The Body Speaks to Us

• Yesterday I had an adventure in awareness. This woman who is a healer held my feet gently and then asked me to allow my mind to travel inside my feet, to feel what it was like inside that complicated mechanism of bone, muscle, and tendon.  I did my belly breathing and shrunk myself sufficiently so I could actually fit myself inside my foot, and when I had landed, I was amazed at how crowded and busy it all was. I did this for quite some time, just breathing and feeling the busy universe of the foot, and gradually I sensed a strong pressure at the top of my left foot, a dully aching sensation that persisted and brought to mind the late afternoon four years ago when a lady in her car ran over my foot, knocking me to the ground and breaking various foot and leg bones.  Oddly enough, I had thought I was "over" this trauma which sent me into emergency surgery for a badly broken elbow, but the truth of the matter is that our body holds everything we have experienced, and in some cases holds the experience with a remarkable persistence.  I lay on the table and remembered my day going from light to dark, my memory of subsequent events blotted out by the sheer pain of the broken bones and the terror I felt through my whole being.  There were tears that rested in my eye sockets that soon dribbled down my face.  Yes, pain and fear had returned ...  And yet I was safe and whole on this bright sunny afternoon in August, though my heart held layers of sadness for people I love whom I cannot help, for myself who yearns for more self-compassion.

Our bodies hold everything.  There's a scar on my left index finger that calls up the morning I was with my grandparents in their country cottage and whittling on a stick with a cute little pocket knife.  I was careless and I cut my finger badly.  I cried, but not for long, because I was with two very stoic people and I needed to show I could rally quickly.  The story is still there in my finger:  the little girl who was hesitant to really feel her pain.  A scar on my knee recalls the summer in Yellow Springs Ohio when I helped my husband bottle his home brew, as I lost balance and fell over on a broken bottle and then saw blood gushing from a deep wound.  Looking through layers of flesh made me queasy, I can still remember.  I was a young mother of twenty one, and I soldiered on ... of course.  There are two vertical scar lines on my left and right cheeks where I had taken a razor blade to my face at nineteen in order to punish the man I lived with for not loving me enough.  A stupid, frightening move...  Happily, I don't notice these lines much anymore, though I can trace the old wounds anytime with my fingers.  That story of suffering is something I still have a hard time revisiting.  I don't think I want to "breathe into" that experience, though my healer friend would tell me that by doing that I can let it go.

My lungs hold fear and anxiety.  When I walk the streets of the city and feel the steps of someone close behind me, I become immediately fearful.  My heart starts to race, I pick up my pace, and feel my breathing speed up.  There is a memory here which takes me back to being a five year old whose stuffed animals were taken away because I was asthmatic and couldn't breathe very well, and also to the time when I had to outrace an large old man who chased me up Green Street when I was nine.  I hauled myself up the hill and breathed heavily, and finally reached my house safely, and now have no memory of why this character was after me.  Strange and surreal, and yet this fear that came forward is terribly real.  I simply don't want anyone moving in on me from behind ...  I have this strange feeling that the lungs that I breathe through in my seventies are those of my uncertain childhood.

There are other stories that come from outside our own bodies.  I am thinking of our domestic accoutrements like refrigerators, cars, record collections, and the pets we have as roommates.  How many times have we named and boxed up another person because we noted their refrigerator filled with pure organics, their glossy BMW, or their French Bull Dog?   Clearly these are NOT who we are, but rather examples of our quirky choices in the moment.  The scars we carry from trauma, such as knife wounds to the finger or broken glass to the knee or slices across the face, are also NOT who we are, but again mindless and sometimes cruel detours from the path.  And the way to let them go and see who we really are is to see them clearly and hold ourselves in compassion.  We must breathe into our bodies and see that we are really and truly o.k.  Beautiful as well...

From Dogen:  "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 one with with all beings.  When one with all beings, body and mind and bodies and minds of others drop away."  Forget the self.  Yes.  Great idea.