About Embodiment — 12 Ideas

---

Embod­i­ment — you are all of you — body, mind, and ener­gy. There are ways to empow­er your­self, to free your­self, to expe­ri­ence “non-hold­ing.”

---

Our approach is quite holis­tic. My prin­ci­pal goal in life is to be ful­ly engaged with all of me. This is because the only real­i­ty you can ever under­stand — or get your hands on — is your own.

Finding Focus

A description of “Zen being”

The essence of Zen is zazen, the act of sim­ply sit­ting.

Many peo­ple want to make a “thing” out of sit­ting. They do this to accom­plish some­thing else — for exam­ple, to get relaxed, to recov­er from an ill­ness, to be “spir­i­tu­al.”

I remem­ber hear­ing a woman attempt this process of judge­ment as opposed to “just sit­ting” at a Zen Cen­tre Dar­bel­la and I attended.

“I have med­i­tat­ed for years, with many, many teach­ers, and I have nev­er found what I am search­ing for.“

When asked what the miss­ing ingre­di­ent was, she said, “Peace of mind, and mys­ti­cal visions.”

I would say, “The point of sitting is to sit.”

• The point of breath­ing is to breathe. 
• The point of body­work is to feel “what’s up” in the body — to expe­ri­ence direct­ly the tight­ness, the sore­ness, the block­ages, and the armouring. 
• The point of free­ing blocked ener­gy is to feel your energy. 
• The point of free­ing your thoughts is to expe­ri­ence the thought process with­out attach­ing to it.

And… the point of living is to live.

Most peo­ple I know are engaged in a des­per­ate search for the mean­ing of life — for the rea­sons behind pain, or ten­sion, or armour­ing. Most peo­ple do not ful­ly engage with any­thing — they think what­ev­er they are doing is the intro­duc­tion, the pre­lude, to some­thing else.

---

The Mind

Most are not present for their actual life because they are too busy planning for the imaginary one.

I’ve quot­ed Fritz Perls’ line, “Go out of your mind, and come to your sens­es” before.

This is short­hand for what I believe to be so. There is no way to stop our­selves from think­ing, plot­ting, eval­u­at­ing, judg­ing, blam­ing. The nature of mind is to think.

However, nothing demands that we take any of it seriously.

“Go out of your mind” has two connotations.

1. to go, or be crazy, and
2. to leave (to step out of) your mind. I sus­pect a lit­tle of both is a good thing.

About “Crazy-thinking”

One def­i­n­i­tion of crazy-think­ing is think­ing com­plete­ly out­side of the nor­mal” box.

For exam­ple, when Coper­ni­cus declared that the earth orbit­ed around the sun, this was crazy-think­ing, as every­one knew that the earth was the cen­ter of the universe. 

When Pas­teur described microbes as caus­ing dis­ease, he was ridiculed. 

Peo­ple want the secu­ri­ty of the known, (that things will remain the same), want assur­ances that (some ver­sion of) god is in charge, and “all is right with the world.”

Crazy-think­ing is this: I have total­ly and com­plete­ly cre­at­ed the uni­verse I live in, ini­ti­at­ed and devel­oped all of the sto­ries I have regard­ing my expe­ri­ences, and choose every­thing that goes on inside of me. Crazy, and also true.

About Stepping Out of Mind-ing

Step­ping out of your mind is sort of like leav­ing a room and then turn­ing around and look­ing back in. You can see what’s going on, but that’s all you can do. You can’t change any­thing in there, because you are on the out­side, sim­ply observing. 

Sim­i­lar­ly, you can have thoughts with­out engag­ing with them. From this per­spec­tive, thoughts arise and drift across your mind like clouds across the sky.

Anoth­er anal­o­gy: pic­ture a clear, still moun­tain lake. In the lake is reflect­ed the vis­i­ble sky, and the clouds appear to move across the face of the lake. It seems that the lake con­tains the sky and the clouds, but it sim­ply reflects them.

What is reflected there seems real, and yet it’s all an illusion. As is all of what we think.

We teach a stance of “is-ness,” as in “This is as it is, right now.” 

Spend­ing time try­ing to process “now” is pre­cise­ly the cause of being non-present. Part of “now” is the thought I think, but the thought is just as fleet­ing as the rest of our expe­ri­ence. So, we see and hear, feel and emote, with­out try­ing to hold on to any of it.

Since we basi­cal­ly hold on with our minds, we loosen our grip there, and “go out of our minds.”

We then come to our senses.

Again, two meanings:

1. to wake up, smarten up, wise up, and
2. to enter ful­ly into the felt-sense of liv­ing, breath­ing, and being.

Wast­ing our lives play­ing guilt games, blame games, hurt­ing our­selves over past, per­ceived slights, fear­ing the future, doubt­ing our­selves — all of these are “senseless” activ­i­ties. They are not mindless, as the mind is the field for all of them.

When we exit our mind, we “come to our senses,” which metaphorically exists from our necks down.

Despite the West­ern fas­ci­na­tion with the mind, with facts, with know­ing, we are most­ly body. Sen­so­ry data comes in and is act­ed upon, in many cas­es with­out our inter­ven­tion. J

ust ask a run­ner how her body “does” run­ning — oxy­gen exchange, pro­cess­ing of waste, place­ment of feet, etc. Data in, body does its thing.

The realm of the body is where the juice is, lit­er­al­ly and metaphorically.

Most peo­ple think about their bod­ies, as opposed to feel­ing them. We sug­gest breath and body­work to teach direct body engaging.

As you “come to your sens­es,” you begin to feel the vast­ness that is you. Your breath deep­ens, and sounds start emerg­ing, seem­ing­ly from nowhere. You expe­ri­ence a push on one part of your body, and anoth­er part seems to move all on its own. 

You sud­den­ly find your­self swim­ming in a sea of sense-ations, some pleas­ant, some scary, some deep, some super­fi­cial, some char­gy, some painful.

You are experiencing you, at your most fundamental level.

Here, expla­na­tions get in the way (lead­ing you back into your head), so you return to the sea of sen­sa­tion with each breath. More sound, more vibra­tion, more sense-ual data. You find your­self danc­ing with your own ener­gy, and in the process releas­ing decades of blocked, tight­ened down non-sense.

And you begin to sense, to feel, to expe­ri­ence, the riv­er of ener­gy that flows in the chan­nels of your body. 

You are sub­merged in your-self, and who you real­ly are ris­es to the sur­face, and begins to unwrap itself from its self-imposed tight­ness. The ener­gy ris­es, and you can feel your con­nec­tion to every­thing — to the ener­gy of the earth, to the ener­gy of the uni­verse. There is a sense of one­ness, of ocean­ic depth and peace.

And you may think, “This is it! Wow! Do I ever get this!”

Oops. Back in your head again. Go out of your mind, come to your sens­es. Again and again.

Sit, and just sit. Breathe, and just breathe. Be present, in the moment. As you think about it, let go and do it all again.

This is the rhythm of life we are here to expe­ri­ence. Gen­tly and with­out judgement.

 Every­thing else is just the set dec­o­ra­tion. Non-sense? I think not!

---

Series Nav­i­ga­tion

« About No Past – 12 Ideas