"Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body." I wish that was my line (but alas, it belongs to James Joyce), since it perfectly expresses the mass twenty-first-century evacuation from our bodies. We think of ourselves as walking heads with bothersome unattractive appendages attached. It's as if we'd rather pretend we don't have bodies. As if they are the source of our troubles, and if only we could get rid of or otherwise dismiss them, we'd be fine. We crash around in our arms and legs, let them lift for us, hold our children, walk for us without ever taking the time to actually life in them. Until we are about to lose them.
An article in The New Yorker about people who romanticize committing suicide (the ultimate body-removal technique) by jumping of the Golden Gate Bridge quoted a man, saying, "I instantly realized that everything in my life that I'd thought was unfixable was totally fixable - except for just having just jumped."
Sigh.
The problem isn't that we have bodies; the problem is that we're not living in them.
When I first talk to retreat students about inhabiting their bodies, their eyes glaze over; the air suddenly feels as if it's made of lead. The body is so- well- unglamorous. This is not what they came for. They want to learn how to have different bodies, not occupy the ones they have now.
One of my students was convinced that her ample forty-year-old, mother-of-three children thighs were the source of her suffering. After spending years obsessing about each new wrinkle of cellulite - how she looked in jeans, how her life could be different with different thighs - she woke up in excruciating pain after liposuction operation. She remembers the recovery more painful than she ever imagined. Remembers looking down on her thighs a thousand times over the next few months to assess their newfound smoothness. A year later, upon coming to her first retreat, she said, "It is devasting to realize that I paid all that money and no one, not my husband or my sister or me - can tell the difference between my thighs now and my thighs then. They don't seem to care, no less notice, that my thighs have less cellulite. I didn't want to go through life hating my thighs and now we've spent half our savings on the operation and I still can't stand my thighs."
I tell her that I have never met anyone for whom years of rejection and hatred suddenly and miraculously turned to love, even after a face-life, Lap Band surgery, liposuction. When you love something you wish it goodness; when you hate something you wish to annihilate it. Changes happen not by hatred but by love. Change happens when you understand what you want to change so deeply that there is no reason to do anything but act in your own best interest. When you begin to inhabit your body from the inside, when you stop looking at it through, as my friend Mary Jane Ryan says, "bank camera eyes," any other option except taking care of it is unthinkable.
No matter how much you loathe yourself or believe life would be better if your thighs were thinner or your hips narrower or your eyes were wider apart, your essence- that which makes you you- needs the body to articulate its vision, its needs, its love. Inhaling your child's baby powder neck perfume requires flesh, nose, and senses. Presence, enlightenment, insights are only possible because there is a body in which they unfold. In The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, when the murdered narrator, Susie, wants to kiss her boyfriend, she slips into her friend’s body to feel the warmth of lips on lips - as if having a body was heaven itself.
Despite your argument with your physicality, the fact is that you are here and the 151,000 people who have died today are not. I heard in a meditation years ago in which a teacher suggested that we think about what people who had recently died would give to be sitting where we were. To be sitting in any body, in any room. He said, "Think of what they would give to have just one more moment inside this physical form, these arms, these legs, this beating heart and no other." I gathered that the dead to whom he referred didn't really care about the size of anyone's thighs.
Your body is a piece of the Universe you've been given; as long as you have a pulse, it presents you with an ongoing shower of immediate sensate experiences. Red, salt, loneliness, heat. When a friend says something painful to you, your chest aches. When you fall in love, that same chest feels like fireworks and waterfalls and explosions of ecstasy. When you are lonely, your body feels empty. When you are sad, it feels as if there is a Mack truck sitting on your lungs. Grief feels like tidal waves knocking you down, joy like champagne bubbles welling up your arms, your legs and belly. Our minds are like politicians; they make stuff up, they twist the truth. Our minds are the masters to blame, but our bodies....our bodies don't lie. Which is, of course, why so many of us learned to zip out of them at the first sign of trouble.
The ability to live a short distance from our bodies was, at one time, our best chance for survival. Since children experience emotional pain in and through their bodies, and since there were no resources for releasing that pain, we became skilled at getting out of Dodge - bolting- in a hurry. In developing skills to leave our bodies, we avoided being destroyed by the onslaught of potentially fragmenting pain. It was a lifesaving exit.
But the fast track up and out of the physicality has become maladaptive for two main reasons; it truncates our ability to feel and therefore move through the situations that arise in our lives. When we are bowled over by grief and our response is to eat a pizza, we halt our ability to move through grief as well as our confidence that it won't destroy us. If you don't allow a feeling to begin, you also don't let it end.
The second reason that living a short distance from the body is maladaptive is that since the body is the only place in which to experience hunger and fullness, any attempts at ending our compulsive eating are doomed to fail. When you start eating without first being aware of whether or not yoru body is hungry, the only signal telling you to put down your fork is nauseating discomfort.
I realize that coming home to your body after a life-time of being at war with it might not seem appealing, especially if it is uncomfortable to sit or walk within its confines. But just because homecomings are rocky does not mean you should spend the rest of your life avoiding them.
Reminding yourself that you have a body during any given day looks like this: You are lurching along and suddenly you catch yourself walking without realizing you are walking. Then you remember to be aware of your breath - your abdomen moving, your lungs filling with air. You sense some kind of flow or density or warmth or tingling in your legs. You notice that you have arms, that you have hands and that one of them is now lifting a pen, or a child. You arrive in your body fro a moment and you are gone again, floating from place to place with no clear rememberance o this transition. Then you suddenly land here again - first one breath then another - and it's as if everything is new. You feel your child's breath on your face. You hear the scratch of pen on paper. You fall into the sound as if it is the first not of a symphony. The next moment you are catapulted into seeing without seeing, hearing without hearing.
You bring yourself back to the body about a thousand times a day. Even if you live in an urban environment with wailing sirens and blaring car horns, you can still focus on physical sensations. The contact your legs are making with the chair, the sound of the computer keys hitting the board, the slight chill in the air. In this way, it becomes possible to live as writer John Tarrant says, "in our true range, and not go around missing things, as if we knew countries only from their airports and hotels."
Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist teacher, says, "There is no way to happiness - happiness is the way." Just so, there is no way back to the body; the body is the way. You leave and then you return. Leave and return. You forget and then you remember. One breath and then another. One step and then another. It's that simple. And it doesn't matter how long you've been gone; what matters is that you've returned. With each return, each sound, each felt sensation, there is relaxation, recognition, and gratitude. Gratitude begets itself, ripens into flowers, snow falls, mountains of more gratitude. Soon you begin wondering where you've been all this time. How you wandered so far. And you realize that torture isn't having these arms and legs; its being so convinced that God is our there, in another place, another realm that you miss the lavender slip of moon, your own awakened presence.
