Touching Enlightenment Read online

  Meditating with the body involves learning, through a variety of practices, how to reside fully within our bodies. What we are doing is not quite learning a technique, not quite learning how to “do” something. Rather, we are readjusting the focal length, the direction, and the domain of our consciousness. Thus, we gradually arrive at an awareness that is actually in our bodies rather than in our heads. It’s not something you actually learn to do; it’s a way of learning how to be differently.

  Forming the core of the training is a corpus of perhaps fifty “somatic protocols” that are arranged in several main groups. One set of practices has to do with learning how to begin developing a pattern of relaxation within the body. Another focuses on cultivating a relationship with the earth underneath. A third attends to discovering awareness of the interior of the body. A fourth concerns locating internal tension and learning how to release it. A fifth group involves cultivating a sense of the inner space or silence of the body. A sixth is oriented toward bringing prana, or “inner breath,” down to the cellular level. And so on. The practices lead people through a rich and multifaceted process of relaxation, developing presence within the body, opening interior awareness, reading the information the body gives forth, learning how to let the body come more and more to life, and finally surrendering to the body as the guide of one’s life. All these aspects are treated in detail in the following pages. A brief summary of the protocols is given in the appendix.

  As one enters the process of the body work, it becomes critical to learn how to see in a new way. As an illustration, I would cite an example provided by Malidoma Somé. Malidoma had been away from his village for a long time. At the age of three, he had been kidnapped and brought up in a Catholic boarding school. When he escaped and returned to his home nearly twenty years later, he wanted to get the light going one night. In the West African village where he was born, though the people didn’t have electricity, they had ways of creating light at night if they wanted to. Still, at night they might say, “Let’s turn the lights off so that we can see.” When Malidoma wanted more light, he was told, “No, if we light the lamps, we won’t be able to see.” As the village elders explained it, 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.

  It is very much the same way with our body. We need to turn off the light of what we think, of our diurnal consciousness. We need to descend into the night, the darkness that is our own body. When we do so, we discover that it is not neutral or dead, nor is it a space that is just simply there for our consumption and our use. Within the deep shadows of the body, within its darkness, we begin to discover a world that exists in its own right, quite apart from anything we may consciously think, expect, or want. We begin to find that the body has it own wants—in a sense, it wants to be seen on its own terms and within its own frame of reference. This can be a rather surprising discovery for many of us who, as modern people, are so very alienated from the body. We can’t imagine the idea that the body might be a living force, a source of intelligence, wisdom, even something we might experience as possessing intention. We cannot conceive of the body as a subject. And yet, to carry out the body work, this is exactly what we need to do.

  As we move further into the work, it quickly becomes evident to us that we are going to have to let the past die. We must not be derailed by some past idea of our body or our life that we have in our mind. Of course, this is what the body work is all about. Discursive thinking is basically a set of 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.

  In letting go of the past, are we losing anything essential? Consider the example of relationships. When we let go of the past in relating with another, it doesn’t mean that we are letting go of the person, not at all. Rather, we are letting go of the habitual, often tedious patterns that have defined how we are together, opening the way for the mystery of the present to unfold with our friend. In a similar way, we have to let go of all the habitual patterns that define—and so severely limit—how we relate to our own life as a whole. It doesn’t mean that life goes away, but our body will start to show us how we need to be and what can happen. This is why the body work is so powerful and so profound: it is training in forgetting in a good way, in how to let go of the past.

  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. At that point, we can say to ourselves, “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” That we’ll die. And not only is that the worst thing that can happen, it’s something that’s going to happen. So letting go of the past at that point can be a great relief and bring much peace.

  THIRTEEN: Entering the Gate

  We begin to make a relationship with our body through meditation practices that direct our awareness to its various parts. 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.

