When we let our bodies do what they were was designed to do — process stimuli — they become whole. Some modern Buddhist practice has not just made an enemy of stimuli, talking about it in the same breath of distraction, but has often lost sight of the intelligence of the body. This is likely due to the distracting nature of the prominent stimuli of our time made up of screens, pings, and notifications. We don’t necessarily need less of stimuli, but instead a higher quality of it.
The original stimuli of our sense organs was the wild world, so we could consider nature a higher quality source. Higher quality doesn’t mean better in absolute terms, but more expeditious for the task. Skillful means, we could say — for the same reason monks for thousands of years value silence when meditating. Silence is skillful.
The obvious question is: What, exactly, can we learn from the body? But really the question should be: How can the body help us unlearn? Buddhist practice can be considered subtractive rather than additive. The intelligence of the body isn’t leveraged for another intelligence. Rather, it is autotelic, from the Greek: “having an end in itself,” to which I’m reminded of one of my favorite quotes by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi: “We do not exist for the sake of something else.” In other words, all forms of mind exist for their own sake when they are present and awake in their environment. The ear, to hear. Skin, to touch. Ear-mind. Skin-mind.
Birdsong, wind (perhaps in the whistle of a coke bottle), and the sound of water are privileged pathways into our bodies. So are the blue-greens hues of nature. We can receive these stimuli deeper than others and move toward them as an animal to safety. Study after study proves nature is good for our mental health and well-being, but we shouldn’t leverage the wild only to buttress our mental health. To be with the wild can be enough. Body practice trains our senses, breathes life into them, and allows mind to enter them.
When your senses awaken, a strange thing happens — joy appears. This joy is not always born because something is beautiful or harmonious, as our senses were also developed to locate the noxious or detect a predator. Rather, joy can be the proverbial fruit of being awake. “Even when the Tathāgata eats the coarsest food, it tastes better than any celestial ambrosia,” reads the Mahāratnakūta Sutra. When it all turns into ambrosia, it’s miraculous, but also mundane. Basic. Archaic.
That day, on the edge of Stagecoach Reservoir, I unlearned something. A body can go about creating the world, achieving this and that, making music, but it also has the ability to be played, to become a musical instrument. We become the Coke bottle. The music being played might be discordant at first, but in time, as with sitting practice, ambrosia emerges.
Meditation is about 