Love, Death and the Skandhas: pt 1

Kate and I were recent participants in an amazing 4 day workshop at Joan Halifax’s Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe. Entitled “Love and Death: Opening the Great Gifts.” Roshi Joan, a force of Nature, has spent many years working with death and the dying process and her co-teacher, Frank Ostaseski, founder of the Zen Hospice Program out of the San41i9Cq-UrML._SX336_BO1,204,203,200_ Francisco Zen Center at the beginning of the AIDS crisis in the 1980’s, is one of the world’s leading experts on compassionate hospice care.

Frank’s recent book, “The Five Invitations” is a must read for anyone inhabiting a human body, as it presents his Buddhist/human approach to being with the dying with real life stories and his own personal experiences and challenges in diving into all the realms of human existence. The basic message is that our essential humanity, what the Buddhists call our basic goodness or Bodhicitta, and what Patanjali refers to as ‘drashtuh svarupe‘ is ever present beneath the roles and masks we present to the world and our selves and is the ultimate ground to meet all that arises with love, wisdom and compassion. But in order to discover this, we must be willing to open to all of the pain and suffering, in ourselves and the world around us, we repress and ignore out of fear.

From the perspective of the skandhas, this fear arises as the first of the skandhas, when we meet the mortality of the body and our egoic structures freak out. This leads to the second skandha we begin to strategize ways of avoiding acknowledging our own impermanence. First we divide our world into like-dislikelikes and dislikes, or as Patanjali describes them in sutra II-7 and II-8, raga and dvesa, attachments and aversions, two of the five kleshas or afflictions we humans are subject to.  In the third skandha, we respond impulsively to our likes and dislikes and busy ourselves in satisfying their demands. Of course, relief from our inner terror is impossible when we refuse to be present to it, and our suffering will continue, as long as we refuse to face our impermanence with an open heart.

To address our innate impermanence directly, and leave us with a lasting meaningful impression, Frank led a closing ritual on the last day, where the group was divided into three inner and outer circles. The inner circle sat on chairs facing out, and the outer circles sat on chairs facing inward, so you were always in a one on one situation with another person. We were all given a sheet of paper listing 5 affirmations from an old Theravadan Buddhist scripture based on Buddha’s oral teaching and translated by Thich Nhat Hahn, I believe. They read as follows:

I am of the nature of old age. There is no escape from growing old

I am of the nature of ill health. There is no escape from ill health.

I am of the nature to die. There is no escape from death.

All of those I love, and all I hold dear, are subject to change.
There is no escape from being separated from them.

My actions are my only true possessions.
There is no escape from the results of my actions.
My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

Persons on the inner circle, speaking slowly and from the heart, offered these verses as reminders to their partner on the outer circle. Then the person on the outer circle offered them back, heart to heart. This completed one cycle, with everyone both offering and receiving some deep truths about our own impermanence. After this, the outer circle rotated one station to the right and the process began again. When ‘in tune’, the verses were read simultaneously by all in the inner circles, and then all of the outer circles. So you had to be aware of not only your partner, but the whole group as well. By the end, there were 11 or 12 exchanges with different people, pointing to and holding the space of impermanence with an open and compassionate heart. Each exchange was unique, as we all embodied  the process differently. It lasted a good half hour and left us all blown open. This was after all the preparatory work done in the previous days.

This was all good timing for me, as the day after I arrived back in Ojai, I received the results of my prostate biopsy and found out my cancer is the aggressive type and requires immediate attention. I am currently in the process or sorting out just what that means. When I first heard about the cancer back in July, there were still a lot of unknowns, as there are many types of prostate cancer, most being slow growing and manageable, and I had no idea which was mine. It was very disconcerting, but I was holding out for a ‘good’ prognosis. But when I saw a radiologist two weeks ago, as I was prepping for the biopsy, and he said “I wish I had seen you two years ago”, the abyss of impermanence opened up.

