Not Bounded by The Sense of Body

           During meditation today, I recited Buddha’s name silently, and felt a warm light softening my body. I simply recited, occasionally asking who is reciting. I gradually could feel a sense of boundlessness. I felt my body expanding. But I also could sometimes see that I am not what I call the body. The body is always a kind of bounded concept. It entails limits, or a skin that separates one individual from other individuals. Body seems to entail duality, but it also means being thrown back upon the limits of a sensation. If even for a moment, I believe that I am this pain that is in my spine, then I have already created an artificial limit with that thought. Who says that I am that pain? Who says that the pain is ‘me’?

The pain itself is not suffering. Rather, it would appear that the suffering is the accompanying belief that the body is me, or I am bounded by my body. This is the double edged sword of the health care profession. While health care is designed to heal the body or prevent illness to the body, it is also invested in the idea that we are determined by the state of our bodies. And this just feeds the notion of identifying who we are as beings. We become married to the idea that if only I ‘get rid’ of some condition, then this would make me an optimally functioning person. The body over-determines what are actually impermanent thoughts and sensations.

I think that the process has to involve a continuous investigation of, ‘is what I am feeling me?’ in order to be able to work on it. But I find it interesting how even the simplest sensation brings out a judgment or an image of self. And I need to keep my awareness just a little bit beyond that judgment, to see who is really having this limiting thought. In that sense, it isn’t that one needs to wait for the ideal moment to practice. Rather, the deepest challenge is the best practice. And one just embraces the struggle wholeheartedly, because there is nothing really limiting the mind or practice. This faith in the boundlessness of mind is so crucial, it seems, not just to spiritual practice but to life itself. As long as I believe in a self that is bounded by obstacles, then this belief is itself a kind of imposed nightmare. All one needs to do is shift a bit and ask the question ‘who’, and then the obstacle is just another rock in the running water. It isn’t that there are no obstacles, but with faith in mind, all obstacles are manageable, because they are empty, part of a flowing totality.