Body Intelligence
-from "The Essential Rumi" translation by Coleman Barks with John Moyne,p.151
The more deeply you probe the body, the more you come to understand it as the energy and awareness of the awakened state itself. This is, in the evocative language of early Buddhism, to "touch enlightenment with the body." -Reginald Ray, "To Touch Enlightenment with the Body
Through years of illness my body was the dark engine of my practice. Now this same body is itself a locus of wisdom. Meditation enabled me to watch what was happening unflinchingly, and over time to deeply accept it as the fact of my life. It helped me to build a psychic container strong enough to hold experiences that otherwise might have overwhelmed me There's also an unanticipated sweetness that comes with including the hard stuff, an acceptance of all of myself that became easier to extend to others as well. Joan Southerland, Being bodies
Tonglen meditation breathes in the suffering we witness adding texture to the in-breath: "Breathe in a feeling of hot, dark, and heavy--a sense of claustrophobia." The out-breath is textured by a feeling of "cool, bright, and light." In the act of responsibly translating between realities, our compassion is awakened, our view of reality is expanded, and we experience the great pleasure of giving back to the world. -Laura Sewall, 232
- Rainer Maria Rilke
A science-less conception of consciousness studies has serious problems. One is a tendency toward Cartesian separation of mind and world, which can only make sense in a deist/creationist framework that explains mind as dropped into the physical world from outside. In a nondeist account evolution has to be part of the story. A related problem is that studies of conscious being shouldn't be separated from studies of kinds of knowing that are nonconscious and yet effective. 'Consciousness' ie conscious perceiving, thinking, knowing, acting needs to be understood as a nested subset of mental/physical function that also includes nonconscious perceiving, acting, thinking, knowing. We can integrate studying conscious and nonconscious knowing only by seeing both in terms of physical structure. So consciousness studies needs evolutionary theory, cognitive science, and ethology in addition to its liberal arts roots. - EE faculty memo
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The key to mystical language and religious metaphor is not theology or cosmology but anatomy. Those who enter deeply into the mystical dimension of experience soon discover that the cosmic design they expected to find in their inward path of ascent to God is in fact simply the design of their own anatomical or psychophysical structures. Indeed, this is the secret divulged to initiates of mystical schools. -Da Free John quoted in Harris, 2001, 53 (contributed by student Elissa Cobb)
Contemplative and creative bodies:
This page groups the spiritual or awareness traditions with dreamwork, art practices, and physical disciplines such as extreme sports, because all promote skillful attention.
Most of us learn to swim before
we're old enough to appreciate just how daunting and counterintuitive a
proposition rapid swimming actually is. The body has to propel itself horizontally,
for one thing, which is weird for human beings. Gravity has stopped working
in the familiar way it does on land. ("You no longer have a platform,"
Nelms says. "Plus, since your lungs are your aerobic chamber, it's
like a water-polo ball is trapped inside your body, so there's a part of
you that falls up.")
The surroundings are lethal, if they're managed incompetently enough, and the racer in particular has to contend with the fundamental paradox of acceleration through water: the faster a person tries to go, the harder the water pushes back. Coaches know that this push-back factor, or resistance, increases exponentially as a swimmer's time drops, and that each small time improvement demands significantly more physical effort. Fast swimmers manage this resistance by both exploiting and eluding it, pulling against the thickness of the water while simultaneously slithering the body through. The more water they can "hold," as swimmers say, and the more efficiently they slither, the farther each stroke propels them; that's why so many of the swiftest racers are not only strikingly graceful but also look as though their limbs are moving more slowly and easily than everybody else's. There's no visible fight with the water at all when a great swimmer is racing, and although coaches and biomechanics experts have learned a lot in recent decades about how this works - nearly every development in modern swimming, from stroke changes to the invention of the low-drag bodysuit, is essentially a refinement in managing the resistance of water - they also know that some people just seem to feel water, as they move through it, in ways that others cannot.
This is meant literally, as in some heightened physical perception of the water around the body, and without it, in competitive swimming, nothing else much matters. "The greatest athlete in the world, the most genetically gifted, can come into your program as an eight-year-old," says John Walker, the U.S. national swim team's assistant technical support director. "But, if they don't have that feel for the water, the least genetically gifted eight-year-old who has that feel for the water is going to beat them."
Nelms says that what sets Coughlin apart from other world-class swimmers he has known is her uncanny ability to connect coaching suggestions instantly to that feel - as though there were a direct route from her ears to her muscles and nerve endings, with no detour through the thinking brain. Both Nelms and McKeever regard this ability as central to Coughlin's speed. McKeever recalls talking briefly to Coughlin, moments before the start of one freestyle race during her sophomore year, and giving her a new suggestion for improving her turns at the wall. "Then she just nailed it in the race," McKeever says. "It looked like a cannon had shot her off the wall. I've never had a coaching experience like this before, where you'd never even talked about something earlier, and then - bang! - they nailed it."
