Touching Enlightenment

by Reginald A Ray

  • Strong emotional states that seem immobile and unmoving: anxiety, dread, depression, fear, etc.

  • The subtle tension we feel when we withdraw from any experience, whether of the senses, the emotions, or anything else.

  On a general level, all these forms of somatic discomfort share one feature: they imply some kind of holding, stuckness, locking, or other lack of movement. As we shall see, simply becoming aware of the discomfort means that movement has begun. But the existence of the discomfort in the first place reveals that the open field of awareness and its accompanying flow of energy are somehow impeded. Let us look more closely into these forms of tension and the processes they suggest:

  • Numbness implies that our consciousness is split off from that part of the body. Energy, when cycling freely, moves through the awareness of the body. When a part is numb, the energy is dammed up.

  • Solidity suggests that we are no longer completely numb, but that we are running into the seemingly outer, unyielding boundary of this part of our body. Our awareness can penetrate no further, hence the feeling of “solidity.”

  • Tightness brings us face-to-face with the inner immobility of the area, its resistance to any softening or movement.

  • Pain is the next step above tightness. It is the first glimpse of specific content—calling to be explored—heretofore trapped in the body, that is now surfacing into our awareness. This content has been dammed up to the breaking point and is now demanding the psychic attention that pain calls forth. All forms of physical pain would be included in this category, whether from illness, old age, or injury.

  • Emotional states that seem immobile and unmoving are experienced somatically in various parts of the body or in the body as a whole. They are a kind of holding that has finally come to the surface, though this “holding” expresses itself in a more overtly energetic way than the other kinds.

  • The subtle tension we feel when we withdraw from any experience is known, in Buddhist psychology, as the “suffering of conditioned states” and refers to the tension that accompanies our retreating from the things that we experience, not seeing or sensing their freshness, as we fall back to and into our centralized self.

  Again, we may refer generally to these various forms of somatic discomfort as tension because they express themselves as some kind of immobility or restriction in the body and also because, ultimately, as we discover through the practice, we are the creators of the immobility or restriction.

  At the same time, it is important to recognize that such attempts at labeling are no more than crude approximations. Ultimately, every experience is unique. Whatever category or set of categories we may use to label a form of discomfort, it is always going to transcend those categories, being its own thing above and beyond any term we may apply. It is the recognition of this that makes the body work always fresh and endlessly fascinating.

  As we engage the somatic practices, we find many forms of discomfort arising—some extremely subtle, others more vivid; some momentary, some ongoing. Discomfort is something that we have already been aware of, but on a subliminal, previously unacknowledged level.

  So it is that this discomfort may be a feeling of being numb, shut down, and emotionally and physically dead. We might feel disembodied, as if we are floating. Our discomfort may take the form of tightness or tension in a large tendon, muscle, or muscle group. Or it may express itself as a frozenness or holding in a small area, say, a tiny muscle on the inside of one thigh, a point under a shoulder blade, something in the tip of a finger. Whatever its size or location, we feel the tautness and the need to release, but we cannot let go. The discomfort may also be experienced as physical pain, possibly little sharp points of pain, a dull achiness, or something more intense.

  Our discomfort may also arise from somatic experiences that are inconsistent with our preexisting concept of what our body is or should be. We may discover, for example, that our body is not the unitary entity we thought it was, and is, in fact, in a state of complete disarray. Thus, some places may feel very hard and armored; others, incredibly vulnerable, unprotected, shaky, and weak. Some places feel stuffed and bloated; others, starved and emaciated. One side may feel shorter or smaller than the other. One side feels alive; the other, dead. Everything may seem out of kilter, which itself may fill us with distress or even dread. We might want to scream or run, or jump out of our bodies.

  On a more subtle level, however, tension may include feelings and sensations that do not feel strictly physical at all. We may notice that there is a kind of emotional or feeling density in certain parts of our body, energy that feels in some way locked up, though not quite in a physical way—and yet we feel it somatically, in our body, and sometimes very intensely. Such feelings might include a sense that our heart is very tight, as if encased in armor. We may feel that our throat is constricted and we are gagging or choking, or that our head is dizzy, our belly feels nauseous, or our sexual center is uncomfortably claustrophobic with its energy. There is a feeling of solidity and stuckness, though it may be very subtle. We feel a call to let go, to release, but we cannot do so.

  Again, our discomfort may be experienced as painful emotions: We may suddenly feel deep heartache, unpleasant agitation, dreadful anxiety, or extreme nausea. We may feel fear, panic, groundlessness, anger, irritation, paranoia, desire, pride, and so on. The list is endless. These emotions are expressions of tension because we find ourselves locked in them—they won’t move and we are unable to escape.

  This initial, most crucial step in the body work involves discovering a body that is in a lot of discomfort, holding, or tightness. As our awareness develops, we begin to realize that our habitual, if subliminal, response to all this somatic distress is an unconscious or barely conscious pattern of freezing: we are holding on for all we are worth, fearful and paranoid, tensing our body so we won’t have to feel. We begin to realize that we have been walling off all this discomfort for years, decades, or even our whole life.

