More and more, the teaching practice takes me into the community where I engage directly with students. My focus right now is on bringing the continuity of the Dharma into the market place. Although retreating is an important form for self-knowledge, I find myself less interested in the immediate results of a retreat and more interested in helping students investigate their relationship to the ups and downs of their everyday life.
Nature, death and spontaneous freedom continually interweave themselves into my teaching. From the forest of Thailand, where I spent several years, I bring a deep awareness of the healing quality of nature into my teachings. Relaxing into our true nature allows us to realize what it means to be a human being. It is here we find a resting point, a counterbalance to the speed and turbulence of our culture.
My work in hospice brings a sense of urgency into my teaching. Working with the theme of death and dying reveals the here and now of life to us, how important it is to open to each loss, change and transition that marks our path. Life is precious. We need to awaken without hesitation.
Many of us crave to be more calm and centered. We know that life has more to offer than this fleeting material world. For each of us, the Dharma offers an immediacy of freedom for which we do not have to strive or wait. In practice, we can learn to relax deeply into the moment and rediscover spontaneous freedom.
How do the mind and body relate and does this tell us something regarding our identification with the processes involved? How does "mine and yours" become established within this relationship of mind/body?
As we explore the body from this sutta, we realize the inevitability of loss and begin to see death everywhere. Death takes us through various stages of realization, altering our life and changing it forever. We learn to live consciously with all beginnings and endings.
The Buddha seems to be encouraging an exploration of the themes of death and the body in this passage of the Satipatthana Sutta. Though all of us know we are going to die, few of us realize that fact as a living truth. This passage is meant to release us from our denial that fixates on permanency and continuity.
We start with an aversive or attractive response to the body or body part, and quickly an emotional attitude arises that fixates upon the appearance; a story is formed, an opinion is held, and our body is made into something it never was. To love the whole of the body requires an intentional reversal of stepping out of those perceptual fixations and embracing the pleasant and unpleasant components in totality.
Once we have accepted the fact that we cannot control the dharma, our practice opens up to the full catastrophe of living. We open first by backing away from our egoic demands and then by infusing our actions with the wisdom of the body.
Movement integrates our insights into living reality rather than theoretical assumptions. When the insights become part of the living tissue of our body, a natural spontaneity arises.
We continually misrepresent the body by forcing it to be governed, controlled, and defined by the mind. When we set the body free from imposed boundaries we find a natural and intelligent life energy that knows its way.