At least I was ‘somewhat‘ ready for it!  All part of the human experience. I’ve always thought that the spiritual/cosmic side of life was much easier than the human side. The human condition is very messy. So I guess this is my graduate course in being human, and it involves transforming the energy of the skandhas, out of reactivity and impulsivity, and into, as Roshi Joan would say, an embodied presence with a ‘strong back, soft front’. The yogis would say ‘sthira sukham asanam‘. ‘Strong back, soft front’ is also very Taoist, paralleling the yang strength and the yin receptivity.

Roshi Joan contrasted this with the current dilemma in Japan where ‘maintaining face’ is so strongly imprinted in the culture that most everyone puts up a strong front, leaving a soft back unable to support challenging emotions. There is an epidemic of suicide in the young generation in Japan and the traditional monks are at a bit of a loss dealing with this. Roshi Joan was just in Japan presenting the emotionally challenging metaphor of ‘strong back, soft front’ at her home Soto Temple. She is the first woman honored to ever address all these male zen monks. The ‘yin’ softening front body, allowing our emotions and feelings to be known, is very much a feminine virtue that all cultures desperately need to embody.

Grief, sadness, greed, jealousy, anger and many more of our emotional experiences need to be fully embodied and integrated into our moment to moment unfolding to keep us from falling back into the delusional pursuit of the likes and dislikes. The impulse to avoid our ‘dark side’ and stay in delusion, skandha three, is powerful, so we become masters at being distracted. There is no cultural impetus to be with difficulty, so the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain become a powerful field shaping our moment to moment behavior. But the secrets of inner peace and true happiness are only uncovered when we face the messiness of life with wisdom and compassion.

The primary practices Frank and Joan taught us during the four days, to help us work with our emotions and cultivate an open heart, were meditation and reciting and embodying the Brahma Viharas, (sutra I-33 for the yogis, metta for the Buddhists). We’ll return to the Brahma Viharas in part II of this blog post.

Mediation practice in a zendo is usually silent, but we had several occasions where Frank would lead guided meditations during zazen sessions, and one I found very helpful. It involves four simple instructions that circulate in and around each other: pause, relax, open and allow.

Pause: Every breath has two pauses; at the end of the in-breath, and at the end of the out-breath. In Itzak Bentov’s brilliant book, “Stalking the Wild Pendulum”, (one of my all time favorites,) the pauses, when the pendulum naturally comes to rest as it is about to change directions, are portals to the infinite to drashtuh svarupe. These pauses are also explored in depth51Ewa4qnlpL._SX313_BO1,204,203,200_ during the kumbhakas in pranayama practice. Frank offered an example in real life of this process. Before he would enter a room with a hospice patient, he would check to see on what side of the door the hinges were. If on the left, he would enter to room left foot first, and vice versa. As he explained, rather than being an expression of OCD, he wanted to make sure he always paused and found a moment of stillness before he entetred, so he wouldn’t walk in with preconceived notions of what he was about to see, what to do or how to present himself. He wanted to lead with his humanity, so he paused before acting.

The pause is the immediate antidote to impulsivity. The impulses are mostly unconscious and deeply habituated, so the pause momentarily stops that. In my meditation, I call call the pauses ‘getting off the train (of thought)’. The distraction of our own thought patterns can be disrupted if we continually remind ourselves to pause, get off the train and wait. As every breath has a pause, we always get to begin again. Beginner’s mind in every pause.

Relax: Amidst the pause we can add ‘relax’. We may be momentarily ‘off the train’, but there may still be an underlying need to ‘make something happen’. I should be doing this pose, doing this meditation practice, so I get it right. In sutra II-47, Patanjali describes the next step after settling into ‘sthira and sukham as ‘stop ‘trying’ and just be.’

II-47 pra-yatna shaithilyaananta sam-aa-pattibhyaam
With the release of effort and absorption in the limitless (posture is mastered).

