Back to the body...

Back to the body is not necessarily regression, unless so doing exploits corporeal possibilities or makes a villain out of rationality and abstraction.

Back to the body involves, among other things, a relocation and redistribution of attentiveness — it is meta-movement, not movement from here to there, but from here to a deeper here, from now to a deeper now.

Back to the body is only a move back in time in a semantic sense; it is not about literally sliding back into the past, but rather about taking ourselves into and past our past, unraveling and disarming whatever would seduce us away from the present moment.

Our body, through its structure, gestures, and holding patterns, reveals much about our past, as various schools of bodywork have demonstrated since the 1960s. But let us take this further. The body is shaped by where it's been — and where has it, in its most fundamental sense, not been? Is it not elementally continuous with the entire Universe, and can this not be heard and felt as more than just astrophysical information? Forms within forms within forms, blooming and withering, evolving and disappearing, birthing and dying, matter and yet not matter, mattering and yet not mattering. We are embodying something particular, and at the same time something so enormous that imagination cannot touch it.

Our ontogenetic development — as revealed embryologically — recapitulates our phylogenetic evolution. The body begins as a single-celled organism (like a protozoan), then expands into a cooperative coalition of cells (like a sponge), continuing to embody and move through the basic characteristics of "higher" phyla — at one point even having gills — until it is obviously human.

Been there, done that — a cliché for the ages.

Such somatic development is roughly paralleled psychosocially, as our worldview shifts from that of infancy to that of adulthood, the sequential stages of which find considerable correspondence in the evolution of our species. Thus is the past present.

Back to the body is not about capitalizing on our somatic possibilities, but rather about releasing our body from the expectation that it console us in the face of our difficulties, that it not let us down, that it not betray us.

But our body does not betray us; we betray it.

Just as we, as a collective social body, have to now store or contain enormous amounts of radioactive waste in firmly sealed, densely walled receptacles, so too does our body have to similarly store or contain — and keep as far away as possible from our everyday consciousness — whatever traumatic imprints it has not been able to release. (Secondary releases — sexual and otherwise — may make us feel a bit better, but only briefly and superficially relieve us of the "outer" stress resulting from the pressure and rising presence of underlying trauma.)

Storing pain that cannot be handled at the time is not just something that we do. It's a survival strategy that goes way back. Consider the amoeba. Put it in water that's been polluted with India Ink granules, and it'll actually absorb them and store them in vacuoles (tiny self-contained cavities in the protoplasm of a cell). Then put the amoeba in water that's clean — a healthy environment — and its vacuoles will move to the edge of the cell membrane — like surfacing trauma in a healthy therapeutic setting — and discharge the ink granules.

Our capacity — including somatically — - to isolate and encapsulate trauma (so that the rest of our system can adequately function) until we are in a truly safe environment continues to amaze and move me. It isn't so much that the trauma isn't markedly influential up until it surfaces as itself, but that its very containment, however neurotically managed and compensated for, has permitted organismic and personal survival. We may have to "eat" it, we may have to swallow it, we may have to act as if it's not tearing at our insides, but we do not have to digest it. Our "vacuoles" aren't literal containers — though they may appear to have specific bodily locations — but rather inner psychophysiological mechanisms that make possible the repression of pain, especially unbearable pain.

The longer we wait — or have to wait — to open the cell doors of such pain, the more compensatory layers of "gatekeeping" we will likely have to penetrate, including any identification we might have formed with one or more of our survival strategies. That is, if we are sufficiently invested in being the "I" that is playing jailer, then any serious intent to release — or even to contact -what's in the dungeon is probably going to be threatening to us.

We may, quite understandably, be very touchy about being touched in our areas of trauma. Our tightly constricted abdominal muscles, for example, may resist any significant softening or letting-go (as perhaps catalyzed through skilful bodywork), because then we'd be closer to feeling what initially made — and is still making — such contraction necessary. Or, by contrast, such muscles may be too loose, too soft, offering no resistance to outside touch (again, such as that of skilful bodywork), as if uninhabited or vacated, indicating what we originally did to protect ourselves. Trauma is not just literally "stored" in the muscles and viscera, but when its imprint is amplified through particular circumstances, the effects are often most clearly displayed through somatic signs.

Back to the body deepens our sensitivity to our “solutions” to our long-ago problems. Back to the body grounds our investigation of ourselves, keeping it from the jaws of unneeded abstraction. Back to the body is about returning to the scene of the crime with an open mind, a willing heart, and the courage to complete what was left incomplete then.

This is not about lingering in the past, overanalyzing its debris, nor using it as an alibi for now’s shortcomings, but rather is about ceasing to be a slave or puppet of one’s conditioning. This is not regression. Rather, it is simply a matter of going upriver for a while, and spending some high quality time at the headwaters, so that we might begin cultivating a definition of ourselves that resonates more with who we really are.

There is in us an ineradicable -- but all-too-often exiled -- longing to be healed, healed fully. This is why we, however mechanically, keep planting ourselves in situations that psychoemotionally mimic or approximate those very conditions of long ago when we were forced to become hosts for trauma. Such situations draw our primal woundedness closer to the surface, to where it’s within reach of a genuine healing, wherein it can be openly and fully felt, illuminated, and eventually integrated with the rest of our being.

