So you need to come to an understanding of your relationship to your body, how you identify with your body and your attachment to your body as a result of that identification. You think your body is you, and you hold on to it for dear life, so you’re never relaxed. This level includes all the attachments to all the bodily pleasures, and the negative attachments to all the physical pains. It includes sexual pleasure, physical contact pleasure, movement pleasure, stillness pleasure, all the realms of bodily attachment to pleasure and lack of it. Attachment to the body then is not just attachment to the physical body, but also to what the physical body means to you, all the pleasures and the comforts and the safety you believe it gives you. There is nothing wrong with these things, it’s the attachment to them that creates the misunderstanding that is experienced as frustration and hell. I’m not saying you shouldn’t want all these pleasures, that’s not the point. The point is, the attachments to them will inevitably cause suffering.

Opening to the Spiritual Wisdom of the Body

Explore a Revolutionary View on Embodiment Here

What is the body, really?

What is the role of the body on your spiritual journey?

Usually the action of the personality separates our mind from our Being, and then we want to figure out what to do and what not to do. So we are not allowing our Being to actually act. Yet it is acting all the time. The majority of our actions are done by Being. If you allow your identity to be the Being, you’ll see that Being is not separate from the body, or even from the mind, instead it is the very nature of the body, the very nature of the mind, even the very nature of the personality. In Being there is no boundary and no separation. That means the action is coming from the ground, the source, Being, so it is real doing and involves all levels at once, from the bottom up. It’s as if the Being radiates from the bottom of a lake and creates a wave that radiates throughout the whole thing. Everything is involved —mind, body, spirit, emotion—and is happening in one direction. And that direction, when Being is focused in one place, is what we call essential identity, the essential self. The true identity arises when there is a need for an essential action. When there is no need for a response, there is no essential identity, there is just Being in repose: no activity, no mind, no body, no nothing, just stillness. When a tiger is not acting, just lying there, it doesn’t know anything, it doesn’t think of itself as tiger. It is just Being. When it acts, it becomes one-pointed, and that one-pointedness is at that moment the identity of the tiger.

What you usually feel is your personality. The best thing to do is to understand it, because understanding, or the attempt to understand, is the attunement to Essence, regardless of what it is you understand. The desire for understanding, the understanding itself, and the result of understanding are Essence. Do whatever is needed to understand your mind while remaining present. That, in itself, will attune you to your essence, to your true nature. It is not that you are looking for Essence; Essence is not something you are searching for. That is not how it works. You find Essence by being Essence through certain activities. This is so without your even knowing it. As your understanding increases and crystallizes, you start becoming aware of what it is that is increasing and crystallizing in you—your essence. It’s not going to be something you get from somewhere over there. It’s not as if Essence is a light somewhere and you walk in the dark until you find the light. The looking itself is going toward the light. By understanding, you embody the light more and more because understanding is the light.

When a quality of Essence is blocked from a person’s experience, what is left in place of that quality is a sense of emptiness, a deficiency, a hole, as we saw in our discussion of the Theory of Holes. You have seen in your work here how you actually experience that emptiness as a hole in your body where a quality of Essence is cut off. This creates the sense that something is lacking and, therefore, something is wrong. When we feel a deficiency, we try to fill the hole. Since Essence has been cut off in that place, we cannot fill the hole with Essence, so we try to fill it with similar, false qualities, or we try to fill it from the outside. Suppose, for instance, that our love for our mother is rejected, not valued. That love in us is hurt, wounded. To avoid experiencing the hurt, we deaden a certain part of our body, and in that way we are cut off from the sweet quality of love in ourselves. Where that love should be, we have an emptiness, a hole. Forgetting that it was our love that was lost, we think that we lost something from outside and try to get it back from outside. We want someone to love us, so the hole will be filled with love.

When our awareness of the body is completely free from any image, conscious or unconscious, experience moves to a different dimension. We realize that our experience is no longer centered within the body, but in a boundless expanse of consciousness, which feels more like clear spaciousness than anything corporeal. (See The Void [Almaas, 1986] for further discussion and case material.) This is not an experience of the mind that is part of the body, as Lowen might assume, because this clear spacious awareness is seen to contain the body and mind. This is not what is commonly called an out-of-body experience, because the body is more vividly and pleasurably sensed than is ordinarily possible. Although this experience of the body occurs in deeper spiritual dimensions when we experience ourselves free from any body image, it is not the deepest, and hence not the most objective, perception of the body. Awareness of the body completely without mental representation is profoundly surprising. It moves to dimensions beyond those encountered in bioenergetics analysis, or in any body-centered therapy. In full self-realization we experience the body as a transparent, diaphanous form of presence. The form is seen to be more superficial than the ontological reality of presence, which is beyond any form. This experience of the body is not easy to access; it involves a leap of consciousness that generally requires a great deal of inner work, such as decades of intense meditation practice. Many reports from spiritual traditions describe the experience of the body as an open, transparent form of presence.

The usual use of will is actually a contraction in the body. It is a hard place in us, which we use as a stepping stone for action. When people say they have their will, they are referring to a certain hardness in the body, from which they feel they can act; they can spring out and feel supported in their action; or they feel they have something under their feet, and that they won’t fall. But if you look closely at that hardness, that stepping stone, you can identify it as a tension in the body. You might feel that you can’t live your life without that tension; you have learned to contract certain parts of you, near your heart, to make a little hardness, and from that little hardness you feel you can act. You feel if the hardness is not there, you will be completely empty, and will just fall, unable to do anything. But what the contraction actually does, ultimately, is close your heart. It closes the love, the joy, and the satisfaction. Using false will always goes against the heart.

