Your Body Is the Universe

The Practice of Pure Awareness: Somatic Meditation for Awakening the Sacred by Reginald Ray.  Shambhala.  286 pp.  $18.95. ****1/2

It’s said that we read dharma books originally for inspiration, then years later for confirmation of what we’ve learned.  Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, for instance, I’ve read at least ten times, and it’s been a different book every time.  I read it rather breathlessly the first time, inspired almost to the point of aching for what it offered; at the same time, I had no idea what it was talking about.

But never have I resonated with dharma books as much as with those by Reginald Ray.  In Touching Enlightenment, The Awakening Body, and now in The Practice of Pure Awareness, Ray writes about the practice that I naturally gravitated toward, and that I have devoted my spiritual life to, which he calls somatic meditation but which corresponds almost exactly to the practice of Soto Zen, the sect I luckily wandered into over twenty years ago.  Never before have I read a book that so accurately describes where my practice has landed as The Practice of Pure Awareness.  Ray writes about it in a prose that is clear and unadorned.

He himself practiced in the Tibetan tradition, under the guidance of Chogyam Trungpa, and at first wrote scholarly books, because he had also studied religion in an academic context, under the famous professor and writer Mercia Eliade.  But after a serious cancer scare some years ago, Ray realized that his real wish was to teach meditation, not write scholarly books.  And though the Tibetan tradition seems to include various techniques (I speak as someone who has mostly just read about it, though I practiced with the Shambhala organization for a few months over twenty years ago), Ray has found himself more and more gravitating toward what he calls somatic meditation, a focus on the body.  He finds that focus in various spiritual traditions.  But it is squarely the focus of Soto Zen.

Here is the way Eihei Dogen describes this practice, in his somewhat mysterious and convoluted way (some of these words are inscribed on the back of my rokasu, chosen for me by my teacher): “To study the way with body means to study the way with your own body.  It is the study of the way using this lump of red flesh.  The body comes forth from the study of the way.  Everything that comes forth from the study of the way is the true human body.  The entire world of the ten directions is nothing but the true human body.  The coming and going of birth and death is the true human body.”

Some teachers look at this same phenomenon and see it as mind, including my own first teacher, Larry Rosenberg (the subject of a fascinating recent documentary).  It isn’t that I think he’s wrong.  I just think we experience things differently.  But since the first time he gave meditation instruction to me, and said I could follow the breathing at the nostrils, or in the chest, or in the belly, I instinctively chose the belly, partly because it was the furthest place down in the body, and all of the revelations I’ve had in meditation seem to have been body phenomena.  Jolts of energy, periods of ecstatic energy, sudden memories, periods of shaking, of release, all have emerged from my body through the years, often on prolonged retreats.

I would say—as I believe Ray would—that the body is the subconscious; it contains much that is below our conscious level much of the time.  It is also, for me, the place beyond thinking; when I see my thinking mind sailing along with compulsive thoughts, I don’t try to stop them, I just move my attention to bodily sensations.  All kinds of things are going on simultaneously.  But the place beyond thinking is the sensations of the body.

What I believe happens is that, when we encounter something in our lives that we can’t or don’t want to take in—it can be a major trauma or some minor annoying thing—we tighten our body against it, so we literally don’t feel the thing.  We also tighten so we won’t feel the full depth of emotion.  (It was Ed Brown, at a retreat some years ago, who told us that anger is up toward the chest area, where we often boil with anger.  Sadness is a little below that, down in the belly.  And fear is in the lower belly, sometimes even further down, toward the perineum.   Fear is the most uncomfortable emotion to feel, so sometimes we tighten against it and feel it as sorrow or anger instead.)

But as we sit in zazen over months, years, we learn gradually to relax our bodies in the posture, and as we do that the things we had tightened against—which have been living in our bodies, weighing us down—come up again.  Hence the sudden appearance in consciousness of something we hadn’t thought about for years.  The process of meditation involves allowing those things to come up, allowing all the knots to unravel, so we don’t have to carry them around anymore.  That is how meditation is freeing.  That’s why we often feel suddenly lighter.

(The phenomenon I’m describing isn’t confined to spiritual life or spiritual literature.  Proust describes this same phenomenon in his life as a writer; the “Proustian moment” was first and foremost a physical phenomenon.  The entirety of his massive novel came from such moments, which called up all the detail of the past.)

It is also true, as we sit, that it is the body that is taking in the outside world, hearing things, seeing things, feeling, touching, tasting.  The body is our connection to the outside world.  It is as we sit that we gradually understand we’re not separate from all of that, as Dogen points out.  The longer we sit, the less distinction we feel between inside and outside (the sound of a bird, for instance: is it “out there” or inside you?); it’s as if we go so deep inside that we turn ourselves inside out, so the whole world seems to be there.

That’s what I think Dogen was talking about with his famous lines: “To study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away.”  That’s not a philosophical statement, as far as I’m concerned.  It’s a description of something that happens, physically, as you meditate.

That’s why I cringe every time I hear Buddhism described as a philosophy, though I suppose it has philosophical elements.  I see Buddhism as a way of living your life, so that your experience of life becomes different, I would say deeper.  More and more you see things as they actually are.  That deepening goes on forever, because life has infinite depth.  The things you realize through meditation are not philosophical (inasmuch as you can state them as ideas, they sound trite).  They’re experiences of life.  They change you in the way that an experience changes you.

I think that Ray focuses too much on technique in this book.  I thought Soto Zen was obsessed with posture, but Ray goes over every element of it (seventeen of them!) and wants you to continually review them, all the time.  I much prefer the more general—though very physical—instructions of Soto Zen.  It’s not that what Ray is saying is wrong.  He’s dead on the money.  But you can drown in the details, and over time the body will find its correct posture on its own.  It won’t be the same for every person, or for every moment in an individual’s life.  Bodies change, and posture changes.

But in the chapters around all the one on posture, Ray’s book is full of wisdom, a lifetime of wisdom that he has gained through sitting.  This is a book to read and read again.  I expect to be reading it for the rest of my life.