Planting Ourselves in the Universe
Here in this body are the sacred rivers: here are the
sun and moon, as well as all the pilgrimage places. I have not encountered
another temple as blissful as my own body.
—Tantric song
When I meet with
people at retreats or in counseling sessions, some will tell me they feel numb,
lost in thoughts, and disconnected from life. Others might tell me they are
overwhelmed by feelings of fear, hurt, or anger. Whenever we are either
possessed by our feelings or dissociated from them, we are in trance, cut off
from our full presence and aliveness.
In Buddhist
meditation training, awakening from trance begins with mindfulness of
sensations. Sensations are our most immediate way of experiencing and relating
to life. All our other reactions—to thoughts, to external situations, to
people, to emotions—are actually in response to physical sensations. When we
are angry at someone, our body is responding to a perceived threat. When we are
attracted to someone, our body is signaling comfort or curiosity or desire. If
we don’t recognize the ground level of sensation, we will continually be lost
in the swirl of thoughts, feelings, and emotions that make up our daily trance.
One of the best
instructions I’ve heard for meditation practice was given by Thai Buddhist
teacher Ajahn Buddhadasa: “Do not do anything that takes you away from your
body.” The body lives in the present. When you are aware of the body, you are
connected with living presence—the one place where you can see reality, see
what is actually happening. Awareness of the body is our gateway into the truth
of what is.
This gateway to
refuge was crucial to the Buddha’s own awakening. When Siddhartha Gautama took
his seat at the base of the bodhi tree—the tree of awakening—he resolved to
stay there until he found full freedom. He began his meditation by collecting
his attention, quieting his mind, and “coming back” to a full and balanced
presence. But then, as the story is told, the demon Mara appeared, accompanied
by a massive army, and with many deadly weapons and magical forces at his
disposal. Mara is a tempter—his name means “delusion” in Pali—and we can also
see him as Gautama’s shadow self. Mara’s intent was to keep Gautama trapped in
trance.
Throughout the
night Mara hurled rocks and arrows, boiling mud and blistering sands to provoke
Gautama to fight or flee, yet he met these attacks with a compassionate
presence, and the missiles were all transformed into celestial flowers. Then
Mara sent his daughters, “desire, pining, and lust,” surrounded by voluptuous
attendants to seduce Gautama, yet Gautama’s mind remained undistracted and
present. Dawn was fast approaching when Mara issued his final challenge—doubt.
What proof, Mara asked, did Gautama have of his compassion? How could he be
sure his heart was awakened? Mara was targeting the core reactivity that hooks
and sustains the sense of small self—the perception of our own unworthiness.
Gautama did not
try to use a meditative technique to prove himself. Rather, he touched the
earth and asked it to bear witness to his compassion, to the truth of what he
was. In response, the earth responded with a shattering roar, “I bear you
witness!” Terrified, Mara and his forces dispersed in all directions.
In that instant of
acknowledging his belonging to the earth, Gautama became the Buddha—the
awakened one—and was liberated. By claiming this living wholeness, he dissolved
the final vestiges of the trance of separation.
For us, the story
of the Buddha’s liberation offers a radical and wonderful invitation. Like the
Buddha, our own healing and awakening unfolds in any moment in which we take
refuge in our aliveness—connecting with our flesh and blood, with our breath,
with the air itself, with the elements that compose us, and with the earth that
is our home. Whenever we bring our presence to the living world of sensation,
we too are touching the ground.
In the early part of the last century, D. H. Lawrence found himself in
a society devastated by war, a landscape despoiled by industrialism, and a
culture suffering from a radical disconnect between mind and body. Written in
1928, his words have lost none of their urgency:
It is a
question, practically of relationship. We must get back into relation, vivid
and nourishing relation to the cosmos and the universe. . . .
For the truth is, we are perishing for lack of fulfillment of our greater
needs, we are cut off from the great sources of our inward nourishment and
renewal, sources which flow eternally in the universe. Vitally, the human race
is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree, with its roots in the air. We must
plant ourselves again in the universe.
When we disconnect from the body, we are pulling away from the energetic
expression of our being that connects us with all of life. By imagining a great
tree uprooted from the earth, we can sense the unnaturalness, violence, and
suffering of this severed belonging. The experience of being uprooted is a kind
of dying.
Some people tell me about the despair of not really living, of skimming
the surface. Others have the perpetual sense of a threat lurking around the
corner. And many speak of being weighed down by a deep tiredness. It takes
energy to continually run away from pain and tension, to pull away from the
life of the present moment. Roots in the air, we lose access to the aliveness
and love and beauty that nourish our deepest being. No false refuge can
compensate for that loss.
Adapted from Tara’s upcoming book, True Refuge – Finding Peace and Freedom in your Own Awakened Heart (Bantam, Feb, 2013)
For more information on Tara Brach go to: www.tarabrach.com
