Touching Enlightenment Page 9

  TWENTY: What the Body Knows

  What does all this somatic work have to do with spirituality and, frankly, with meditation? We need to realize that when we develop somatic awareness and enter into the process of relaxation and release described above, we are not just making peace with our physical existence. In fact, we are entering into a process that lies right at the heart of the spiritual life itself, something the 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.

  Our constant attempts to maintain the “integrity” of our continuous, solid sense of ourselves lead us to be very resistant to—in fact, to ignore—information that is inconsistent with that image. And this means that we have a huge amount of information, moment by moment, to block out.

  When we live our lives, the body itself is a completely nonjudgmental receiver of experience. These days there is much talk about creating effective personal boundaries. The interesting point here is that you actually can’t put up boundaries around your body. The boundaries happen up top, in the head. There are no boundaries in the body. The body is open and porous; it is sensitive and vulnerable; it is already in interconnection with everything in the universe. The body is intelligent, and the body’s knowing operates completely outside of and beyond the realm of our very limited conscious ego awareness and its desire for “boundaries.”

  From the body’s viewpoint, whatever occurs in our world—whether we like it or don’t like it, whether we find it a bad situation or a good situation—is perceived with complete openness. Whatever occurs in our environment, our body receives. On a somatic level, we receive the full experience in that way, always. There are no boundaries around the body and there’s no way you can protect yourself, unless you go into a dark dungeon and shut the door and try to hide under your bunk, and even then your body’s going to be receiving all the energies that are going on around you. No matter what the mind thinks or wants, the body receives and the body knows. It is always and without fail in immediate and direct contact with the naked, non-conceptual experience of life. In fact, in a real sense, the body is that experience—the non-conceptual substratum that precedes the overlay of concept, labeling, and judgment. As we discover in and through the body work, the body—in what it senses and what it picks up—abides in the ineffable reality of what is; it is unobstructed in its wisdom and its knowledge.

  So, the body receives experience in a completely open and nonjudgmental way, but because of our investment in who we think we are or want to be, in relation to our hopes and fears about “me” and our attempts to maintain this self, we refuse to receive a great part of what the body knows and feels and understands. (Here, “we” means our conscious self, our conscious mind, our ego.) This is the process: something happens, the totality of experience is registered on a somatic level, and our conscious mind says, “No.” Or we say, “I want this part of what happened but not that part.” Thus, our ego consciousness doesn’t simply receive what the body knows; we don’t receive the somatic information it is trying to deliver in a complete and straightforward way.

  This is what Buddhism calls ignorance (moha). This ignorance is not being unintelligent or uninformed. It is the act of blocking out knowledge and wisdom—received by the body and abiding in it—that is inconsistent with our self-image. Ignorance is actually incredibly intelligent. The activity of ignorance knows exactly what to accept and what to reject in order to keep the illusion of our unity and consistent self intact.

  In Buddhism, ignorance is considered one of the three basic mental poisons that operate to protect our “self.” The process of ignoring described above also involves the other two poisons, passion (raga) and aggression (dvesha). Using passion or desire, we try to draw in and latch on to those small portions of our somatic experience that seem to reinforce our “self” toward our consciousness. Using aggression, we try to deny, negate, or destroy whatever in our body’s knowledge is inconsistent with what we are trying to maintain. Our aggression especially sets up a deep conflict, not so much with outside situations or other people—though we may view it that way—but with our body itself, with information about reality that it is trying to deliver. 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.

  TWENTY-ONE: What Happens to What Is Rejected?

  This leads to another most important question: What happens to all that denied and rejected experience that our body has already received? To put it simply, all that somatic awareness and experience is walled off from our consciousness. As we have seen, we literally freeze the body—which knows and is aware of the totality—so that we don’t have to feel more than that very small portion we can accept.

  The experience of the body, however, has not been destroyed by our rejection nor has it somehow disappeared. Rather, it continues to live in the patterns of mental avoidance and physical tension that we have developed around it. In fact, the ego—along with the physical freezing and holding that maintain it—is a large, ongoing activity of avoidance and denial. As Freud noticed a long time ago, if we know how to look at the ego in the right way, we can see that all the rejected experience that is held “down below” is actually visible in a kind of compressed, impacted, and pathological way, in the very nature and structure of the ego itself.

