Equally important, falling apart is a deeply somatic experience. Let us be clear: What falls apart is not our body, not at all. The only thing that falls apart is our mind or, more specifically, what we typically think about everything, all our concepts of “me” and “the world.” It is the self-absorbed, self-congratulatory, or self-mutilating activity of our conceptual process that begins to wobble, totter, shudder, give way, and collapse under the weight of our somatic experience.
But when we fall apart in this way, we notice that the experience is intensely somatic. As our conceptual framework begins to wobble and totter, we feel first slightly uneasy, then queasy, then distressed, and then quite anxious indeed. As it shudders, we feel an increasing dread. As it begins to give way, we experience strong fear. As it collapses, we feel a rush of intense energy that we might associate with panic or terror. One can hardly miss the increasingly somatic nature of this process of falling apart. Uneasiness is felt as a kind of slightly sick feeling; as our falling apart continues, with increasing distress, we feel anxiety and then dread—we may feel like throwing up. While these feelings tend to be localized in the belly, when we begin to experience strong fear, the feeling becomes more extensive—we feel fear throughout our thorax, belly, heart, and throat. Our face may burn and our head throb, and we may feel dizziness or even some vertigo. Then when we feel panic or terror, there is a release of energy that we may experience as rather open and empty, not solid in any physical way yet pervading our whole body. The feeling is very much in our body, yet the solid ground we usually associate with our bodily experience just isn’t there. We are finding a very different, much more purely energetic experience of our so-called body.
So, as our mind, or what we think, falls apart, at the same time, we fall into our body. But the body we fall into isn’t one thing—it is a cascading series of ever-changing, ever-deepening events. We are discovering a lot of things about “physical embodiment” that we did not know and perhaps never even imagined.
Falling apart is a troubling experience for all of us, to say the least. We feel our mental superstructure become shaky—trembling, tottering, then plunging into emptiness. When this occurs to people who are disembodied, it is very difficult to stay with the process of falling apart, to follow it through and reap the benefits it offers. If we are primarily in our heads, we will short-circuit the experience and exit into thinking. We will run after strategies of distraction, medication, therapy, work, and so on—anything to try and make sure we don’t have the experience again. However, if we are grounded in our physical being, if our awareness is sensed as pervading the body, if in the background of our psychological undoing we feel the body’s own sense of peace, well-being, and—dare I say—security of a fully embodied existence, then falling apart, while painful, is no big deal.
When we let ourselves fall apart in this way and allow ourselves to fall into our body, we come upon an experience of somatic existence that is quite unique. At this point, the body is like a vast ocean, and our distress at falling apart is like a sudden gust of wind that sweeps down and momentarily churns up a patch or sector, sometimes in big, violent waves, clashing against one another, throwing up cascades of white spray—in a certain sense, a vivid experience, one that can be awe-inspiring, terrifying, and even beautiful, in its own way, but definitely no problem, at least not in any fundamental sense.
So we mustn’t be afraid of falling apart. This is just the falling apart of what we think of ourselves and what we assume we need to be. It is only the falling apart of our frozen disembodiment and our self-imposed limitation. So let us realize what a blessing it is when our practice with the body leads us to the point of falling apart. Don’t worry, we are not falling into the pit of despondency and despair. We are not falling off the face of reality. In fact, we are falling into reality. We are giving birth, birth to ourselves. And birth is never given without pain and without surrender.
Our ego, our self-apparatus, our disembodied life, is like a suit of armor that is way too small. We are in there, we are being constricted to death, and we are suffocating, drowning in our own psychological and spiritual vomit. Then somebody says, “You know, if you follow the spiritual path, you can get out of this.” So we try it out, we practice, and the suit of armor starts falling off. And, of course, then we see what the process is really like—we begin to feel like a raw nerve. We feel very vulnerable. But, on the other hand, we feel the fresh air against our skin, the warmth of the sunlight, the cleansing of the pure rain. We finally begin to feel free.
So yes, we are falling apart and we feel vulnerable, shaky, and maybe even a little crazy. But we are present in our body, in our feelings, like we’ve never been before. We are starting to wake up and feel our own life fully, after all these years.
THIRTY-FIVE: Tracking Our Emotions
When we carry out the body work and begin to experience our self falling apart, we generally find our self feeling strong and sometimes very intense emotions. It is as if the breakup of our previous psychological rigidity and solidity opens up a much more vivid, full, and raw emotional life. This raises the question of the relationship between the body work and the appearance of these emotions and feelings, and how we may work with their new strength and intensity.
Emotions such as passionate yearning, violent rage, desperate loneliness, boundless paranoia, or terrifying fear of annihilation do not just appear in our state of mind out of nowhere. In fact, they are the end result of a process that begins with the primeval openness of our physical body, moves through increasingly differentiated energy to more specific feelings, finally appearing in fully developed form as emotions with more or less explicit links with our story line or ego narrative.
