THIRTY-SEVEN: Imagination in the Body Work
As we enter the body with our awareness, as we begin to explore it and engage in dialogue with it, the imagination plays an essential role. This is often noticed by those engaging in the somatic practices—we are constantly trying to visualize parts of our body and imagine our way into various areas, playing “as if” in trying to find certain inner dynamics. This raises some important questions: In using our imagination, are we simply engaging in fantasy? Does it mean that this work is really nothing more than imagination? Or is there something more real going on here? These questions are critical since our responses to them will greatly impact our ability to carry out the somatic work, as well as our confidence in what we discover.
We can arrive at some answers by taking a look at Tibetan yoga, which, in its somatic work, makes extensive use of the imagination. Within this tradition, imagination is called bhavana, or “visualization,” the act of creating mentally. The Buddhist approach begins with the insight that human beings are continually visualizing, or imagining, everything in their world. The so-called “ordinary reality” of our everyday lives is actually the product of a comprehensive act of imagining or visualizing. When we look at something and recognize it, we are engaging in an elaborate process of receiving sense perceptions, lining them up with already known perceptual categories, identifying them as this rather than that, attaching labels to them, and then setting them within our continuous narrative, including both “self” and “world,” our fundamental but misconceived dualizing of our experience.
In order to recognize anything to be some specific thing, we engage in a process of filtering out a tremendous amount of potential perceptual and cognitive information. For example, the “impressionism” of the painter Monet is keyed to the somewhat amorphous blaze of color, the outpouring of visual energy, and the swirling intensities and patterns that are seen in the first instant of looking at a field of flowers. When confronted with this literally overwhelming and disorienting first flash of experience, we literally don’t have any mental concept of what we are seeing. Monet paints this first flash. To “make sense” of our visual experience, to domesticate it into a known quantity, without even realizing it, we drastically narrow down our visual experience and line it up with concepts, such as tulips, daffodils, and hyacinths, and red, yellow, and white. And what else is lost to us in this process? The sound and feel of the summer breeze playing across the field? The flowers’ wild scents sweeping through us? The shocking depth of the blue sky above? We wouldn’t know, for at that point, we think we are looking at a world that, while appealing, falls within known conceptual quantities and is familiar to us. This creates a more or less airtight visualization: we feel we know exactly where we are and what we are looking at.
Thankfully, in life’s more intense moments, we are unable to carry through this diminishing and neutralizing process in such a tidy manner. In moments of great emotion, we can look into the face of our beloved and realize, “I have never really seen this person before.” It is as if we are looking at him or her for the very first time. We might say that our idea of the beloved, which we took to be reality, was the visualization we carried around. But then, at a certain moment, something else crashed through: the intense reality of the loved one’s being, beyond our imagination, manifested itself to us.
Another example is provided by a friend who was in a jetliner crash in which half the passengers died. Though injured, she survived. She reports that when she escaped from the wreckage and found herself standing in an Iowa cornfield, she realized that she had never before seen the overwhelming reality and beauty of the rich brown earth, the brilliant green of the corn brimming with life, the depth and power of the shimmering blue sky. Her previous, familiar, somewhat humdrum experiences of earth, corn, and sky had been her visualization, but what she saw on that day was something infinitely more real breaking through.
Thus it is that we are always imagining. We imagine that our intimate relationship is a certain way. We imagine what our family, our friends, our job, our financial situation are. Most especially, we continually imagine the person that we take our “self” to be. Sometimes what we are imagining is not particularly challenged by reality. But it also frequently happens that what we have been imagining is suddenly revealed to be rather completely false. Things break through our mental framework that show us quite a different reality, a reality beyond our visualization: a check overdraft reveals that we didn’t have the money in our account we thought; a partner whose faithfulness we never questioned turns out to have been involved in an affair for years; we lose a job when we thought things we going well; emotions and behavior on our part make clear that we aren’t quite the kind and loving person we had imagined ourselves to be.
It is interesting that, in such situations, we often look back and realize that there had been a considerable amount of information in our environment pointing to the falsity of our visualization, but we just didn’t acknowledge it. We often ask ourselves, “Why didn’t I let this in? Why didn’t I pay attention to what was right before me?” In such situations, we realize after the fact exactly how much we were ignoring what was actually present within our experience, so invested were we in hanging on to our imaginary version. The clichéd phrase “in denial” holds deeper wisdom than we might realize!
We so often find ourselves filtering out what later seems so obvious because that is, in fact, what we human beings are doing all the time. We are always looking for a familiar and coherent world; to find it, we have to ignore a lot. Particularly when we are strongly emotionally invested in things being a certain way, we simply choose not to see many aspects of the actual situation until, of course, things occur that penetrate our ignorance.
