Return From the Ghost Realm

I was 30 years old before I realized that I was disembodied. Like so many people, I walked around thinking I was living a life, and of course I was, but most of my existence played out in my head. I had almost no present moment awareness of my body. I was senseless.

In certain respects, there is no way I could have been otherwise. I survived an upbringing filled with drama and trauma which I both endured and witnessed, and which was largely hidden from the outside world, as we all tried to maintain an image of “normal.” My reactive strategy was to cut myself off from bodily sensation and attempt to think or imagine my way through life.

In college I majored in Theater and Psychology, both of which provided opportunities for Gestalt-like exercises and improvisations to open us up into vulnerability (where change and creativity can flourish).  I somehow managed to be both devoted to and disconnected from this work. Even through years of Jungian therapy and brief forays into yoga and Zen practice, I remained in the world of mental construction. I certainly felt passionately about things, and frequently expressed my strong emotions (in ways I sometimes regretted), but in retrospect it seems I was merely having passionate thoughts. I wasn’t truly feeling emotions, which is a bodily experience, so I remained stuck in the realm of hungry ghosts – the unsubstantial realm of ideas and concepts, never quite fully connecting to tangible reality.

When I began taking Alexander lessons, this all changed. I found something better than the short-term safety provided by shutting down or numbing out. I literally learned how to feel my body once again. This brought with it a more sensitive and increased appetite (so I ate better), the ability to enjoy a soak in a hot bath (so I could soothe myself), and a deeper appreciation of nature (even in New York City), to name just a few benefits.  I also discovered some buried memories of abuse, but I was ready to receive this information, in spite of how scary and unsavory it was. Regaining an embodied awareness made it possible to face my past and heal from it. It became my new survival strategy.

For many years, as I continued to grow and heal, I held a view that I was rather damaged or deficient in this area, that normal people didn’t have to remember to be embodied or didn’t have this problem with disassociation. I held this view regardless of a mountain of evidence to the contrary. As an Alexander teacher, I see very few students who show up fully embodied (or even partially so), but nevertheless I carried this notion that my history was responsible for my need to practice embodied awareness.

Then several years ago, I read something by Ajahn Sucitto, a widely respected Buddhist monk and teacher, which helped me correct my wrong view, and see that nearly everyone tends to live in their head. I was relieved to hear him describe his early years of practice and his misunderstandings about meditation and mindful living. His description of attending to bodily sensations -- and what can result – sounds exactly like what I learned to do in my Alexander lessons, and what I do now as a meditation and mindful movement teacher.

Here’s what Ajahn Sucitto has to say about deepening his understanding of embodied awareness:

One of the things I worked on was to widen my attention by attuning to the bodily sense. For example, when you’re standing up and know whether you’re balanced or tilting over, that’s a bodily sense. When you feel tension or when you feel relaxed, that’s a bodily sense. It’s not focused on a particular point, it’s a reference to the whole; and it connects to the emotions. When you feel welcome and when you feel rejected, there’s a bodily sense there. When you feel frightened or angry, there’s a bodily sense. If you bring up images associated with ill-will, you can feel certain energies shift in your body. If you feel you have to defend yourself or prove that you’re good enough, something in your body has to tense up. This bodily sense is affected and responsive.

Attuning to the bodily sense is a form of mindfulness of the body. It’s essential to embody awareness in order to handle mind and feeling, because otherwise we have to rely solely on our conditioned thinking. In other words, if awareness isn’t embodied, then the domineering head is likely to be the default director. But with an embodied mind, assessment tunes in to the direct feel of anger, worry, or craving in the nervous system. In my own case, simply attuning to its effect on my body would bring around an immediate relaxation; not a slump but a relaxation, especially in the face, the shoulders, the belly, and the hands. Rather than judge or complain, embodied awareness allows stress to discharge by softening, widening, and releasing.

This approach enabled me to note and include the intelligences of body, head, and heart. I found this both transformational and at the same time very ordinary and obvious. I could establish kindness from knowing in my body how good it felt to be warm-hearted. Then I could develop the heart by collecting my thoughts on those occasions when others had manifested generosity, helpfulness, or sympathy. These didn’t have to be emotionally highly-charged, just instances of the ordinary decency that people manifest towards each other every day. It’s all very natural; but for me it represented a return from the ghost realm of imagined objects to the real world of feeling subjects. [Excerpted from Unseating the Inner Tyrant by Ajahn Sucitto, 2014 © Amaravati Publications]

People spend a lot of time in meditation (as in life) trying to wrangle their thoughts, when what needs to be happening more and more – what will actually provide the most calm and power – is to turn the mind toward the body, and dwell there.

I’ve written about this before: Ease Up for a Change, Go With Your Gut, There is a Body,  and A Most Reliable Mindfulness Bell are some examples, and they contain Bodymind Experiments for you to try.

Because, as it turns out, we all need more practice in fully inhabiting our incredible bodies.