When we become experienced in somatic meditation, we are able to track this process in two different ways. First, as we work with the body, we begin to notice the different levels in the arising of emotion. We can’t always look at these directly because, if we do, we actually interrupt the process. But through the work, through sidelong glances that we experience in a kind of random but ongoing way, we gradually develop a topography of the journey our emotions make from the primeval somatic state to their fully developed, most neurotic and ego-bound manifestations.
The other way we learn about where emotions come from and how they come to be is through following the process backward. We can begin with highly charged, intense emotions, and, through our somatic explorations, we can track them backward, through their various developmental stages, to the point of their origins.
In this working-backward process, which the body work makes possible, we want to begin with the highly charged emotions. However, in the beginning, although we may feel strong emotions, we find that they are tangled up with our story line or narrative. “I feel angry because...,” “I feel desolate because...,” “I feel paranoid because...,” and so on. Initially, we need to let go of our narrative preoccupation. We do this through entering into the body. When we do so, while the narrative may dissolve, the emotions do not. At this point, we simply rest in the supercharged atmosphere of our strong emotions, wherever in the body they may be appearing.
There is a common mistake that beginning somatic meditators may make at this point. When they let go of their story line, they may, without realizing it, push away and repress the emotions that are driving it. The trick here is to descend into the body actually looking for the location of the emotions in question. If we stay fully within the body, the story line will drop, and we will be able to abide with the intensity of the emotions.
At some point, the turbulent quality of the emotions we are feeling will begin to settle out, and we will discover a more subtle, continuous feeling underlying the more dramatic displays. Behind anger may be sadness; behind paranoia, fear; behind desolation, hurt feelings. These feeling states are likely to be somatically more generalized than the turbulent emotions. At this point, our task is just to abide in our body with whatever feeling may be going on.
As we continue, an even more subtle level of experience emerges, a general “felt sense”12 in the body. While it is difficult at this stage to pin down, with any certainty, what we are feeling, we know definitely that “something” is going on. Yet it can only be felt and sensed, not “known” in a more conceptual way. The body will reflect what we have called above a “totality” of experience. It embodies the totality of what the body knows, so it has no specific location within the body. This totality of somatic sense also cannot be named because it is so abundant and so complete that any naming would be limiting and artificial. Moreover, what the body knows at this level is implicit, because what we are sensing is folded into, enfolded within, the “something,” not yet emergent into the light of our ordinary ego consciousness. The felt sense is a kind of global somatic environment, a totality of just how we are feeling our existence just now. We can’t get a conceptual hold on it or pigeonhole it, or else we would lose it; but it is there, emerging, as a particular kind of galaxy of experience.
Beneath this, we may feel a boundary beyond which we cannot pass, at least in terms of having a “something” that is our experience. We sense that boundary initially as fear or even panic. But fear of what? Panic in relation to what? If we abide in that fear or panic, look into it and through it, we may suddenly find ourselves “lost in space,” so to speak.
Here, finally, we arrive at our most basic experience of being alive: just the empty, open space of our awareness. When we journey down into the body, to its deepest levels, when we extend our awareness from subtlety to greater subtlety, we eventually arrive at the completely open domain of empty space, our basic body, our basic nature. While this nature is open, spacious awareness without any boundary or limit, nevertheless, it is colored by an energetic demeanor. As the great Dzogchen master Tulku Ugyen put it, this basic, empty awareness is like space suffused by sunlight. It is that subtle. And to arrive there is to arrive at our longed-for destination of full embodiment—it is what our body ultimately is.
(12) Philosopher and psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin’s term, discussed in interesting ways by John Welwood. Toward a Psychology of Enlightenment, (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2000), see index for references; and David Rome, “Searching for the Truth that Is Far Below the Search,” Shambhala Sun, (Sept. 2004):60–63 and 91-93. back
THIRTY-SIX: Trusting Our Emotions
The body work calls us to fully and completely be with each layer of our experience, whatever is arising within us. This includes the narrative of our “self,” progressing through the turbulent emotions, the more subtle feelings, the felt sense, our fear or panic, and our own nothingness. In the work, there can be no rush. Often, we feel that we have to do something about our vivid experience, especially our strong feelings and emotions—and the sooner the better. That, actually, is a large part of our problem. If we feel a tremendous amount of anger or frustration, overwhelming nervousness or fear, terrible emptiness or meaninglessness, we often find our self unable to remain with what is arising. Certainly, when we are not grounded in our body, it is highly unlikely that we will be able to stay with the feelings and emotions that arise.
