Discovering liberation through the body

A supplement to the Snowdonia Pure Awareness Summer Retreat 2006.

One of the greatest dangers we encounter when we take up the practice of Buddha-Dharma is that we think of it as essentially one of mental development.

When we first start our practice we naturally read and listen and talk to others a great deal. And when we begin to meditate we almost certainly learn a conceptual form of practice. All these activities exist essentially on the conceptual level.

On this retreat we will learn that to truly enter the profound process of change that we all seek, we need to understand how crucial it is to avoid this one-sided trap and instead learn to bring the whole of our being into the practice. For only then can genuine lasting change take place. The Buddha-Dharma is not just a mental exercise of developing ‘wisdom’, but is a reintegrating process that involves the body every bit as much as the mind.

We will learn that the precious jewel of self-awareness is not to be found in the head at all, as we are likely to believe, but mysteriously in our body. And it is here in our form that we will surely find the centre of the wheel of becoming that takes us from one life to another, in an unending cycle of dukkha. From this slow unfolding of insight into the truth of our total being we will discover that even nirvana, astonishingly, is also hidden and waiting to be discovered in the very same place as our created samsara. All in the body, in the form. Not in the head, at all.

We will learn that to awaken to the truth in its completeness we primarily need to take our practice to the heart of our awareness and begin that process of integrating mind and body. This type of practice brings us into direct contact with our emotional experiences. Experiences that have their direct emotional impact in the body as a living reality before thoughts arise that take us into our habitually created dream world. We learn to come into direct contact with ourselves, no longer hiding behind thoughts and reactions acting as some sort of safety barrier protecting the threatened self and weaving still more delusion to ensnare us.

Through this most direct form of practice we will learn that it requires nothing more than our willingness to open up, accept, contain, and say a big ‘yes’ to ourselves and the world we create and live in. Nothing to do or develop, or even become. Just to be. This simplicity, when engaged in wholeheartedly, will require our complete emotional commitment. With this commitment our true inner nature of warmth and spaciousness can truly open up. And with astonishment we may discover the wonder and mystery that the environment we live in and our true liberating being are not two and separate at all, but rather one and bathed in the liberation of love, beyond time, and deathless.

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