  FIFTEEN: The Background and Process of Discomfort

  In a teaching known as “the birth of ego,” Buddhism offers a theoretical explanation of discomfort. Initially, discomfort arises on a purely spiritual level: all kinds of phenomena burst upon us in our lives—sense perceptions, feelings, thoughts, people, situations, and so on. In the very first instant of their appearance, they arrive unexpectedly and with much vividness, and our initial experience of them is one of shock. They challenge our small, restricted sense of self because they always come out of nowhere and are always initially independent of what we think or want. Momentarily, they shatter our self-concept. In that first instant of any experience, we find ourselves floating in the open space and emptiness of non-self. Typically, seeking to reconstitute our “self,” we retreat into primal feeling reactions to the open space: fear, anxiety, dread, or even panic. This is the beginning of ego.

  Fear and these other basic emotions are also, in their turn, challenges to our solid self—they are so distressing and so uncontrollable. We usually resist the intensity of these feeling reactions by solidifying them into more gross and tangible emotions, such as irritation, anger, neediness, pride, desire, paranoia, and so on. To these, we usually attach some kind of ego “narrative,” some story line that locates them in reference to our “I.” These more gross emotions also represent challenges to our sense of self, because they are so powerful and painful. We may further try to deny the intensity of these emotions by tensing or freezing our body against what we are feeling. We freeze so we won’t have to feel the intensity of what is occurring.

  In the somatic work, as we become more and more aware of our own process, this theoretical outline becomes a matter of personal experience. We can see exactly how “we” come to be: (1) something disquieting arises; (2) we feel an instant panic; (3) we react with sudden anger, jealousy, pride, etc.; and (4) we tense our body against it—our chest tightens up; we feel our belly drop; our shoulders hunch up. Although all of this happens in a
matter of a second or two, the more somatically aware we become, the more we can discern the stages quite clearly.

  There is one final stage in this process. We should remember that the experience of tensing, tightening, and solidifying is itself most unpleasant, involving sometimes intense somatic distress as we recoil from our experience and freeze. How do we handle this very unpleasant somatic feeling of freezing up? If we are skilled practitioners, we may know how to read what has happened and to relax through the layers of reactivity that have been building.

  Most of us, however, will deliberately turn our attention away from the unpleasant tensing and tightening. We will shut out our body’s feeling and retreat into our conceptual thinking process. Will Johnson, in his writing on the posture of meditation, has noticed this critical movement. Our way of shutting out our body and its discomfort is, in fact, by retreating into our obsessive thinking process. The more we shut out our body, the more we retreat into thinking. The intensity of our compulsive thinking is in direct proportion to the extent that we are unwilling to experience our body in a full and direct way. We have, in fact, dissociated from it.

  This final stage, where we are more or less entirely disconnected from our bodies, where we are physically numb and not even aware of our numbness, is the state in which many of us modern people live. Once we have retreated so fully from our somatic life and our physical embodiment, about the only thing that will help us reverse our direction is the kind of somatic crisis described above: we fall ill, experience some injury, or are overwhelmed with some other uncontrollable somatic situation. At that point, we have little choice but to take seriously the message the body is sending us.

  Within the framework of the body work, the appearance of discomfort is thus good news. This is because it marks the beginning of reversing the process described above, of the development and fortification of the ego, the ultimate cause of our disembodiment and alienation from the deeper self. By working with the body, by engaging the discomfort, the tension is present to our awareness, and we are able to engage the process of unraveling the layers of our self-concept.

  The first step in this process is that we move from a state of insentient numbness backward into a state of discomfort. Then, as the work progresses, we move through layer upon layer of discomfort, sometimes feeling great freedom and fulfillment, but often just finding another layer to peel away, as if we were an onion. The discomfort becomes more subtle and transparent as we move deeper and deeper into the body, through each successive level of emotion, feeling, sensation, mood, and felt-sense. Finally, we arrive at our core, the empty space at the center, which is open and free but, at the same time, the basis of our entire being. At that point, our embodiment is complete, our realization is actual, and the solid “ego” has become a distant dream.

  In order to work in an open and creative way with the discomfort that is arising, then, it is important to understand that, far from being a problem, it is what we have been looking for. If we believe that our discomfort is an indicator that something is wrong, it will be natural for us to resist it and push it back again into the shadows of our body. If, on the other hand, we see it for what it is—a positive development and marker of our progress in the somatic work—we are far more likely to welcome it and approach it with an attitude of openness and curiosity.