When we breathe into our body and are fully present, though, we find that the emotions come. When they do come, we go through some kind of process, and then they go, and there is no problem in any of it. How can this be? It can be because we are identifying with a deeper part of our self. We have unplugged our thinking mind for the moment, and then we are there, just in our body, with what is occurring there. We experience the emotions and feelings with no sense of pressure to do anything about them. Of course, when we do this, our conceptual mind is always hovering in the background, our fear tempting us to do something. Frequently, we exit into thinking. So then the practice is to just keep coming back to the body, and feeling what we are feeling.
If we can learn to feel our emotions without rushing, they become the offering that is desperately needing to be expressed in the particular human situation we are just now in, whatever it may be. But we have to take the impulsiveness and the fear out of our expression. We can do that simply by being in our body fully and allowing the emotion to have its life, to move through us to expression in its own time and way.
Often the expression will be the exact opposite of what we might assume is appropriate. For example, if somebody makes us really, really angry and we just allow that anger to burn in us, let it burn without giving in to reactivity, then often quite of its own accord it will turn over, perhaps, into a gesture of kindness that softens everything, or a joke that liberates the situation, or some act of compassion that seems so unexpected and outrageous in the given context that it opens everything up. This kind of expression is not, in any way, strategized, self-conscious, or deliberate. It just arises out of the emptiness of the emotion itself; it surprises us just as much as it does the other person, and brings a sense of open space, freedom, and delight. It can really be quite amazing. As it can be with anger, so with jealousy, paranoia, want, ignorance, fear, hope, or any of the other painful and threatening emotions.
When we remain within the body and are thereby able to remain open enough to allow the process of the emotions to unfold in their own way, we make the startling discovery that the so-called “neurotic emotions” are not inherently neurotic at all. The neurotic emotionality—the self-absorption or twisted reaction that often happens with us—is not a result of the emotions themselves at all, but rather of our attempts to get control of them, to short-circuit their own natural, inborn process, and to prematurely come to closure about them. This discovery, which we make over and over in working with subtle as well as highly charged emotional states, can be experienced as astonishing, moving, and deeply inspiring.
At the beginning of this book, I suggested two possible reasons why modern people often have so much difficulty trusting emotions and working with them in an open way: the particular, highly structured, even rigid expectations of modern life; and a kind of basic paranoia about emotions that emerge from our cultural and religious heritage.
A further, perhaps deeper reason for modern discomfort with emotions is worth mentioning, because it suggests that a shift in our basic understanding can help make emotions more trustworthy and workable, even given our contemporary cultural context and our history.
As we have seen, our modern disembodiment means that people live largely within a conceptual world of their own making, attempting to “handle” experiences by fitting them into the continuous, conceptual narrative of their “I,” or ego. As noted, the more disembodied we are, the more strident and compulsive this incessant narrative becomes. In addition, the more disembodied we are, the more isolated and disconnected we are, not just from our emotions, but from a feeling of connection with other people and the larger world. Our disconnection and isolation are reflected in the high degree of personalism (everything is about me, narcissism) and individualism (I am a free agent with no inherent ties or obligations to anyone or anything) found in modern societies. The personalism and individualism that mark modern people is, in other words, a direct function of their disembodiment.
It appears to be true that emotions seem especially overwhelming and frightening for us modern people because of our overly disembodied individualistic and personalistic understanding of them. In other cultures, emotions are often understood within a much larger, less individualistic context. For example, Malidoma Somé speaks of emotions within a different, more transcendent frame of reference. Malidoma says that when someone in his village is taken over by a strong emotion, the entire village attends to that person. The reason is that, for the Dagara people of Malidoma’s homeland, strong emotion is never about just one person alone, but rather about the village community itself. In his or her highly charged emotional state, a certain person is understood to be giving birth to something that the entire village needs to know and needs to address. Beyond this, emotion is considered one of the primary ways that the “unseen” or “other” wor
ld of the ancestors—the transcendent source of life, well-being, and wisdom—transmits needed, life-giving information to the human community.
Vajrayana Buddhism articulates a similar perspective. When strong emotion erupts within us, it is regarded—in its own nature—as beyond ego and inherently pure. This means that it arises from a realm beyond ego—the buddha nature—it cuts through our ego stability and desire for control, and it invites us to contemplate the wisdom that is contained within it. Hence, in the Vajrayana, practitioners invite the chaos of emotions and attend to them with meditative presence and openness.
When, as modern people tend to do, we regard emotions that we experience as just about us, then their interpersonal and transpersonal implications are denied. We try to “handle” the great power they embody within the frame of our personal self, our individual history, and our individual life plans and ambitions. As Jung has observed, strong emotions carry the transcendent. For an individual to take them too personally is to invite repression and emotional numbness on the one hand, and inflation, illness, or insanity on the other. It is a little like trying to contain the ocean in a tea cup. It just doesn’t work and can’t work. No wonder that those in modern culture who are particularly sensitive to the emotional dimensions of life often feel marginalized or “crazy,” are frequently victimized by culturally sanctioned but inappropriate and damaging medications, and sometimes wind up institutionalized.
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