Learning What the Body Needs
Aprender lo que el cuerpo necesita
A question about working with the body's energy after a long, active day, which opens into a wider exploration of mistakes, ethics, and the balance between waking up and tending to daily life.
Learning What the Body Needs
A question about working with the body's energy after a long, active day, which opens into a wider exploration of mistakes, ethics, and the balance between waking up and tending to daily life.
I have a question about our energy. I've had a long day, doing all kinds of things, moving around. I feel pretty grounded, but at the same time my mind is getting a bit lazier, and it's harder to stay present. My body feels more energetic. So I'm curious about your take on working with the body's energy. I have this desire to splurge on some food, or maybe go on a run to use that energy efficiently. But at the same time, my mind feels tired from the day. I also take in my environment very intensely when I'm out, which expends a lot of energy. So I'm curious what you'd say about that.
There isn't a lot to say, in the sense that it is always a learning and an exploration to discover what works and what is needed. It never ends. It's ongoing for me too. If I have long days and I'm doing a lot, I have to manage and discover what kind of food works, what kind of activity I need, or lack of activity. It's a constant flow, a constant learning. What I can say is that the exploration itself matters, and that the body has fewer limits than we think it does. But it does have limits, and the same is true of the mind. So we need to learn what is healthy for us, and that changes.
So maybe it's about working with whatever is happening right now, wherever the mind is at, wherever the body is at. Not putting it down for the state it's in, but also not taking on things that will intensify it too much. I guess it's discovered.
Reading discomfort correctly
It is a discovery, because even intensity could be right. It's also learning to sense what is not right, because it's very common to interpret healthy discomfort as wrong. An easy example to understand is physical exercise. It can feel uncomfortable, but we know that if it's done right, it's healthy. The same is true with the mind. What matters is to have the sensitivity, the attunement with our own body, and then to read things carefully, being wary of the misinterpretations that are in service of a belief.
For example, suppose the body is signaling a need to have a healthy meal right now. There's hunger, and there's a felt-sense knowing that this is a good moment to stop and eat something specific. But then the interpretation can come: "It's fine if I eat later." This happens to me. Even when I know it's an interpretation, there can be a misreading. There is always interpretation, and this is where it becomes a never-ending learning. A few hours later I can realize that I did need to eat, because now I'm feeling the effect of not having eaten, and it wasn't the right thing. That's a learning. Then I know that when I have that particular sense, most likely I do need to stop and eat, and it's not okay to eat later. So it's a constant attuning and learning, watching the misinterpretations. Learning from knowing they are all interpretations, that's what helps.
I find myself making a lot more mistakes lately, and afterward I think, "Okay, interesting, I can learn from this." I could be making really hideous mistakes. Although I don't know if it's right to call them mistakes, or just behaving in different ways: doing different things, eating different things, saying certain things to people.
What a mistake means
I believe there is a right place for the meaning of mistakes. In an ultimate sense, there are no mistakes, but that can be a bypass, a cop-out for not looking at them. Mistakes are where we learn. So it's functional and useful to see, "Yes, that was not right for me, or not right for somebody else, or for both." That is a mistake in the sense that, if I am in love with love and true to absolute truth, I will see it as not wanted. I don't want to repeat it, and I want to learn to shift so that the behavior that happens through me is most aligned with my deepest understanding of what is loving and truthful, to this body, to this mind, and to others. It cannot be at the expense of one or the other. If it's loving to this body but unloving to others, it's not loving, and vice versa.
That makes sense. I guess it also has to do with not getting trapped in the game of self-righteousness.
That's the end of learning, the end of wisdom. The end meaning that it will happen no more.
But then some people in my life may take advantage of that sweetness or kindness. If I apologize, someone might use it against me.
That's where it's complex, and the learning is infinite. You can learn whether an apology is needed, and how to offer it in a way that also makes clear that taking advantage of it is not acceptable. It doesn't go both ways. If I'm apologizing, it doesn't mean you can now slap me. That has been a very big learning for me.
That feels doable.
