Freedom Is the Ground

Freedom Is The Ground:
An Inquiry Into The Opportunity For Deep Surrender Revealed In The Experience Of Depression




Brian Adler



















BIRDWINGS




Your grief for what you've lost lifts a mirror

up to where you're bravely working.




Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,

here's the joyful face you've been wanting to see.




Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.

If it were always a fist or always stretched open,

you would be paralyzed.




Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding,

the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated

as birdwings.

-Rumi










Introduction- Heaven and Earth




My motivation for writing the following paper is twofold. My first objective is to discuss depression and the tendency to pathologize its experience in our culture. I intend to communicate my view and experience that, when embraced, depression affords the wonderful opportunity to deepen, empty, and open one's heart. We have the mistaken notion that the point of life is the successful attainment of situations and conditions that will make safe, secure, and happy. Depression seems to us to be the nemesis of happiness which indicates a fundamental failure in life. We typically see it as nothing more than an obstacle to fulfillment.

But the truth is that none of the circumstances that we struggle to achieve will last and they do not provide the height and depth of freedom we are after in any case. Further, when I have admitted defeat in my every cell, given up fighting being who and where I am, I have not found only collapse and misery as I have feared. Rather I have experienced a peace deeper and more boundless than I ever knew through having life go "my way". My heartfelt conviction is that true freedom resembles more a surrender to death than a victory over life.

My second objective is to discuss how this embrace and surrender can be served through an integrated understanding of Somatic Psychology and Buddhist Dharma. Too often our spiritual search remains idealistic and conceptual. When surrender is visceral, when it is embodied then the process is taking root for real. In his description of the discovery of basic goodness the Venerable Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche points to this visceral surrender to the ground and to the freedom that it reveals:

Imagine that you are sitting on the ground, with your bare bottom touching the earth. Since you are not wearing a scarf or hat, you are also exposed to heaven above. You are sandwiched between heaven and earth: a naked man or woman. Sitting between heaven and earth.

Earth is always earth. The earth will let anyone sit on it, and earth never gives way. It never lets you go - you don't drop off this earth and go flying through outer space. Likewise, sky is always sky; heaven is always above you. Whether it is snowing or raining or the sun is shining, whether it is daytime or nighttime, the sky is always there. In that sense, we know that heaven and earth are trustworthy.1

This surrender must take place at our depths; it must happen bodily. Our allegiance to struggle, non-surrender, the effort to increase, to decrease, to maintain, and to get rid of, pervades the bodymind. It can be observed in our speech, movement, and physiology. The intelligence of being who and where we are must awaken bodily. It may be revealed in a simple and unextraordinary way; catharsis if it occurs is definitely not the point. But if we are to awaken for real we must change our relationship to our bodily felt experience, literally.

True vulnerability becomes possible as we shift from cognitive dominance to submission to direct experience. The need for this transition becomes obvious at some point through somatic movement practices. I will explain their value in light of the awakening of bodhicitta, tender heart, or the genuine heart of sadness (Trungpa, 1988) as Trungpa Rinpoche refers to it.

In my several years at The Naropa Institute I have observed that many people are curiously uninterested in what a thorough understanding, experiential as well as conceptual, of Somatic Psychology might accomplish to enliven and embody their Buddhist practices. Likewise, too few people look to the heart of the Dharma to deepen their understanding of the profundity and true significance of basic goodness that somatic awareness practices lean on.

Through the practice of movement awareness disciplines such as Body-Mind Centering and Authentic Movement, I have realized the error and insufficiency of a meditation practice that is not fully embodied, whole in mind and body. For many years my meditation practice remained mental and aloof. I hadn't transcended so much as dissociated, gone to sleep.

And yet meditation practice has taught me that authenticity and bodymind integration need not be the dramatic, explosive, and ultimately unsustainable expression of emotion that can happen in somatic practice that is too preoccupied with self and the manipulation of body energies. At the heart of the dharma is the intention to live where we are, as we are, to interrupt the assumption that we must escape or change our present experience to become whole. The presumption inherent in true meditation practice is that no remedial technique aimed at lessening our pain is necessary or fruitful. We cannot become safe, secure, or free of discomfort, but we can be who and where we are and realize we are already whole even while pain and sadness persist leaving an unhealing wound in our hearts.

It is not my contention that somatic awareness practices are better or worse than meditation practice. Rather my point is that fully grasped they are the same, they point to the same reality, they awaken the same experience. The practice of one enlivens the practice of the other. I do believe that the longer meditation is practiced, the more fluidity of feeling and breath become manifest amidst the stillness, and so more embodied it becomes. Similarly the more movement disciplines are practiced the simpler they become, the radiance they manifest becomes more apparent through subtlety as grosser movements burn away. But in my experience if the two disciplines are practiced simultaneously, they serve one another and the ripening occurs more predictably.

