The Shift from Mind to Body to Beyond
El cambio de la mente al cuerpo y más allá
A student describes a recent experience of turning away from thoughts and toward bodily presence, noticing what feels like a binary quality: either lost in thinking or genuinely present. The teacher responds with a framework for how identification shifts from mind to body and eventually beyond both.
The Shift from Mind to Body to Beyond
A student describes a recent experience of turning away from thoughts and toward bodily presence, noticing what feels like a binary quality: either lost in thinking or genuinely present. The teacher responds with a framework for how identification shifts from mind to body and eventually beyond both.
I wanted to mention that these things come out unbaked, so I'm never sure how it's going to come out. Recently I've been experiencing something I don't know what to call exactly. Maybe a turning away from thoughts and toward bodily presence. Feeling the body much more, not looking at different sensations but just being with them. A shift inward.
I was thinking just now how it's almost like a binary thing I never really noticed before. If I'm in thoughts, I'm not present. I can be thinking, but if the identification is there, if there's that quality of being sucked in, then I'm not present and I don't feel what I actually am. It feels like it's either one or the other.
I don't feel the shift inward exactly, but I notice sometimes there's a shift away from thinking, and then that brings me inward. And then there's this spaciousness. I feel charitable. I feel like I don't have an agenda. I feel connection. It's a loving kind of gentleness. It seems connected to what you were saying earlier, though I can't quite remember the details.
The words come to me in the moment too, and I have no idea what I'm going to say next. I'm basically feeling into where the speaking comes from. There are many ways to try to communicate this, and they are all different forms of transmission, more or less successful, more or less resonating for different people.
Rather than trying to reconstruct what I said before, let me speak to what you're describing.
From mind to body
There is a shift. There are different kinds of movements, and one, as you're pointing out, is out of thinking and into bodily sensation. When we are very identified, we identify with very limited and constrained ideas: all kinds of concepts and beliefs about who we are and what reality is. That becomes a mental map of ourselves and of reality.
As we shift out of that, we move from identification with the mind to, in a sense, identification with the body. We are moving out of purely mental identification. And from the body, we can then move further and see that what we are is beyond the body as well. So you could say we move from the mind to the body, and from the body to the world.
The tipping point of attention
Between the mind and the body, there is a tipping point. It has to do with where our ground of attention rests. If you average out where your attention is in a normal day, you might say, "It's ninety percent in my mind." Then it shifts: sixty percent in the mind, forty percent in the body. Eventually, there is a great deal of body awareness, a lot of direct raw sensation, as opposed to the image of the body, which is still mental. These are all just ways to describe something.
As you start to move more into what's called grounding, there are all kinds of body work and meditations that create a lot of sensation in the body. They help us get used to sensation that is usually so intense we pull into mental identification just to numb it. There are different kinds of discomfort we can't bear, so we retreat.
As we move more into that, it feels challenging at first. Then we get more used to it. Then it starts to feel much better: more relaxation, more spaciousness.
When inside and outside become the same
But this keeps going and going, to the point where the sense of something I'm expanding toward starts to make no sense, because inside and outside are the same. The sense of self that is based on splitting our experience, saying part of it is me and part is not me, that mechanism that creates the boundary and activates the separation, will start to lose its utility. It is useful for that to be in place constantly, and then at some point it stops being useful. Then it can just become a function, rather than an identity.
In that shift, the sense that "what is inside me is part of my experience, and what is not me is the other part" starts to soften. That is the famous final shift. When inside and outside are recognized as the same.
But it's not that important to fixate on that endpoint. What's really important is this: if there's a love and a passion for this work, for this direction, for this movement, then just move. Keep exploring. Keep moving out of identification with a limited self, which is going to be ideas, concepts.
The subtlety of the shift
We're talking about something very general here, giving a general framework. But yes, it is like that. It is like moving out of the mind into the body, and then there is more. You could have sensations where you look at something outside of you and the sense of "that's not me, and I'm here" loses its reality. The experience itself doesn't change. The interpretation of it changes. And when that interpretation changes, all of our life changes.
As my teacher once said, the shift is really subtle, but it has a very powerful effect. It is perceived internally and externally by others as a really powerful shift, but it is actually a very subtle change. It is literally moving from believing something that's not true to not believing it. Period.
Thanks.