Ok. It has been less than 48 hours here in India, but true to any real travel, an hour might be a day back home. The gift of letting yourself move into a truly foreign environment is that you have chosen to be changed. It's like diving into the surf on day with high seas… and the water is cold. You can't inch your way in, of course: you run, you throw yourself into the next falling wave, get tumbled, rolled, hit the floor of the sea, pick up a suit full of sand, then stand up gasping and smiling.
And with all of those senses so active, and every moment and nuance being recorded, you see far more than you ever would have seen on your way from breakfast to office, from office to lunch, from lunch to the afternoon, and from afternoon to home. Safety is safe… but what have I seen today? What have I been today?
Yesterday our day began long before sunrise. We were in the middle of Bangalore, in what I now would consider the lap of luxury, though at the time I would have perhaps compared it to a stripped-down Motel 6… except of course for the quality of the people at the desk and at the cafeteria there, who were distinctly Hilton Hotel. The way one's energy flows, having switched night for day in the intercontinental flight, and top for bottom in navigating a culture, is unpredictable, and well worth watching. A much more fascinating show than yesterday's television or tomorrow's film. In any case, I finished the first day in India exhausted, and woke at 3:30am exhilarated, not to sleep again.
What to do with that emptiness? I rolled about a bit in bed, figuring that I was really so tired, sleep would come quickly if I just let it… but it kept hiding from me. I went looking for it, and now and then would catch a glimpse, but then quicker than the inner eye, it slipped away again.
The street was quiet, Manny was sleeping, so I sat in meditation for a while — if there was to be no peace, then I might as well take a look and see what was in its place.
Nothing too pleasant at 3:30am. Really, early morning you face everything you have been suppressing all day long. Lately I have felt the body, the physical body, to be weighted, almost as though walking through mud; when I was younger — perhaps your age? — I walked with the lightest step, I danced as though I could fly, and I ran as fast as the fastest sprinter in my school. Now I climb a flight of stairs and the breath comes heavier than I have noticed before, the knees have little creakings and groanings which belie 46 years of gravity, and the muscles at the end of the day seem to have accumulated tensions, instead of putting them off. It was a rather disappointing inventory.
But there is a useful practice with insight: a one-year practice, where in stillness you scan the body, scan every inch and without moving feel the nerves, the musculature, the support of the skeleton. Oh, you say you can visit the toes, the ankles, the calves, the knees, the thighs, the hips… the torso, the chest, the shoulders, the upper and lower arms, the wrists and palms and fingers… the neck, the jaw, the eyelids, the forehead, the ears, the scalp? Five minutes, you're done!
No, what I mean is, you visit the small toe on your right foot. Close your eyes and breathe, and feel that toe. You haven't arrived there yet, your mind is untrained, you are already thinking about what you are going to have for lunch. Go back to your toe. Without moving it, feel the nerves and the muscles that connect it to your foot. Breathe again; your mind is untrained, now your are worrying about a payment you have to make, your son's health or mother's health. Go back to that toe. Have you seen it? No, you think the toe is a Toe, because there is a word that makes it one thing, you think that it is not made of many. Give your awareness to the pad of that toe. Did you know there are nerves that line your skin and organs in an infinitesimal array… and you can, if you train your mind, if your train your awareness, feel any of them. Breathe. Go back to your toe., go to the tip of your toe, go to one nerve in the tip of your toe, and when you breathe in, allow your breath to follow a line through your entire body, down the leg, through the foot, over the knuckles, down the length of that toe, through the pad, through the tip, to the one nerve you inhabit with your awareness.
Ridiculous? Of course it is. Still, if you practice being alive to this degree, you will be alive to this degree. If you practice for an entire year, fifteen minutes each morning, you will maybe be a little more aware of your physical body, and notice that it is not one thing — simply because there is a word that describes it — but ten thousand things, one million things, and all of them are not you. Imagine how full a day can be, if you giving feeling a little practice? Imagine how warm the embrace of your children, if you are that present, or touching a partner in love?
Because of a long practice of self-awareness, my inventory the other night was incredibly subtle. My doctor says "Oh, your health is great," because his eyes are weak, he can only see my skin, measure my blood pressure, and count hemoglobin. My doctor, he is very smart, but he measures my health with a club, while I measure my well-being with instruments so fine they can follow a single nerve. My inventory was saddening, because this world is so amazing and beautiful, life so full, and I see the curve of the hill, I feel the wheels turning and rolling faster and faster, and even though I have perhaps just rounded the summit, still I know it is a summit I have climbed, and now I am walking down from heaven to earth.
In the middle of the night, when your best defenses are still asleep (but you are not), this sort of note is rather hard to read. Like an envelope whose return address says "Death", how delightful. Thank you for the invitation, but regretfully I cannot attend?
I am happy to say that, over the course of a good and adventurous life, spanning several personalities and as many continents, I have acquired some strong practices which have helped me out of a jam more than once. That night I returned to look at the body, full of small aches and travel-exhaustion, and felt the power still within it. The muscles may be knotted, tensed; but they are still strong, the body is still so strong, and when I remembered that this body, made of a million parts, a million bits of matter, is not Me… ah, then Me, I could decide to do something about it. I rolled out my yoga mat, and practiced a good hour and a half of yoga, opening, opening. And with that good strength invited back, the sun rose up over the city of Bangalore, the traffic began to blare its way here and there, Manny rose and said good morning… and so it was.
Only 24 hours away from habit, and already I have freed myself to follow a better course. This month I will rise every morning at 5:30 — I am such a night owl, usually I run until I am empty, then sleep until I must awaken — I will rise every morning before the sun, and practice yoga, strengthen myself the better to embrace the day, and the better to live my life. Yes.
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