I have a life-time of familiarity with my psyche, having watched it within a millisecond of its sometimes absurd and most times illuminating shift-shaping. I know its nooks and valleys and other than any worrisome possibility of going psychotic I was pretty comfortable with the dark and light places I found myself. And I knew how to get help when I needed someone else’s guiding light.
But not my body. My body, in the past, has scared the hell out of me and now here I am. I mean here I am in the grounded, earthy, sensual sense and I mean here I am in the profoundly spiritual realm of here am I. Being conscious, being aware of being human in the exact same moment of being human.
Being embodied. There is something completely wondrous about it to me. It sits deep in my solar plexus. Settling into the contours of my shape gives me the gift of being real. And congruent. It is as if I live inside the deepest bowels of the earth, when it used to feel like floating. To defend myself against insult and injury to my body I had lived as if I was far removed from it, hence floating . . . energetically apart, so seemingly unaware of having a body.
And now, with no removal, no separation, consciously embodied, I marvel at the real part of things, the way, being embodied, is showing up and, increasingly, from moment to moment, affording me realness. I would not have said, since awakening, that I was pretending or putting undue effort into interactions with other folks. I would not have said I was pushing to make something happen. But relatively speaking, I was. In retrospect I can see, my body, tired to the bone, knew it.
It is the quiet that first gets my attention. Or maybe, better expressed using the word neutrality. From this unassuming and powerful state of quiet . . . neutrality . . . everything has slowed down. Cooking a new dish, I recognize . . . easily captured now in this slowed down state . . . the assumption that I am feeling good about the activity; feeling happy and peaceful. But I don’t. Not particularly. I am simply going about the business of chopping and roasting, reading a recipe and paying close attention since I have not cooked this before.
It is what happens next (automatically) that gets my attention. In this recognition of it not being what I assumed it was and settling into whatever it really is, in this case, neutral, unemotional, maybe even indifferent, a just is ness. . . with absolutely nothing needing to be done or different about it . . . is restful. Bodily restful. Grounded restful. A first time ever full body restful.
This is ness . . . a knowing that keeps deepening and widening. And now it is quietly alive in my body.
Awakening, that radical shift in perception . . . the movement from seeing through the ego’s eyes to seeing from awareness, to being awareness . . . all that, all that is the beginning. Even though others had said this very thing I was still surprised; I had the illusion that the long sought after freedom was the be-all and end-all of things.
Now six years later I marvel at the embodiment of freedom, at the evaporation of anxiety that lived in the cells of my body, having a life of its own. The embodiment that is landing me even more deeply inside here and now.
Since awakening I have had a sixth sense/ intuition of something needing to unfold, reveal itself. I felt “unfinished”, not even fully knowing what that might mean. I would say to myself that the body needed to awaken.
I turned to yoga, to meditative body scanning, to cranial-sacral and Feldenkrais work. My nervous system, from years and decades of hyper vigilance was in a low level state of anxiety. Automatically and chronically. I wanted to kiss Scott Kiloby when I heard him say, about himself, “the body had not yet gotten the good news”, in reference to his state of being after awakening.
I had been afraid of illness, whenever something felt “off” with my body I would worry. My mind would quickly go to some possible catastrophe, and even though I didn’t buy into the thoughts, my body would tense and tighten. Since I was so out of touch with my body I didn’t have a reasonable read on things; my beleaguered body would hold the worry as a state of emergency when, in fact, there was no danger.
I became more and more conscious of this pattern, strikingly so and as all the varying body workers offered their skills and kindness, the love that we all are continued to, from deep inside me, embrace and contain all the cells of my nervous system. Always held in warm, soothing, and caressing arms, quieting and relaxing.
My body seems to have gotten the good news and the original shift in perception has deepened considerably. This more integrated and deeper awareness of how things really are feels innocent. Innocent like a young child who moves through the day and the world attuned to what comes to her attention. That might be the mesmerizing movement of color as the clothes spin in the washer . . . it might be a wash of feeling . . . it might be the ticking of a clock or the bark of a tree. This is how it goes when anxiety is not clouding perception. A simple fresh and neutral look at what is showing up in awareness at this particular moment.
And now there is an is ness in my body as well. A sensation is a sensation – an ache or pain or limitation is just that. A deepening of trust – the body speaks – and I listen.
It is a Technicolor embodiment – the irony is not lost on me. Becoming a full human being, alive and at home in my body, open and transparent, further reveals and expands the animating presence and unconditional love that is our essential nature.
This presence, this unconditional love, this is ness is silent, oh so quiet, and neutral . . . innocent; empty of this full humanity it so loves.
And is larger and more real (the realest) than anything my mere humanity can fathom.
We are, indeed, divinely human