Relax. Posture/presence is a state of being, not doing. We need to remind ourselves again and again to just relax. I can be a bit compulsive about needing to ‘fix’ or ‘improve’ my sitting posture, so this is a challenging instruction for me. If something needs attention, take care of it, but don’t obsess over the details. Relax does not mean collapse, but to find what is called in Taoism, wu wei, effortless effort. Ananta in sutra II-47 is the Tao. Relax and let the Tao hold and nurture you. Be aligned with the flow of life and Trust it. This trust is described in sutra I-20 as shraddha, one of the five ‘yoga vitamins’

Open: From the release of efforting, we may feel places that are still holding on, resisting the flow of qi/prana/aliveness through our bodies. The instruction ‘open’ is an invitation to find some space in and around the holding, around the fear, to open to the deeper aspects of the breath waiting to emerge. We may feel this as an expansion out of structure into energy, or out of energy flow into the expansive energy fields. Or it may be just holding the fear in an open heart.

Allow: When some are of the body is holding on, there is usually some pain or suffering associated with it. ‘Allow’ gives permission for the pain or difficulty to be felt honestly, with an open heart. I like the word allow much better than surrender. Surrender, a term often used in this context, can feel like ‘giving up’, whereas allow seems to me to be non-judgmentally open. Frank mentioned the same thing.

Isvara Pranidhana , first mentioned in sutra I-23 from the Yoga Sutras, invites us to allow our own innate Divinity to merge with Divinity as wholeness, in any and all life situations. It is actually never separate. We just believe that it is. Namaste. Our divine wholeness is ever-present, effortlessly. Nothing to do, but feel, open to the breathing, open to Mother Earth, open to the cosmic heart. Find the strength to be present to whatever arises.

I find myself going back and forth with whether to begin with Pause or Relax. They seem to work together. As they become established, Open and Allow can come forth and deepen the practice, until you get distracted and then another pause is needed. Find any way to use these invitations to help your meditation practice and then put them to use in your day to day life. Pause, Relax, Open, Allow

The Five Skandhas

In the previous post I covered various perspectives on the often negative inner dialogue running on in morphing loops through the human psyche. Amazingly enough, in my almost 50 years of spiritual inquiry, I had never encountered the Buddhist notion of the skandhas, which clearly describe the emergence and development of the egoic mental states and structures. Until now! Timing is everything, of course.

imagesThe revelation comes from the enlightened writing of Reggie Ray in his new book, “Pure Awareness”. Reggie comes from the Vajrayana tradition of Buddhism as taught by Chogyam Trungpa, and what I love about Reggie’s approach is that it is all in the body, or soma. Meditation as an embodied spiritual practice is radical, as most traditions still teach it ‘top-down’, ie , use the mind/psyche to calm the body/soma. Reggie’s Vajrayana approach is to: go to the core of the soma to discover the origins of the egoic structures: see them from the body’s perspective; notice the suffering and unhappiness they unconsciously manifest; and transform them into healthy expressions of human possibility.

What is most fascinating is that this was my primary take-home message in the ‘Embodying the Embryological Foundations of Movement” workshop I attended with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen last month. A brief summary includes: 1. that the earliest stages of embryological development take place before the brain emerges; 2. the foundational intelligence of the body is ‘original (infinite) space plus movement; and 3. the body can ‘know itself’ independent of any act of mind.

BNP_Book_Cover_RGB_FrtIn Bonnie’s ‘hot off the presses’ book, “Basic Neurocellular Patterns” she describes what she calls ‘The Embodiment Process’, which is also how she was presenting the material during the workshop.

” The process of embodiment is a being process, not a doing process; it is an awareness process in which the guide and witness dissolve into cellular consciousness.” (I’ll link this to the skandhas shortly!!)  She list three processes leading to embodiment.

“1. Visualization: the process by which the brain imagines (visualizes) aspects of the body and informs the body that it (the body) exists. (We had anatomical drawings of the various stages of embryological development that we color coded. (Like being in 2nd grade again!)

2. Somatization: the process by which the kinesthetic (movement) and tactile (touch) sensory systems inform the body that it (the body) exists. In this process there is a witness – an inner awareness of the process. (Many hours exploring: solo, with a partner/guide, or in a larger group, using any means you desired. Yoga- centric ones used postures and yoga flow primarily, dancers moved, and everyone received hands on support whenever needed. (There were 30 assistants!)

