A few weeks ago, I found a new ecstatic dance venue in town and gave it a try only to find that it overlaps with the same social circle I lost months ago, a tribe for which I still grieve. Eager to avoid the scenes frequented by a former love and his close companion whose feelings I hurt, I put my shoes and coat back on and drove to a club where they were celebrating Bob Marley’s birthday. An insatiable reggae fan, I had a swell time, except that I bumped into the best friend of another former love, someone I had reached out to during a time of suffering, and she gave me the cold shoulder.
Being shunned is excruciating, especially as a single mother. This town is way too small. I am counting the days until I move away. I would go to the places that scare me, as Machig Labdron suggests, except that apparently I myself am the monster.
The point is that those things which daily fill my thoughts are far from lighthearted. Yet, every time I dance, even the most tormenting thoughts fall into silence like snow on a warm lake, the boundaries between myself and the rest of the cosmos blur, and I experience ineffable bliss. Dancing has become my primary method of meditating.
When I dance, I combine skills learned during meditation practice in both Zen and Dzogchen traditions with improvised movement, listening to my body, and opening. These are the processes that consistently lead to samadhi:
- Notice how thoughts create feelings in the body
- View feelings as creations, not reactions
- Focus directly on the body
- Manipulate feelings with movement, not with thinking
- Let the movements choose themselves
Notice How Thoughts Create Feelings in the Body
The next time you are dancing, watch carefully how every thought that arises in your mind shifts the pattern of sensations and urges throughout your body. Ordinarily, events in life determine how you feel. You think about something, and your thoughts create feelings in your body.
Every time you think about something going on in your life, a situation, an event, or a relationship, your body fills with particular shades of tension, focal points of awareness, and ribbons of sensation ranging from heaviness to fluttering, sharpness to burning. Your body is like a still pond, and each thought about your life is a leaf or stone falling into the pond, creating ripples that spread throughout your nervous system.
Notice how you can be sitting peacefully on your couch contemplating events of the day. One moment, you feel content, your body free of tension and pain. A moment later, a new thought arises. Someone you care about expressed a negative opinion of you, and you have no way of rectifying the situation. As this situation fills your mind, your body tightens, curls, burns. The thought, like a stone, crashed into the traquil surface and created waves.
Feelings appear and move in your body in response to your thoughts like the strobing colors on a cuttlefish. The important point is that you are doing this.
A rather intense thought, the memory of a painful event or sudden rumination about an unresolved situation, can fill your body with instant pain and tenderness, like a cuttlefish in fight mode. You are moving along peacefully, metaphorically speaking, and suddenly your thoughts turn to the project you failed to complete in time or the relationship on the verge of collapse.
Spend some time strengthening your capacity to see, in real time, how every shift in your feelings is closely tied to a shift in your thoughts or your perspective. When you feel a wave of discomfort gradually leak into your good mood, notice how your mind had just turned to financial matters. When you feel a buoyant sensation in the center of your body and a lightness in your step, notice how, just moments before, you began thinking about how nice it would be to hang out with an old friend.
I Begin a Dancing Cuttlefish
On Saturday night, I was home with my two little boys after declining an invitation to a dance event where my former love would be playing his songs. Since letting go, my memories have become more pleasant and gentle, so I let my mind seep into the space where my old friends were dancing among string lights.
In my house I have a very large room devoted entirely to play. My boys and I cleaned it up and cleared the floor and brought in a stereo system, my laptop, and a projector. I was the DJ. I plugged everything in and aimed the projector at the wall and ceiling, which formed an eight foot wide visual display. We turned out the lights and played all my favorite dance music while spinning mesmerized beneath the psychidelic iTunes visualizer.
I had so much fun dancing with my children, who apparently take after me when it comes to a love of movement. I kept asking myself, “Why didn’t I think of this before?” The room is even lined with a wooden ledge where I set our ice water, like we were clubbing, and a few bean bags supplied the occasional respite.
As I was swaying to the rhythm and feeling into the melodies, my thoughts turned to my social milieu. I wondered what my former friends were doing, what their lives were like, what new loves now graced them. In my body, a slight heaviness set in. Do they ever wonder how I’m doing, or have they put me out of their mind now, and should I do the same? Will I ever speak to my former loves again? When I leave town, should I say good-bye?
My awareness shifted away from my dancing body into the past. Memories of loss. Messing everything up, falling apart, ruining bonds, burning bridges when I needed them most. A brief burning twang meandered through me and faded. I remembered the countless moments in which some divine presence soothed me, all the times I surrendered completely, let the downward spiral uncoil on its own, and accepted the cascade failure of my social network. I rememberd how every time I fell expecting to hit the ground, I landed in a cloud of light. I didn’t remember in words. I rememberd in my body.
All this while dancing to the music! I was a cuttlefish! But I didn’t need to be.
Once you can follow the progression from thoughts to feelings, you can alter how you approach your feelings through movement.
View Feelings as Creations, Not Reactions
Ordinarily, we perceive these bodily changes as an emotional response to the situation we are contemplating. The concept of emotion, however, is laden with stereotypes and assumptions. For the sake of discussion, think of these as feeling patterns. They include sensations and urges to move in certain ways.
When you are dancing, approach these feelings patterns directly instead of seeing them as reactions to something.
You are like the cuttlefish, forming intricate patterns of feeling to reflect your surroundings. Yet, quite often, the intricate patterns you create are not actual reflections. They are not direct perceptions of your reality in the same way that visual images are direct perceptions of light entering the eye. Rather, they are your own creations. They are patterns based on your best guess about the outer world, and even then, you are usually responding to abstract situations, not the immediate reality.
