Coming Home Tuesday Morning at 9am EST ~ Body As Awareness
Coming out of our theme of numbness, we'll begin to exercise our ability to receive impressions from our whole body
Dear Friends,
As I come through the fog of numbness, I am exploring a basic, but profound aspect of embodied practice — working with awareness as the body/the body as awareness. Why? Because this is much closer to the way we perceive and sense, and it helps us awaken parts of our sensing that have been asleep.
In Western adaptations of yoga and mindfulness, the body scan has become almost rote. It’s useful to calm the nervous system and tame a wandering mind. But, it can also reinforce the illusion of a separate mind and body. The split is so fundamental and pervasive, we conduct the scan from the elevated perspective of the head, which seems to be the home of thinking, of the mind.
With practice we can begin to eliminate that mind-body split fallacy from our perception and re-claim a fullness of experience that generates and receives impressions and intelligence from the field, as the body.
I am fascinated by Dorje Drolo, the “crazy wisdom” aspect of Padmashambhava. He has eyes all over his body. “Crazy wisdom” is a poor moniker for what is essentially a primordial awareness that is wild, untamed, unspoiled and unconditioned by society’s many taboos. We call it insane only because it seems that way from the point of view of a rationalist and reason-obsessed culture. The eyes all over his body signify the awakened state and unconditioned, natural processing of information from the field.
Conceived as an ecstatic manifestation of Padmasambhava, the deity Dorje Drolo embodies the forces of insight and compassion beyond logic and convention. Invoking in the practitioner the fearlessness and spontaneity of the awakened state, Dorje Drolo transforms hesitancy and clinging into enlightened activity. ––Tibetan Buddhist Encyclopedia
This quality of multidimensional sensing is characteristic of the higher Tantras where the body is the gateway into and beyond experience.
My daughter who has been obsessed with the Greek Gods since she was five (over half her life!) reminded me of Argus Panoptes (Argus “All-Seeing”), a primordial giant and servant of Hera, who was a guardian or shepherd tasked with keeping Zeus away from the heifer, Io. Hera gave him the power to never sleep and to be always watchful in all directions at once.
Tomorrow we will sit and restore some sensing capacity to the body. We’ve been working with numbness for 3 sessions (or was it 4??), so it will probably feel good to lovingly invite awareness into our beautiful, somewhat-neglected bodies. I promise it will be illuminating.
A note on payment for Coming Home sessions
I really appreciate donations for Coming Home sessions if you feel called to give. Suggested donation is $10-20. Venmo @ElizabethSchuyler-Brown and PayPal is eschuylerbrown@gmail.com. If you are a paid subscriber, you’ve already done your part and I appreciate it!
Join me tomorrow from 9-10:15am for a talk, sit, and share.