When we desensitize ourselves to our body, we tend to associate knowledge and wisdom only with our thinking mind. We try to think our way through life, giving ourselves a break from our minds every now and then by drugging ourselves, getting erotic, or otherwise using the body as a tool for distraction. Our bodies get so easily saturated with our mental activity—if someone asks us how we’re feeling, many of us tend to look up or away, scanning through our mind for the answer. As if the mind knows!
Getting back to the body not only speeds our healing, anchoring and centring us, it also helps decentralise egoity so that we become more than embodied ego and its imperialistic holdings. Getting back to the body isn’t about having ego-governed relationships with our different “parts”—part of me wants this, part of me wants that, and another part of me doesn’t want either, and so on, revealing not healthy ambiguity but only self-fragmentation. Getting back to the body is about having a being-centred relationship with all that constitutes us.
Our body is our medium for being in relationship with our environment (a physical body for a physical environment, a dream body for a dream environment, and so on). But embodiment is relationship. As we mature, we shift from sensing our body as a solid something to sensing it as something far from static, something through which we are revealed and expressed, no matter in what state we may be.
When lost in thought, we have no body.
When attention is brought to thought, we have a body.
When attention is brought to sensation, we shift from having a body to being in a body.
When attention is brought to perception, we shift from being in a body to being present as a body.
When attention is brought to our overall presence, our innate wholeness of being, we shift from being present as a body to simply being, neither separate from nor identified with our body.
By Robert Augustus Masters
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