CALM AND INSIGHT
Initially, many of the traditional Buddhist practices work to develop strong concentration in the mind, which calms the stormy waves of involuntary thought. Building on that foundation, the practices move on to reveal insight into the nature of reality, the nature of self, the mystery of incarnation. A foundation of calm gradually develops into a culmination of insight.
The main distinction between the foundational practices of the traditional teachings, as they’re being beautifully shared with a new Western audience, and the foundational practices of a more somatic approach to the dharma is a shift in primary focus from mind to body. Somatic dharma establishes its foundation of calmness more through practices that awaken the unfelt presence of the body than those that specifically concentrate on the mind. Building on that felt foundation inevitably leads to greater insight into the mystery of who you are. It leads to a literal awakening (buddha means “one who has awakened”) of sensations that have been asleep for too long. As you keep feeling ever more deeply into the interior of body by exploring the posture of meditation, you experience ah-ha moments of greater insight into self and the nature of reality.
In traditional dharma the foundational practices go by many different names: anapanna, shamatha, samadhi. These practices all have you focusing intently on an object of attention and bringing your mind back to that object when you realize your attention’s wandered. Common to most of them is paying attention to the eternal cycle of the passage of breath. Breath comes in. Breath goes out. In and out. On and on. Over and over. It never stops. But ordinarily we have little to no awareness that we’re even breathing. We’re lost in thought instead, so thoroughly engaged in the caravan of silent words that parades through our heads that we have little awareness left over to apply to something that’s going to go on whether we’re aware of it or not. And this is exactly the situation that the foundational practices of traditional dharma seek to address. The dharma asks, What happens if we reverse that relationship? What if you can train yourself to lead not from the mind but from the breath? Bringing awareness to the passage of breath disperses the gauzy haze of thought waves that, one after the other, keep clouding the mind.
The foundations of somatic dharma—built as they are on the alignment, relaxation, and resilient motion of the body—are also directed toward an awakening of breath, but the focus on breath is not so much a guarded, passive observation of its passage in and out as an active surrendering to its force. In somatic dharma you don’t just watch the breath. You yield to the potency of its impulse. You help free it from its imprisonment in unnecessarily still and unfeeling flesh. You help it make its wavelike passage through the entire length of your body as easy as possible by relaxing the tensions that restrict it. You feel where its force causes motions in your body and where it doesn’t. You feel where your body relaxes to accommodate breath’s passage. You feel where your body resists and blocks breath’s flow. And then you relax the tensions. Paying attention to the three principles of the posture not only exposes where you’ve been unwittingly restricting the breath but also affords a unique opportunity to soften and relax those restrictions.
In the foundational stage of somatic dharma, you also focus, lose focus, and refocus. The object of your attention, however, is not just the passage of breath (and especially not just the passage of breath divorced from the felt presence of the body) but the possibility of greater alignment, relaxation, and resilience within the body. There will be moments when all three principles come together, awakening breath and body, and there will be moments when you once again become lost in thought and out of touch with your body. Once you realize you’re lost in thought, you simply refocus your attention on alignment, relaxation, and resilient motion, and as you do this, the breath once again wakes up and reveals its urgency. During the foundational stage of somatic dharma you move back and forth between being lost in thought and present in body. When you’re lost in thought, breath shuts down. When you’re present in body, breath becomes more vital and full.
The culminating practices of traditional dharma, for which the foundational practices prepare you, are often referred to as vipashyana, which translates as “seeing things as they are.” A somatic reinterpretation of that incisive translation might be “feeling things as they are.” Awakening is not some kind of event that happens only in the mind. It happens throughout the entire body as ever more sensations keep coming back to felt life and presence deepens. Somatic dharma would suggest that, ultimately, the clear vision and understanding of vipashyana need to be felt, not just seen or understood.
In traditional dharma, the ability to see things as they are—once the veil of distorted concept is lifted from your eyes—yields insight into who you are and how reality is actually constructed. A somatics perspective might like to call those greater insights—and the transformation that occurs in you—“infeelings.” As you awaken soma through settling ever more deeply into the posture of meditation, you start feeling things as they are. Exposed to the bright light of feeling awareness, long-buried sensations and emotions start coming out of hiding. Wave upon wave of sensations keep bubbling up to the surface where, through a gesture of relaxation, they can let go of whatever tensions they’ve been hoarding. Layer by layer, the sense of egoic self that feels claustrophobically compressed into your physical body relaxes its grip and releases its sovereignty over you. Eventually, as the body keeps awakening, a profoundly transformational infeeling occurs. The mind that conceives of itself as an entity, forever separate from everything outside its physical body, is suddenly saturated by an awakened presence that feels the substratum of the unified field that binds everything together into a single thing. By feeling where its passage gets restricted, breath directs you to where you need to relax. In somatic dharma, you ride along with the breath and feel how it gently nudges up against, leans into, and welcomes back to felt life places that restrict its motions. You cooperate with the breath so its passage through your body can be freer and easier.
