Embracing embodiment

 Let us bless
The imagination of the Earth.
That knew the early patience
To harness the mind of time,
Waited for the seas to warm, 
Ready to welcome the emergence
Of things dreaming of voyaging
Among the stillness of the land.

So begins John O'Donahue's "In Praise of the earth". I turn to it as I contemplate the bottom-most tattva on the Map of Meditation, earth element. Not lowly for all that it sits there at the bottom, Tattva 36 as numbered from the top down, but remember, it is number one on the return journey! 

(Read my previous post "The map of meditation")

No, not lowly, but the fullest expression of the amazing unfolding of the universe. When the element of earth is manifest, creation is complete.

Think about this. Embodiment, to have a body, is to inhabit earth element.  Only earth element contains the totality of everything, from Śiva Consciousness to the ultimate of creation. As embodied creatures we are that.

Sage Patanjali, in forming the sutras on Śauca, Purity, displays a distaste for the embodied state which was common in many Indian spiritual traditions.

By cleanliness, one [develops] distaste for one's body and the cessation of contact with others. (Yoga Sutra II:40, Bryant tr.)

The original commentator, Vyasa, whom many scholars now surmise was one and the same person as the author of the sutra, observes that the yogin realises that the body can never be clean, no matter how much it is washed, and therefore he no longer would wish to contact with other bodies which is bound to be more polluting.  Sex is off the agenda, for sure!

This attitude arises when you believe that you are somehow separate from the body, believing that it is just simply part of that "other", Prakṛti, when one is attempting to realise fully that one is pure spirit, Puruṣa.

In Advaita Vedanta also, the body is dismissed as not real, the real is Puruṣa, now called Ātman, which is none other than Brahman, Universal Consciousness. There is nothing else. So it too is body-denying, shunning the pleasure and experience of embodiment.

The View of Non-dual Śaiva Tantra is different. There is nothing in your experience of the embodied state that is not a valid place to explore your Essence Nature. Right - down - to - earth!

Further lines of the O'Donohue poem are pertinent:

Let us thank the Earth
That offers ground for home
And holds our feet firm
To walk in space open
To infinite galaxies.

And:

Let us remember within us
The ancient clay,
Holding the memory of seasons,
The passion of the wind,
The fluency of water,
The warmth of fire,
the quiver touch of the sun
And shadowed sureness of the moon.

We thank and praise the whole of experience as anything at all can  and does illuminate the whole of Consciousness which is the author of everything.

So we take the body, and experience it fully. We let go of the concepts we might have about it and simply experience it.  It is sensation. Sometimes loud, sometimes soft. Sometimes it sings, sometimes it cries, but we do not judge, it simply is.  What is your experience of the body, without any thought about it? When we are fully experiencing the whole of what is here by fully entering into the felt sense of the body we are embracing the entirety of all 36 tattvas at once. 

If we divorce ourselves from that full felt experience, we do not fully embrace all of what is here. This not only creates a schism in ourselves where we are unable to fully process feelings and emotions but it also says, I cannot be awakened to the whole of my truth until I can be rid of this body.  And this tradition says, no, you can be awakened in an embodied form. Accept and embrace everything.

So being fully embodied, fully embracing the felt sense of the body with all that it presents, helps us to become more psychologically integrated but also helps us towards our spiritual awakening. Whoopee, let’s fully sense our body.

The Vijñāna-bhairava-tantra has many practices that invite us to be fully embodied, with the promise that this may be the experience that catapults us to Awakening, such as when receiving a body piercing, fully enter into the pain; when embracing a friend not seen for a long time sense into that embrace; swinging on a swing, through the soothing motion one knows the Divine.

Yoga Nidra always includes a rotation of awareness around the body. It springs from the practice of nyasa, a ritual of touching parts of the body in a rotation together with the intonation of specific mantras. The literal touching and the mantra are replaced by mentally touching named parts of the body with attention and then moving it on to the next point.

In iRest® this is a fully developed experiencing of the body as sensation, letting go of cognition and simply experiencing as sensation.

Movement practice such as asana, can be practiced as an athletic exercise, true, as in a vigorous vinyasa, however all asana practice is an opportunity to practice being fully embodied, sensing into the full sensation of the body, moving a bit more slowly perhaps to be more fully present. Somatics was not designed as an Awakening sadhana, but it is so mindful it too offers such an opportunity.  All our movement practices, with the right approach, can be "Embodiment practice", an opportunity to  connect to all the elements, right down to Earth.

