A New Series—The Body Speaks

A Con­ver­sa­tion with Your Body

Today, I’m begin­ning a new series. I’m not totally sure which direc­tion this series will take, so I decided to use today’s arti­cle is a way to present the frame­work of the topic I have in mind. As usual, I’m com­ing at a topic from two direc­tions at once.

Some weeks ago, in the last series, I talked about “los­ing your head.”

One of the biggest prob­lems we expe­ri­ence here in the West is over-thinking while under doing.

Peo­ple have a burn­ing desire to under­stand why they think and act the way they do. Typ­i­cally, much energy is devoted to find­ing the peo­ple, places, or things that are to blame for where the per­son is right now.

I spend count­less hours attempt­ing to demon­strate that the sto­ries in our heads about who we are, and why we are, are noth­ing more than fic­tions. Indeed, from a Zen per­spec­tive, the “entire cat­a­stro­phe” (to quote Zorba) is a fic­tion. Not only is our world view a con­struct, our ego is equally a con­struct.
In other words, we are noth­ing more than our lat­est story of our self. The cure is giv­ing up story telling altogether.

The odd piece is how much time and effort peo­ple waste “think­ing things through.” All this reflec­tion amounts to, ever, is one the­ory stacked upon another.

It’s only when (and as) we let go of the sto­ries that we have a chance of find­ing peace of mind.

Peace of mind comes not with the ces­sa­tion of men­tal chat­ter, but rather as we turn our atten­tion to the silence that comes in between the sto­ries we tell our­selves. In a sense, enlight­en­ment seems to be all about find­ing a way to be at peace despite the chatter.

So, if liv­ing in our heads all the time sim­ply does not work, what’s the alternative?

As I’ve men­tioned before, a rather offhanded com­ment by Fritz Perls sum­ma­rizes where we’re going with this series. He said,

“Go out of your mind
and come to your senses.”

I pic­ture him smirk­ing as he said this and wrote this.

Again, as I said in that for­mer arti­cle, this flies in the face of West­ern assump­tions about the value of our minds.

It’s why, for me, I expe­ri­ence had The Haven in 1996 was so pro­found. I’d spent 13 years doing coun­sel­ing by that point, and I knew that some­thing was miss­ing when all we worked on was the odd, pecu­liar habit of think­ing. At The Haven, I was rein­tro­duced to ele­gant breath­ing and to Body­work.

Redis­cov­er­ing that the body has a lan­guage of its own expanded my prac­tice, my focus, and my approach to life.

Now, the weird piece is how often we try to ana­lyze, label, or describe our body sensations—and thereby end up right back in our heads.

So, you may be won­der­ing, “But don’t I have to fig­ure out what my body is try­ing to tell me?”

My answer is both yes and no.

The “yes” part has to do with “get­ting” the mes­sage our bod­ies are work­ing so hard to tell us. The “no” part has to do with not get­ting stuck there—in other words, hav­ing yet another story or expla­na­tion of who and what we are is of lit­tle use.

What’s required is a change in direc­tion, and that requires a change in behav­ior.

Let me repeat a really impor­tant Zen prin­ci­ple, and then tell you a story.

In Zen, every­thing is directed toward find­ing com­fort in peace and emptiness—emptiness of a pecu­liar kind. Zen and Bud­dhism are not nihilis­tic.

Nihilism (from the Latin nihil, noth­ing) is a philo­soph­i­cal posi­tion which argues that Being, espe­cially past and cur­rent human exis­tence, is with­out objec­tive mean­ing, pur­pose, com­pre­hen­si­ble truth, or essen­tial value.
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In other words, they are not focused on noth­ing. Zen and Bud­dhism are focussed on empti­ness.

My way of describ­ing empti­ness?
Emptiness=empty of meaning.

Zen is about drop­ping the need to define, explain, defend, or judge. The more empti­ness I can cre­ate inside myself (where else would the empti­ness be?) the more space there is for the free flow of Chi. This, in turn, can be refined, directed, and used to power our cre­ativ­ity, our pas­sion, and empower the ele­gant liv­ing out of our lives.