- from an article on swim champion Natalie Coughlin by Cynthia Gorney of the New Yorker, available as Infotrac article A118989237 of the New Yorker, available as Infotrac article A118989237
Acupuncture visualization
It's become my practice to meditate at my acupuncture appointments. Once the needles are in place, the heat lamp is on my body, and a soothing CD is playing, I start concentrating on my breathing and let the music take me away for the next 25 to 30 minutes. At one of my recent appointments while listening to a CD entitled "Journeys," I suddenly envisioned this beautiful image of a stream in front of me winding through a rising meadow filled with golden wheat swaying in a soft, gentle breeze. The rippling sound of the water was soothing and rejuvenating. I concentrated more on the water flowing through what I thought were my legs. The sensation of standing in this warm, clear running stream filled with smooth, oval, pale stones was overpowering. When I relaxed even deeper into the moment, I was stunned to see that the stream was actually an extension of my female organs and the stream bank was an extension of my vaginal wall. The water flowing into the stream came out of my uterus. It was pleasantly warm and had an oily feel to it like natural vaginal lubrication. The banks of my stream which I had at first thought were clay, were actually the blood-rich lining of my uterus. The smooth stones were uterine eggs.
I dipped into the stream again and again and picked up eggs. Each one I touched and held resulted in an unique experience. One egg's top would open like a blown-out Easter egg and hold something representative of my life-experience - the face of one of my children, the face of someone who had greatly impacted my life journey, something I had created, somewhere I had traveled that held significance for me. These eggs were holding past creations and experiences. These eggs were laid out in front of me in my life-stream; my life-force rippling over them and out into the world impacting others.
Other eggs that I picked up left holes in the uterine lining that strong, white energy shone from. These eggs wouldn't open. My sense was that these eggs were my future creations and experiences. Each egg fit neatly back into my uterine wall; nestled and nurtured by the warm stream. As I looked out onto the stream and followed its flow, I observed that the wheat in the meadow actually started out as soft pubic hair around my vagina but as the stream passed out further and further around the stream's bend and into the distance, the hair gradually changed into thriving golden wheat. The rolling meadow was fruitful, warm, and pleasing to the eye. Rapture filled my body and my heart each time I dipped my hands into my warm water and held my eggs - this intimate and gentle exploration of my own body.
- student JA
Pigeon pose
This is a story of patience, awareness, and faith in the unfolding of the self. It is my attempt to share a series of interconnected experiences that arose over a period of one week of intense and frequent yoga practice, which included meditation, asanas, and yoga therapy. Although I can write about what these experiences mean to me now, I remain curious about what might still become clear when I consider them in the future. All things change somehow.
The posture was pigeon pose; a prone posture in which one leg is crossed in front of the other and the heart is aligned with the thigh of the crossed-in leg. I was feeling my heart beat against my right thigh. I had been in this posture for several minutes. Its edge was deep. I was coaxing myself to stay and explore the sensations. I focused on the "thu-thump" of each heart sound and considered my direction. Were my heart and my direction (leg) aligned? My answer was "Yes" and yet, I felt sad. The sadness did not make sense, but I decided to stay with it, and tears came.
A minute or two later, I experienced what I can only describe as an awake dream. I was not asleep. The images seemed to be inside of me and outside of me at the same time. They were clear, colorful, and rich.
A tiny, bent over old lady with a red cloak and a basket on one arm was walking around in the woods of me. She smiled and winked at me as if we had some deep comical secret between us. She was bending down every now and then, picking up some objects from the forest floor and tucking them secretly into her basket.
I watched her with surprise and curiosity. As bent as she was, she moved almost dancing - from object to object as if she were a child. Beneath her smile, I sensed that she was taking her job quite seriously. Then an awareness of what she was doing came to me like a drop of water splashing onto the surface of a pond. This old woman was gathering the fruits of my labor for safe-keeping, harvesting the orchard of my Self.
As quickly as it appeared, the image was gone. Unlike most dreams, however, it is as clear today as it was then.
Two nights later, again in meditation, I had another awake dream as vivid and real as the previous one. I was walking in the forest where the red-cloaked lady had been. Someone was calling to me in an urgent whisper. I walked toward the voice and saw something moving in the leaves up ahead. As I came closer, I saw that it was an eye growing out of a root in the ground. It was as big as my hand. Its lid and brow were arched in anxiousness, and its expressive eyeball darted around nervously.
It spoke without a mouth, trying to let me know about some urgent thing. Behind its anxiousness was a deep kindness and sincerity, the likes of which I have never seen. The eye in the ground was desperate for me to see or know something. I knelt down and pushed away the leaves and forest debris so the eye could see clearly. I spoke to it. "What? Tell me more." At this point I woke up, and the dream of the eye, like the dream of the old woman, has remained fresh over time.