Do not forget the simple act of living as an opportunity too. Walk barefoot and feel the earth, the grass, the sand, the rock, beneath the feet and between the toes. Put your hands in the dirt by gardening. 

What will you do to embrace yourself as Earth element today?

The Blue Marble is a famous photograph of the Earth taken on December 7, 1972, by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft en route to the Moon at a distance of about 29,000 kilometres (18,000 mi). It shows Africa, Antarctica, and the Arabian Peninsula.

The dance of ever renewing delight

I recently spent a week on retreat, in silence, while also being in community. Try imagining sitting in a dining room full of other people and talking to no-one. Many find it impossible to imagine.

What a treat it was! And a week did not seem long enough in the end.

Silence doesn't only mean "not talking". It means "not doing anything that will take you away from the ongoing meditation and stilling of the fluctuations of the mind". Pretty much no texting, emailing, reading the frivolous, like Facebook,. I didn't take a computer, and the only book I had was my handbag sized copy of the Yoga Sutras interpretively translated by Swami Venkatesananda, as it goes wherever my handbag goes. I did indeed open and read it on a few occasions at night and during the long afternoon breaks, finding that it could take me deeper, rather than taking me away.

Another text that might have also taken me deeper would have been the Radiance Sutras had I thought to take it. Many of the meditation practices we did on retreat were from the Radiance Sutras.

The retreat was titled "Embodied Awakening" and was led by a very talented teacher, Anne Douglas. The title indicates that the body itself is a gateway to awakening. As we come into a heightened sensitivity to information of the body we start to open all of our perception, including to the experiences that are beyond the body.

Through repeated body-sensing practices, meditation and Yoga Nidra, and by not interspersing this with the things that would take us away, we began to enter a more awake state.  An awakeness that is awake no matter what the state of the body, awake even if the body sleeps, dreaming or dreamless, and awake in a vaster sense than ordinary wakeful states.

The Radiance Sutras are Lorin Roche's beautiful, modern, interpretive translation of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra (c.800CE), a lovely text from the tradition of Kashmir Shaivism. The title of this post is taken from Sutra 156.

Let me share Sutras 155 -156 with you.

155
Breath flows
Into this body
As a nectar of the gods. 

Every breath is a whisper
Of the Goddess:
"Here is the ritual I ask of you -
Be the cup
Into which I pour this bliss,
The elixir of immortal peace." 

156
The breath flows out with the sound sa,
The breath flows in with the sound ha.
Thus thousands of times a day,
Everyone who breathes is adoring the Goddess. 

Know this, and be in great joy.
Listen to the ongoing prayer that is breath.
Life shall dance in you
A dance of ever-renewing delight.

Perhaps you are put off by this talk of "the Goddess" so lets talk about that. Who is this Goddess?

The text comes from the tradition of Kashmir Shaivism. The "Goddess" is, at a story-telling level, the consort of Shiva, who is sometimes called Parvati, but also is known as Shakti. But such terms are actually metaphorical. This God and Goddess are not personalities, they are the Universe, and they are in fact one. The Goddess is the energetic aspect of Consciousness that causes manifestation. In other words, Shakti causes Divine Consciousness to pulse, and matter to come into being. These concepts have a very nice correlation with astrophysics!

So everything is really Shiva-Shakti, and you can experience this, in your body. Your body becomes a pathway to knowing the Divine and a pathway to returning to the knowledge of your True Nature. So the 112 meditations of the Vijnana Bhairava are 112 gateways of the body to returning to your True Nature.

Here in these two sutras our gateway is the breath. "Be the cup into which I pour this bliss", be receptive to the breath, "be in great joy", "listen to the ongoing prayer", "life shall dance in you".

So next time you are lying quietly - in savasana at the end of your next yoga practice perhaps, or even in bed tonight, waiting for sleep, be receptive, open, listen, feel and quietly let this wondrous experience of the breath be meditation and prayer.

There is a poem about how I was feeling when I returned from retreat here.

You might also be interested in a previous post, Siva - Sakti.

Proprioception and interoception in yoga

Credit: coredynamicspilates.com

Interoception, defined here as the sense of the physiological condition of the body, is a ubiquitous informatin channel used to represent one's body from within.

