting with focus and clarity exactly how things go for us. The experiences described in the previous chapter have been a fertile source of insight for me into what karma is, how it reveals the functional relationship of body and mind, and how somatic meditation opens the way for its purification and transformation.

  The principle of karma may be divided into two parts: the karma of cause and the karma of effect or result. The karma of cause refers to the way of acting and the acts that create the unresolved karma, while the karma of result refers to the totality of unresolved karma that we have created. The karma of cause refers to the production of what we may term “unfinished business.” In other words, there are certain ways we act in our lives that leave some kind of hangover, that will haunt us until it is resolved. To give a very simple example, if I leave the house for work in the morning in a rush and I am short with my wife without acknowledging it, much less apologizing for it, there will be some cloud in our relationship that will stay there until it is resolved. I have created unresolved karma. If it continues to be unresolved, it will contribute to a gradually increasing cloud bank of similarly unresolved situations that will haunt the relationship until dealt with. If none of this is ever dealt with, it could end in a relationship that is either dead or in the divorce court. According to Buddhism, each of us has created a nearly infinite mass of unresolved karma in this and countless previous lifetimes—the karma of result.

  When we attend to the karma of cause, we look at how we relate to our life and experience to see how karma is being created by our way of acting. When we attend to the karma of result, on the other hand, we contemplate the entire bank of unresolved karma that accompanies us in each moment—recognizing that all of this is actually the result of our own previous actions. “Owning” the karma of result, the totality of our relative situation, as our own creation, empowers and enables us to take full responsibility for our life and who we are.

  We can view the karma of cause and the karma of result in somatic terms. The unfinished business created by the karma of cause comes about through the incomplete mind-body process previously described, that results in holding patterns of tension. As we saw, when something occurs in our life, we tend to accept a small part of the total experience into our consciousness and block out the rest, so that it remains trapped in our body in the form of unacknowledged feeling, emotion, sensation, insight, and so on, held at bay by unconscious tension, holding, and freezing. When we resist our body’s experience, we increase the backlog of incomplete experience and our somatic frozenness. In order to hold the increasing backlog at bay, we must develop more and more sophisticated ego strategies of avoidance, denial, and rationalization, and also increase the force of the energy we put into locking up and numbing our bodies to maintain our repression. This process is what is meant by creating karma, the karma of cause. As our ego situation becomes more and more at odds with what is held in the body, our karmic backlog, our karmic debt, and our bodily dysfunction increase. The karma of result is the totality, at any given moment, of what we have been unwilling to fully experienc
e and the way in which we have managed to avoid it through short-circuiting the natural cycle of life.

  According to Buddhism, each baby is born into particular circumstances that are in accord with its karmic situation, that is, its unresolved karma, at the end of the previous life. The entire complex of the baby’s gender, physical makeup, general strength and constitution, experiences during pregnancy, family, local region, country, and culture, and even its birth as a human baby, reflects the baby’s final karmic situation in his or her previous incarnation. Also included is all the unresolved karma from all of the person’s previous lifetimes, stretching back into the illimitable past, which cannot be readily seen in the immediate situation, but rather resides below the surface, in the universal unconscious (alaya), in the form of mental traces and tendencies that will emerge at some later time. All of this is the totality of the baby’s relative situation, the baby’s karma of result. In this life, based on how we live in relation to our already existing karmic situation, we affect our karma of result, exhausting some karmic seeds and sowing others.

  Some of the individual’s karmic situation becomes evident during infancy and childhood, first to his or her family, then gradually to him- or herself. However, much of the unresolved karma—the part that is hidden in unmanifest form in the unconscious—will only emerge during later life, as the infant moves from infancy into childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and finally old age and death. According to Buddhism, most of the individual’s unresolved karma will not surface in any given lifetime, awaiting another time and place, another birth, for the moment when its appearance becomes timely and necessary.

  The small child is just a recipient of his or her accumulated karmic situation and, at least according to Buddhism, does not yet have the tools to actively engage and resolve the unfinished business of the past. When the child reaches adolescence, however, he or she begins to engage this karma in an active way and work with it more or less consciously—and this process continues from then until death. In a sense, all of life—whether or not one is a self-conscious practitioner of some spiritual tradition—involves engaging the unfolding of one’s karma, creating new karmic seeds and perhaps resolving some old ones.

  TWENTY-FOUR: Our Unlived Life

  As we have seen, we create karma by never fully relating to anything that we ever experience or do. We experience things openly up to a certain point in the body; then, before it has been delivered fully to our consciousness, before it has completed its own process, in fear, we separate and exit into our thinking mind. As we have seen, this leaves a surplus, an overhang, unfinished business that remains pending, perhaps for a few moments, perhaps for a million lifetimes.

  In the example described above, as a small child, I was unable to integrate—to maintain conscious connection with—either the horror of abandonment or the ferocious, murderous rage I felt toward my mother for her neglect. To have felt those emotions as a small child would have been overwhelming and, in relation to my need, would have made impossible the developmental tasks, in relation to the mother, incumbent upon a growing child. So I managed to “forget” the small child’s despair and his rage for the time being, which enabled me to focus on the kind of maturation needed in order to continue the genetically given ontogenic process, to grow into life and its various stages. But, as we saw, the experiences of the infant were not really forgotten, for they remained alive and active though trapped in the body, expressing themselves in the shadow that hung on the periphery of awareness and in periodic sadness. It was perhaps also active in particular challenges I felt at that time in trying to help students who also experienced depression and despair in their lives.

