In this article, first published online in the Dew on the Grass blog, Anna describes how her childhood experience of pain caused a disconnect between body and mind, as a method of survival, and how Buddhist practice, over time, was the catalyst for a deeper understanding of ‘reality’, bringing greater harmony and a sense of wholeness into her life.

As a fifteen year-old teenager I wrote in a dairy entry that my greatest wish in life was to become as transparent as fine cloth.*

That wish was born out of the experience of the body as dense, dark, heavy and claustrophobic. It was born out of the experience of being trapped in this limited form that was being judged, mistreated, medically probed, jabbed, grabbed, pushed and pulled; that was being restrained by plaster casts, by cold hard gripping metal drilled into it; that was being subjected, many times over, to the deep slicing of the surgical blade, slicing-drawing broad, indelible lines of considerable yardage, creating intricate cord like scars, with a halo of crude stitch marks, as scattered grains of rice. I would often dissociate and retreat from the body so as not to feel the pain that was being inflicted on it. To this day, it does not come naturally to say “my body”, although perhaps it is partly for different reasons now than it was in the past. This type of detachment from the body is a mode of survival, induced when the current experience is felt to be too overwhelming, when the current experience is existential terror.

A few years after writing down my greatest wish in life and as a slightly older teenager, I travelled to a Buddhist monastery to learn to meditate, led by a deep intuition that the key for realizing my life’s wish and overcoming the shadow world of the body, may lie there. It was surprising to learn that Buddhists deem a state of detachment as something desirable, something to aspire to. It would long remain a mystery as to why.

Localization in the body

The experience of being localized in the body is a difficult conundrum to crack. Our senses seemed to reinforce that ‘I’ is localized ‘here’ behind the eyes and the world is localized ‘over there’ outside ‘I’, creating the dichotomy of self and other, the duality of subject and object. Ideas like ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’ reinforce the belief that we are localized in the body. This mainstream belief is challenged when suffering becomes so excessive that it forces a disconnect. Existential terror induced at an early age is one of the causes for such a disconnect. It results in a debilitating state of affairs. Nowadays, terms are used like childhood trauma and PTSS. Information and research in that area can very much help understand and deal with the impact of certain experiences on the body-mind, even though solving the root cause falls in the spiritual domain.

The Immovable One

Achalanātha, The Immovable One (J: Fudō Myō-ō) 1199–1399, Art Institute Chicago

Becoming established in the unmoving, unflinching presence of Zazen meditation – vividly personified by Achalanātha, The Immovable One – makes it possible to face debilitating states.

It took more than 35 years of remaining present in the experience of being trapped in this body, being in chronic pain and in existential terror, to realize the simple, glaring truth: the body is within ‘I’, not the other way round. The erroneous belief that the self is trapped in the body, and shares the limitations of the body is a contraction and that contraction is at the root of suffering.

The unbound state

The body being within ‘I’ is glaring because it is our direct experience all along. All that we know of the body is bodily sensations, that is, how the body feels on the inside and sense perceptions of how it appears on the outside. Both sensations and sense perceptions arise within the space of awareness, the space of stillness. This collection of bodily sensations and sense perceptions we call ‘my body’ is an activity within the space of stillness, which is the true ‘I’. The activity of bodily sensations and sense perceptions is ‘the contained’, not ‘that which contains’. Ignorance, that is the ignoring of this reality, is the root cause of suffering. Ignorance obscures the true ‘I’ but it can never obscure it completely. Even in the midst of deep suffering, the truth remains as the deep wish in the heart to be free of the contraction, to be free of the belief of being a limited entity. The deep wish in the heart to dissolve the contraction is like a beacon directing ships at night, it guides us through suffering to return to our true home, the unbound state, which was never lost to begin with.

Effortless detachment

Coming back to detachment, the disconnect caused by suffering shatters the belief of being localized in this body but it does not eliminate that belief altogether. Even without trauma, the idea that the body is an obstacle, the experience of being a limited entity and the wish to overcome that limitation, are all forms of disconnected detachment, are forms of suffering. The detachment the Buddhist teaching speaks of is not a disconnection, rather it is the natural outcome of seeing the truth of the matter, which is: the true self does not share the limitations of the body. The body is not an entity in its own right; the body-mind is the activity of the true self. Seeing it for the activity it is, seeing that the body cannot impact the self, puts the body in its rightful place in the wider perspective. This natural detachment is effortless and intimate.

Buddha recognizes Buddha

The realization that the body-mind does not contain but is the contained, that it is within the space of awareness, the true self, is a major shift that has far-reaching implications. It is not just this body-mind that is the activity of the true self; the whole universe is contained as activity of the true self, therefore the universe is our true body. The expression: “Buddha recognizes Buddha” does not mean: “I as Buddha recognize you as another Buddha”. This had been the underlying assumption. The teaching does not say: all beings are Buddhas. The believe that there are multiple Buddhas is duality, is still the believe of being a separate finite entity. All body-minds, all beings, the whole universe, is the activity of a single, universal True Self. The teaching says: All beings are Buddha. There only ever is one indivisible Buddha. Buddha recognizes Buddha is the true self recognizing no other than itself. To reconcile this reality with the sensory experience of a world ‘out there’ is the work at hand

Old habits

The ingrained thinking, sensing, feeling based on the belief of being localized in this body-mind, of being a limited object in time and space, are conditionings that have deep roots. These patterns have been reinforced over a lifetime, are still reinforced in the world. The work of re-examining these ingrained habits whenever they arise, aligning them with the truth and allowing them to dissolve is a long process. Some conditionings laid very early on at the time of infancy may never dissolve completely as the imprint is too deep. That is okay. It does not obscure the inherent transparency of the fine cloth.

This article is a brief write-up about an ongoing, non-linear process, I hope it may be of benefit to others.

* The curtain in the Wind from the Sea painting represents the ‘fine cloth’ in the article. The transparency and the gentle flowing in the breeze of the illuminated curtain evokes a sense of spaciousness and freedom that is not inhibited by the dark frame. This represents the wish to be free of the contraction that shines brightly as the truth which cannot be obscured within the experience of the body as dark and heavy, within the experience of suffering.