3. Embodiment: the awareness of the cells themselves. It is a direct experience. There are no intermediate steps or translations. There is no guide. There is no witness. There is the fully known consciousness of the experienced moment initiated from the cells themselves. In this instance, the brain is the last to know. There is a complete knowing and peaceful comprehension. Out of this embodiment process emerges feeling, thinking, witnessing and understanding. The source of this process is love.”

This last paragraph is a good a description of fully embodied, non-dual, ‘Pure Awareness’ as you will ever see. And it is the ‘goal’, if we can call it that, of the Pure Awareness meditation process as described by Reggie in his book. This convergence of visionary beings in the present is a tremendous gift to us.

So what are the skandhas? Reggie uses the Greek word ‘soma‘, so I will use the Greek word psyche to describe the neuro-biological processes and dynamic structures that we might call thought, feeling and emotion that combine to give us a self sense, (the ahamkara is said to do this in Yoga Philosophy), and there are many more attributes we can find. (Modern Western Psychology calls these components of the psyche “parts” (Internal Family Systems) or “voices” (Voice Dialogue).

From an evolutionary perspective, ‘soma’ emerged from the depths of timeless mystery through the evolution our planet, Mother Earth, 4 billion years ago with the first primitive single cellular organisms. This soma, as a cellular intelligence continued to evolve over the next 4 billion years, and, still embedded in mystery, continues to evolve moment to moment, here and now. What we are calling psyche, in its human form, emerged within the soma somewhere within the last 2 million years or so, and continues its own unfolding into the present.

Somewhere along the line of evolution, the psyche developed the possibility of forgetting its origins in Ultimate Mystery and the primal cellular ‘soma’. When this forgetting happens, the psyche begins to create a separate ‘me’ and then feels an existential terror at being a tiny ‘me’ in a world where ‘dissolving into infinite mystery’ means the end of ‘me’. A bit of a Catch-22 here. In other terms, this is the eviction from the Garden of Eden.

This recoiling in horror at the vision of Ultimate Mystery is actually the first skandha, known as the ignorance of the nature of form, or just form.  The ‘Truth’ of form is that ‘forms’ (Prakriti in the Yoga Sutras) are continually arising from and dissolving into ‘Emptiness’. The psyche, itself a form, being horrified by its own impermanence, starts to create all sorts of problems. My own personal experience with PTSD and panic attacks, in retrospect, was this first skandha in action. Yes, there was stored trauma in the body and psyche, but ultimately the resolution was to let the body heal itself by staying present. For the Yoga Sutras students, this is also the first klesha, avidya, as described in II-3 to II-5. Also, Arjuna, in chapter 11 of the Bhagavad Gita, gets a very abrupt, full on introduction to this skandha. Some aspects are shattering, but fortunately he has Krishna as his guide and Krishna helps him return to a state of inner peace before his skandhas get too scrambled.

Of course the psyche is highly unlikely to say to itself  “Oh, my bad. We’re all cool with impermanence, emptiness and unbounded mystery. Lets ‘let-go’ and enjoy the ride.” It almost always desperately looks for something to grasp onto for security, something tangible to feel, so it (the psyche) can be reassured of its own ‘solidity.  It begins to divide the infinite world of forms into ‘things I absolutely need’ and ‘things I absolutely need to avoid or get rid of. This is the second skandha, known as vedana, or feeling”, where the pain of craving is born. The ego starts to gain in solidity. In the Yoga Sutras, II-7 and II-8, these are described as two more kleshas.

The third skandha, perception/impulse, is the playing field of spiritual practice. Once craving arises the psyche begins to develop strategies to deal with this craving by manipulating its personal world. The three primary strategies are passion, aggression and indifference. Passion is the energy that drives us to acquire what we desire; aggression provides the energy to fight off what we are afraid of: indifference allow us to numb any other unpleasant or unresolvable feelings. In this skandha, our life energies are conscripted to pursue the endless cycle of passion and aggression, or the numbness of indifference leads to depression. Our primary self-sense is that we are ‘lacking’ or ‘wanting’ and there is never a resolution. As we will see later, impulse is our entry point into the skandhas and the one place we can begin to make changes.

