What the Body Knows
Lo que el cuerpo sabe
A question about working with the body's energy after a long, demanding day, which opens into a wider exploration of mistakes, ethics, and the balance between waking up and tending to daily life.
What the Body Knows
A question about working with the body's energy after a long, demanding 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, and 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 in an energetic state, so I'm curious about your take on working with the body's energy. I have this desire to just splurge on some food, or maybe go on a run to use that energy, but I don't know, because my mind feels tired from the day. And I take in my environment very, very much when I'm out, which expends a lot of energy.
There isn't a great deal to say, in the sense that it's always a learning and an exploration to discover what works and what is needed. It's never-ending. It's ongoing for me. When 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 don't need. It's a constant flow, a constant learning. What I can say is that the exploration itself matters, and the body has fewer limits than we think. 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.
Maybe it's about working with whatever is happening right now, wherever the mind and body are 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 has to be 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. So what matters is having the sensitivity, the attunement with our own body, and then reading things carefully. Be careful with the misinterpretations that are in service of a belief.
For example, the body might be saying there's a need to have a healthy meal right now. There's hunger, and there's this felt-sense knowing that this is a good moment to stop and eat, and to eat something specific. But then an interpretation can come: "It's fine if I eat later." This happens to me. Even when I know it's an interpretation, there can still be a misreading. It's always interpretation, and this is where the never-ending learning lies. A few hours later I can realize I did need to eat, because now I'm feeling the effect, and it wasn't the right thing. That's a learning. Then I learn that when I have that sense in that way, most likely I do need to stop and eat, and it's not okay to eat later. So it's a constant attuning, learning, and watching the misinterpretations. Knowing they are all interpretations is what helps.
Mistakes as the place of learning
I find myself making a lot more mistakes lately, and then thinking, "Okay, interesting, I can learn from this." Sometimes I don't even know if it's right to call them mistakes. It's just behaving in different ways, doing and eating different things, or saying certain things to people.
There is a right place for the meaning of mistakes. In an ultimate sense, there are no mistakes, but that can become 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. That was not right for me, or not right for someone else, or for both." That is a mistake in the sense of something that, if I am in love with love and true to absolute truth, I will see as not wanted. I don't want to repeat it. 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. That is to this body, this mind, and to others. It cannot be at the expense of one for the other. If it's loving to this body and 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. It means it will happen no more.
But then some people in my life may use that sweetness or kindness, that willingness to say sorry, and take advantage of it.
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 is not acceptable. It doesn't go both ways. If I'm apologizing, it doesn't mean you can now slap me.
That's a very big learning for me. It feels doable.
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 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, that's also where a traumatic response comes in, where things are a certain way and they're stuck that way. I've been exploring that lately.
Waking up and tending to what is here
Different traditions teach this in different ways, but I see it in nearly all of them. There is the work on ethics, on how to be and how to behave, alongside the work that is more about waking up. Some traditions focus on one first and then the other, or the reverse. Waking up, 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. And 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 mind from 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 some countries. India, for instance, 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 people can do there, working with that pain. Then you go to a country like Japan, very clean and organized, with a certain orderliness and calmness, people giving each other space and quiet, and you have something else to work on.
It's complex to generalize, but one can say loosely that in India, because there is a focus first on spiritual recognition, there is a kind of misattending to what is here, not taking enough care of what is here. That is, in a sense, a beautiful thing, because 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's 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 in India has been a pride of a family, generally speaking, whereas in the West, not so much. Japan seems more balanced. I haven't been there, but I have a sense that it's a more balanced culture, one that has managed to hold both.
But then you might argue that such balance could be not challenging enough.
I don't really know. I'm generalizing very loosely. I've been to India, but not to Japan. 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.
Rhythm, and the two forms of bypassing
It may not have the mechanical rhythm of a pendulum. It is a little like hunger or sleep, which are fairly rhythmic. We sleep when the sun goes down, we eat once or twice or three times a day at certain times. But what I'm talking about is more mysterious. It could be that for ten years one really focuses on the development of the body and mind, and less on waking up, and then waking up becomes a calling. It's a weaving that is very personal and very mysterious.
What can happen is the avoidance of one over the other. That's what needs to be recognized, because that recognition is what will be most helpful. Someone might be trying to wake up when ninety percent of the struggle is simply facing the challenges of daily living, and they are avoiding that through an attempt at waking up, with a belief that waking up will solve it, or mean they won't have to deal with it. That'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 arrive at 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. But that can only be known by the ending of being that, the ending of the belief in that separate self. Psychological bypassing is the attempt to arrive at freedom through personal gain, through personal effort and achievement, hoping it will be granted through merit. And it's the opposite of that.
So the middle way is to see what is needed here, right now.
Yes. And then to have 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 fears and the avoidance of pain.
That's all over the place in my life.
This is hard. It's complex.
Thank you for your time.
Thank you. A pleasure. I have to go now. Thank you for your question, and thank you all for coming. Have a lovely day.