You must understand and co-operate with the body. It is ignorance of the mechanisms that creates conflict.
~ Jean Klein
No, I’m not done with this topic yet. There are two reasons for this. The first reason is that it is incredibly difficult to use words to describe the workings and laws of the invisible world. For the mind to learn the language of the body is in itself a serious challenge, and a life-long commitment, but to extract a syntax from that process, in a way that is digestible and relatable, is a frustrating undertaking. I feel I’m both mildly successful and thoroughly failing at it.
The second reason is that the journey of embodiment inevitably opens Pandora’s box. When you first start exploring your inner landscape with the right tools and mindset for the job, you will find a plethora of emotions and sensations, waiting patiently for your reaching out. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Yes.
Pandora’s iceberg.
Deal with it.
If you commit to a consistent daily practice, without an intention to stop after a predetermined period of time, you will find it evolves in very undelineated phases. This is the body we’re talking about : a million and one cycles flowing with and through each other, without any clear beginning or end. Dancing sensations, constantly melting into one another, in ever varying rhythms and tempos. But there are discernible patterns in this apparent chaos. It just takes patience and vigilance to notice them.
At first you will encounter solid and simple phenomena. This has more to do with your addiction to mental understanding of the body’s language, and less with the nature of the experiences you will be introduced to. The compulsive strategy of the thinking mind to name everything it encounters, immediately reveals its shortcomings : it doesn’t have the vocabulary or tools to categorize and catalog the body’s experiences. But that doesn’t stop it from trying and sticking its crude labels onto them : I feel something in my belly. My lower back feels numb. Something hurts in my left leg. And is that a vague sadness I sense in my chest? This is just the tip of said iceberg. (Spoiler alert : there is no end to its mass once you get below the waterline.)
As you persevere in your practice, after some time you will become more and more aware of increasingly subtle sensations. Pain, numbness and especially tightness will slowly be mapped out with growing accuracy and distinction. Bringing loving awareness to these places will make them open up, ever so slightly, and make way for the gentlest increases in energy flowing through them. Emotions will gradually become larger, richer and more distinct in flavor, and you will become more and more familiar with their preferred ways of moving through your vessel. You are mapping and charting out your inner territory, with great care and love for whatever greets you in this seemingly new world. With every new encounter and discovery, you are drawing a tiny new section onto the map of you.
As you persist in this exploration, and the landscape of sensation and emotion continues to broaden and become more intricate and colorful, a parallel shift will be set in motion, which will slowly become apparent to you. Your focus will naturally start to move from the experiences of these sensations and emotions, to unfold into the enjoyment of the exploration itself. As stuck emotions and energies become unstuck, the length of their life cycle will be reduced to its natural state, which is much shorter than culturally accepted. They come and go at a quicker pace, and they succeed each other more rapidly as well. And as this never-ending and ever-changing parade of bodily sensations finds it natural rhythm, the unchanging qualities of the exploration will become more obvious by contrast.
We could say that this is when you first dive beneath the waterline, and are truly confronted with the vastness and infinite depth of your invisible inner world. And as the landscape that is being explored becomes more familiar – just like driving down the same road, day after day – the exploration itself will become more satisfying than the discoveries it produces. If this exploring comes from a place that is devoid of goals and assumptions – the empty cup thing – you will rediscover the true meaning of the words welcoming and curiosity. You will revive the childlike qualities of these states of being, and find how powerful they are when they can freely operate inside the love and wisdom of an educated awareness. And this will announce another spontaneous, natural shift.
The same way your exploration of inner experiences introduced you to the art of exploring, so does artful exploration introduce you to the explorer. Yet another, entirely new conversation can begin now : the one between that in you which says yes to experience, and that in you which says no. Now the actual source of the internal conflict can start to come into focus. When trying to put into words what is happening here, things can easily become very convoluted, so mental focus is required for what comes next.
The basic premise at hand is this : there is an aspect of your being that seemingly has the power to reject other aspects of your being. This ‘no’ is the source of the inner conflict. But where does this ‘no’ even come from?
As stated in the previous post, what you consider to be your personality is nothing but the unnatural mechanisms of withdrawal from, and repression of, feeling in the body. You were born into a human world which is living from this faulty paradigm. There’s no escaping it. Everyone you have ever come into contact with (unless you have enlightened neighbors) carries with them this personality, this very personal and individual concoction of repression and compensation mechanisms.
Every time you were told you were bad by the grown-ups, this reality became yours a little more. And after a while, you grew numb to how unnatural this feels, and you became a grown-up yourself. Usually before age twelve. And then you were stuck in this personality, convinced this is who you are. You might even be convinced that the name they gave this personality is yours now, too.
First side note of the day : this obviously does not answer the question in a larger, anthropological or evolutionary sense. Where the basic mechanism of the ‘no’, of the internal resistance and constriction of energy flow, originated in humans, or why it’s even possible, is a conversation that’s very interesting, but also not relevant here. Help yourself first. Airplane rules.