The psyche, its its own clever way, needs to now validate all this impulsive 3rd skandha activity, so it begins to categorize, label and organize its behavior and observations. The fourth skandha conceptualizes and names, and is thus known as the skandha of ‘Intellect or Concept’. This leads to memories and habits, or what are called samskaras in Sanskrit, and karma. Think of samskaras as the immediate response to an impulse, and karma as your full history of all responses. Thus the full personality structure or ego is almost complete. (See Sutra I-43 where Patanjali describes the healing of this skandha.)

Finally, we need something to integrate impulse and intellect and the Sanskrit word given to the fifth skandha is Vijnana, or Consciousness. The ego is now a fully valid, conscious entity. Chogyam Trungpa, Reggie Ray’s teacher describes this skandha eloquently:

560418_10150957370433933_640895989_n“Consciousness consists of emotions and irregular thought patterns, all of which taken together form the different fantasy worlds with which we occupy ourselves. These fantasy worlds are referred to in the scriptures as the “six realms”. The emotions are the highlights of ego, the generals of ego’s army; subconscious thought, day-dreams and other thoughts connect one highlight to another. So thoughts form ego’s army and are constantly in motion, constantly busy. Our thoughts are neurotic in the sense that they irregular, changing direction all the time and overlapping one another. We continually jump from one thought to the next, from spiritual thoughts to sexual fantasies to money matters to domestic thoughts and so on. The whole development of the five skandhas–ignorance/form, feeling, impulse/perception, concept and consciousness–is an attempt on our part to shield ourselves from the truth of our insubstantiality.”

The Five Skandhas:
(Ignorance of the true nature of) Form – Feeling – Impulse – Intellect – Conscious

In our somatic exploration/meditation practice, because we have trained our attention to stay in the immediate somatic experience (dharana, dhyana, samadhi, or Samyama) we are able to feel the level of impulse, skandha 3. Because the body, the soma, is both fully present and effortlessly embedded in Ultimate Mystery, totally comfortable with impermanence, our capacity to stay here gives us a non-grasping anchor resisting the winds of impulse. When, as Bonnie describes, the body becomes ‘conscious’, or awake, the infinite space is just there, present, luminous and alive. This is ‘embodiment‘. When an impulse arises, we can choose not to respond and just stay present in the soma. This, by the way, is the meaning of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra I-2 and I-3; yogash citta vritti nirodha; tada drashtuh svarupe avasthanam. “Yoga is not responding to impulse, but remaining stably in the infinite (illumination reflected in the soma.) Or “The Drashtuh Abides”.

What Bonnie taught me this past month was to stay embodied and be in the world at the same time. That was the primary lesson for me, and it took her catching me in the exact moment of losing the soma to really get it. We were exploring some new inner spaces and feelings while staying aware of presence and the outer world simultaneously and I got distracted by some new exciting revelation. She was tracking me and immediately snapped her fingers. At first I thought she was signaling the class, but when I looked at her, I realized that she was calling me back into the soma/infinite that she was holding effortlessly, while being present to all, inner and outer. The whole workshop was captured in that moment. Sustaining this is not easy, but that is why we practice. (see Sutras I-12 – I-16). This is the transformation of the skandhas.

This practice goes on forever, of course, as impulses arise from all over the field of human consciousness, wanting to take us back careening into ignorance and delusion. Especially as we engage dynamically with the world. It is one thing to be in a monastery on a remote mountain top where the outer world is no longer present. You still have your own inner world to deal with, back back on the street, back in society, many many more triggers are activated. Less time and more need to practice. A bit ironic.

