Radical
Pertaining to the basic or intrinsic nature of something
Wiktionary
Consent
To express willingness, to give permission
Wiktionary
Ending the war with my body
When I came to formal zen Buddhist practice, I was focused on the adversarial relationship I had with my mind. I was so tired of arguing with myself all the time, trying to talk myself out of feeling what I was feeling (thanks, CBT). I was seething with an inner rage that I couldn’t seem to control my thoughts.
Like most people, formal sitting meditation seemed to be about “dominating” my mind–forcing it to stop thinking so I could just “be”. I soon learned from the teachers that thinking is what minds do. There’s no “stopping” the thoughts. What there is is cultivating a new relationship to them. Letting them go, float by like a cloud, rather than grasping, pushing, or piling on and taking a 10 minute thought detour into the past or future and completely leaving the present moment. We train in coming back not in never thinking.
It was another few years before it started to dawn on me that zen practice, at least for me, was not about making friends with my mind (important and necessary, yes); my practice was actually learning to make friends with my body. That was a much, much taller order.
Over the next few years I mostly just uncovered the depths of the violent, adversarial relationship I’d always had with my body. Not so much about appearance and weight: I do care some, but that’s never been my primary focus. No, my body fury was about how my body let me down and prevented me from doing what “I” (my mind) wanted to do. My body was weak and easily injured, I was in pain all the time, hell my damn bladder was too small and I had to pee “too much”.
My whole life was spent dragging this meatsack around so that my mind could do what my mind wanted to do. The meatsack was a means to an end at best, and an infuriating obstacle most of the time. I was going to force it to do what I wanted, even if it killed me!
The intensity of my formal zen practice increased as I progressed on the path to ordination as a priest in training in the Soto Zen tradition. What I could not yet articulate was that the literal forms of Soto Zen were un-doable in my body without great violence. As little as an hour of sitting meditation in a day would set off a cascade of physical injury and migraines; kinhin–walking meditation traditionally done barefoot–done for less than 5 minutes would initiate weeks-to-months long flares of plantar fasciitis. The only way to get through a sesshin (retreat) was absolute force and willpower, injuries and emotional suffering be damned.
A few months after ordaining, I turned around and went on sabbatical from priest training. I came to this decision after a year of doing Somatic Experiencing therapy which let me finally admit and articulate to myself how harmful formal practice was for me in the way I’d been doing it. One session I described what zazen (sitting meditation) was like, a description that ended with “and all the while there’s a voice inside me screaming “NO!!!!!!!!!!” at the top of its lungs. The hilarious part about that session was that (I kid you not) I started the session by reporting that I often had trouble knowing what I was feeling. After the “NO!!!” comment, I laughed and said, “Oh, is that what you mean by feeling?”
It was clear as day to me that I needed space to cultivate my ability to hear that NO …. and to hear any YES my body had. I could not do this within the context of formal zen practice, a fact that’s hilarious to me now because I think this is exactly the point of zen practice: radical awareness and acceptance of what’s happening, to step out of the fog of delusion. But because the physical posture of meditation itself, combined with the forced stillness, was what my body was saying NO to, I couldn’t explore that space while also trying to meet a specific quota of meditation and retreat days.
I then found two threads that gave me a way to articulate my experience and investigate it non-judgmentally:
- Parts work therapy (Internal Family Systems)
- Intuitive eating/anti-diet
Parts work, in a nutshell, is guided presence with our internal “parts”. You know, like when you say “part of me really wants to apply for a new job, but part of me is afraid!”. What are those parts? IFS helps us investigate them in a compassionate way. What was most interesting to me about the process is that every single step of the way my therapist was asking for consent. Consent from each part to investigate it or permission to investigate another part. Literally every few minutes she would ask me if this or that part “was ok with us _____”, and if a part said “no” (either hearing that word, or feeling some kind of protective or freezing sensation or posture), we would stop. Nothing was done without explicit permission.
It was absolutely mindblowing to me. I think I hadn’t really understood what consent was until she started eliciting it so explicitly. Because tearing through the resistance of one part to “get to” another part is violent. The resisting part feels threatened and will strengthen its resistance. And that–that tearing through a part saying no–feels emotionally violent inside. It literally feels like a tearing, ripping, destructive feeling.
And I began to form this idea of complete, wholebodied consent. Where every part of my being was on board with what was happening. It was radical: “pertaining to the basic or intrinsic nature of something”. It’s like radical acceptance–truly seeing and accepting everything that exists in the present moment. I wanted to learn to treat myself with such deep respect that I had self-consent before doing anything. I didn’t want to rip or burn past my internal warnings ever again.
Intuitive eating helped give me a place to talk about this kind of internal consent. I came to it through Christy Harrison’s book Anti Diet. I’ve never really been a weight loss dieter, but I definitely feel into the “wellness diet” realm for many years, where I was convinced I could solve all my health problems through extremely rigid and curated nutrition. And it dominated my life. I came to understand that I could let all that go, and eating and movement could become something joy-filled again, something experienced as peace rather than as life-threatening angst.
I love the IE space because it’s the only place where I’ve found people talking very explicitly and concretely about working with trusting their bodies, about how to listen to that inner YES and NO and the varieties of ways our bodies communicate those.
I came to believe that we are able to have absolute trust in our bodies, that if we are really listening to them, we can completely trust them to lead us into compassionate “right action”.
I mean this completely and absolutely. If we cultivate a relationship of internal consent and trust, we can absolutely trust our bodies to move in the direction of “ending suffering for all beings” rather than in the direction of increasing suffering (for this being or any other).
This was my vow when I ordained: to dedicate my life to ending suffering for all beings. Its both impossible and I vow to do it.
So, I circle back to my formal meditation practice: if the literal act of sitting meditation in one of 3 allowed postures is injuring me or causing other harm, if meditation itself is landing violently on my body, how can I ever hope that this will end suffering for all beings? The ends absolutely do not justify the means. That’s not possible. Violence cannot and will not ever beget peace and non-violence.
I give myself permission to explore formal zen practice non-violently. To find a way to do it that doesn’t harm this body or other bodies. And the only way for me to do that is to investigate radical consent. Moment to moment I am listening to what my body is telling me, and when it says stop, I stop.