Your body carries a record of your past experiences, some deep and old and intense, but the past no longer exists. Rather, all you suffer from are imprints. The imprints shift and shape, obstruct, rush, and stifle the currents of energy that flow naturally through your body. Only the patterns you carry right now have any power to harm you. You can heal and awaken not by dwelling on the past and turning it into a catalog of who you are, but by allowing the imprints to dissolve in the currents of energy in your body.
A Dream About Memory
I finally discovered the meaning of a dream I had two years ago. On April 11, 2008, I dreamed that I was lying stretched out and my body was like a vinyl record. Someone put their finger on my body as though they were the record needle, and everywhere they touched, they activated a vibration.
Each vibration was a memory, a full and vivid memory returning to life in all the senses, complete with the thoughts and feelings that once permeated it. I got the sense that my very body was a library of experiences, and each one would be fully relived depending on which part of my body was touched.
One particular spot on my body evoked the memory of Martin Luther King Jr, an admirable, altruistic black man. I wrote that down at the time, but it seemed peculiar and made no sense.
Read on, and I will tell you what it was about.
My Archeological Dig
For the past week, I have been packing from dawn until dusk in preparation for my move. On Saturday, I packed everything in my bedroom. A Tibetan prayer wheel from my Buddhist love, pebbles from a beach in Northern California where we spent the day after my retreat, seeds he gathered from a hibiscus at the botanical gardens, candles, cards, books, gifts, notes, and prayers I’d written out for my children, my family, my Buddhist love, the sociology student I dated and his friend, and others. Every night for nine months, I recited them, wishing them freedom from suffering, contentment and bliss. I placed them among notebooks, necklaces, crystals, and essential oils.
Taking and touching each item was like playing a record containing all of my life experiences during the past few years. Everything playing out in living color, as if everything I touch is the record needle, and I was playing my body’s record of the past. A life review, the kind that supposedly happens after you die. As I poured through my most meaningful possessions, all of the memories awoke in me and resounded with feeling as though they happened just yesterday.
Many of my experiences during the last few years have been extremely painful. Some memories that awoke in me were full of suffering and darkness. A troubled marriage and prolonged divorce. A long period of severe behavioral problems in my psychic six year old. Frequent illness. Six years of intense joint and muscle pain (fibromyalgia or rhematoid arthritis). The loss of my social support network. Single motherhood. The gut wrenching end of several meaningful relationships.
Reliving My Samsara
Not only did I replay sensory memories but emotional memories too. I relived thoughts, perspectives, and beliefs. The record of my samsara. You can replay the experience of seeing the world in a particular way. You can replay a belief system or a set of thoughts about life. Saturday night, I began to replay my suffering, my samsara. My body was the projection screen, and samsara was the movie.
After about sixteen hours of packing, I could no longer stand. I was exhausted and incoherent. I had forgotten to eat. I finally got my kids into bed and fell into mine. A bad dream woke me up at 3 a.m. I was in the city where my Buddhist love is on retreat, and I was wandering the streets looking for him, but he was no where to be found. I saw him briefly, but he passed by me, distracted and preoccupied by good things in his life. When I woke up, I couldn’t sleep. My body was roiling with emotion and memory, activated and sensitized.
I was too hungry to return to sleep, so I found something to munch on and turned on my computer, wandering through my frequent online pit stops. Among them, in-your-Facebook. Somehow, I soon found myself staring at photos of my Buddhist love and his very young and extremely beautiful Buddhist girlfriend kissing him on the cheek, and it hit me just how misguided my hopes had been to offer him any sort of healing or happiness. He didn’t need healing. He just needed someone else. The image and the realization cut into me hard.
I thought of the prayers I had written out for him, the ones I spoke every night. In fact, they had been answered. Answered gloriously. And yet, I was in agony. The intensity of the pain surprised me. The days of strenuous, memory-laden packing had splayed open my heart, taken me back to old times, and laid me bare to jealousy, envy, regret, and bitter grief. Here was something within me not awake.
I peered into this well of pain. I felt its pull like a gravity well in the fabric of my consciousness. Is it possible for me to get caught? It had an illusory quality, a transparency. Slowly, I fell in. The chasm stretched and opened and caught me in the realm of tormented thoughts. At first, I was just experimenting, but soon I was coiled up. I found myself at the bottom of the hole, looking around, examining the dark walls I once identified as my universe.
The sense of being alienated, left behind, and “not enough” was an ancient anguish. Much of that anguish was transformed by our friendship, but the life review brought my old belief tendencies to the surface for scrutiny. While a part of me felt intense pain, another part of me simply thought, “Hmm. Interesting.” The world we create in our own minds feels real, and then there comes a time when we see through it. The memory of delusion itself, however, is unique in the realm of conscious experience. How does one see through blindness?
Memory as a Useful Lie
Memory is essentially a recreation of experience. Simultaneously, it gives us information about the causes of our current patterns and deludes us into having experiences that are not actually happening.