Lab of Action and Body, Department of Psychology, University of Holloway UK

Proprioception is a process by which the body can vary muscle contraction in immediate response to incoming information regarding external forces, by utilizing stretch receptors in the muscles to keep track of the joint position in the body.

The Proprioceptive System, SPD Australia

Yoga: A system of disciplines and exercises aimed at liberation of the self. A discipline involving controlled breathing, prescribed body positions and meditation with the aim of attaining a state of deep spiritual insight and tranquility.

The Free dictionary.com

I start this post with some definitions. I didn't make them up, I googled the terms and took what came up. To me, both proprioception and interoception are important in yoga.

The word interoception is a new one to me but the practice of it is not. In somatics we call it the soma, the felt sense of the body, from the inside. It is tuning into sensation and becoming sensitised to the messages of sensation. In iRest we practice Body Sensing, both during Yoga Nidra and in movement.

The word proprioception is more familiar to me. I have always understood it as the way we sense our body's place in space. Thus when we are standing we know where our head is in relation to our torso, our pelvis and our feet.

Children must develp proprioception in order to learn to walk, pick things up and place them where they want to place them. It is fascinating watching this unfold when you watch a baby grow.

Both are important to yoga.

Proprioception is important to the physical discipline of yoga, to alignment, and to the ability to maintain good posture in sitting.

It is not a given.

Most people starting out in yoga, unless they are coming into yoga from another finely tuned physical discipline such as dance or gymnastics, find it difficult to find good alignment and this is due to a deficiency in proprioception. Even though we have learnt to stand up, walk around, pick up a cup of coffee and get it to our mouth, at a finer level we still do not have a clear sense of the position of our body in space. Hatha Yoga is fantastic to help to develop it and this will have great benefits in our coordination, our posture and as a falls preventative as we age.

Have you ever received an adjustment in which the teacher has suggested a new way to do a pose, but the next time you come into it you still cannot find that position and the teacher adjusts you again? Somehow we must develop an internal way of feeling our way into that spatial relationship that is good alignment, we need to fine tune our proprioception.

Interoception is a pathway to proprioception. By sensitizing to the body as sensation we become more aware of the signals that can feed our proprioception.

Even more that that, interoception is like another sense that is a portal right into the present, directly to the goal of yoga, into awareness of who we really are.

But lets drop the complicated word. A simpler term is body-sensing.

We train our ability to body sense as the teacher invites us, in relaxation, to note what is present, to open the senses, to note the feel of the breath in the body, to bring different parts of the body into focus. As we do this thoughts become defocused. they may quieten completely or they may just cease to be as interesting as we sense the body, thoughts simply come and go without distracting us. We enter the present moment and we may well find that in that state we open to spacious awareness and begin to recognise our true nature.

As we open into body-sensing we also begin to experience the body as vibratory energy, a kind of radiance. The sense of being a physical entity begins to dissolve, the sense of the body's edges may become fuzzy. We know from physics that everything is really energy but in the normal everyday state we do not usually sense that. In body-sensing this becomes a reality to us.

The practices of body-sensing arise from the yoga practices of Kashmir Shaivism. A hallmark of Kashmir Shaivism is its focus on practices that the ordinary person can do to achieve awareness of their true nature in this lifetime. No need to be an aesetic and meditate in a cave. This is a path to enlightenment anyone can do. It's perfect for us in our modern world.

The Vijnana Bhairava Tantra is a text of 112 meditations designed for the householder, framed as a conversation between Shiva and his goddess consort Parvati, or Shakti. the lovely modern translation by Lorin Roche, The Radiance Sutras, makes these meditations very accessible and from time to time we try them out in the Sunday morning class. Here is a taste.

"The senses declare an outrageous world -
Sounds and scents, ravishing colors and surfaces
Decorating vibrant emptiness."

Body-sensing is also practised as we move. Again in the words of the Radiance Sutras, 'the soul reveals itself to itself through movement, energy infused undulations and gestures of hand, foot, spine, face and form". In hatha yoga form and movement become the meditation, ever inviting a heightened awareness of the body as sensation.

Follow sensation. It might be the path to wholeness.

I am grateful to the many teachers who have taught me to practice yoga as body-sensing, especially Dr Richard Miller, Jennifer Carbanero, Fuyuko Toyota, Anne Douglas and Kirsten Guest.

Anne Douglas is visiting Australia in June to teach a retreat "Embodied Awakening". Find out more here.