O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!
—John Keats
It is good to feel at home in your body, to enter into your animal nature.
You need to fall silent, so that you can be aware of what you are feeling in all its immediacy. To be sensitive to fine sensations, vibrations and delicate flows of energy. To notice how you are affected by your immediate environment, your here and now. To become aware of desire, as it wells up and dies down again.
You are going to sink down softly, into your own embodiment.
For many centuries, in many parts of the world, people have feared and suspected the body. The physical and the sensual have been widely condemned – and often brutally punished. Now people turn against these customs, but in ways which may be merely rebellious.
Are we still contaminated, despite a surface hedonism? Are we divided selves?
And are you not human, in a human frame? Are you not alive?
Here is a practice, which is simply about being alive. It is easy. It takes little time. Soon you will find that the puritan who watches over you is fading naturally away.
The practice branches after the first three steps. And so you must choose.
At the branching point: will you actively choose one of the five branches? Or will you choose to wait and see which branch opens up before you? Then as the process develops: once you are on one branch, will you commit yourself to it? Or will you leave yourself free to move from one branch to another?
Stillness
The first step is to become still.
Find a time and place to be quiet, to shut out distractions. Let yourself be comfortable, in whatever position feels good to you, standing, sitting or lying down.
You are allowing your thoughts to subside, little by little.
Sensation
Spend some time simply being aware of raw sensation.
This has nothing to do with naming or describing. Nor having insights, nor being wise. You need not set out to change anything.
When the mind begins to chatter or images to stream, come back gently to what you are feeling.
Just sink luxuriously into whatever is there. Be aware of the body as a whole – the complete body-image – and felt patterns of sensation, vibration and energy.
Environment
At times, you will be aware of your present environment, your here and now.
Whatever sense impressions are here, just let them be. The world is having a certain effect on you, which the body registers.
Now the practice branches:
The sensual branch
In the crucible of stillness, as the elements of sensation and environment combine, there wells up in your body some kind of wanting, desire, restlessness or longing – an impulse to act, or a wish to be acted upon by the world.
Here you meet both freedom and captivity. You fall into a world of pure sensuality, the pleasure and the agony of the physical.
The compassionate branch
Perhaps you are in pain. You have been through some deeply traumatic experience, either in early childhood or later on. When you try to work with the pain or frozenness which is left behind, it is too much – too direct, too invasive, and unsafe.
You might try just being very gently present to the world of your sensations, quietly aware of the place in you which is hurting. It may be that little by little something will ease.
There may be a symbol – that is, an image with a charge of associated feeling. Perhaps you can let the image simply be there in the image-space? – letting yourself be gently aware, so gently aware, of the pattern of feeling which it carries.
Now suppose, for all your gentleness, you find yourself beginning to drown. Then clearing a space may be more helpful – for it offers a way to be just barely in touch with painful memories; safe from being sucked back into their agony.
The contemplative branch
Meditation is awareness without judgment
in the whole of your life.
—Akong Tulku Rinpoche (personal communication)
Now you are simply watching your feelings, as they come and go.
Our souls are cluttered up with psychic litter. All our lives we have been hoarding junk. Let it emerge, and let it go.
When we simply discard – not pushing anything away, but simply releasing, releasing, releasing – sometimes there comes a breath of profound existential relaxation – an unfamiliar opening into freedom and space.
Perhaps some veil will be drawn aside. You may feel desire or terror, awe or mystery, clarity or joy, peace or benevolence. You may find yourself entering into the white oceans of silence.
There is nothing here to hold on to. Inner states come and they pass.
Something remains.
The intuitive branch
You are listening to the shifting energies of the body.
You may simply leave yourself open to the Other; or you may actively say (to yourself, to God, to the source, to the universe, or wherever the magic comes from…) –
“Please – I need some help with Problem X”.
And you wait…
A window may open here – perhaps into the world of dreams; or perhaps some intuition will flash into your mind.
Please don’t expect to remember what comes. Insight is often fleeting. You may need to write or draw for a few moments, to capture what just came.
The expressive branch
So long as you are still, be still. After a while, you will feel ready to move.
When you need to move, then move. You might move into dance or poetry, music or painting. Some form of creative expression is natural for you. You are allowing it to emerge gracefully from the silence of waiting.
You can go to and fro between stillness and movement, each informing the other.