On Monday, after writing about packing as a life review, I was sitting out on the terrace with my boys watching them eat ice cream cones, and I pulled out a book from my bag, The Holographic Universe, by Michael Talbot. I opened randomly to a section entitled, “The Vastness of Memory,” which caught my eye. In that section, Talbot discussed how the holographic brain could explain its memory capacity and the act of recall. Shine two lasers on a holographic film at just the right angles, and you recreate the image recorded by the original lasers. Similarly, he suggested that when we shine our attention on the mind in the same way, or when sensory experiences touch our mind at just the right spot, we recreate the images of our past. He mentioned that Proust once wrote of a character who was transported back in time to some early, vivid experience upon tasting tea and petite madeleines.
Everything he wrote was a very apt description of what I’ve been experiencing. This is what my hours and days of packing had done. As I poured through my possessions, I shined the light of attention on my being, like lasers directed at particular angles, and recreated images of the past in living color. In fact, any time we interact with the world, I suspect this happens, and much of what we experience is not the world itself but how the world activates the images stored in our body, memories of visions, sounds, emotions, thoughts, perspectives, beliefs, and whole living experiences.
The Man with the Needles
Late Monday night, after reading about holographic memory, my boyfriend came over, and he could tell I was carrying a lot of pain in my body. He is an acupuncturist. We met in December of 2009, about a year and a half after I dreamed that my body was a vinyl record.
He touched a pressure point on my back, behind my shoulder blades. I wailed. I was so tender there. “You know what that is?” he asked. “What?” “That’s your heart shu. It means you have heartache.” He massaged several points on my back which somehow released the pain, then he retrieved his needles and treated me for heartache.
As I lay on my bed feeling the energy in my body shift and open as the needles were going in, I started sobbing. I felt as though I could cry for days. The last four years flashed before my eyes and through my body, and I realized just how much grief I had experienced, and how truly helpless I felt to do anything right or make things better. There is nothing like realizing and deeply accepting that even your attempts to correct your mistakes were just more mistakes.
With every convulsion, the vibrations seemed to ebb from my body. My boyfriend wiped the tears from my face and drew blessing symbols over my body.
He knows my heart has suffered a lot of pain. He’s convinced that an episode of sudden, extreme heart pain that hit me in March was a heart attack. I remember that night. I clutched my chest, feeling as though a knife were lacerating my arteries, fell off the couch, broke into a sweat, and remained in contorted agony for fifteen minutes until he pushed a needle into my palm in a point known to address heart issues. The pain dissolved quickly, and he urged me to see a doctor. Physical pain. Emotional pain. My heart has been through a lot.
I started telling him about my dream, then I remembered the time he explained his philosophy of acupuncture. Months ago, he told me: “Your body is a hologram. Each point corresponds to an element of your system. The needles harmonize your chi.” Stimulating particular points causes the energy to shift and flow in ways that bring healing, peace, and joy. Just like shining lasers onto the holographic film at just the right angles. With every needle, my energy rearranges itself, shifts direction, and flows in a smooth, unified current.
My dream was about him!
About the healing power of acupuncture that would one day grace my life and transform my suffering into awakening. His ethnicity explained the unusual reference to Martin Luther King Jr. My sobbing calmed and soon I was laughing. Over the past six months, he has treated my samsara with his needles at least forty times, and every time, my whole world shifts, and my heart wakes up. Adyashanti wrote that during his tumultous awakening process, his wife, an acupuncturist, helped him immensely. Now I understand what the treatments have been doing.
The needles enabled me to dissolve the cacophany of intense body memories playing in my system. They activated new body memories, which overcame the sounds of samsara. If my body is a movie screen, and samsara is the movie, acupuncture changed the movie by creating new patterns of light on the screen. If my body was a hologram, samsara is the image created by shining two lasers on it at a particular angle, or focusing energy on particular areas of the whole, and acupuncture changed the image by shining lasers from a different angle, outshining the image of samsara, shifting the focus of energy.
Awakening to True Experience
Spiritual awakening accomplishes this same dissolution by drawing our attention to what is really happening. When your attention is filled only by what is really happening, you cannot relive the past without seeing that your experience is nothing but an empty recreation of the original image long since consumed by the void.
For nearly a year, I dated a sociology student with a bachelor’s degree in history who continuously encouraged me to dig into my past and unearth my traumas in order to cultivate a better understanding myself. Towards the end of our relationship, I had a vivid dream that he was trying to drown me in a river, my river of pain. He thought it was needed, but the past does not constrain us. Renewal happens.
I told my Buddhist love about the pain I experienced when I realized that his new relationship was fulfilling him in ways I never could. In fact, I was wrong. There was never anything insufficient about the love I offered. He explained his world to me and wished me freedom from suffering, but even before receiving his words, I was diving into this movie of samsara playing on my body, and it began to deflate. The more I tried to enter it fully, to experience and accept it, the more elusive it became. Of course the pain slipped from my fingers. It was not real. The fears lost their power. A day later, my boys sat down to watch Harry Potter, and just as I was thinking about the deflation of my fears, I walked into the room and caught the scene where a professor is waving his wand at a shape shifting entity who has taken the form of his worst fear, an illusory image of the moon. The professor says “Rediculos!” and the moon turns into a white balloon that quickly deflates as it flies around the room. All the children laugh. I laughed, too.
Look at the past when the patterns of light and darkness, flow and obstruction, that fill your body call for a story. The story can help you make sense of the patterns, enough to unravel them and see through them. But once you have seen through the images you carry, let the stories go. You don’t need them anymore. You are free right now.
