Your Body Knows the Answer

Chapter 19

THE ORIENTATION of this book has been toward you as an individual, finding and cultivating your inner felt sense, growing the capacity of your sovereign self, and carrying forward the intricate and beautiful life process embodied in your unique existence. In concluding, I would like to point briefly toward a kind of carrying forward that is larger than any one individual’s life story and personal experiences.

This larger context has two dimensions. There is the “more than me” dimension—other people, the communities we are part of, other communities and cultures and species, people who lived in times past and struggled and survived to create and sustain human society for us to inherit, people yet to be born who we hope will sustain and build on our legacy. There is also the “more than I” dimension—some greater space or consciousness or power that transcends our sense of self altogether. It is the realm of the spiritual, of transformation, of the self becoming, or dissolving into, more than itself. Zen master Dogen encapsulates both the “more than me” and the “more than I” in a beautiful and profoundly paradoxical description of the path of spiritual awakening:

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.¹

For me, the essence of the spiritual is not some end state of enlightenment or salvation but rather this always present possibility of becoming “more.” It is a paradoxical kind of becoming more because it is also a becoming less, a letting-go of our old sense of self. Like the snake shedding its skin or the butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, we can break free from that which has contained and protected and identified us up to now, and emerge fresh, vulnerable, perhaps fearful, but ready for a new stage of our journey.

In chapter 15, we saw that making tough decisions often involves asking challenging questions: What’s at stake here for me? What is ready to die? What is ready to be born? When we apply these kinds of deep questions to ourselves, they become challenges to self-transcendence: What is at stake for me as a person? What in me or about me is ready to die? What wants to take birth freshly in me? Are situations that seem to have no satisfactory solution challenging me to grow, to change, to become more than I have been—stronger, gentler, more responsible, more loving? Are they inviting me, perhaps, to come alive in a whole new way?

In decision making, we work on solving the situation; in self-transcendence, it is more like the situation is solving us. Having differentiated ourselves as unique individuals, we experience a dissolving or reintegration into something larger. At times self-transcendence happens abruptly, perhaps from the impact of powerful events beyond our control. We can also consciously open ourselves to a more incremental transformation process through contemplative practices such as Mindful Focusing. The core dynamic of contemplative practices is pausing the momentum of everyday activity and thought and holding our attention still long enough to let something emerge, in its own time and its own way, from the infinitely generative realm of our not yet formed knowing. This knowing is implicit in our living body.

Because body processes are slower than mental processes, nothing may come for a long time. What is important is not to be overcome by impatience, doubt, or discouragement but simply to wait and give our felt sense, our body-knowing, as much time as it needs. T. S. Eliot describes this kind of radical waiting in his deeply contemplative Four Quartets:

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.²

Self-transcendence can also feel like returning to the deep source of our being. William Butler Yeats’s late poem “A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” a passionate confrontation with his own sense of identity, concludes:

I am content to follow to its source

Every event in action or in thought;

Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!

When such as I cast out remorse

So great a sweetness flows into the breast

We must laugh and we must sing,

We are blest by everything,

Everything we look upon is blest.³

Those last two lines are a thrilling evocation of the “more than me” dimension—the community of all beings, of all existence, what Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh calls “interbeing.” As we come to recognize our subselves, our own multipleness, we also come to realize that we in turn are subselves of a larger constellation. When deeply felt, this realization is spiritual, but also ethical, cultural, and historical. We participate in a reciprocal dynamic by which social, economic, and environmental stresses drive individuals to deepen their self-understanding and undergo personal transformations that, in turn, power the engines of social and cultural change. The personal is political, and the spiritual is practical. “In our age,” said Dag Hammarskjold, “the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.”

The following exercise marks an end and also, I hope, a beginning. It invites you to apply the felt-sensing skills you have been developing to the spiritual practice of contemplation. I offer it as a complement to whatever spiritual, religious, philosophical, and ethical resources you already have. It is not meant to replace but to deepen and enrich.

Exercise 19.1 Sensing for the More

Below are seven statements. They might feel true for you, or they might not. Say them silently and / or out loud. Try out the alternate words suggested in parentheses; substitute your own words. Wait; be with your felt sense; notice what comes for you in response to each statement. Something may come as a felt sense or a realization or both together. Whatever comes, stay with it gently, take it in, contemplate it. If nothing comes in relation to one of the statements, or if what comes doesn’t feel true or fresh, wait some more before moving on. Nothing has to come; the waiting itself is enough.

Something in my sense of identity [who I am, what I’m all about] no longer fits [serves me well, feels right . . .].

Something is ready to die [let go, dissolve, change . . .].

Something is ready to be born [appear, come alive, manifest . . .].

To study the self is to forget the self.

The darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

The road to holiness passes through the world of action.

We are blest by everything; everything we look upon is blest.

Wisdom can be found anywhere, everywhere. The sentences above are merely suggestions reflecting some of the themes of this book and others’ words of wisdom that I myself have found meaningful. You will find your own sources for contemplation in the context and events of your own life, perhaps from a sacred text, a poem, a song, a movie, a friend’s caring words, or your own freshly arriving words or images. Contemplate, sense for the more, trust your felt sense.

And don’t be afraid to just wait. Let us end where we began, with John Keats’s evocative description of negative capability: “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”