The Gradual Rewiring of the Body After Awakening

So tonight and other times you've mentioned the tension from, it sounds like it comes from identifying with the limited self. And I can't remember whether it was your first evening or one of the recordings, you mentioned that there can be layer upon layer of that sort of tension felt in the body. Do you know what I'm referring to? Yes. So how do you recommend working with that? That's my experience. I'm coming to this from another spiritual practice. And I'm curious how you recommend working with those layers of tension. Okay. Yes. Just first of all, a comment about those, these tensions in the body, that they're tensions that are laid down all through life, but particularly very early on in life. For instance, let's say that there was suddenly a very loud bang in the room. Let's say that, I'm not even going to suggest the sound system. Let's say a clap of thunder, very sharp. We would jump, that there would be an instant contraction in the body. And for some time after the sound had disappeared, that the echo of this contraction, this tension in the body, it would take some time, possibly some minutes to dissipate out of the body. So that's what I call a residue. The residue that is left in the body after the initial shock. In this case, the initial shock was a clap of thunder. It had no emotional content to it. So in almost all cases, in fact, in all cases, it would wash itself out of the body in a matter of seconds or a few minutes. But if as a child, we are repeatedly subjected to unloving behavior or circumstances from which we feel, in which we feel we have to protect ourselves or shrink, this is like a repeated shock. And those residues don't get washed out of the body. They begin to build up in the body. And they are, this is what I mean when I say they are laid down like layers in the body. And they last long after the relationship has been healed or not, or the situation or whatever it is. They last into adulthood and they continue being laid down in adulthood, in response to circumstances. And so most of our bodies are a network of these layers of tension and contraction. And these survive the recognition of our true nature. So it is precisely this aspect of our experience that our yoga meditations are deal with. They are that part of our experience that lie below the threshold of the thinking mind. The thinking mind doesn't touch them. Even a clear non-dual understanding doesn't touch these residues. So normally on a retreat such as this, quite early on I would very slowly begin to introduce this approach to the body. But because I was away for a few days, in effect I kind of started halfway through the retreat and I started from scratch. I did try to look at the meditations that you had listened to, but I couldn't. It felt too mechanical to try to incorporate them. I just thought I'm going to start from scratch. So we haven't had as much time this week as I would normally have had, and I would like to have had, to explore these yoga meditations. And I apologize for that. Although in the last few mornings we have just begun to go there. And it's an exploration in which we explore very deeply the actual experience of the body. So we drop the label body. We start with our eyes closed. We start with experiencing the body just as a sensation. Then we drop the label sensation and realize our experience of the body is just sensing. And then we touched on this a little bit this morning. We allow sensing to expand into the field of awareness in which it appears. We notice, for instance, that the experience of sensing has no edges. Now it may seem that in these contemplations we are not doing anything to the body. Indeed we are not doing anything to the body. However, in exploring the body in this way, we are realizing in a non-conceptual experiential way the inherently transparent, open, borderless nature of the body. That experiential understanding has a profound impact on these residues. It feels like we're doing nothing. Indeed we are doing nothing to the body. But feeling it in this way, feeling that the body, for instance, is just a borderless field of sensation rather than an object with a clearly defined border. To feel the body in this way liberates the body or begins to liberate the body from the tensions that accompany the belief, I am a solid, separate entity. In fact, we have been doing this for the last few mornings. Although I haven't really mentioned the body specifically, I've referred more to sensing. We have actually been allowing the body to liberate itself in our contemplation of these residues. I would encourage you to go more in this direction. There are lots of examples on my website of these yoga meditations. They are all based on this new way of feeling the body in a way that is consistent with our understanding. They are tremendously powerful exercises. I sometimes call it homeopathic yoga in the sense that it seems to be almost nothing, but it has a profound effect. It rewires the body. It reorchestrates the body. We feel the body more and more to be open and sensitive and empty and transparent. In this process, layer upon layer of these residues of feeling, these ancient feelings bubble up to the surface. They are just sensations, they are tensions. They are layers of tensions that bubble up to the surface. They are simply felt as sensations that are just allowed to soak in this warm bath of awareness and gradually percolate out into the surrounding space. The surrounding space, in turn, percolates into them, transforming and dissolving these knots with the lovingness and the emptiness of the surrounding space. That's a description, but it's a very experiential thing. It's not a one-off thing. It's something that, in my experience, we need to come back to again and again and again and allow this soaking of the sensations in the space of awareness. They are in time. Slowly, the body gives up its solidity, its density, its tension, its me-ness. Thank you. That's the way I've been dealing with it. It's very similar to what you're describing, so it's good to get it clear. That's a description of the general approach. Then there are specific contemplations that we do sometimes with specific areas of the body. For instance, the face is where a lot of me-feelings are stored. I, the seer, and I, the hearer, and the taster, and the thinker. The face and the head is a place where there is a very dense and rich mixture of me-feelings. Sometimes, in a meditation, we'll spend the whole meditation just exploring that area. I've given you a broad outline. As I say, on my site, there are lots of specific explorations of the breath, of the chest. Thank you.