Wild and Untamable
"Heart unclouded, heart clouded. Standing or falling, it is still the same body."
Princess Yodo
5th Abbess of Tokeiji
What does it mean to have a body? I live there, it shits, it sleeps, it tosses awake in the darkest hour of the night. It stands with a spine and a belly. It weeps. It is nature, always changing and never solid. It is a miracle of form and function, and it is off-putting too with its odors and fluids.
The body is not a fixed stable object (hello aging), and yet it can be relied upon. We can rest the mind in its here-ness and a-liveness.
The body loves the deer that has fallen, its neck twisted and body bloated, eyeballs missing. It loves the vultures that come to eat and the coyotes with their rowdy uproar under the moon.
The body holds paradox, strength and resilience like a miracle. Yet it is fragile too, vulnerable and so easily hurt. Broken by accidents. Cut open by doctors. Burned by sun. Soothed by sun.
It is wild and untamable, subject to fits of loneliness and illness.
You may have heard the spiritual saying that you are not the body. Which is not entirely true nor is it entirely untrue. I would rather say that you (and I) are not just the body. The body is our doorway into belonging and awakening. Without it we would not be here together on this earth as spring deepens and the sun moves across the sky.
And not only that, it is the doorway through which we walk to heal our anxiety and fear.
Everywhere I turn there is the instruction to come home into the body. I teach yoga, a practice of intimacy with the body. I attend a healing trauma course and the instructions are to ground into the moment to moment physical sensations of the body. Mindfulness instructions point us to feeling the sensations of the breath in the body. The Buddha himself tells us that everything we need to wake up in this life is right here in the "fathom-long" body.
The body is alive and it is my life. Can I learn to love it? Can I learn to love all bodies and all lives? Can we?
It is nature. I am nature, and we are nature. It is the vehicle for serving this life and this world. Through it, we are in relationship with all things as they arise together. To love and care for it is to love and care for life itself.
"Yet it is just within this fathom-long body, with its perception & intellect, that I declare that there is the cosmos, the origination of the cosmos, the cessation of the cosmos, and the path of practice leading to the cessation of the cosmos."
Rohitassa Sutta