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Revelations of the body/mind
Revelations at the silent meditation retreat that I recently attended? (See October 18, Gently radical changing 1, which also includes information about Vipassana and the Buddha, both of which I mention later in this post.)
Some of the revelations were new, some renewed. ALWAYS trust my body. Let life take its course as I simultaneously act in the world from the seed of that trust. Never force, a feeling, an energy, a sensation, idea, or fantasy. Volition creates reality.
Revelations also came as bodily sensations whose causes or disappearances I cannot explain. We presume to know what causes effects in our lives: I did such and such which then produced such and such outcome–a one-to-one correspondence. That’s simplistic, as you might understand by reading publications in quantum physics or the ecstatic writings of mystics or by deeply exploring your own life, past and present, because trajectories and vectors of acts, speech, events, and volitions are complex, rich, and mysterious.
Recognizing such circumstances, the best we can do sometimes with reality is to announce to ourselves, “Now that was interesting!” Revelation as an amazed but not very verbally articulate response. Case in point. The second or third night when I lay down to sleep, my sacrum and left hip hurt like hell, soreness that resembled the worst aches of flu. Within the next 2 days, that anguish disappeared. According to Vipassana theory, those bodily pains were simultaneously mental/emotional pains. When the mind reacts, the body does too, and that reaction, which creates physical sensation, may embed itself in the body. Without reaction, gunk–not the Buddha’s term!–surfaces and leaves.
Another inexplicable dissolution of gunk happened over the first two days of the retreat. Wave after wave of tension, like a tide of sighs, washed down and off my upper and mid back, leaving both the back and shoulders with an unfamiliar and delicious ease that I didn’t know I’d been missing.
The effects of those revelations? Freshness and lightness.
- October 27, 2009
- Filed under: Body and mind
- Comments 4
I am fascinated with the conjunction of your experience with this meditation and the introduction of your new website and these blogs. (I must say that I am also fascinated with your use of the word “Gunk”. It is so visceral, visual, and experiential. It is a connection word — one of those words that immediately connects with personal experience — ah yes, I know GUNK and I also know that with meditation it passes through the body and eventually leaves you alone with yourself, with your breath.) In your notes above there is a trace of the meditation itself moving through the soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body. After you described the process to me I tried a rudimentary and uninformed version of the meditation and emerged with enough understanding that its potential is powerful. I am one who struggles with the mind/body problem and have spent a good part of my life trying to escape being in the body, so the pleasures of reconnecting with it are sometimes quite astounding. I wonder as we sit and write, is it possible to be in the head and the body at the same time?
Your post reminds me how funny it was to me that this site launched while I was in the airport waiting for a shuttle to take me to the silent meditation retreat. I loved that particular paradox of public and private.
You do say that your experiment with the meditation process that I described to you was “rudimentary and uninformed” and that you felt its powerful potential. Even so . . . I emphasize, as I did in our conversation, that whatever I said, or say, about the process is not in any way to be taken as instruction.
My immediate response to your wondering about the possibility of being in the head and the body at the same time as we sit and write, is YES. So is my response as I think more about your question, . . . for here I am feeling bodily sensations and I know that they’re informing what I say, even if the complexity of those sensations seems rationally to have no bearing on the words I’m writing. I think that that very complexity is beyond analysis, but that its richness, which is its REALITY, is mentally formative. And . . . all this coming from a person who lives, and has always lived, very much in her body. As well as her head. Doing my best to let go more of the ways in which obsessive head stuff desperately intrudes on pleasurable living.
A great quote by Pico Della Mirandola makes me think of Love, Pleasure and the nature of your work:
“The proportion of reason to sensual passion is an octave.” -25.8 of the 900 Theses.
The reason behind conceptual and pleasurable work comes from the base sensual passion that creates it. While coming naturally from an emotive space, that passion when I think of moving work often comes from Love. Whether from a dark and isolated place or from an open and giving space, good work provokes movement toward the common goal of Beauty and motivates the eye and heart toward the common bond of Love. As Elaine Scarry writes in On Beauty and Being Just (1999):
“People seem to wish there to be beauty even when their own self- interest is not served by it” -p.123
Like Love, Beauty has the benefit to open our own self-interest into dialogue with the world. Love and Beauty motivate and affirm a common state of being: a meditative sense of what it means to be human and hopefully, this brings our heart and mind closer to contemplative solace and bliss as we ground ourselves in the body.
Thank you for crafting Love, Pleasure, and Beauty. It never ceases to move me.
Sounds exciting! Meditation and revelation make interesting bedfellows.