  The discomfort that we are experiencing in the body work is, then, a sign that our somatic practice is beginning to succeed. It means that the body is communicating information that has needed to come to our awareness, perhaps for a long time. We begin to understand that distress itself is an expression of the “wisdom of the body.” It is the body’s way of letting us know there is work that needs to be done and life that needs to be lived—and our discomfort shows us the way in. Discomfort, then, is always a message—that we are holding on too tightly to our sense of self—and an invitation for us to relax, open, and surrender to the fire of larger experience.

  SIXTEEN: The Process of Letting Go

  Within the body’s tension itself is found an invitation for release. This invitation brings with it critical information: as we become more and more aware of the uncomfortable tension, we also find ourselves beginning to sense that it is actually we—the conscious, intentional, focal awareness we are constantly trying to maintain—who are responsible for the tension in the first place. It is our own overlay, so to speak, that is creating this phenomenon of freezing.

  This is not a conceptual kind of understanding, but something that suggests itself on a much more primary, even physical level. By doing the body work, we start to “feel” some pattern of our investment in the tension, our contribution to it, our maintaining and reinforcing of it. As this sense becomes more and more palpable, we begin to discover that we are coming into the capability to take responsibility for the tension, to enter into it consciously, and to let go.

  It is as if, at first, we are on the outside, looking at the holding. Next, as we look more closely, we can feel a boundary between us and the holding. Then we find that boundary dissolving, and, as this occurs, our awareness begins to dissolve into the tension itself, so that, in a manner of speaking, we find ourselves inside it, discovering that it is actually we who are holding on. There is, at this point, a sudden, though often quite subtle, somatic fear, almost a panic, that arises—there is a trembling, a shaky, unstable feeling. For a moment, we are both holding on and releasing. We oscillate back and forth. On one hand, we can’t seem to let go, but at the same time, we feel we have to let go—to open, relax, and surrender. We hover on this excruciating edge for some time, and then—as long as we don’t back off and run away—we find ourselves somehow moving through it and releasing.

  This process of release is repeated in virtually all the body work exercises, every time we do them, whether we are just beginning practitioners or have been at it for years. Sometimes the identification of tension and its release form the core of the somatic protocol we are doing. At other times, we may be focusing on something else, but even then, we are continually finding places where we are holding and that are calling for release. At certain points, when our awareness is deep within the silence of, say, the lower belly, we are aware that release is still occurring on some outlying periphery, and we are able to incorporate that into the work we are doing without moving off-center. Often, the release occurs in a very small region of our body, but there are times when we locate a tension, enter it, and let go, only to find an entire side of our body letting go and opening up. The process of release seems to go on and on because the journey into full embodiment, and the accompanying dismantling of the solid, pathological self, offers no endpoint in sight.

  Our holding on is both physical and psychological. Ultimately, what we are holding on to is some kind of fixed feeling of being; that is the psychological dimension. It manifests in physical holding but is ultimately driven by psychological fear and insecurity, by our grasping after personal solidness and security, personal territory that we are trying to maintain. When we let go, then, it is thus not just a physical letting go but, at the same time, a letting go of our fixed sense of being. This represents a leap into the unknown.

  The moment of release is a leap into the unknown because, in that instant, we can’t take our thinking mind—the mind that objectifies our experience and knows conceptually—with us. When we leap, we just find ourselves there, naked and stripped of any way to conceptualize our body—or anything else—at all.

  In this moment, there is an abrupt and complete shift in the way we are experiencing our body. Prior to release, we felt an intense solidity, an unbearable claustrophobia, related to our somatic holding and our frozenness. In the moment of release, however, it is as if this intolerably suffocating claustrophobia has suddenly disappeared completely.

  Abruptly, we experience ourselves as nothing but empty space, with no one commenting or even observing. We find our body still present, for this is not a disembodied state. In fact, it is quite the opposite: we f
eel completely in and at one with our body while at the same time feeling empty of any solidity or objectifiable reality. And, with nowhere to land, nothing to latch on to, our mind falls into a state of utter silence. We may feel relief or freedom—we may burst into laughter or uncontrollable sobbing—to find that there is, in this moment, no longer any sense of “me” at all.

  This experience of “unknowing,” as we may call it, goes by in a flash. Soon enough, we come back, reconfigure ourselves, and engage in the process of holding and freezing, of thinking and objectifying our body once again. But such an experience leaves its imprint—we are left longing for it, longing to return to that “nowhere” space of our body, which, strangely, is what we have been seeking all our lives.

  SEVENTEEN: The Unfolding Journey

  As we continue with the practice, the process of exploring our physical being and unlocking our somatic tension goes on and on, to more and more locales in the body and to deeper and deeper levels of subtlety. In each new experience, we bring prana, life, and awareness to our bodies, we feel the blockage, we meet the invitation to release, we surrender our hold, and finally, we experience the relaxation, the sense of unknowing, and the open space that result.

  In this process, we become acquainted with our body in ever new ways. As we proceed, we may feel as if each particular part of our body is opening like a flower. As we go further with our breathing, we increasingly discover a sense of energy, life, and vitality in, for example, our hand.