  Thus, the experience that our body has taken in but our conscious “self” has been unwilling to receive dwells in a kind of no-man’s land or bardo (“intermediate”) state, in our body. There, we do subliminally feel it, primarily as an abiding threat and source of subtle anxiety that runs throughout our life. 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.

  Our ego maintenance, then, represents the ongoing activity of rehearsing and repeating, over and over, the “narrative” of our personal “self”—who I am, who I should be, who I want to be, who I must be, to survive as “me” and escape annihilation. It is very serious business, indeed. The more this continuous conceptual narrative is cut off from what the body knows, the more delusional we could be said to be.

  We might think that the process of “walling off” experience is fairly simple, manifesting through obvious physical tension—a tight back, frozen shoulders, a rigid pelvis, and so on. The experience of Tibetan yoga suggests that this is a vastly oversimplified view. In fact, the “repression” that occurs when we push back against the body’s knowledge involves every part of our body—not just our muscles and tendons, but our cartilage, all our organs, our nervous system, our bones, and even our blood and lymph systems. According to Tibetan yoga, when we push back against our experience, the totality of the unreceived knowledge is “held” in every part of our physical organism down to our very cells. In this way, the body is literally “petrified” and locked up, unable to perform—in relation to our consciousness—its genetic function, the natural function of its original “design.” And what might this be?

  The body’s natural or genetic function is to take in the totality of its experience of reality.
This totality becomes—for an ego-consciousness that is open to it—the ever-changing and reformulated basis of how the human being thinks about him- or herself, other people, and the world. Let us consider this process in more detail. In our usual state of disembodiment, when something occurs that is, in any way, jarring or threatening to our sense of “me,” we can see our mind freezing against what our body is implying. As we saw above, we literally tense up so we won’t have to see or feel. We are resisting and turning away from the somatic information coming our way.

  However, the somatic work enables us to approach this situation differently. When we have gained the ability to reside within the body in an ongoing and continuous way while living our life, we notice how much information comes to us that, under other circumstances, would be highly troubling and cause us to turn away. But, abiding within the body, we find we can receive this information, however inconsistent it may be with what we had thought or want to think about ourselves. The next thing we notice is most interesting, even astonishing: as we receive this information, we find that we can easily and simply, sometimes with humor, sometimes with sadness, let go of what we thought, abide in the “unknown” space mentioned above, and sometime later arrive at a different way of thinking about situations, our lives, and who we are.

  The more aligned with our body we are and the more we are able to receive its totality of experience, the more our conscious self, what we think about ourself and our world, will exhibit a loose, porous, and flexible nature, readily able to undergo transformation. We will be able to let go of what we thought; we will receive the new information the body is bringing forward; our preexisting concept of self will be able to dissolve; and we will be able to reconstitute our ideas of ourself—for that is part of our human way of being—but in a more informed, more realistic, more easy, and more up-to-date way.

  It is important to emphasize that the body’s way of communicating information, and the ego’s relaxation, letting go, and reformulation in light of the new experience, is very different from the ego’s habitual way of “processing” information. In our habitual way of operating, any new piece of information is put through the ego’s sieve, the ego’s way of picking and choosing. It is “processed,” trimmed down, manipulated, and filtered so that the end product can be assimilated by the preexisting self-concept. The integrity of our preexisting “self” is thus maintained by basically destroying the life of our “new” experience.

  Consider how people become our “enemies.” Initially, someone does or says something that implies they do not like us, would like to undermine us, want others to think poorly of us, or are against us in some other way. Our usual response is to feel deflated or angry and to think, often obsessively, about what occurred until we have “figured it out.” For most of us, what we figure out is to place this person in the category of “enemy” or adversary, a person who is defined by their hostility toward us and our revulsion toward them. Maintaining this conclusion inevitably involves ignoring the information of our body in several ways. For one thing, particularly if this is a person we have previously known, we begin to wall off any positive qualities or experiences that may have been part of our experience of them in the past. In addition, from now on, we are unwilling to allow in, to see or acknowledge, anything good in them. Thus we arrive at a caricature of the person, a greatly reduced version of who they have been, are, and could be.