  We can speak of our unresolved karma, our rejected somatic knowledge, as our “unlived life.” It is that very large part of our human existence that we do not consciously feel, engage, accommodate, or incorporate. It is something that has come to our body, something that is an expression of our karma ripening and coming to the surface, but that we have allowed to go no further. Many of us feel that we are missing life, that life is passing us by, that we are missing what our life could be. We don’t know why we feel this way or what to do about it. However, when viewed from the point of view of the body, this unlived life is the life that is already ours, that is already happening, but that we are ignoring and avoiding out of our fear and desire to maintain our status quo. Of course, we long for this life, and, of course, our sense of missing it can be excruciating. It is our habitual way not to ever live through anything. We only live through things up to the point that we know what to do with them, and then we shut down. We don’t allow experience to flow through all the way. Thus, we are continually creating karma and remaining locked in the grip of restricted awareness and incomplete experience. Meditating with the body provides a way for us to reconnect with our unlived life and, gradually over time, to learn how to live in a more complete, satisfying, and fulfilling way.

  TWENTY-FIVE: The Body and Its Dimensions: The Full Extent of the Karma of Result

  This precise physical body of ours—human, male or female, tall or short, and so on—is, as mentioned, the result of all previously created karma. In understanding the karma of result, however, it is important to realize that our body is not restricted to the envelope of our immediate physical person. In fact, when explored deeply through the body work, our body is discovered to have an interpersonal, and even a cosmic, dimension. The interpersonal body refers to the other people with whom we are interconnected; and the cosmic body refers to the “body” of the natural world, both animate and inanimate. While we shall explore each of these three in more detail later, it will be useful to touch upon them here because, together, they compose the karma of result.

  In the modern world, we generally think of our bodies as being discrete entities separate from other people and from the larger world. This view is an expression of the disconnection we feel between ourselves and the interpersonal and cosmic dimensions of life. Through the somatic work, though, as we fathom the body through deeper and deeper layers, we come upon the somewhat startling discovery that, as far as our body is concerned, we are not separate from these larger communities of being at all. We see that our apparent separation was simply due to our unawareness of what our body knows, the result of residing in our head and experiencing our life from there. We realize that our body feels, senses, knows its interconnection with all things. In fact, we are, we exist, only in and through interconnection; ultimately, we are nothing other than “interbeing,” in Thich Nhat Hanh’s beautiful phrase. All of this becomes increasingly clear the deeper we enter into our somatic existence.

  Our physical body, the one seemingly bounded by the envelope of our skin, is the first somatic “layer” we encounter in our practice. It forms the main focus of our somatic explorations in the beginning. The second body, the “interpersonal body,” represents a layer that gradually begins to make itself evident after we have explored the more individual aspects of our body quite extensively and developed a relatively open and free relationship with them. This interpersonal body may be defined as the nexus of relationships we have with other human beings, of which we are an incarnation and an expression. The third body, what I call the “cosmic body,” really only becomes accessible to us at a fairly advanced stage of our somatic practice, after much work with the physical and the interpersonal bodies. The cosmic body is the primordial “body” of the earth, of the natural world and its nonhuman creatures, of which we are, at an even deeper and more subtle level, embodiments and expressions.

  Thus it is that the more deeply we explore this body of ours, the more we discover that what it “really” is, is not just this immediate individual body, but actually an interpersonal phenomenon, and then, beyond that, a cosmic phenomenon. Through this work, we discover that it is not possible to be fully embodied, fully present to our body, if we remain only within the confines of our physical bodies. If we want to be truly “grounded,” fully real, and completely emb
odied, we will find ourselves needing to open to our body’s interpersonal and cosmic dimensions.

  Our physical body is the portal, then—the one and only gateway that exists—to the totality of our embodied existence. Our individual, personal body is the outward layer. The interpersonal network and the living energies of the primordial world abide at more and more subtle levels within us. The deeper we journey into our body, the more we come upon the infinite worlds of other sentient beings and of the cosmos itself. In this way, the physical body is the all-important access point to our embodiment in its various dimensions and layers, the incomparable, sacred gate. This is why the great siddha Saraha could sing:

  Right here [in my body]

  Is sweet Yamuna[river],

  Right here the Ganges sea;

  Right here

  Are [sacred cities of] Prayag and Banaras,

  Right here the moon and the sun.

  Holy places, shrines, and lesser places

  All right here—

  I’ve been there in my travels,

  But I’ve seen no place of pilgrimage more blissful than the body. 7

  It is worth noting that, even though we modern people tend to think of our body otherwise, as an entity that is separate and distinct from the interpersonal body and the cosmic body, modern science is showing us that there is no solid, impermeable, discrete envelope to our individual body and that we are in constant and open-ended exchange with the larger bodies, just as our brain is with our lungs, our bones with our circulatory system: the same principle, just a larger scale. This growing modern acknowledgement of the profound interpenetration of our physical body with the social and cosmic bodies is certainly moving in the direction of ways in which the body is understood and experienced in Buddhism and Buddhist yoga, and also in many indigenous cultures.