This isn’t the story I was going to tell you, but it just occurred to me so let me toss it in here. I was work­ing with a client yes­ter­day. She’s a per­son I’ve known for almost a decade, and some­one I care about deeply. She just recently returned to talk and to do Body­work. We were dis­cussing her beliefs, and how they play out in the real world.

I kid­dingly sug­gested that she get a
T-shirt with two let­ters on it:
R C.

R C stands for “Res­cue Chick.” Because that’s what she does—she res­cues. Since our first ses­sion, she’s taken a bit of a step back from res­cue mode, but her descrip­tion was, “I’ve put them all in lit­tle boxes, and I’ve pro­vided lists of rules for how they should behave.”

Her default belief, and the one it might best empty her­self of, is that it’s her job to save every­one else first—and then it’ll be time for her. But it’s never been her turn, not in 45 years, and maybe never will be, if she doesn’t drop this belief. Which is hard.

So, I told her some sto­ries and we talked and talked, and finally her eyes glazed over. I said that I thought her mind was likely full. And then I told one more story, about total self-responsibility.

Her eyes opened wide. She said, “In the past, I thought I under­stood what you just said, but some­how now I really get it.” I replied, “So now you know. In order for you to learn some­thing new, you first have to exhaust your mind, so that you can finally let go of your fix­a­tion on your beliefs—beliefs that do not, and have never, worked.”

But the key here is to remem­ber that the voice in her head, the one that encour­ages her to be a res­cuer, will go on and on until she dies.

The only ques­tion is, can she quiet that voice enough to choose another way of being? And when she estab­lishes this other way, will she also choose to put it into action?

If you’re a long­time reader, you’ll know that one of the core com­po­nents of my Body­work the­ory is that the body is divided into zones. Many East­ern approaches to the body do this, divid­ing the body into regions, and sug­gest­ing that regions, or merid­i­ans, or Dan Tiens (burn­ing cen­ters, or energy gates) have psy­cho­log­i­cal meaning.

Many years ago, I fell in love with Car­olyn Myss’ “Anatomy of the Spirit,” and use her chakra the­o­ries all the time. There is a wealth of infor­ma­tion on this the Body­work sec­tion of our website.

On to the story. Recently, I’ve been work­ing with a client who has returned after sev­eral years. She’s done all of the tra­di­tional things West­ern­ers do to deal with a badly blown lower back. Noth­ing much has helped, and she is notic­ing that she is get­ting stiffer, and, as she put it, “Less flex­i­ble.” To which I replied, “Yeah, and your body is less flex­i­ble too!”

Our belief is that the lower back, the sides, and the lower belly is the rela­tion­ships zone. The lower back has much to do with pas­sion for life, and a lower belly with sex­ual passion—and thus an issue of how we relate to sex.

Need­less to say, in our cul­ture, this is a hot, hot zone for injury. And in keep­ing with the the­ory, my client, in the past, has had many unre­solved rela­tion­ship issues.

The thing that caused me to think about writ­ing this series hap­pened as I was work­ing on her solar plexus. (Chakra 3) As I men­tioned with the Zen guy, the solar plexus region is about self-esteem.

I don’t like to get all airy fairy about self-esteem.

Self-esteem, to me, is “sim­ply” about own­ing, respect­ing, and liv­ing from a place of accept­ing all of me. It’s not about pos­i­tive affirmations—because the real key to self-esteem is accept­ing and own­ing not only the socially accept­able, fun parts of myself, but also the dif­fi­cult parts.

In my client’s case, she is com­ing more and more into a place of accept­ing the rela­tion­ships she has just as they are. She’s learn­ing to give up on wish­ing they were some other way or try­ing to fix peo­ple. And, as she does this, she has less and less pain in her body.

But notice what’s hap­pen­ing here. As you let go of the long-held belief that your mis­ery is the result of the behav­ior of oth­ers, sud­denly there’s no one left to focus on. Or bet­ter put, all that’s left is you. I thought it very sig­nif­i­cant when I asked her how she was, and she said, “Bored.” This from a highly active, deeply involved pro­fes­sional woman.