We go through life imagining, visualizing, our reality, making it either less or more than it actually is. We might think of this imaginative tendency as creating problems for us. In terms of how our imagination usually functions, it certainly often does. Our discursive thinking, labeling, and pigeonholing of everything acts as a buffer between our self and anything real. When we feel disconnected and cut off from our self, other people, our life, and the world, it is because we have retreated into a purely conceptual world of our own making, where everything is dead and nothing is true. Living in such a conceptualized world makes us very sloppy and inaccurate in relating to people, situations, and—ultimately—our self.
Our problem, though, is not that we imagine our world, but that we believe in and hang on to our imagined version as if it is the real thing. When we look more deeply, we see that the imagination itself can provide a link between ourselves and reality that stands beyond. We begin with the fact that, as mentioned, we human beings cannot stay with our naked experience of the world, but create mental pictures of it. We then take these mental pictures to be reality and try to live within them, losing touch with the living, changing nature of our actual life. This is what samsara is, trying to live in mental concepts of things as if they were real.
But because we do try to take our conceptualized versions as real, we set our self up, so to speak. The fact that my visualization isn’t entirely accurate at least sets up the possibility of reality breaking through my version and making itself known, showing me the inadequacy of what I have been thinking. Then, in the case of the beloved or my friend standing in the Iowa cornfield, in the breakthrough, we are able to realize reality in and of itself. This reality is just our life—what it is and how it unfolds—but it is a life that had previously been unknown to us because we were lost in our imagination of it, our ideas of what it was. When the visualized or imagined life breaks down, the true reality of it is disclosed. Our small, conceptualized version of the beloved provokes the beloved to protest—“I am not your idea!—and then a breakthrough is possible. Imagination is thus able to provide the link, the connecting point, between my self and reality, and opens the way to seeing things truly and exactly as they are, beyond fantasy and beyond limitin
g concepts.
But do we have to wait for those very rare, chance, climatic moments in life in order to find the opening through imagination to reality? Buddhist yoga says “no,” but rather that we can approach imagination with an understanding that it is no more than conceptual, and also with an openness and even a yearning for what lies beyond. Then we can use imagination, ultimately unreal though it is, as a stepping stone to the reality we seek.
In Buddhist yoga, we deliberately visualize something and use that visualization as a link to the greater reality of what is beyond ego. For example, we might visualize our body as empty yet having various inner manifestations, such as energy, colors, locales of special awareness, bliss, and so on. Initially, we have no actual experience of our body in this way, but are creating a mental picture. Through using our visualization as a stepping stone, though, there comes a moment of breakthrough when we see the emptiness and manifestation of our body without any conceptual or imaginative overlay at all.
The previous examples indicate how our visualization of ordinary sense experience can break down to reveal the reality beyond. It is also true, however, that we can visualize aspects of experience that are much more subtle and less accessible, and, in a similar way, deliberately use our visualizations to open the doors of reality itself. An example from Vajrayana Buddhism may suggest how this can work. In one traditional visualization practice, meditators visualize themselves as Vajrayogini, the adamantine wisdom being, a female representation of our own inner enlightenment. The visualization includes precisely how she looks, how she speaks, and what her mind is like. She is red in color, with one face and two arms, naked, adorned with charnel-ground jewelry, and so on. Her speech is sacred utterance, a Sanskrit mantra traditionally associated with her. And her mind is the mind of enlightenment—empty, clear, and luminous. In a very real sense, the Vajrayogini we have visualized is the imaginary form of our own awakened state, present within but, up to this point, inaccessible. Then, through meditation, we invite the true reality of Vajrayogini—the true reality of our own inner enlightenment which is beyond our imagination—to break through the visualization. The process of meditation itself invites this breakthrough because, in meditation, one opens one’s mind more and more fully. Then, at a certain point—though often not before years of practice—the meditator suddenly realizes him- or herself as Vajrayogini, as the enlightened being who is truly empty yet really appearing in the world.
The very same principles apply in the body work. We have a mental image of our body that we carry around with us all the time. At first, we have no direct experience of the body, only an experience of our thought of our body, our mental image or imagination or visualization of our body. Initially, when we are instructed to place our mind into one area or another of our body, we are directing our mind to a place in our conceptualized or imagined body that actually isn’t real.
But then, at a certain point, we begin to glimpse our actual body, quite beyond any and all imagination. Our visualization breaks down, and we are left with a direct experience of our somatic being, without filters or concepts. In this experience, our imagined body simply disappears, and we are left with something quite different. We might find that, rather than being solid, our body seems filled with space; rather than being dull, it might seem brimming over with ever-changing patterns of sparkling, scintillating energy; instead of having a shape that conforms to what we think, it might be felt to have a constantly changing configuration or perhaps no particular shape at all. Moreover, we may find our body continually giving birth to inspiration and even imperatives to engagement with the world. Opening to our “real” body in this way, we are touching our own inner awakening that exists in a pure and unobstructed form within us. At this moment, we are, indeed, touching enlightenment with the body.
