I waxed quite poetically in my previous post about the joys of following the body. But
But what is the body?
What is the body?
Not the physical body, not our skin and organs and bones and whatnot, not what we can pin down and cut open and reduce evereverevermore to try to get at what we really are, that’s not the body I’m talking about.
I mean the experience of being in your body—what is that irreducible feelingness that is with us, that feels like us, all our waking moments? The experience of this emotion and then the one after, this thought occurring and then the one after and on and on and on?
And what if you hate your body? I said so seemingly blithely in my previous post to “just” follow the body, like that’s such an easy thing to do, and maybe it is if you haven’t suffered terribly with and within it—suffered at the hands of others and probably your own hands, too. Your own thoughts.
***
Well, let’s start with this.
If you hate your body, or if you hate being in your body to whatever degree or whatever percentage of the time: that hatred is for a good reason. Good job for being so reasonable and hating that which has brought you pain. It’s reasonable to hate what has hurt you.
We don’t stop here, of course. But it is where we must begin, is being honest and acknowledging your reasonableness. I’m going to come back to this.
For now: what is the body? Not our physical anatomy, but the body I’ve said that I follow as my religion?
The body is nature.
The body is made of nature.
Nature isn’t of our 3-D, or 4-D, material existence.
(Nature made our material existence.)
Nature is the unexplainable “why mountains, why mist, why beauty.” Why love.
Nature is love. Heaven.
We have immediate access to nature, to heaven, via our breath.
When we return to nature, to our breath, we can remember that we are okay—like, deeply. Somatically. We can feel-know our okayness.
Here is all you have to do to get to Heaven: notice you are breathing.
Just pause here, literally for two seconds.
And notice you are breathing.
Now: notice how you are breathing—or rather, how your body is bringing you your breath. Is it soft? Long? Round?
In noticing, you come, you are arrived, more into your body—your real body.
Not the entity you may (reasonably) hate. Not the same 10 thoughts and memories and resulting emotions that recycle with sometimes subtle and sometimes ferocious unrelentingness but always lurking unrelentingness.
No, not that.
Your real body. Your real body. Your nature-made body. Your natural body. Your nature.
Just notice you are breathing.
You cannot bypass this noticing.
Fortunately, it doesn’t take long time. And you can know your okayness—your real body, your true body, evermore deeply.
And here in this noticing, in this okayness, in your real body: you can create a genuinely new life.
***
That sounds broad as hell, but truly, life is just this right-now moment. Just this moment right here.
But what about this or that painful situation/circumstance/event that’s fucking up my life?
Yes, see it. Go ahead and see it now.
Say to it: I see you, situation. I see you, though. I am seeing you.
It just wants to be seen.
No the fuck it doesn’t! It wants to devour and destroy me! It’s already destroyed/destroying me!
I really do understand. You might wanna tell me to go fuck myself with all this “seeing” bullshit.
We think, we’d put our lives on the certainty that, the thing wants us to do something to or about it.
It doesn’t.
It just wants you to see it.
It just wants you to say to it, “I see you” and to just look at it in all its awfulness without doing something to it or about it. Keep noticing you’re breathing, and see the thing.
Set a timer for literally 1 minute and do this.
1 minute can be the beginning of a new life. New lives, truly new beginnings, all are so happy to start with 1 minute. Even 30 seconds.
***
So: you can create a new right now: a new life. As in, something that wasn’t here a minute ago might be here now.
Something that wasn’t true at all before might be at least possible now.
Something new can show up in the space of your seeing. In the space of your true body.
***
Now—back to the hate part.
What about when we hate our bodies?
Or, we hate our experience of being in the body, we hate what happened to us, we hate the things we did, we hate how we feel, how we felt? What about when we want to escape our bodies and can’t?
What about when we feel like shit?
See it. See that hate. See the wanting to escape, the feeling like shit.
What you are feeling is the inner child—the unseen inner child, that is.
When you experience your body in this manner—in other words, when you are triggered…and it is possible for your “normal/default” state to be a triggered state…
But when you experience your body as “I hate my body”:
What you are experiencing is the unseen inner child. The content, the feelings, that have not yet been seen—that have not yet been seen, that is, minus you doing something to or about them.
In this way: the body is the inner child—the unseen inner child, that is.
And the hate, the wanting to escape, and actually, any time we are charged up, to any degree, with light or heavy charged-up upset: that charge is the unseen inner child.
The unseen inner child comes up as triggers. As charge.
***
There’s natural upset—natural dismay about, say, the computer breaking yet again. And then there’s no no no no no this can’t be happening, not again, not now. That—that charge—that is a trigger. That is the unseen inner child.
For there’s being upset. And then there’s being fucked up about a thing happening.
Any time we feel fucked up, to any degree of fucked up’tedness: it’s a trigger. We are triggered. We can be a little bit or a lot triggered.
That experience we feel in our bodies—that thing that takes us over, that thing we can come to think of as our very bodies: it’s the (unseen) inner child speaking. It’s a trigger.
In this way, the body, all that felt sensation, is the unseen inner child speaking.
And when we say to the sensation, to the upset thought: I see you. I see you, I see you, I see you…
The unseen becomes seen.
And things get interesting in the best ways possible.
***
By now, you might be good and confused with all these different definitions of the body and all this talk of hate and triggers and the inner child and whatnot.
That’s because you’re reading about a bodily experience, about somatic experiencing, on a screen.
Also, maybe this post could’ve been better written in some way. Probably so.
But no matter how much you read about water when your mouth is dry, no matter how well that content is written: it can’t quench your thirst.
So, let the confusion washhhhhh over you.
Because if you’ve read this far: your body knows the truth of what I’m saying.
Your recognition of your bodily understanding: this is what it is to follow the body. This recognition carries joy. It is so joyous to follow the body.
And following the body is the beginning of how we move from the comfort of mental understanding to bodily knowing.
Which we can recognize as felt and lasting (bodily) relief and peace.
Otherwise known liberation and oneness. And joy. Bit by bit. Little bites at a time.
END.
P.S As the body is liberated—since this is the only place liberation can happen, is in the body: then they/she/he—the body—will teach the mind. We think it works the other way around but it doesn’t.
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