Spacious Solidarity Blog: Day 17

At some point in the middle of the night I am awake in a dreamy sort of way. I intuitively drop awareness into the body to check in with how I am just now, physically, mentally, emotionally.

I notice the lower back feels sore. I know this soreness well and what to do to alleviate it. I roll onto the stomach and relax into the sensations across the front of the body. I can feel the weight of the body slowly sinking into the mattress below me. There’s tension in the neck, so I consciously release the weight of the head, turned sideways now, through temple, cheek, and jaw.

It occurs to me that practice has long been a process of getting to know the body, on deeper and deeper and subtler and subtler levels. I’ve slowly learned to patiently open and sit with sensations, noticing the alive parts, the stuck parts, the sticky parts, the numb parts, the hurt parts, the comfy parts, the brittle parts.

I know my right hip doesn’t like it when I sit with my legs outstretched for too long. And that I’m slightly twisted, probably as a result of a childhood accident, with the left hip a bit higher than the right. That’s why the seams of some clothing wrap round my arms and legs in a funny way.

I know that when I’m scared the stomach hardens into a ball of knots before a hot rush of energy moves up into the chest and the heart starts to beat faster. I know that if I breath into that knot and remind myself of my own deep sensitivity, that these sensations can move and change in their own way, putting me in touch with the qualities of courage and conviction that can carry me through this moment.

Anger feels like steaming, dark lava moving slowly from the central diaphragm outwards, while flames leap up from the pelvic floor. Shame like the blood on the underside of the thighs has run cold.

Desire has an all-over tingly texture and a co-arising resistance, felt as a contraction in the chest and belly.

I know that the right side of the jaw clicks when I chew my food, the left foot sometimes seizes up in the night if the calf muscle hasn’t been properly stretched, and that I get tension headaches above the right eye when I’m stressed, have had too many conversations in one day, or are dehydrated.

I know this body loves to stretch and climb, like a cat in the wild.  

Sometimes I can hear the soft sound of crunching and crackling at the very top of the spine when I turn the head this way and that. Sometimes I can hear the heart beating. Sometimes I can hear the stomach growling, before I know I’m hungry.

This body tell me when its tired, tells me when it’s cold or hot, tells me when I’m about to start bleeding, tells me when I’m about to stop.

The body also tells me when I might be in danger, when beautiful music is playing, when I’ve forgotten something, and when to pause and appreciate something.  

Lying here now I feel gratitude arising. Gratitude, an emotion that’s taken me a long time to learn how to fully feel. It starts as a gentle fluttering in the heart. I breath with it, and lay awareness there, like placing a baby in their cradle. It expands outward, growing in intensity.

Eventually it feels as though I could explode with the energy of it, moving in undulating waves from the centre of the heart across the whole of the body. I remember the advice my teacher once gave me to “just get bigger”. I flash into open awareness, out beyond the physical boundaries of the body.

Gratitude fills the space around me.

This familiarization of the body is my practice. I’ve gotten to know the body in order to learn how to let it go. In getting to know this body, I’ve seen first-hand through direct experience, that in no way am I ever in control of this body, it doesn’t belong to me, there is no me that can own it or be it or hold on to it.

This knowing somehow brings an intimacy with the body previously unavailable to me. This knowing prepares me for the inevitable. That one day I will have to give up this body. That one day, it too will go, just like the sensations arising and passing that tell me there is a body.

At that I’m back to sleep, as if the memory of my future death is too much for my waking consciousness to process just now.

The morning is full of chores. Vacuuming and washing up and laundry.

Then we’re back on our computers. Today we’ve swapped workstations, my partner on the couch and me on our comfy orange chair. When I point this out, my partner says they are enjoying the view from the couch which includes their bookshelf, an image of Amoghasiddhi (a Buddha they like to visualize sometimes), and a model schooner we bought at a second-hand shop in Southwold.

I look up from the screen and take in my view. Shelves with more books, family photos, knick-knacks, and a huge, red, plastic blow-up heart. An enlarged print of the famous painting of Lake Keitele by Finish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela.

Plants. A ceramic elaborately painted Mexican Day of the Dead skull sat atop an hourglass. A shrine to Green Tara, the Buddhist goddess of compassion. A bouquet of tulips. My partner.    

It’s a good view.

Later we go for a walk. Back to Hackney Downs. It’s the 1st of April but could easily be mid-January. It’s starting to feel like if our life were a film we’d be reaching the mid-story montage. I imagine similar scenes from our days on end, edited and sliced together with music playing in the background, this walk through Hackney Downs featuring prominently.  

Returning back home through the front door of our building, we run into our upstairs neighbor barreling down the stairs. She comments with delight that she’s so glad we’ve been out. She’s been exercising fervently and was worried she was making too much noise. She quickly forgives herself by saying it was only 20 mins or so, but still, she’s glad we weren’t in.

All this is communicated as she whips past us at lightning speed, out the door before we can respond.

While processing this deluge of information, I’m also aware that the hallway is narrow and she’s come way too close. I consider calling her a twatwaffle, only in my mind of course, but her concern for our well-being is just endearing enough to save her from my wrath.

Now I’m on an intense group Zoom mtg. Two hours of deliberation and difficult decision-making. Someone remarks that it’s important to remember that during this time it can feel like everything is amplified.

I like that word, amplified. And the awareness in which things are amplified doesn’t differentiate between the difficult stuff and the liberating stuff. And depending on what we’ve done before, some of what is amplified is also the liberating stuff. I resolve to notice this more.

After dinner I call my Dad. He is telling me about “the search”. I have no idea what he is talking about. Finally, I realize he’s saying “the surge”, which is what they are calling the rapid increase in COVID-19 deaths in New York and soon Boston.

He tells me my sister has volunteered to be part of an antibodies study to see if she has already had the virus and might be immune.

Right before bed I make the mistake of watching a video someone posted on Facebook by a conspiracy theorist who is arguing that the whole thing’s been made up by the big banks and governments who want a scapegoat to blame for all the ills of late stage capitalism so when things really start to go wrong the people won’t turn on them.

Although tempting to buy into such stories, I know better.

Nevertheless, as I lay down to sleep I notice fear deep in my belly. I decide to invite it in, fully and completely. It’s been simmering under the surface for days now. I take a few deep breaths into the space of contraction and heat while simultaneously calling on a few archetypal friends for support.

After an initial onslaught of catastrophic thoughts, awareness steadies on the sensations that are now moving fast and furious through the body. I breath and bear it, bear it and keep breathing. The sensations eventually settle in the heart center, warm and expansive.

All of a sudden, I feel a little bit braver then before.