The unobstructed feeling of such pain -- as difficult as it may be to get to and as intense as it may be -- is ultimately adaptive, so long as it’s handled with sufficient care and skill. In his work with the dying, Stephen Levine speaks of letting go of one’s suffering through consciously entering into and making space, merciful space, for one’s pain. Opening the body -- not just to let trauma out, but to let healing in, letting body and mind settle into the heart, into the boundless vastitude of Love.

In making room for our (and others’) pain, our heart may break, but it’s broken in much the same way that a stream rushing down through a mountainside forest is broken -- it’s still cohesive spiritually, still unified in essence, its elemental dying only strengthening and affirming its fundamental aliveness, its rough-and-tumble course only furthering its dynamic yet vulnerable surrender.

Back to the body not only speeds our healing, anchoring and centering us, but also helps decentralize egoity, so that we become more than embodied ego and its imperialistic holdings. Back to the body isn’t about having ego-governed relationships with our different “parts” -- part of me wants this, part of me wants that, and part of me doesn’t want either, and yet another part says so what, and on and on it goes, revealing not healthy ambiguity, but rather self-fragmentation.

When I ask clients where each “part” (and its voice) is located, most will just indicate their head in general. And what if I then ask where is the “I” who’s behind each (or every) part? The initial response is almost invariably confusion and some serious semantic scrambling on very slippery steppingstones. A far from common search.

To approach the actual nature of our stable of “I’s” usually requires some somatic grounding, some relatively steady awareness of, say, the movements and sensations generated by breathing, so that attention is sufficiently anchored as it ventures into the labyrinths that lead back to the source of “I.” Without such a link (or capacity for conscious remembrance), considerations of who “I” is will likely be short-circuited by the compelling automaticities of our usual mentalizing.

Giving emotionally alive -- and perhaps also exaggerated -- voice to these “parts” will generally expose their somatic components or correspondences. Our forehead might wrinkle up, our hands suddenly fist, our chin push forward, our chest collapse, our right side tense up -- the signs are many. And what do they signify? In general, the presence of those desire-systems in us that, when given enough attention, tend to refer to themselves as “I.” Becoming more aware of their presence and appearance, as achieved through recognizing their bodily patterns, makes it more possible for us to deal with them sanely.

When we say or think “I,” where do we sense it in our body? Where does the sensation of “I” primarily register? From where does it seem to arise? I’m not talking about the sensation of “being-ness” -- which we may sense in many different somatic locales (or none at all) -- but about the sensation of egoity. Explore the apparent location of “I,” and a crucial, perhaps unnerving discovery will start to become apparent: “I” does not possess innate existence. Just like everything else. And yet here it is again!

The usual us is just a thought away.

One moment of nonmindful attention, and “I” is resurrected, along with the sense of familiarity that serves as a kind of nutrient dish and hedge for it. Instead of using our thinking mind in the service of who we really are, we tend to exploit its attributes, using its reasoning and contextualizing powers to distance ourselves from the very pain that we need to face.

That is, we habitually use the cognizing portion of our mind to reduce such core feelings -- or at least their message -- to little more than mere informational “readouts,” which can then be manipulated in any way that “we” want. Thus do we entrench ourselves neocortically, busying ourselves with a protective yet deadly alchemy, converting the emanations of our primal fear into something more tolerable, such as worry, depression, or mild paranoia.

Depression is an appallingly common “solution.” Contrary to popular opinion, depression is not primarily a feeling, but rather a suppression of feeling, consuming an enormous amount of Life-energy in its pressing-down of feeling. Depression could be said to be the sensation of partially-successful repression, minus any significantly satisfying compensatory lift. As such, it is a pain that walls away a deeper pain, serving as the drugged yet still wretchedly insomniac gatekeeper of incarcerated trauma.

Where anxiety “wires” us, depression flattens us, leaving us amorphously and grayly embodied, stuck in a flaccid rigor mortis. In depression, cognition is employed as an immune system of sorts, barring entry to the bare facticity of raw feeling -- with all of its attending imperatives and intuitions -- and whatever else is organismically recognized as a threat.

This “numbing by mind” frustrates us somatically, creating a rebellion against such “above”-anchored tyranny. Thus does the body act up, crying out through its symptoms for awakened attention and compassion. If the body is not permitted to be here -- as when the lights are on only upstairs -- but is “down there” or “over there” or in for repairs, then we literally are elsewhere and elsewhen, stranded from the very grounding we need in order to truly come alive.

Our body is not in the way.

When we desensitize ourselves to our body, our feelings, our visceral nature, we then overassociate knowingness with our thinking mind -- we try to think our way through Life, giving ourselves a break every now and then with a pleasure-plunge into the mess we’ve made of our somatic reality. Our bodies tend to be saturated with our cognitive leanings and solutions -- someone asks us how we are feeling, and many of us look away or up, looking into our mind for the answer. As if the mind knows.

Yes, it is not our ultimate destiny to be this body, but this fleshiness, this bodymind complex, needs to be loved and appreciated and consciously lived, until it is healed at the heart. Otherwise, reeembodiment at the level at which we’re stuck may be our next chapter.