So it is that, as we enter each practice in the body work, we do indeed imagine what we are doing. We are visualizing; we are imagining. It is not yet real; we are not yet connected with that which exists beyond our concept. In this way, our imagining or visualizing functions as a necessary stepping stone to the body as it really is. Still, the transition from the imagined body to the real body might take considerable time to begin unfolding and, at the beginning, may occur only in glimpses. Here, as always in the body work, patience is our most important asset.
THIRTY-EIGHT: A Tibetan Yoga Approach to Physical Pain
As I have said, nothing that arises in our body and in our life happens outside of our journey, of our path, to full realization. Everything that occurs needs to be welcomed with an attitude of acceptance and openness. No matter what happens, it is imperative that we do not judge it. Especially when we are going through very difficult and trying circumstances, one cannot repeat to oneself too often, “Do not judge it; do not judge it.” Only when we resist the temptation to judge what we are going through can the journey we need to make at this moment continue to unfold, and can we receive the needed development and transformation it may bring.
But what about physical pain? Customarily, I think, the majority of us regard the physical pain that arises from injury, illness, degenerative conditions, difficult life circumstances (such as demanding physical work, hunger, cold, etc.), or simply old age as sidetracks and impediments on the path. Physical pain, whatever its cause, including even the sometimes intense discomfort we feel when sitting on the meditation cushion, is certainly one of the more distressing somatic experiences that we can have.
Tibetan yoga has some very interesting things to say about what physical pain actually is and how we may use it as a stepping stone back into our own embodied fulfillment. Since these are teachings that we can apply even at fairly early stages of learning to meditate with the body, I want to provide a brief description of them here.
The essence of this teaching is that, through descending to the depth in our body that is empty of substance, the open, vacant awareness described earlier, we have a vantage point from which to understand and even experience physical pain that can bring relief, profound learning, and even fulfillment.
By moving down through the layers of our body in the somatic practices, we arrive at a point where our body is an empty, luminous presence. As we continue our practice, we find ourself able to abide there for increasingly extended periods of time. It is from within this unconditioned dimension of our body that we can begin to make a non-ego-based relationship with our relative experience, including physical pain. In this case, it means approaching physical pain as our body itself would see and work with it. When we do so, we are able to discover the way in which physical pain, far from being any kind of problem, actually has the possibility to reveal to us the full possibilities of our somatic being. Tibetan yoga provides three primary instructions to facilitate this process.
According to the first instruction, when physical pain arises, we are instructed to rest deeply within our body. Thus resting, we allow our awareness to enter directly into the pain. This is not the ego looking from its dualistic, self-centered consciousness, but a looking that occurs from within the body itself at the level of its own primeval awareness. In this case, it is not “we” who is looking. Rather, it is we having surrendered our vantage point, and simply letting our body itself “hold” or reflect the physical pain that is arising.
We are allowing the experience of physical pain to register within the deepest level of our body’s own awareness, and we check to see what, exactly, it is. If we are willing to let go of our belief that physical pain is “bad”—and this we do by attending very closely to its physical sensations—we may make some interesting discoveries. We may unlock these by asking ourselves some questions: Does physical pain have any substance? Does it have any heart, any essence, that would mark it as “physical pain”? What we may discover is that the thing we thought of as physical pain—which, from within dualistic consciousness itself, seemed so real, so definite, and so problematic—doesn’t really have any defining feature or definitive profile at all. It is really
empty of anything that would mark it as physical pain. And it is no longer a “problem.” If we back up into our dualistic mind again, we discover the very same “physical pain” that has been hounding us. But, within the body’s depths, there is nothing identifiable as physical pain—or as anything else either. It is not that the physical sensations have disappeared. What is no longer there is our judgment of them as “bad” and “problematic.” But then, strangely, because our labeling of them is gone, the physical sensations themselves appear to be completely different from what we had previously thought.
Lama Thubten Yeshe had a serious and painful heart ailment from which he ultimately died. He used to comment that using this instruction to work with physical pain eliminated all the feeling of “problem” or even of “pain” from the pain itself. He said, “If you do this practice, you won’t ever have to go to the doctor to get pain medication.” He wasn’t saying that one shouldn’t be treated for medical conditions, but that, through these practices, one can eliminate the “problem” that pain usually involves, the identity of pain itself that causes us to be so closed down around it and so preoccupied by it.
When His Holiness the Sixteenth Karmapa was dying of cancer in a hospital in Zion, Illinois, his deteriorating physical condition certainly suggested to the attending medical staff that he should be in agonizing and completely incapacitating and absorbing physical pain. Yet, all reports described him as being fully present to others and concerned only about how everyone else was doing. I have often thought that he must have been embodying a high level of mastery of being present to pain, as suggested here, from within the ultimate depths of the body.
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