I wrote about these two experiences in my journal, illustrating my words with drawings of the eye in the ground. I decided to stay as present to their unclear messages as I could as I went about my daily this and that. It was like staying in one very long yoga posture edge. I felt these images somewhere in the center of me, working away. They created an interesting edge, one that required the patient waiting and the faith that I mentioned earlier faith that their meaning would become clear.
Two days and two hundred miles later at a yoga therapy intensive program, I decided to take an early evening walk in the new snow behind the inn where I was staying. I had never walked back there before. It was almost dark.
Behind the inn is a ravine with steep sides. There is a path that enters the ravine and follows it back a few hundred yards. I walked in, happy to be making the first tracks in the fresh snow, and was drawn to climb up the ravine's north side. At the top, I turned back to face the way I had come and sat down in the loose red and yellow leaves and dry white powder snow, gathering my knees to my chest and gazing around my sitting spot.
Next to my left side, protruding out of the ground was a root shaped exactly as my eye in the ground had been. The only difference was that instead of the anxious eyeball, the eye space was hollow and dark.
I sat there for a while, pondering the root, touching it. I was excited to see it there, and had the distinct feeling that it had called me to find it. I cleaned the snow away from the root, as I had cleared away the leaves in my dream. It seemed as though I was supposed to give it some sort of offering. I had nothing but my words of thanks and recognition. So I gave these to the eye and then went back to my room to write and draw some more.
The next morning in meditation, the same whispering voice that I had heard in my dream, the eye's voice, reminded me of the offering that the eye root in the ground had called for. It occurred to me that this gift needed to be something that I did not want to give up, something that I was attached to in some way.
All morning I wondered what this thing could be. In a later morning meditation, I found myself considering the turquoise and silver ring I wore on my right thumb. Was this the thing to place into the eye? I reasoned that there must be something I could go purchase to put there instead. Or maybe I could buy a new ring to replace this one and then give this one up to the eye. I was definitely resistant to putting a beloved item into a root in back of a Massachusetts inn without a good reason.
At lunchtime, I went to a gift shop in search of a replacement ring, but there were none that I liked. I searched for a suitable alternative offering, but I kept coming back to the request that it must be something I was somehow attached to. I ended up purchasing a turquoise stone and left the store.
Back at the inn, I walked up to the root; it was not waiting, nor had it gone away. I sat there with the turquoise stone in my hand. It meant nothing to me. It would be too easy to give the stone to the eye. This was about letting go of something as an act of pure faith in something else. This was about listening. I took off the ring, blew my breath on it, and tucked it deep into the eye socket of the root, not unlike the way the red-cloaked old woman had tucked the fruits of my labor into her basket. A tear or two dropped down into the snow, and I left feeling that something important had just happened, even though I wasn't sure what it was. The experience felt a little like a first kiss excitement and confusion silently erupting in an adolescent body. On my way out of the ravine, I tucked the turquoise stone into a fox track beside the snowy path.
Two hours later, while receiving a yoga therapy session, I experienced the following healing journey. There was a door before me. It was old, wooden, arched, and plain, and it was set into a mound of forest earth much like a hobbit house door. It was a functional representation of the eye. As I looked at it, words grew out of its surface and spelled "Welcome Home". When I approached the door, it opened for me.
I had to duck my head to enter, but once inside I could stand tall. It was night, and stars lit the large room because it had no ceiling. Roots grew out of the walls and dangled decoratively downward. The room was filled with every living creature imaginable and also every non-living being, including water and rock. A long table had been set in my honor. It was a welcome home party for me. All the beings were laughing, dancing, and singing, but their singing was not coming from their mouths. It was a collective sound coming from someplace else. The song said, "Thank you for the offering. You will always fit in here. You are a part of this voice. Listen. Listen and you will find home."
As I drew closer to the table the dancers moved aside to let me pass and turned to watch in approval. The smiling red-cloaked old woman was spreading the fruits of my labor out upon the banquet table to be shared with all.
When it was time for me to leave, the collective voice said, "Ground yourself in this. Everything else will fall into place." And the meditation's journey ended there.
In the summer, I returned to the inn and made a beeline for the ravine to find the root. It was gone. There wasn't a trace of it anywhere. I crawled around, pushing the ground aside, but there was no root, no eye, and no ring.
-
The red-cloaked woman was courage, the courage to share my fruit. The eye in the ground was my need to become grounded in the wake of my self-expectations my need to clear away the debris and see things as they are. And in order to do this, something had to be given up control, attachment to the debris itself. The offering was a symbolic act of letting go, which allowed me to come home to the banquet of myself.
- student Elissa Cobb