The deep and steady exploration of your personal mechanisms of resistance is not done by your personality, even though you inevitably start from this false belief. And this is the final point of embodiment work : it’s not about feeling into what you say no to, or knowing how you say no – it’s about deeply understanding that the one who is saying no, isn’t real. It is this understanding that will end the inner conflict.
At this point down the road it’s good to know about the concept of doership, which is the actual cause of all this misery. Moving from exploring sensations, through the enjoyment of the exploration itself, and into discovering that the one who does the exploring is not the same as the one who has learned to repress sensation, we end up at a very bizarre intersection. The path ahead is very simple : you keep on venturing deeper into the darkness, welcoming everything you find there. At the same time, you learn that the welcoming attitude you bring, and who you are, is the same thing. The explorer is the welcoming is the real you. And still there is this other “me” who insists on believing it’s in charge. Who believes it has the power to act upon, change, control and resist life. Who believes it has the power to do things.
The doer is a very old and formless idea that lives in your thinking mind. It is part of your human inheritance. It’s at the core of the urge to restrict and resist the natural internal flow of energy forms. It is the idea that forms the root of the illusion of being a separate entity, living among other separate entities. It is the foundation of your sense of alone-ness. It was born from the first heartbreak you experienced, when your mere being was pointed out to be unworthy of love. And it keeps itself alive by the continual insistence on this restricting and resisting. It feeds on starving the body from its natural freedom of energy flow. It IS the internal conflict, and it does a masterful job of convincing you that the mental narration of this conflict is who you are.
To put it in more direct terms : the idea and feeling of “being someone” only exists in relationship to saying no to your inner experiences. Compulsively misusing its own faculties of memory and anticipation, the thinking mind has spun a very tangled web of mechanisms to counteract the problems born from the inner conflict – a conflict it is itself the cause of. In doing so, it is constantly distracting you from being aware of the present moment.
This is a positive feedback loop : clinging to being someone requires constant effort by your thinking mind to suppress what it considers to be parts of you that you shouldn’t be. The reflections of this inner conflict in the outside world will then strengthen the illusion that your being is under a mild yet constant threat of annihilation, and that you are the one who needs to do, act, control to keep yourself safe. This is a highly inefficient and unnatural way to use your inner resources. Very exhausting and stressful.
Luckily, this is exactly the chain you’re breaking through your embodiment practice. Doership only lives on as long as it’s not seen for what it is : a mental illusion. To be more accurate, you think you are that until, through exploration, you find yourself to be that which explores. Using more traditional names, you find yourself to be the silent witness, the background of awareness. Not as a lofty idea you read in a book, as a concept that speaks to your heart or soul, but as your very natural and innocent core reality. Facing, welcoming and fully experiencing the parts of yourself that you have always been a ‘no’ to, is what dissolves the illusion of personality.
This, to the thinking mind, presents an obvious new challenge. As you slowly migrate to living in this constant state of flux, of discovery and welcoming, there will be resistance to this seeming untethered instability. It will put the spotlight on a very old and powerful fear – the fear of losing your mind, which would mean death, and the dreaded sense of insecurity this produces. It might feel like a new encounter, but this fear has been simmering in the background of your awareness for most of your life.
This is just another experience to welcome, and one which will actually anchor the awareness of inner stillness into your consciousness. Life’s defining quality is that it never stops moving and changing, and the thinking mind tightly clings to its own illusion, that it is needed to deal with this never-ending flow. In reality, it is incapable of doing so, and its involvement is not only unneeded, but as I’ve been trying to say in many, many words now, it is also detrimental to all areas of your life.
Through exploring this fear, and surrendering the mind’s reins, the mountain-like unmovability of the explorer, of awareness becomes unveiled and unmistakable. And as your sense of self begins to find its home in the explorer, the art of exploring will reveal itself as your natural state of being, and no longer feel like a skill that requires effort to acquire or sustain.
Quick side note : in their most universal definitions, the constant flux of movement and change in the world is the Feminine principle, and the unmoving stillness of welcoming awareness is the Masculine principle, both of which are the polar aspects of God. More on that in a later post.
Where the doer only exists through sustained effort – saying no to life is a full time job, since life never stops moving and changing – the explorer finds itself to be in life without any need for effort. Awareness is a constant yes, and so it doesn’t need to spend energy on resisting life, inside or out. This is the true meaning of effortless living. This is the natural openness that you, as a human being, are capable of. It is your birthright and your true home. Life flows in, around and through you in all its various forms, and you are there to witness, welcome, enjoy, and at the same time, be the dance of life. Even your habitual and inherited repressions and restrictions will eventually be seen as part of the dance, and will lose their nightmarish sting and sluggish weight.
When the body is given its daily moment of freedom to explore and welcome itself, a natural trust in its immediate wisdom will emerge. The body spontaneously takes over its own steering wheel, and the thinking mind will slowly, and with faith in the body’s wisdom, settle into its natural role : thinking. The stillness in being aware of energy flow, inside and outside the body, without resistance, anchors you to the present moment. Time and space lose the rigidity they seemingly possessed when you were living from restriction. The dance of light and dark finally becomes beautiful, no matter which of the two takes the lead.
And all is good.
The End.