  When we do this, initially we find we often cannot find anything at all. Though we may begin with absence of feeling or with numbness, as we continue, the place we are attending to will begin to show signs of life. Let us take the example of the big toe. At first, we may have no sensation at all in the area of our toe. We may continue for some time, trying to feel, with no results. There is simply no feeling in the location of the big toe. It is as if we are missing that part of our being.

  Then, at some point, we will begin to detect a very faint sensation in the general area of the big toe. As we continue, we begin to feel a kind of increasing sense of something being there. Going further, the big toe will begin to take on signs of definite life, and we begin to feel that there is something here to find out about. Further on, we feel the big toe as a rather complex entity, with much going on within it. Beyond this, we find ourselves increasingly sensing the big toe as having a kind of vividness, energy, and intensity never experienced before. Finally, the big toe is discovered as a universe unto itself, with patterns of tension and relaxation, frozenness and openness, pains and feelings of well-being, humming with life, with a particular character and demeanor unique to itself.

  One begins with the more obvious and identifiable parts of the body, such as the big toe of our example. Since the lower belly is a key center from which both tension and energy radiate out, one might also begin practice there. But then we begin to develop more subtlety, and we gradually become aware of places within the part we are attending to, of tendons and ligaments, tiny muscles in out-of-the-way places, organs, bones, the circulatory system, the heart, and so on. 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.

  As we continue further in our practice, increasing interiority develops. At first, we put our awareness into our abdomen or our heart center or our limbs, our feet, our fingers or our toes. 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. We direct our awareness to a certain part, and we find oursel
ves discovering that what we experience is actually much larger than the awareness we have put there. It is as if this larger, preexisting awareness of this part of our body is coming back toward us. As we experience it we come to realize that what we are doing is actually tuning in to the awareness already existing, not just in these particular places, but throughout the entire body.

  Through this practice, there arises a shift in the emphasis and shape of our awareness, a shift in the way we are aware as people. Habitually, we experience a highly conceptual form of consciousness, the “daylight consciousness” already mentioned, which most people experience in their heads and even in their frontal lobes—a kind of being up front and “out,” “toward” the others, the environment, toward what we want or consciously or unconsciously intend for our lives.

  This kind of restricted consciousness is actually a way of being very focused based on what we think, of trying to bring into being things that are in some way important to the project of “me,” to my self-image and my life. In this highly focal, intentional consciousness, we exclude a huge domain of potential information—information that is actually already at the periphery of our awareness. In fact, part of the process of being aware in the “daylight” way includes pushing against and marginalizing—or repressing—the much larger field of potential awareness.

  But when we start to place our awareness in our body, something different begins to happen. Usually fairly early in the practice, we come to realize that there is another way of being aware. The more we work with the body, the more we are able to see within the body. This seeing is quite different from the daylight variety: we increasingly come to attend to the periphery of our daylight awareness rather than strictly to the center. It is almost as if we learn how to disregard what is sharp, clear, and right in focus, and receive what is happening on the boundary. This is not only the boundary of our awareness, but it is also the boundary between our “mind” and our “body.” We are learning to see more in the body’s way. This process begins as soon as we begin the somatic meditation work, but it continues on and on, to greater levels of subtlety, seemingly without end.

  Over time, the way in which we are aware as people undergoes a basic change. To reside beyond the periphery of ego awareness is to reside in the body. The more we reside in the body, the more we find ourselves living in the penumbral awareness of the body itself. 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.

  ***

  The body work described here is the path toward this goal. Through the somatic awareness practices, we are able to arrive at greater and greater alignment—and finally identification—with the body. As we seek to bring awareness to various places in our body, the breath can be used to great advantage, as a vehicle. To continue the previous example, one of the somatic exercises I teach asks meditators to bring their attention to their big toe. Initially, as mentioned, people often can’t feel anything; there is just a complete numbness. But in the teachings of Tibetan yoga, it is suggested that we can use our breathing to enhance somatic awareness.

  Tibetan yoga speaks about the outer breath, our normal respiration, and also about the inner breath, our life force, or prana. The outer breath holds the inner breath, as a sheath of a plant might hold its pith. When we bring our attention to the outer breath, we gain access to our inner breath.