It helps to remember that manifest existence is the body of the Unmanifest Eternal.

The body is the medium for being in and maintaining relationship with one’s environment. Embodiment is relationship. As we mature, we shift from sensing our body as a solid something to sensing it simply as a fluidly shapeshifting patterning of energy. And this energy is, we eventually realize, inherently self-illuminating -- it is not really apart from that which is aware of it. To embody this realization is to rightfully position the body.

Late December, 1995. I’m running through the rain, along the local seawall. Soft, soft waves. Though it’s only 4 P.M., it’s already dark. My attention wanders for a while through a crowd of jostling thoughts, as my body weaves through shadowy, umbrella-topped figures having an “evening” walk. I let this be for a few minutes, enjoying the feeling of aliveness slowly surging through my flu-ridden body. My awareness of actually running is minimal.

Gradually, as I become more attentive to the actual process of thinking and rethinking, physical sensations claim a little more of my attention. The details of movement, the nuances of texture and pressure, softness and hardness, expansion and contraction, fluidly combine with a kind of composite sensation, namely that of everything working together so that running can occur. My attention now and then settles on intentionality -- the intention to lift my leg, to lean forward a touch more, to slow down, to speed up, to rock forward on my foot, to leap over a puddle, to duck under a sudden umbrella.

The sky is blackish-silver, plump and sagging, as if impaled upon the hazy treetops and highrises. I gaze at the sky, the sea, the darkly glistening ribbon of path ahead of me, then become aware not just of what is being seen, but also of the actual process of seeing -- not fully, not even steadily, but enough so that perception itself becomes the object of awareness.

In this, seeing, hearing, feeling, and sensing become even sharper. Now there’s a spontaneous shift from what could be called the first stage of conscious attention -- a deliberate focusing on the details of one’s immediate experience -- to what could be termed the second stage of conscious attention, attention that’s given to the totality of one’s presence. While there’s still some focus on detail, it is functionally peripheral to the focus given to presence.

Now all there is is running and awareness of running. Pure movement, nothing holding still. But does it ever? Does anything hold still? My attention is magnetized to these questions -- and the second stage of conscious attention is no more. Yet, seemingly instantaneously, it returns. Or did it actually never leave? Was it just that my focus was elsewhere (or elsewhen)? I love the rain blowing in my face. Washing away the questions.

I’m so hot now that the damp chill and general sogginess are a pleasure. As my attention shifts from cognition to sensation, I get more and more inside my running. And in that “within-ness,” as my attention shifts from sensation to perception, I’m both in my running and “all around” it, as if cupping this running body in the palm of a vast, ineffable caring.

There is pain now, as I leave the seawall and labor uphill, my legs heavily afire, sweat rinsing out my eyes. Ambition wrestles with care, and I slow down, grateful to be able to run at all. At last, I finish my run, squatting in drenched silence, stretching my Achilles tendons, feeling a deep tenderness for my weak spots.

When lost in thought, I had no body.

When attention was brought to thought, I had a body.

When attention was brought to sensation, I went from having a body to being in a body.

When attention was brought to perception, I went from being in a body to being present as a body.

When attention was brought to my overall presence, my innate wholeness of being, I went from being present as a body to simply being, neither separate from nor identified with my body.

The body is not self (childhood), nor object to exploit (adolescence), nor ego-container (adulthood), nor burden (late adulthood), nor soul-container (metaphysics), but is simply Consciousness or Nondual Awareness “making an appearance.”

What we essentially are is appearing not in, but as a body.

So many bodies are simultaneously here for each one of us, every one of them prismed into animation, all of them wondrous coalescings of Being -- the body dense, the body unbound, the body bright, the dream-body, the everyday body, the body of Time, the body suddenly see-through, the body shattered, the body Divine, the body of no beginning, the embodiment of every possibility, leaving imagination in the dust.

Flesh of mud and stars, flesh of gravity, flesh of ecstasy, flesh of history, body after body, body within body, all speaking their own mind and -- if we but hear with more than our ear -- also Truth’s tongue, all arising as both Cloud and Endless Sky, in which everything (including these words) is but vanishing confetti.

Our body is not a hindrance to realizing What-Really-Matters. As we shift from having a body to being a body to simply Being, we find ourselves not just coming Home, but already sitting at the hearth.

In embodying, consciously and responsibly embodying, all that we are, we become, however gradually, intimate with all that is, including our resistance to such radical intimacy. We may apparently still be somebody, but we’re now, to a more than significant degree, no longer in our own way.

Our body is then no longer ours, but Being’s -- we’ve just rented the facilities for a needed sojourn, so we could get some things straight.

And even if we keep having to renew the lease, we know we’re in the right place. If our Earth-life is a classroom -- and don’t assume this is just a metaphor -- then we, all of us, have lessons to learn. No grades given. No Oscars for awakening. We simply repeat our lessons until we have learned them by heart.

Learned them from the tips of our toes to the crown of our head.

To become intimate with it all is to embody it all, to touch it all, to recognize the inherent inseparability of all that is. We need look no further than our body.