I am trying to change my language to match my change in perspective. It is starting to seem strange to refer to “my body” when I am increasingly aware that this body with fingers on the keyboard and feet on the floor is “me!” I am this body, I do not have a body. This body is all that “I” am.
Consciousness is not something that floats outside this body, watching and observing all that is happing with this body. Consciousness is something that this body does. Consciousness is co-extensive with this body as clearly as my sense of touch. I am not aware through my body. This body is aware, which is to say I am aware.
The sensations that belong to this body are my sensations, not my body’s.
It has been a lengthy process for me to come to this way of thinking. I have always resisted the cultural training that objectified this body, that made it something to control, to beware of, to reverence. I have spent a lifetime slowly unlearning all I have been taught about body. Body awareness has not come easy for me, but I have had an intuitive reaching out for that understanding.
This is no subtle shift, but seems to me to be more of a tectonic shift in perspective. My body is not a temple of the Holy Ghost as I often heard. This body is the deity. The more I am able to enter into deep concentration, the closer I get to samadhi, the more I realize that what once seemed outside my awareness is actually within. The Vajrayana path is feeling both comforting and familiar. Will I have the courage to let go of my preconceptions and walk it?
Sensory connection is my only real connection. For me that includes imagined sensation. Imagination is included in what I regard as sensory / body experience. I think this is because imagination is built primarily with my remembered sensory / body experience.
Right now, Zoom is a useful substitute for direct sensory experience. But Zoom still remains a somewhat tragic substitution for direct body experience because I must imagine and then relate to something that is not actually happening in front of me right now.
For me, body is the foundation for longing and desire. Body is a rich source of how it feels like to be alive. At the same time, body is a constant reminder of the impermanence of life.
Body is how I most deeply relate to others. Closeness with others, with trees, with rocks comes in many body experience. I open in awareness in a manner that is intimately involved with and dependent on body. How I relate to others comes in so many forms: how I see, how I hear, how I touch others. I consider it ironic that I learned how not to see, how not to hear, how not to touch, all things that body does so naturally. So much shame has been attached to teaching about body.
It is a gift to feel body. I feel grateful to have the experience of ripening, of shedding the deadening husks of my culture. I am grateful to begin to know what it means to be body.