  According to Tibetan yoga, our inner breath, or prana, can be directed in various ways. For example, our outer breath fills our lungs. But we can also visualize ourselves bringing our outer breath into any place in our bodies. Thus, we use the visualization of our breath—rather than the physical breath itself—as a way to bring our attention in a strong and focused manner to any place in our body. 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.

  We might do this by visualizing that we are bringing the breath into our body from the outside, through the skin. In the example of the big toe, we can visualize that we are bringing the breath in through all the pores of the big toe, top, bottom, the sides, the front, all at once. Alternatively, we might visualize that we are just breathing directly into a location, such as the interior of the lower belly or joint such as the knee. Here we are not moving from the outside to the inside, but just breathing directly into the interior location, from the inside to the inside, so to speak. It is as if our entire attention is within the lower belly and we simply find the breath arriving there. Although this cannot really be described in words with much accuracy, a little practice quickly shows how it works.

  And here is the key point: wherever our attention goes, the prana goes, and the prana carries awareness right to that point. By directing the prana, we are able to bring awareness to any location within our body. The practitioner breathes into the big toe and is able to bring awareness to it. This kind of breathing greatly enhances the process of developing our ability to be aware of virtually any part of our body. Breathing into the big toe enables our direct knowledge of the big toe to develop much more quickly than it otherwise would. It facilitates our ability to receive the impressions of our sensations without impediment and opens us directly to the experience of the self-existing—that is, already present—awareness of the big toe.

  This breathing practice also helps us uncover the energy that ultimately is the big toe, when considered strictly from an experiential standpoint. In other words, our seemingly solid physical sensations of the big toe are a substantialized and solidified experience of a more primary experience of the toe: that it is actually a vibrating, scintillating field of energy. By directly feeling this, we are opening to a kind of communication with that part of our body that is without impediment and even without any duality at all. When we leave aside our usual conceptual image of ourselves and of our body, when we are able to identify completely with the energy in the big toe, there isn’t anything else. In a sense, we become the energy of the big toe; we are it.

  This kind of “non-dual” experience of the big toe is clearly a dynamic process. Somehow, the more we sense the energetic world that is the big toe, the more we find flowing into our consciousness in the way of input, grounding, revitalization, and nourishment. Somehow, simply through developing this awareness, we feel that we ourselves are changing on some fundamental level. All this is “information” of a sort, but not a kind we could objectify or name in any way.

  FOURTEEN: Discomfort in the Somatic Practice

  The somatic meditations are often experienced as deeply satisfying, leaving us with a profound sense of well-being. At the same time, the actual work of developing awareness that occurs through our practice often carries with it an edge of discomfort. For one thing, the sheer energy and intensity we uncover in a particular location in our body, or in the body as a whole, can be quite uncomfortable. Our experience often seems to be too much, out of bounds, even verging on unbearable. 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.

  As we work with the body and explore the various parts of it, we are likely to begin discovering painful tension. The word “tension” is a general term used in this book to cover a wide variety of difficult somatic experience
s. Tension can be viewed from either of two angles. In one sense, it refers to an experience in the body: we feel tension in a certain place. In another sense, it refers to the result of an activity on the part of our ego mind, the activity of holding, tensing, or freezing in a certain location. In fact, these two meanings are the same thing perceived from two different angles. 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.

  The term “tension” as used here refers to these forms of somatic discomfort:

  • Numbness: the body or a part of the body feels numb, insentient, dead.

  • Solidity: a part of the body feels heavy, dense, and solid—as if it were a brick or a stone.

  • Tightness: we notice a kind of overly constricted quality to a place in our body—it feels unnaturally tight.

  • Pain: the body or a part of the body feels soreness, achiness, dull pain, throbbing pain, acute pain, a kind of locked-up tension that signals the body’s more or less acute distress.