When you know your essence, you can allow yourself to experience merging love with another person; you don’t feel the need for barriers between you and the other. When you feel your beingness and the beingness of the other, it is okay for them to become one beingness. When there is no issue of me and you, of boundaries and separation, then there is no issue of us as One. Merging love creates a state with no barriers. There are no barriers then between you and anyone or anything, between you and your body, your surroundings, your car, the whole universe. You feel you are sharing in everything, you are part of everything, melted with everything. Your heart is open and melting like butter. This is a deeper aspect of who you are, a deeper realization of yourself. You begin to know yourself without reference to your body, your feelings or your environment. You are a depth. You look into the distance and you don’t feel you are looking at the distance; you are the distance. You look up into the sky, into the clouds and you don’t feel you are looking into the clouds. There is no distance between you and the clouds. You are the clouds. You are here and everywhere. Your boundaries are gone and the belief in boundaries is gone. They have melted away. This kind of love is one of the most difficult for people to experience in love relationships even though it is exactly what they say they want.

The next step, which is the most difficult one, is to recognize what the body is. Basically, you see that you are the divinity, and you are also a particular condensation out of it. And that condensation becomes a body of light. You recognize that the body itself is light; it is this divine love, but in a particular form. So we can see that at the beginning, when we are identified with the body, we are not even identified with the true body. We’re identified with an image we’ve developed of what the body is. We don’t even know what the real body is. When we’re free of that mental construct, that story we developed about the body, we can begin to experience what the body truly is—a body of light. Because when you know that everything is light, you recognize that even your body is light. It’s very difficult for people to develop an awareness of this because our familiar experience of the body is so physical. I mean, your body hurts, right? And we can say from the scientific point of view that the pain is real. Well, it’s true, sometimes the body hurts. But who says a body of light can’t hurt? The body of light is pure awareness, and when it hurts it’s due to an intensification of sensation in that field of awareness. And there are two ways in which we can experience such an intensification of sensation: one is painful and the other is pleasurable.

In realizing the freedom vehicle, we realize that each of us is an objective, precise instrument for the absolute. We exist as its eyes, its mouths, its ears, its arms, its legs, its genitals, its brains, its nervous systems, its mind, its intellect, its heart, and so forth. The complete and natural function of any of these organs, and hence of our bodies and souls, is to be an instrument of the absolute, allowing the absolute to behold and experience its own creation, its own display of its hidden treasures. To be fully ourselves is to faithfully serve the absolute, to purely and selflessly do its bidding. In serving it, in surrendering our wills completely to its dynamic will, we find our happiness and fulfillment. We cannot be happy by trying to fulfill our separate and self-centered wishes and desires, if they conflict with the natural outflow of the logos of true nature. Recognizing our selfishness and egotism and understanding how these positions dissociate us from our true nature, allows us to align our wishes with the natural flow of Reality. First we need to align our identity with the absolute ipseity; but deeper still, we need to align our will with the will of the ipseity.

The physical body is one way that our individual consciousness appears in the world. Each body and form is unique and beautiful as the expression of the one consciousness appearing as many. The ocean of consciousness can express itself as currents of uniqueness that can feel the pull toward one another with a fullness, velocity, intensity, and energy. Rather than a hunger spawned by a sense of missing something, it is a wanting to give and a wanting to receive at the same time. The desire to unite is the expression of the ocean that knows itself as the unity arising as currents within it and that feels a charge, an attraction between those currents. The currents—particular individuals, each a unique consciousness expressing the ocean of our nature—sense this energy and desire between them since they are fundamentally not separate from one another.

For example, to believe that I’m not a body but I have a body is very useful at some point when I begin to recognize and deal with my body image. As I begin to realize that I am identified with a body image, it is possible for me to recognize that I am a consciousness or spaciousness that has a body. This insight may manifest as truth at some point, which then transforms my experience. But this truth is not final. A year or two later, I might start having certain issues that I recognize are there because I make a separation between my body and my soul. I think I am a soul that has a body or a body that has a soul. At the time, it was useful for me to recognize that I am a soul that has a body, but a year later that truth becomes a falsehood because I recognize then that the body is nothing but a manifestation of the soul. There is no body separate from the soul. The soul doesn’t have a body, like a possession; the body is as much a part of the soul as my feelings are a part of the soul.

This points to something important about our True Nature, our natural condition: True Nature is indivisible. True Nature cannot be divided; it doesn't have separate parts. It is not like a machine that has many parts, and it’s not even like the body, which has many differentiated organs. Everything implicit in True Nature exists everywhere within it. It is not as though True Nature had love, for example, and this love is sitting in the gall bladder; it doesn't have a gall bladder. Love is everywhere in True Nature and so is awareness and so is strength. All of True Nature is one unified presence, and the same is true of awareness. True Nature and awareness are inseparable, and that fact can serve as guidance for our practice.

When thinking in terms of the self, when we have a self-centered point of view, we are dominated by what the spiritual traditions call the animal soul or the carnal self—the part of us based on, and oriented toward, physical reality. Its aim is to satisfy instinctual needs, such as survival, security, pleasure, and social comfort. To satisfy the self, basically, is to satisfy those needs. But even when those needs arise, they are inseparable from the belief in a self that is separate from the rest of reality, that needs to be supported in order to survive. We generally cannot separate the body from our sense of self, of identity. If we look at it from the perspective of nonconceptual reality, we see that the self is really a concept in the mind—an idea that we have believed for a long time. We have believed it for so long that we are convinced that it is absolute reality. This idea is based on seeing that the body is separate from other physical objects, and concluding, “I exist as a self, as an individual with instinctual needs.” We find that many of our needs, if not directly instinctual, are just modifications or elaborations of, or reactions to, those basic needs. Those needs are real, but if they are what you live for, then as Christ says, you will lose your life. You will not have a true life. But if you lose your life for his sake, for the sake of truth, you will regain it.