‘[w]e are somatic creatures, living in bodies, having emotions, bathed by sensations, at times bubbling and simmering, at times dawdling and eddying, hot and cold, nervous and calm, fearful and yearning, hungry and satiated.' Arnold Weinstein in 'A Scream Goes Through The House'.
'Consciousness is essentially a matter of having bodily sensations rather than of having higher level thoughts' Nicholas Humphrey in 'A History of Mind'.
Ah, not to be cut off, not through the slightest partition shut out from the law of the stars. The inner what is it? If not intensified sky, hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming. Rainer Maria Rilke
Locating our awareness in the body, in the bones and marrow of body, requires slowing down, and slowing down even more than is normally comfortable for the mind. Something like watching a snail move, with awareness as slow as a snail. Slowing to the pace at which we can know the sensations that underlie our thoughts adn feelings takes a little practice, and only with mind's permission.
More like allowing than making the mind do it.
Silence is the companion of language. There beneath all the busy-ness and noise resides a tacit or implicit will to live, within each cell of our body. Almost as if each cell has an awareness of its own and a will of its own. In all, a body with a mind of its own.
Not what most of us think of as the 'will to live' when we hear of people taking their own lives. It is something more subtle, pervasive and enduring. It is like a miracle - the body's ability to survive and rebuild itself after devastating exposure, catastrophic injuries or 'life saving' medical interventions.
It's not like a will to live that you can choose, but it is a place that can be accessed in dreams and imagery that is a part of some basic encoding at the very centre of our personal lives... a drive to remain incarnate for purposes unknown to the conscious mind... Our deepest and most unconscious beliefs about our own essential nature, our worthiness to live, may be operating here. Source
People who have survived involuntary paralysis, terminal illness or a near death experience may befriend this level of cellular awareness in returning to health. Here, at this soft, quiet level of embodiment, one can watch the immune system like a beloved friend, 24 hours a day, carefully sifting out the cells that are 'me' from those that are 'not-me', safely disposing of the danger to 'me', maintaining body integrity and health.
The key to mystical language and religious metaphor is not theology or cosmology but anatomy.Source
Those who have had the considerable good fortune of having grown up in a family and a culture that supports body awareness and a balanced brain come to this awareness of anatomy more easily than those who have not.
Embracing body awareness
Imagine my surprise,
sitting a full hour in silent and irremediable fear of the world to find the body forgetting its own fear the instant it opened and placed its unassuming hands on life's enduring pain and the world for one moment closed its terrifying eyes in gratitude Saying "This is my body, I am found." David Whyte
When asked to become aware of what is underneath their upset or distress, most people speed up and go into higher level thoughts. To slow down and become aware of the sensations underneath is initially uncomfortable. Yet it is relieving to slow down and just sit in the sensations underneath powerful emotions - almost like the centre of a cyclone.
When asked to meditate a busy, acquisitive mind seeking calm is likely to go out of body and become disembodied like kids watching TV, or dissociate entirely. Meditation cannot arise without a body. Disassociation happens without a body. When you're dissociated you're not associated with anything, not even with intimate knowledge of the self or of your beloved.
Break through or turning points in a previously stuck intimate relationship occur with embodiment of a sense or feeling. Likewise with a meditation entered through sensations and feeling. Mental experiences of beauty, awe and wonder are incomplete unless accompanied by the body.
So that's the good news.
The tough bit is that body is also a store house of unfinished experience.
A junk yard of sorts.
Because body is slow minded, the mind can hide parts of itself in the little cracks and crevices of awareness. If the person is busy, the mind can know it won't have time to pause and examine those recesses. Hence, they are smart places to hide fragments of traumatic memory or parts of ourselves we deny. And a wrong headed reason to keep busy.
In the practices that lead to meditation, the mind gets a chance to notice hidden contents in those tender spots.
Mind is as vast as the imagination and the creativity that nurtures us. Consequently, being embodied means feeling physical and emotional pleasure and pain. The road to meditation leads through those places. The journey is eased without craving for relief or for delight.
Thoughts and dreams may arise as well as long forgotten memories or body sensations. Some of these are delightful full bodied recall of childhood wonders or the not so delightful lack of them. Being embodied in meditation requires a dispassionate witnessing of the unfolding process of body/mind as it grows toward balance. We cleave toward balance and harmony.
The paradox in the word 'cleave' resides in its meaning both to join together and to break apart.
'The body is not the ultimate truth and attachment to the body causes suffering .... yet if we inhabit our bodies with the finest degree of awareness, we experience the body as permeable, borderless, empty space...'
'The absolute is here in each embodied moment - when we breathe, when we sweat, when we bleed, when we feel desire.'
Quoted from 'Being Bodies - buddhist women on the paradox of embodiment'. 'Being Bodies' is a collection of women's stories of the struggle to stay with the body and not leave it behind, even under the extremes of experience from birth to death.
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