By the Way, in Pure Awakening, Reggie has some deep insights into the relationship between technology/social media, the near total disembodiedness of much of our youth, and the sheer terror they feel at actually having to face their own unpleasant feelings. Without the support of the body/soma, the option is to try to avoid anything uncomfortable and blame someone/anyone else for causing this. Big skandha problems here. The ‘adults’ in Congress and the business world don’t seem to be much better at dealing with reality than the youth, so it makes our own urgency to build a strong embodied field of love and compassion that much stronger. The skandhas can be transformed. We need their healthy expression to fully function, as individuals, but also as a society. Our culture has its own skandhas.

So how can we train ourselves to abide in the stillness while simultaneously being engaged in the world? Got to your mat and find out.

Choose a pose: (easiest in a sitting posture of course to go all the way with this.) Picture1
Find flowing connection to yin/ground/weight and yang/lightness/sky.
Find your center channel, (chong mai) feel it open at the crown into heaven and root into earth;
Relax and open your heart to find center.
Connect root and crown with small orbit meditation, completing the circle in both directions to open and relax the larger energy field that connects and integrates inner and outer worlds, yin (cv or ren mai) and yang (gv or du mai).
Add the girdle vessel (dai mai) for horizontal stability.
illus3Let your breath further awaken the lower dantien, broadening and spreading your base to deepen the rooting in the soma, away from the psyche.
Open even more deeply to Mother Earth.
Let your breath fill the inner space effortlessly on the in breath and let it dissolve into emptiness on the out breath.
In that dissolving feel the infinite space that receives the breath and illumines the body. Rest in that luminous emptiness for a (second .. few seconds– minute…)
and then return to any of the steps above and begin again.

When you find yourself lost, retrace your way back through the skandhas. Impulse – intellect – ego story. Drop the story. Bring your attention back to the soma as a felt sense of weight, breath, volume, whatever works for you. When you feel the impulse, resist. Practice nirodha. Open back into the infinite space and the aliveness of the soma. Over time, the habits/impulses begin to lose energy because we are no longer feeding them with our attention. Our fears begin to subside as we feel the fullness that the soma provides. Our concepts and conscious choices begin to reflect a deepening sense of well being that is actually our ‘True Nature.” What a surprise! Continue for the rest of your life in this body. Be a radiant presence embracing your own very real and very human failings.

Trauma, Neuroscience and the Microcosmic Orbit

illus3The microcosmic orbit encompasses two of the eight extraordinary vessels recognized in Chinese Medicine; the yin Ren Mai or Conception Vessel, and the yang Du Mai or Governing Vessel. These two complete a balanced circuit linking both front and back, and inner and outer bodies, and also hold energy in support of the traditional twelve organ channels commonly used in acupuncture. (These include the six yin organ channels: lungs, spleen, heart, kidneys, liver, and heart protector (pericardium); and the six yang channels; large intestine, stomach, small intestine, bladder, triple heater (sanjiao) and gall bladder.)

The microcosmic orbit meditation awakens the flow of Qi in the two vessels, but can also point out blockages in the circuit. And these circuits and blockages have layers and levels. One of my first awakenings when I began exploring this was the amount of glue I felt along the back or Governing Vessel. Using the clock image below, my key areas of tension are around 2 getPart-3o’clock behind my heart, and around 4 o’clock, or the region of my kidneys. Clock245

 

 

 

 

To no surprise, this tension is manifesting as an elevation of my blood pressure. And there are similar regions of tension on my front, along the Conception Vessel, between 8 and 10, up into the 5th chakra.

When my PTSD was activated in January, after the fire, the primary locus was on the front, near CV-12, the center of centers, (nine o’clock above). My yin blocked up and the yang tightened even more, preventing me from sleeping normally and doing a number on my nervous system (yang) and psyche. It took about a month, with lots of help from friends and various therapies, for my sleep pattern to settle back to some sort of equilibrium. It has been re-triggered twice since then, once in May and then again last week, and on both occasions, the initiating factor was acupuncture needling at CV-12.

