The body never lies. — Martha Graham
We want to get to below discursive thought to the place where mind—not your mind or my mind but mind itself—is original, fresh. . . . At the back of every word we write is no word. — Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life
When I received the invitation to contribute to the recent Buddhistdoor Global (BDG) 30th anniversary symposium, my immediate thought was to offer a guided movement practice, even if it was online: my ecological conscience didn’t let me fly across the Atlantic to be there in person. A conference entails much sitting on chairs—you may cross your legs one way, and then the other, and that’s as far as physical exercise goes. I thought that some scheduled movement would provide a welcome break and reset the nervous system, so participants might find themselves more relaxed and alert as a result, able to take in things afresh.
Another reason for my choice had to do with the theme of the conference: how to take BDG into the future—a future in a digital age that would involve a great deal of sitting in front of screens, potentially neglecting the body and missing out on its wisdom. When it came to the delivery of my contribution, I found it a little difficult to stop at the brief introduction and ask people to stand up. It would have been easier to keep talking, to not interrupt the conference status quo, to display PowerPoint slides with arguments for exercise as a means for more balanced living, rather than actually doing it. The resulting cognitive dissonance would probably have hardly registered; we are so used to it. So much of what we do every day is at odds with our instincts of what constitutes planetary sustainability, for example. In this article, I can flesh out my argument a little and make a plea for a more embodied way of conducting our enquiry into mindful, ethical, and compassionate living, now and into the future.
Using words and other intellectual capacities is alluring to us and we value it highly, but it does come at a cost. We become so invested in the stories we tell ourselves, or are being told, that we lose contact with the immediate, pre-narrative reality of sensory experience. We easily override the barely perceived signals that our eyes become tired from staring at screens for too long, and that our bodies ache from being in contorted positions for too long. We lose touch with the subtleties of interoception, not just knowing when we are hungry but what we are feeling and picking up below the intellectual radar—the gut sense of whether something is in alignment with our values. Without fluency in reading the physical signals that give us information about when our defense system is triggered, we are in a far less potent position to make creative decisions about our actions. Riding out emotional discomfort on a visceral plane, feeling it as physical tension in shoulders, jaws, and stomach, enables us to keep a wider window of tolerance. And we generally learn better when our experience is anchored in physical experience.
I always appreciative when opportunities for embodied learning and enquiry are made available to the wider public, as in the current exhibition in the Glasgow Tramway by Solange Pessoa, called Pilgrim Fields: “an ecological, visceral and sometimes otherworldly landscape unfolding across the gallery floor, creating connections that span the prehistoric past to the present ecological crisis.” (Tramway)
You see heaps of organic matter, millions of marigold metals, safflower seeds, with sculptures dotted about, inspired by plant shapes. The best thing about it is that you are welcome to pick up the clanky gourd shells, listen to the rustling of dry reeds, smell the black sheep wool and dried seaweed, press your hands into wet sphagnum moss, and stroke the sculptures. Our grandchildren wanted to do more than just carefully touch the edges of the heaps; they wanted to immerse their whole bodies in them, learn about them by becoming one with them. I felt sorry for the gallery attendants, trying to reign in the visitors’ zealousness.
There is, of course a verbal element to an enquiring attitude. Being curious often entails asking questions and some questions are more helpful than others, as I learned in my coaching training. Questions that can be answered with a “yes” or a “no” tend to keep things in a narrow range of development, and “why” questions take us into our heads, make us intellectualize. “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is perhaps the most puzzling, and unanswerable question. We will never know what came before the Big Bang, and apart from instilling a general sense of awe and wonder it is not worth spending time pursuing the matter. The Buddha, while encouraging the spirit of enquiry, advised his followers to stay away from such metaphysical conundrums. Certainly, in a context of personal, creative, or spiritual development, “what” and “how” questions are more rewarding than asking “why.” Try it out right now, if you like, and listen to your body’s response. Ask, “Why do I want to meditate?” a question asked by some meditation teachers to arrive at an intention for the practice period. Then ask, “What do I long for in this meditation?” The difference is quite pronounced in my experience, the first question activating the brain in a narrowly searching way, prepared for success or failure, the second dropping me into the mysterious depths of a body-based savoring of possibilities, already aligned with the state I am attracted to. “What is going on in the body right now?” is always a useful, grounding, mindfulness-based enquiry, or, “What wants to be experienced and accepted?” or, “What’s important to the other person?” or, “How can I contribute to a kinder world?” And I listen to answers that do not just confirm the already known.
Through my lifelong active pursuit of the arts, particularly painting and movement improvisation, I have become familiar with the energizing and absorbing power of playful inquisitiveness. I dialogue boldly, yet sensitively with the material I am exploring, coming from parts of myself that are less rational and less governed by social expectation. Rather than asking, “What do I want to paint?” where the success/failure-oriented concerns of the “I” narrow the field of options, I ask, “What wants to be painted? What is waiting to be expressed?” I let the colors and shapes themselves speak, and listen to the request of a golden yellow asking to be complemented by a particular shade of pale blue, in order to bring out its warmth. A dance is happening, with minimum editorial direction, where marks of different length, thickness, and texture interact and feed off each other. It is an open-ended improvisation, like life itself. Abstract art doesn’t try to imitate nature but uses the principles of nature to express aspects of its spirit. A painting is finished when there is a sense of clarity and balance—when nothing more asks to be done, when questions have been laid to rest—for now.
This approach extends naturally into meditation practice. Instead of demanding that the mind behave in particular ways, we can ask: “What is the quality of awareness right now?” or, “How does kindness want to express itself in this moment?” These enquiries invite a receptive, listening quality that allows deeper wisdom to emerge organically, rather than forcing outcomes determined by over-idealistic expectations.
You don’t need a canvas or a box of paints to develop this spirit of enquiry, but it helps to have some routines of training in some kind of discipline that can be opened up in this way. Actually, something as ordinary as cooking a meal would serve the purpose just as well. I have a morning routine of doing “bodywork”—exercises and movement sequences drawn from a range of approaches, such as the Feldenkrais Method, yoga and Authentic Movement, which emphasize sensitivity to the interoceptive field and working with the breath. Even so, this morning I felt some resistance—it all seemed a tad tedious and pedestrian. I was lying on my mat, with my knees bent, feet on the floor, just not motivated to move at all. Rather than forcing myself, I simply waited for a while, feeling and allowing the flatness of my energy. Eventually I asked myself “What wants to move?” a core question in Authentic Movement, and my legs started to sway almost imperceptibly from side to side, then swinging in unusual circles, making my spine arch and twist in ways that led to surprising head positions. Very soon I started to feel engaged again, plugged in to ever-present life energy, in touch with John O’Donohue’s (1956–2008) words:
I would like to live
Like a river flows.
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding. (Tenneson Woolf)
See more
Solange Pessoa – Pilgrim Fields (Tramway)
Fluent, Like a River (Tenneson Woolf)
Related features from BDG
Resiliency: Releasing Trauma through Embodied Art
Ancient Dances Today
From Mandala to Nirvana: The Monk, the Dancer and the Archeologist – A Pilgrimage of Activation
Why I Dance
Mindfulness Coaching, Where Contemplation Can Meet Action