Freedom from the need to be a certain way
It's a beautiful way to live, when one wants to live aligned with truth, love, ethics, and beauty. And it's never-ending. There is no perfect arrival at being always truthful and loving. The work we do here allows us to be more and more aligned with, and free to be, truthful and loving, learning more and more. It's the freedom from the need to be a certain way, and it's also the freedom to then be as loving as we can. It begins from the freedom to be in any particular way, because the need to be a particular way is where most of the distortions that create unloving behavior come from.
To add to that, there's also a kind of traumatic response, where things are a certain way and they're stuck that way. I've been exploring that lately too.
Ethics and waking up
Different traditions teach this in different ways, but I see it in nearly all of them: the work on ethics, on how to be and how to behave, running simultaneously with the work that is more about waking up. Some traditions focus more on one at first and then the other, or vice versa. Waking up, said in this context, would be the recognition that there is no need to be any particular way. It is the freedom from arriving somewhere, from being any particular way. That actually creates a freedom from the need to avoid fear and pain, because the need to avoid fear and pain is what creates most unethical behavior.
That recognition is somewhat rare, and it takes time. So in the meantime, one can work on ethical behavior. It's also known that clearing the body and the mind of beliefs and traumas makes one more prepared for that recognition. But there isn't a perfect map. There isn't a perfect method.
That makes sense. It makes me think of certain countries. India, for example, where there's a lot of suffering in the streets, garbage everywhere, and things can seem full of pain. But there's a certain work that people can do there, working with that pain. Then you go to a country like Japan, which is very clean and organized. There's a certain orderliness, a calmness. People give each other space, they have their quiet areas. So there you might have something else to work on.
Two cultures, two emphases
It's complex to generalize, but loosely, in India, because there is a focus first on spiritual recognition, there is a misattending of what is here, not enough caring for what is here. In a sense that is a beautiful thing, because it's an example, and it's also a place where a great deal of spiritual recognition has come from. Many people have awakened very deeply in India for that reason.
For the reason of not tending, not cleaning?
For the reason of the focus on waking up. It is very socially acceptable there to focus on waking up, to decide to go to a temple and dedicate one's life. For millennia, spiritual exploration has been a pride of a family in India, generally speaking, whereas in the West, not so much. Japan I sense is more balanced. I haven't been there, but my impression is that it's a more balanced culture, one that has managed to balance both. Then again, you might argue that such balance could be not challenging enough. I really don't know. I'm generalizing very loosely. I have been to India but not to Japan, so this is only a loose generalization. My point is that both aspects are needed, and they're not separable. But at different moments of our lives, one is more needed than the other.
It's like a pendulum.
Yes, though it might not have the regular rhythm of a pendulum. It's not so mechanical. Although it is a bit like hunger or sleep, which are fairly rhythmic. We sleep when the sun goes down, we eat one, two, or three times a day depending on the person. What I'm talking about is a little more mysterious. It could be that for ten years one really focuses on the development of the body and the mind and less on waking up, and then waking up becomes a calling. It's a weaving of something very personal and very mysterious.
The two bypasses
What can happen is the avoidance of one in favor of the other. That's what needs to be recognized, because seeing it is what will be most helpful. One might be trying to wake up when eighty or ninety percent of the struggle is really about facing the challenges of daily living, and one is avoiding those challenges through an attempt at waking up, with a belief that if I wake up, this will be solved, or I won't have to deal with it. That's what's called spiritual bypassing.
But the opposite is true as well. I don't think I've seen it named this way, but there is a psychological bypassing: the belief that all I need to do is keep working on my body, my mind, and my traumas, and then I will get to what only waking up can give me. The root of that belief is that I want to arrive as I am, to arrive as a person, at the very thing I intuit that I want, which is freedom, which is only here. But that can only be known by the ending of being that person, the ending of the belief in that separate self. Psychological bypassing is the attempt to arrive at that through personal gain, through personal effort and achievement, hoping for it to be granted through merit. And it's the opposite of that.
So the middle way is to see what is needed here, right now.
And then the inner integrity to see where we are lying to ourselves, where there is an agenda of avoidance, where we are living in service of our fears and the avoidance of our pains.
That can be all over the place in my life.
It's hard. It's complex.
Well, thank you for your time.
Thank you, a pleasure. I do have to go now. Thank you for your question, and thank you all for coming. Have a lovely day.