  In our habitual ego operation, then, our experience is unable to complete the circuit: body to flexible self-conscious ego, to dissolving of the previous self-concept, to reformulation of the “self,” keeping it current with our true somatic experience of the world. Being unable to complete the circuit, the literally organic journey our experience is making toward consciousness is aborted, and it gets jammed back into itself, impacted as described. And there it stays, in a kind of unhealthy stagnation, where, in some instances, it may be unlocked through the kind of somatic work described here, or by some other form of somatic intervention or discipline, years or even decades later. In contemporary society, we talk about these as a release of “trauma.” But actually, for our ego, all naked experience is “traumatic,” meaning unacceptable. As with our traumas, so with virtually every moment of our lives—the full range of our experience is not admitted, but is pushed back, jammed down, and walled off, where it abides in the body as conscious or unconscious tension.

  In the somatic work, the process is exactly the opposite: the integrity of the body’s communication is retained. This leads to the breakdown of our previous way of conceiving of ourself and our world. In the previous example, rather than try to come to any conclusions about our apparent adversary, rather than try to actively “figure out” what happened and how it fits into our idea of our “self,” we simply abide within the body, in the sting and the pain, and perhaps the humiliation and confusion of what occurred. Abiding in that way, we let all of it work on us, in the shadows and the darkness.

  If we can resist forcing the process, over time we will inevitably come to a much richer understanding of both ourself and the other person. We are likely to see what we may have done or may have been in relation to them that contributed to their hostility. We may come to see their own pain in relation to their life and how we became an occasion for them to express it. We may see qualities or attitudes in our self that are somehow part of the mix that we had missed. All this information was, prior to the upsetting incident, unavailable to us. But, through opening to the experience itself as we feel it in our body, and being willing to let the body show the way, the incident may well become a catalyst to a larger way of being for ourself and a greater sympathy for this person and for other people. Through this process, we have irrevocably lost our previous way of being and thinking and have come upon something unprecedented, a new “self” and a new way of being, born from the ashes.

  Many strands of contemporary research suggest that this open, free-flowing relationship between body and mind is, indeed, part of our genetic heritage and fundamental biological inheritance. Certainly, anthropological studies suggest that this kind of open, porous, flexible, ever-changing, body-centered self-concept characterizes contemporary hunting-and-gathering societies and characterized the peoples and communities of the Paleolithic Age. In light of this, it appears, as suggested above, that the increasing emphasis on having a solid, continuous, relatively isolated “self” through the agricultural, industrial, technological, and cybernetic ages represents a pattern of mounting dysfunction that is inconsistent with our genetic makeup, with how we are biologically set up to function. If so, then the kind of body work proposed here perhaps offers a way, without our necessarily trying to become different people in a different time and place, for us to reclaim a far more healthy and satisfying relationship to our body and rediscover our “original nature.”

  TWENTY-TWO: An Example

  I would like to illustrate these points with a personal example. Although there are many different examples I might use in this context, this one seems especially fitting for the wealth of practical insights it affords into the processes and principles of the somatic work being described here. I describe the example here and will then draw out some of its more important implications toward the end of this chapter and in those that follow.

  Many years ago, I was on a long solitary retreat. At that time, my mother was dying of cancer. One day, while I was sitting on the porch of my little cabin, eating lunch, completely out of nowhere, I felt a terrible and hopeless despair fall over me. Somehow I knew that this was not a feeling of my current self, but a long-buried memory that had surfaced, and yet the experience was completely fresh, vivid, and absolutely real. After a few moments of unbearable intensity, the despair abruptly vanished.

  But it was immediately followed by a recollection from earlier in my life. When I was in my teens, my mother had confided in me her opinion that babies should be allowed to cry themselves to sleep because it “made them tough” and was “good for their lungs.
” She went on to say that when I was a baby, she had engaged in this practice, allowing me to cry in my crib, night after night, unattended. At the time she reported this to me, I reacted very negatively, becoming unaccountably angry. The moment I remembered my mother’s report, I realized with utter clarity that what I had felt was the despair of myself as a baby crying for his mother, to no avail. I realized exactly how I had felt at that time, helpless and hopeless, abandoned to death. I also understood why I had never been able to bear to leave my own infant children crying and unattended for long and also why, when other parents left their children crying with seeming unconcern, it always upset me greatly. After my retreat, I filed this experience away as another retreat lesson, and that seemed to be the end of it.

  A number of years later, long after my mother had died, I was leading a meditation program at a Buddhist center when chronic back problems seemed to intensify. I sought the help of one of the participants, who was a network chiropractor. Network chiropractors work with precise patterns of unconscious holding in the spine and elsewhere in the body. She gave me a few treatments, which seemed to relax and open much of the tension in my back.