The opening passages of the Satipatthana Sutta provide a shorthand version of the progression of meditational practices related to the breath. After suggesting that you sit down with your spine upright and erect, the Buddha tells you to begin by becoming aware of the passage of breath as it moves in, as it passes out. Here we have the classical presentation of the practice of passively observing breath. Most contemporary dharma teachings that focus on breath both begin and end with this instruction, but this isn’t where the actual instructions end. In just a few more sentences the Buddha tells you, in an altogether remarkable statement, not just to stay observing the breath but to merge with it completely: “As you breathe in, breathe in through your whole body; as you breathe out, breathe out through your whole body.”*
While a passive observation of the passage of breath can be extremely helpful in settling the all-too-often out-of-control inner monologue of the mind, it also perpetuates a division between a mind that observes and whatever it is that’s being observed. When you breathe through your whole body, you can’t sit back at a comfortable distance and just watch what’s going on. You have to immerse yourself in the felt terrain of soma, swim amongst its rivers’ currents, all the time welcoming and celebrating sensation and breath like a prodigal returning to life. The focus on breath in traditional dharma is more aligned with the initial instructions at the beginning of the Satipatthana Sutta: “Remain aware of the breath as it passes in and passes out.” Somatic dharma focuses more on the culminating instruction: “Breathe through the whole body.”
The most radical idea I bring to the dharma conversation is my insistence that, if the body is truly to relax and the mind is to become quiescent, then you need to allow constant, subtle, amoeba-like motions to occur everywhere in the body in resilient response to the force of breath. No longer sitting like a garden statue of the Buddha, the body expands, retracts, pulses, never stops moving, even if only slightly. The inclusion of resilience as one of the three legs of the stool of the posture forces you beyond passive observation of the breath into direct participation with it. As your felt sense of your body’s innate resilient motility keeps deepening, you’re naturally led on a journey through your body where you find out which parts freely assist the breath in its passage and which parts hold it back. You discover where breath has gotten stuck, and then…you relax. Out of relaxation, resilience is born. Out of resilience, relaxation deepens.
As you continue to cycle through the emergent layers of sensation that the posture generates, you can feel breath pass through and beyond your entire body during moments of release. Very often it then shrinks back down and again becomes more constricted as newly emerging layers of tension arise. While you can’t push away waves of tension, you can breathe into them, touching them with your breath, soothing their fears, inviting them to let go, all the while honoring their pace of resolution.
I used to say that breath wants to be freed, but someone challenged me as to how could I possibly know what breath wants, and I had to admit that the person was right. Breath just breathes, and it couldn’t care less if it’s contained or not, just as a wave that originated halfway around the world doesn’t care when a beach stops its beautiful passage across the ocean. But the life force does care, as do you. If breath can pass through the watery medium of the body so that subtle motions of expansion and retraction can be felt everywhere, then the life force stays strong and vibratory and can be felt to flow through the whole body as well.
As you continue to work with the principles of alignment, relaxation, and resilience, as your body keeps coming more alive, breath naturally starts coming up against newly emerging areas that are frozen. A body-worker helps soften and relieve tension from the outside in. Breath can soften the tensions and frozen holdings that keep it constrained from the inside out.
Chronic pain resists both the breath and the current of the life force. Ordinarily, when we become aware of discomfort, we do our best not to feel it. We encapsulate the pain in a numbing layer of frozen stillness, but in doing so we enshrine it, and it has little chance to resolve its tension. Pain is life force seeking to break through the barriers to its flow in the service of evolution. You don’t have to run and hide from it. When pain reveals itself, feel it without trying to change it in any way. Just be with it, and feel how the part of your body from which the pain emerges has become frozen, doesn’t move, and keeps breath out. Feel how little movement there is at this moment in that part of your body. Breathe gently into it. Let your breath lean into the stillness. Don’t force movement to occur. Just let your breath keep leaning in, touching the stillness, inhaling right up to it. Gradually the motion that frozen tension prohibits gets liberated, and the breath can breathe through more of the body.
It’s the bringing of motion to frozen places in the body that heals whatever the freezing has calcified on physiological, emotional, mental, and spiritual levels. When the body freezes around a joint, the fascia constricts the passageways of the vast web of capillaries that bring blood to the cells and remove the waste products of metabolism. So when motion is reestablished, the tissue environment becomes far easier for the capillaries to penetrate, and greater vitality can be more easily restored to that part of the body. Long forgotten emotion and felt memory that have been stored away in dissociated parts of your body may come back to you. Unbidden thoughts have less of a foundation on which to stand and rant, like a speaker in Hyde Park. Motility is what gives you infeeling into what Zen calls “your original face before you were born.”
In truth, there aren’t two sets of practices, one for calming and the other for insight. The one naturally leads into the other. The practices that develop calm gradually become more refined, and insights are revealed. For somatic dharma the practices of the posture keep taking you into ever deeper infeelings about who and what you are and how the world works.
Traditional dharma speaks of calm and insight. Somatic dharma is oriented toward motile stability (real stability only comes through motility) and infeeling. Focusing on the posture creates the foundation of practice, which then allows you to start yielding to the current of the life force that wants to pass through your entire body. When the whole of the body has awakened to the extent that you can feel the current of the life force move through you, you have entered into the culmination phase of the practices. Then, when you lose your awareness of this felt flow through your body, or when too much current gets stirred, you return to reestablishing the foundation of the practice by paying attention to the principles of the posture. In this way you move back and forth between the practices of calm and insight, between stability of body and infeeling.
Ultimately the practice is about surrendering to soma, yielding to its sensational surges, letting them take you wherever they want, riding on them like a kayak shooting through rapids or a surfer on a wave. It’s like surrendering to a current in a river as you set out on a float trip. You never know what’s around the next bend. A beautiful vision? Rapids to scare you silly? As best you can, you keep letting the current take you. If ever the ride becomes too choppy, if ever you become too lost in thought, or whenever you want or need to, you can always go back to the shore and pay renewed attention to alignment, relaxation, resilience, breath, and felt presence until your body reawakens, and you feel ready to resume the journey of letting go. When it’s time to move to shore, your body will know. When it’s time to set out again, your body will know. Just stay as sensitive as you possibly can to the messages you’re getting.