“The sensation of life is, I believe, the sensation of two-as-oneness… When we are completely healthy we feel oneness with our bodies.” -Shizuto Masunaga
Making a good formative impression on a newborn isn’t easy. They can’t talk, they can’t see very well and they don’t entirely distinguish themselves from the environment. Instinctively, we fall back on direct modes of communication: touch, tone of voice and the energy of our presence. All modes of communication that are difficult to fake when registered by an ultra-sensitive receiver.
The transmission of information alone is the lowest form of teaching. A teacher is not only someone to learn from but to tune from. If we’re honest, we probably can admit that any teacher we really liked we wanted to be to some degree. Being to being there is a vast spectrum of energetic and spiritual transmissions. Our whole bodies listen and learn. We can speak heart to heart and bone to bone.
Children’s characters cannot be formed out of ideal word and phrases alone. Children grow up to be like what we are and not what we say. An angry parent will almost never convince their kids to control their temper. Who we are takes shape in resonance with the condition of our total environment, with the breathing and heartbeat of our family and neighbours.
As business becomes the model for life, progress and profit spur us on an eternal climb but to heal we often need to descend. In this descent, we are listening and making contact with the most basic parts of ourselves, the life system. We may be the chariot driver but we still need rapport with the horses. And animals are a lot like children, both serve as good analogies for the body. The spirits of the organs are approached as child-like in some Taoist thought.
Mindfulness as it is preached is often too psychological for my taste. My experience and the teachings I encountered on my wanderings were more practical and tangible. As the body becomes the central implement in the path of meditation we saturate it with consciousness. A process that is like a slow, careful kneading. As the Buddhas says of the first meditative frame of mind, the first jhana:
“Just as if a skilled bath attendant or his apprentice would pour soap powder into a metal basin and knead it together, sprinkling it again and again with water, so that the ball of soap powder would be filled with moisture….even so, the monk drenches, steeps, saturates, and suffuses his body with the rapture and happiness born of seclusion…” – Anguttara Nikaya 5.28
Within the body is the primal sense. It is impossible to develop the intellect required to cope with the modern world without diverting nourishment from the primal receptors of the limbic system. Most of us live our yoga of action and service in the full-on modern world. Maybe we need to be objective about our real state.
“To feel life is to become one and when you feel oneness there is life.” -Shizuto Masunaga
Yoga renews and strengthens the primal feeling. Yoga nourishes the renewal of the earth in ourselves and our connection to the substratum of nature and the elements. This connection is a basic support for our health and sanity. I’m not suggesting the connection to nature is a substitute for higher yogic aspirations. It is the part of ourselves which is like the deep life of the earth where the roots taste the soil and trees whisper to each other.
“In a material society we are prone to deal with material things instead of life-spirit. The more you emphasize materialism the more life-spirit deteriorates. This attitude towards things endangers nature.” -Shizuto Masunaga
When intelligence floats away, far from our life feeling we tend to wander in illusion easily believing in lies in spite of our proudly hyperactive intellect. This situation also opens our bodies to diseases we don’t understand because we are far from our ground and our consciousness follows its own pathways effectively abandoning its own life systems.
Where marketing has obscured sincerity we can’t hope for much in the long term. We have a shiny skin and something resembling a brain but the bones and the heart are missing. Why endlessly rationalize when the smell tells you everything you need to know? Look at recent history, how many bizarre cults had doctors and engineers in their fold. Intellect has limits.
The alchemical world view permeates my thought. The problems of the inner and the outer world seem to be sympathetic reflections of each other. We need to go deep to breath into the bones. Let’s breathe life into our work with sincerity for our health, the health of yoga and the health of our world.