PTSD activation is a very unpleasant experience filled with fear-based, chaotic energies disrupting my moment to moment experience. Fortunately, my process is mutating, the energy is finally moving, and my overall capacity to make sense of the process and hold it in open awareness is evolving. I am grateful for the Somatic Experiencing work I did years ago with Caryn McHose. This therapy, first articulated by Peter Levine, requires building strong ‘resources’, or regions of somatic strength and stability, that can anchor you during the release of the trauma. Other key principles in SE include not releasing more trauma than you can handle with your resources, and finding the support and guidance of an SE practitioner who can hold the space of open awareness and presence, help you track the sensations, and recognize that they are memories from the past that you are feeling in the present with some spaciousness.

I’ve been my own SE support this time around, which is challenging, but there is progress and it is my on-going sitting meditation practice that is my primary resource. Resting in Pure Awareness, even as the mind/body are doing their dance, requires a lot of trust, because most of the ‘time’, the practice doesn’t seem very ‘silent’. The mind field is a busy place. But the silence is ever -present, independent of what is arising, and this trust/faith that you are being held by the Divine, called shraddha by Patanjali (sutra I-20), is your most important strong resource. As a meditator, this begins as a ‘non-judgmental witnessing consciousness’

As Swami Dayananda taught me years ago, our moment to moment experience, observed formally in meditation, has two components. The first is Awareness, aka Pure Awareness, Purusha, Ground of Being, Luminous Emptiness, Stillness, or Witnessing, etc. The second is ‘What is arising in Awareness’. This includes all the transitory phenomena of sensation, perception, action and thought, or what we call ‘reality’.  If we can sustain some dimension of the witnessing, then what arises doesn’t fully take over the mind field, but can be held and examined by the intelligence, known as buddhi in Sanskrit.

‘What arises’ has layers and levels and this is where the suffering and/or liberation takes place. Awareness is always free and unbounded. The first level of ‘what is arising’ is pure sensation, a triggering of the sensory nervous system by an impulse of energy. At the reflexive level of the nervous system, this sensation may immediately trigger an an action, as when a doctor taps your knee to check on your ‘mono-synaptic’ response. The knee-jerk tells the doctor your spinal nerves are working.

A fun piece of trivia I’ve retained from my MIT biology days is that frogs have a neuron in the retina that only fires when a black dot moves horizontally across the visual field. If triggered, a muscle at the root of the tongue fires and the tongue extends out to ‘capture’ the dot. No interpretation or deliberation is required. More primitive creatures have mostly reflexive nervous systems. Not a lot of thinking or analyzing goes on in the lower brain.

As evolution expanded the brain, a new type of brain cell, the inter-neuron, appeared, allowing the possibility of pausing, deliberating and/or analyzing the sensation before acting. This allows learning, and more and more nuanced responses to take place. Humans have lots of inter-neurons, and this scientific reality is what allows us to get lost inside our own heads. Our attention is drawn to the various loops of non-stop thoughts, beliefs and confusion flowing through neurons not directly connected to our moment to moment experience and this inner dialogue become our day-to day reality. This is the monkey-mind noticed by mediators. What is actually arising moment to moment is totally missed. When the PTSD kicks in, the mind reels in desperate attempts to escape, and the practice is to just notice the actual sensations, in the moment, however, wherever. The body wants to process and return to balance, but staying present to its information allows the body to reveal its innate intelligence

halasana 1982Any mindfulness practice will help develop the capacity to stay present so matter what by directing the attention to the sensations of the body as they arise, before interpretation kicks in. B. K. S. Iyengar did his best to teach me this. His constant lesson to me: Stop thinking about what was supposed to be happening in a yoga pose, or how it felt yesterday. Start actually feeling the sensations and tracking them and let them dictate the action of the pose. That did not happen over night for me! (A full articulation of his teaching on this is included in the 2 part ‘Samyama in Asana’ posting. Part1  and  Part 2.)