Of course she’s bored!

She’s invested years of energy blam­ing every­one else, being sad about every­one else, being focused on every­one else. Now, she’s giv­ing up on this and has yet to dis­cover some­thing else to do with her time. At the same time, she’s landed firmly in her body, which for years has been giv­ing her mes­sages. In the past, when that hap­pened, she retreated to her head and thought about some­one else. She’s now resist­ing this temp­ta­tion. And she’s notic­ing that she’s bored because she doesn’t know how to be with herself—without ref­er­ence to others.

Then, as I pressed on her solar plexus region, she noticed “…an amaz­ing rush of energy.”

It’s almost as if let­ting go of her men­tal chat­ter about oth­ers has become the key fac­tor in her expand­ing aware­ness of herself.

And as she attends to her self, with­out much thought, she notices her own energy, flow­ing up through her legs, her pelvis, her tummy, her heart.

Our work con­tin­ues. I attempt to give only as much expla­na­tion as is barely nec­es­sary to frame this new expe­ri­ence. I want her to engage with the expe­ri­ence, and the only place that hap­pens is in her body.

Med­i­ta­tion

I got an e-mail from this client a cou­ple of days ago, and one thing she wrote was, “I’m hear­ing that I should med­i­tate, from a lot of sources. I think I’m inter­ested in this.” Funny, isn’t it? You start doing body and breath­work, and the world con­spires to get you to sit down and be quiet —to do zazen—to cen­ter your­self in your­self, qui­etly. To still your mind, and bring your atten­tion deeply into the emptiness.

Body­work, at its best, brings us fully and com­pletely into the ener­getic expe­ri­ence that is hap­pen­ing in our bod­ies (mostly unno­ticed) all the time.

The body begins to open phys­i­cally. Hard, dense, over tight­ened mus­cles begin to melt. Rigidly held body parts begin to shift, to move, to open. And with this relax­ing and open­ing, this un-tightening, comes a pow­er­ful flow of Chi.

I have an artist client, Susan Seitz, who is crank­ing out amaz­ing paint­ings at a prodi­gious rate, and has laugh­ingly sug­gested bring­ing a can­vas to my place so she can paint after Body­work. Need­less to say, I’d be delighted if she did, and I might even buy the paint­ing. Here’s one she did fol­low­ing our last session.

by Susan Seitz

I nat­u­rally lis­ten to Dar­bella all the time, and I’m really enjoy­ing her explo­ration of what’s chang­ing for her since she started a daily med­i­ta­tion prac­tice the begin­ning of Feb­ru­ary. There is no easy way to describe what has shifted, but Dar has noticed that the expe­ri­ence of just sit­ting is some­how per­me­at­ing pretty much all of the rest of her life. It’s nei­ther big nor dra­matic. It just is. And, with­out coin­ci­dence, or per­haps serendip­i­tously, my clients and our friends seem inter­ested and/or want to begin med­i­tat­ing too.

I think what I’ll do with the rest of this series is to talk about what you can learn if you’re will­ing to lis­ten to your body. I’ll do this as I always do, using the chakras to describe the zones of the body—and thereby help you to begin your own explo­ration of the voice of your body

The goal is not to get you to think more about these issues, but to rec­og­nize how pro­foundly these unre­solved issues have affected all aspects of your life.

If you will just barely notice, you can be kind and patient with your­self, incor­po­rate your think­ing and your actions into your self-definition, with­out judg­ment, and explore other options and ways of being and behaving.

I’ll pro­pose body tech­niques like med­i­ta­tion, Chi Gong, breath­ing, and of course, Bodywork—if you can find some­one—I sup­pose you can book some time and come here, he says with a grin.

You’ve put in a lot of years into liv­ing in the 6 inches or so of your body that exists between your ears. I’d like to sug­gest spend­ing the rest of your life going out of your mind—as you come to your senses.