Reaching Past the Body

As I sit under the morning Phuket sun, after exiting the west for a year now, I can now confidently say environment determines state.

There is something this year has taught me, I have been sitting with for a long time now. And every time I try to put language around it, the language falls a little short. But that is part of it. The falling short. The pointing. The way we can gesture toward something the body already knows but the mouth cannot quite articulate.

So I will try to point to it.

We wake every morning into something that has already arrived. The breath was there before we noticed it. The light was doing what light does. The body had been running the whole operation through the night, repairing, dreaming, cycling through things we will never consciously remember, and it asks nothing in return. It just keeps going. And then we open our eyes and the first thing most of us do is reach past the body, past the breath, past the light, toward a glass screen that will tell us what to think about today.

And I do not think we realize what that costs.

Not once. But thousands of times. Over years. The body keeps arriving every morning with the same offering. And every morning the hand reaches past it. And slowly the capacity to taste what is being offered begins to dim. And we call this aging. We call this stress. We call this just how things are.

And I am not sure it is any of those things.

I think the most profound thing we can learn in our time here is not a technique. It is not a system. It is how deeply we can participate in the experiences of life while staying connected to something behind the experience. Behind the breath. Behind the form. Behind this finite body that is walking around doing its groceries and putting gas in the car and sweeping the floor and repairing the relationship and raising the children.

How deeply can we be in the mundane. That is the whole question.

Chopping wood, carrying water. Before and after, the same actions. Nothing changes except the depth at which the participation is happening. And that depth is where the fracturing starts to heal. The fracturing of the mind from the body. The fracturing of the spiritual from the practical. The fracturing of who we think we are from what we actually are.

Because most of us are walking around thinking one thing, feeling another, the body holding a third thing nobody has asked about in years. And any real practice is simply this. Bringing those layers into one coherent arc. So that the person who walks out the door is not three different people pulling in three different directions, but one person, arriving, whole, into whatever the day is holding.

And the way this happens is almost embarrassingly simple.

We breathe. And I do not mean the breath that happens by itself, though that breath is a miracle we have never adequately thanked. I mean the conscious breath. The breath that drops into the belly on purpose. The breath that says to the body, I am here. I have arrived. I am not reaching past you this morning.

How deeply can you breathe in the moments when you want to contract. How deeply can you simply be aware that yes, you are participating in this breath, but you are actually behind this breath. Behind this finite form. And who you are behind it is almost unnamable, because as soon as we name it, we have created another label, another concept, another thing the mind can hold and feel safe about. And what is behind the breath does not need the mind to feel safe. It was safe before the mind arrived.

So all we can do is point. And even the pointing falls short.

Forgetting is necessary to remembering.

Children carry a unique quality of wonder, and a natural knowingness of their own being. You can see it in their eyes before the world has taught them to doubt what they are looking at. An intelligence that is in synchronicity with something much larger than the room they are standing in. And then slowly, through the well-meaning mechanisms of a civilization that does not know how to hold this kind of wholeness, the forgetting begins. And by the time we are thirty or forty we have forgotten so completely that the forgetting itself has become invisible. We think the forgetting is just who we are.

And the whole purpose is remembering. Not learning something new. Remembering something that was there before we had language, or a story about who we were supposed to become.

Our ability to perceive this is cultivated. Through our own inner practices of clearing the lens. Through making spaciousness with the breath. Through listening to sound. Through warm water in the morning. Through sweeping the floor with attention. Through allowing the earth to do what the earth has always done, which is nurture us through wind and water and silence and the raw intelligence of seasons. The more we tune, the more we harmonize. And the more we harmonize, the more we start to generate a life rather than manage one.

Every soul has a unique way into this. A unique doorway that only they can enter. Some need movement. Some need sound. Some need solitude. Some need companionship. Some need the teacher’s voice. Some need the friend’s presence. Some need heartbreak, because heartbreak is the territory where the door was hidden the whole time, behind everything we were trying to protect.

Without initiation, people mistake accumulation for meaning. Each threshold of a life teaches its own lesson of impermanence, and what is left after impermanence is virtue.

This is why I gravitate toward heartbreak. Not because I love it. Because I know what it is made of. The same thing love is made of, only turned inside out. And when you stay with it long enough, when you do not run from it, when you let it move through the body the way weather moves through a valley, something loosens. And what is behind the loosening is not emptiness. It is the unchanging ground that has been holding everything this whole time.

So the practice is not a practice in the way we usually mean. It is not something you add to your life. It is how deeply you can enter the life you already have.

How deeply you can breathe when the moment wants you to contract. How deeply you can be with the warm water in the morning before the day has asked anything of you. How deeply you can chew the food until the sweetness arrives. How deeply you can look at the person across the table until you see them, really see them, not the role, not the function, not the history, but the face. This face. Right now. This unrepeatable face.

How deeply you can sweep the floor. How deeply you can carry the water.

Every moment is the practice.

The beginning of knowledge is always, I do not know.

What matters most usually arrives before explanation does. The way starlight arrives. From somewhere beyond anything we can calculate. Reminding us of something we knew before we had a body to carry it in.

So we breathe. And we stay. And we let the breath reach the places we have been afraid to feel. And we let the body be met. And we let the morning arrive.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​