“In the very moment, therefore, of an event occurring,
whoever recognizes the language of biased projection
and morally discriminating goal-directed behavior
as unreal, and like the nonactive sky,
he catches all experience in the snare of absence.”
~ Longchenpa, Old Man Basking in the Sun
View Pain as a Thing in Itself
In the case of emotional pain, look at the feelings, the hurt, the discomfort, and see just that: discomfort. When you see pain as a reaction or a direct perception of some external reality, you see yourself as a helpless victim of your environment. You may not be able to alter the pain just yet, but you can still look at it directly and see it as just pain.
There is Nothing Else Happening
Own your pain by realizing, deep down, that the pain is not really a direct response to anything in your concrete, immediate reality. What other reality is there? The one you create in your head! Let it go. You think the world in your head is a good proxy for what is happening “out there,” but you forget, there is nothing else happening. Remember, all the “situations” in your life consist mostly of your thoughts about them.
As you dance, say to yourself, there is nothing else happening. Say it slow and intensely, not as a command to yourself, not as a denial of anything you are thinking about, but as a profound realization. Know it to be true rather than forcing yourself to believe it.
“From the perspective of pristine awareness, there is no objective field to investigate.
Nothing has ever happened, nothing will ever happen and nothing is happening just now.”
~ Longchenpa, Old Man Basking in the Sun
View Joy as an Offering
When we feel happiness and energy, it usually means that our situation in life just became more agreeable. In order to recreate those positive feelings, we manipulate our situation until life has that same pleasurable effect on our bodies. Consequently, we begin to see joy as a reaction to favorable conditions. If you want to cultivate unconditional joy, begin to see joy differently. When you feel joy, you are not taking or acquiring anything from the universe. Rather, you are allowing happiness and energy to manifest in you, and this is a gift and a blessing to the cosmos.
Focus Directly on Your Body
Most of the time, your focus is not directly on your body. Your focus is partially on your body and partially in a dozen other abstract places, your broader situation, an ongoing issue, a lingering problem. When you do turn your focus onto your body, you may be placing your body perception within a larger context, all the circumstances in your life. Or, you may be watching your body simply to experience how your body is reacting to everything in your life.
The keyword here is “directly.” Concentration is not necessary. This is not about concentration; it’s about point-of-view. Listen to your body directly as though nothing stood between you and your feelings. See your body and all the feelings coursing through it as though they existed independent of the outside world. Be with the feelings as though they were entities in their own right, not reactions to something external. Thought, interpretation, rumination, and contemplation are just middle men. These translate the events in your life into feeling patterns, but the “events” in your life are far more empty than you realize. Through thought, you give life to things that otherwise have no real substance.
As you dance, say to yourself, I am brand new. Your body is what is. Realize deep down that you are as new in this moment as everything else, as impermanent as everything else. Your self-image and the impressions of others have no tangible reality. Your past self has no tangible reality.
Don’t force a shift in focus. Let your focus fall naturally on your body, and only your body and your immediate surroundings, by remembering there is nothing else happening and you are brand new.
Manipulate Feelings With Movement, Not With Thinking
We are like cuttlefish roaming the ocean looking for something to illuminate our skin. We find patterns in our surroundings that prompt our skin to glow, but the light is not a reflection–it is our creation, and we can do it anytime.
Normally, we alter the feeling patterns in the body by manipulating our external circumstances or thinking about troublesome situations until we arrive at a solution or a perspective that makes us feel better. When there is no clear solution, we ruminate, mull, or dwell. Because the feeling patterns in our body seem like direct perceptions of reality, manipulation and rumination seem like our only tools for feeling better.
When you realize that feelings are creations, not perceptions, and open to the bare reality in front of you, things change dramatically.
Mantras
- There is nothing else happening.
- I am brand new. Everything is brand new.
- My joy is an offering.
Let Your Movements Choose Themselves
As you move, instead of directing your body to move in ways that run in parallel to or against these feeling patterns, move in ways that work with and reshape them.
Keep in mind that you are not trying to fight your feelings with dance movements. You’re not mounting an attack on your feelings or even trying to give expression to them. Rather, you are giving them permission to work themselves out of your body without your interference or direction.
In the end, each of your movements will come entirely without volition. You won’t need to think about it at all. Your body will move as it will move until you experience a merging between you and the lights and sounds in your immediate environment.
Effortless Samadhi
As you shift the energy in your body directly through movement, without using thought or rumination as a tool, you create a space within which thought naturally subsides. You have cut out the middle man! Samadhi arises naturally, without effort, as a gentle byproduct of your shift in perspective and your alternate approach to your experience of reality.
You will be surprised what the energy in your body will do when it is no longer being manipulated by your thoughts. If you entirely circumvent the route between situation and emotion, or between thought and emotion, the release you will experience will be earth shaking. Expect rapture. You will wonder how you carried those “situations” in your bones for so long.
You are not bound by anything! Not anything! You are so free, you have no idea. None of the situations that seem to bind you have any real power to cause you suffering. You do not need everything to be right with the world before you can experience deep happiness. That sort of happiness is raining down on you right now, only you are too busy forming mental worlds to perceive it.
When you stop creating mental worlds and start truly listening to what is actually happening right here and now, you’ll discover something surprising and unexpected, something extremely beautiful that you cannot put into words, because words only translate it into yet another mental world. A something, not a nothing, but in the world of words, the ultimate nothing. Open and see. I can only call it the divine.
“Nondual pure pleasure abides naturally,
and through detachment, without need to do anything,
it is uninterrupted like the river Ganges.”
~ Longchenpa