Our use of the micro-cosmic orbit is a great way to organize and train our attentional field to lock into the flow of energy (qi or prana) and track it in and through regions of the human energy field. This practice builds stability of the mind (abhyassa) and frees up the organic field to improve not only health, but spiritual sensitivity through cosmic resonance with the life forms and energy field of Mother Earth and the celestial realms of the sun moon, stars and galaxies. To the Taoists, the micro-cosmic field is an immediate and conscious expression of the macro-cosmic field including all layers and levels of creation.

Qi gong ImageWhat other resources can we find within the micro-cosmic orbit? In previous posts we have explored the whole circuit, with the lower dantien as the root of our practice. We want to continue to deepen the connection to the lower dantien by breathing with the 4 points on the diagram below, CV-1, GV-4, CV-12 and CV-6, as if this is a small circle, and then expand into a dynamic sphere. Feel your tail and lower limbs being embraced by this to strengthen the grounding. You can do this as a meditation or breathing practice, or even add it to any asana you may be exploring. We are working with 3 dimensional volumes here!

Next, join the lower dantien with the middle dantien in your breathing practice. You can do this in two sections like this: inhale lower 1-2-3, upper 4-5; exhale lower 1-2-3, upper 4-5. Feel the diaphragm softening as it is supported above and below. Try other combinations until you find something that feels right for you. Upper dantien stays quiet, like in any breathing practice.

A more challenging, but fascinating option is to have three sections/parts, like Viloma Pranayama. Section 1 is the lower burner, or the bottom 2/3rds of the lower dantien; section 2 is the middle burner which is the liver/stomach/spleen/pancreas, or the abdominal organs inside the lower ribs. Section three is the area of the chest above the diaphragm, heart and lungs etc. Keep the primary in the lower. Inhale lower 1-2-3, pause middle 4-5, pause upper 6; exhale lower 1-2-3, pause, middle 4-5, pause upper 6. Or something like that. Like the shape of a snowman, only no head, three torso sections.

Working in Segments:
getPart-3Another option is to use the circuit to look more closely at various segments or arcs to see the where obstructions manifest in our embodied energy field. If we imagine the circle as a clock face, we can use the numbers to define some of these regions. Clock245Looking from the left side as above, 9 is the front and 3, its complement at the back, passing right through the third chakra, or more specifically, CV-12, the ‘center of centers’ directly connecting with the middle burner. What has worked best for me is to by-pass CV-12. When I can link GV-9 to GV-4 and GV-1 ( not shown but at the tip of the coccyx) and through to CV-1, my back softens and opens somewhat. As a down the back inhalation, I can feel the kidneys grasping the qi as GV-4 and GV-9 work together to ground the breath at the root.

Similarly, if I can link CV-17 with CV-6 and CV-1 in a down the front action and link this to GV-1, I can feel a stabilizing of my front body to help support the softening back body. This ‘abdominal tone’ that arises from this circuit gives a presence to your sitting posture that is yin (internal and front body) which helps allow the witness to rest in stillness. Too much use of the back muscles keeps a yang inner state, a bit less conducive to quietness.

And please add any and all of these suggestions, plus your own that arise when you practice, to any pose, any time, when on the mat, sitting at your computer typing, in your car, walking about. Make it part of your moment to moment awareness. This is the neuro-plasticity that really is the core of the practice we do as awakening humans embedded in the cultural, relational fields. We can change how are brains are wired and this changes the field of the whole, as we are the field.

And, a question for all to ponder, How can we continue to speak-out and protest the stupidity, ignorance and violence being perpetuated by our government and segments of society without demonizing anyone???  This is no simple answer to this, but we have to use our intelligence and spiritual insight to find other options. The demonization of others is imagesthe primary problem of our times and the cause of all the suffering. We have political leadership that uses this ‘demonization of others’ to rally its base. As long as ‘liberals’ get sucked into the same insanity by ‘demonizing the demonizers’, there is zero chance of moving into a more progressive society. The first principle of Taoism, and Buddhism, and Vedanta  is wholeness. There is no other;ther is only us. And we, the collective are seriously out of balance. The wisdom of the body knows this, and that is why embodied spiritual practice is so crucial to our times.

Keep practicing !!!!!