If Buddhist and Somatic instruction provide the education, then the experience of loss provides the motivation and ultimately the inspiration to discover and live a life based on the truth. There is something very "real" about the rawness that depression evokes. If someone is experiencing significant depression he must be close to the conclusion that peace cannot be won through attainment. Although most people make the mistake of believing this is their own personal destiny and so lose heart or turn to medical remedies, depression marks an individuals proximity to the obviousness of surrender. At some point surrender may become obvious and choiceless as every other option is extinguished.

Awareness practices have taught me how to utilize this state bodily as a descent to the ground or where I actually am without it becoming collapse or persistent stagnation. As I address the transformation of the view of loss and defeat that depression affords I will also explain how this appears in my own life as well as in my work with others.










One cannot reach the dawn

save by the path of night

-Kahil Gibran




Depression and Descent


In modern times since the advent of psychology depression has been understood first as persistent unhappiness caused by early learning experiences that conflict with primal instincts; then more recently we have turned to a biological mechanistic view that depression is basically caused by faulty brain chemistry.2 I am amazed people conclude that because we can track the altered brain chemistry that the chemistry must be causing the unhappiness rather than being yet another symptom of the whole systems condition. It is almost unheard of to value depression as an important catalyst in a larger life process.

In order to qualify for a diagnosis from the DSM-IV for a Major Depressive Episode someone must have five or more of the following symptoms:

1. depressed mood most of the day

2. diminished interest or pleasure in activities during the day

3. weight loss or gain

4. insomnia or hypersomnia

5. psychomotor agitation or retardation

6. fatigue or loss of energy nearly every day

7. feelings of worthlessness

8. diminished ability to think or concentrate

9. recurrent thoughts of death 3

These symptoms are clearly cause for concern that something is occurring that requires care, attention, and perhaps facilitation. But rather than conclude that this person is sick and needs to be made well, I see depression as a sign that an initiation is immanent and necessary. It marks a potentially significant break with someone's old life and attitudes.

I have often joked to friends that if it were not for periodic experiences of depression I would most likely be a lawyer today. It sounds like a joke but its the truth. During my teen years I dreamed of being a lawyer or a politician, but depression prevented me from developing the competitive, achievement oriented attitude I needed to be successful. I did not willingly or joyfully begin to ask more introspective and reflective questions about life's purpose and meaning. I had no childhood education that predisposed me towards religion or psychology. I remember long hours sitting alone in my room facing the truth that I could not continue to live out the expectations of my peers, teachers, and family.

I didn't consciously realize that money, power, and status would not be ultimately fulfilling. I desperately wanted to succeed as I had been taught to understand it. I went to a very competitive high school and undergraduate school. I wanted to be among the best. My problem as I saw it was that I was incapable of succeeding. For some reason I could not muster the same dedication, the same effort as those around me. I felt that I was a complete failure. Because I was so exhausted by the weight of frustration and despair, I began to long with all my heart for help. I didn't know who I was praying to or for what help. But the emergence of deep longing gave a shape and substance to my experience. As I gave in to my exhaustion, my attention was forcibly turned to ask deeper questions about life's true nature and significance. In "The Paradox of Finding one's Way by losing it", Michael Washburn writes:

There comes a point in some people's lives when worldly goals lose their significance and life loses its perceived value. When this happens, it seems as though life in any meaningful sense has come to an end. In fact, however, this apparent endpoint can be a turning point toward a new beginning. It is a paradox that we sometimes need to lose our way in order truly to find it, or, as Jesus says in the Gospels, that to save one's life is to lose it and to lose one's life for his sake is to save it.4

In my view depression manifests as the struggle between the longing for freedom and the fear of death reaches its heights. We want to be free but we haven't decided we're willing to lose everything else to realize it.




The Fire of Despair Leaves Nothing but the Ground

Depression teaches me to turn inside out. The despair underlying depression is a powerful catalyst to deepen farther and farther to the ground, to the sense that I'm simply here with nowhere else to go. It causes me to abandon all the familiar ways I know to keep myself entertained and distracted through life.

Typically, we're fascinated by what this new house, job, relationship, diet, technique etc. is going to do for us. We're captivated by the endless task of making ourselves better, of improving our lives so that we hopefully won't have to experience insecurity and imperfection, unless we believe experiencing our insecurity will make us better off, have a payoff somehow. When I'm depressed I lose hope for the possibility of self-improvement. I begin to feel my faultiness is inescapable. I lose my hope and motivation to try to get more, be more, and achieve more. Hope is intuited fundamentally to be futile in this kind of despair. I come face to face with my insecurity. All my hidden in shadow fears of myself come into focus as inescapable. We see that our worst fears are true. I am needy, constantly making mistakes, and not becoming all that I hoped would make me happy. We realize the inescapable truth of our own insecurity. The collapse of depression is the notion that I am unique in this frailty. It is the belief that I in particular have failed at the life task everyone else must be succeeding at. In writing about the Dark Night of the Soul, St. John of the Cross describes this state:

The self is in the dark because it is blinded by a light greater than it can bear. The more clear the light, the more does it blind the eyes of the owl, and the stronger the sun's rays, the more it blinds the visual organs, overcoming them by reason of their weakness, depriving them of the power of seeing.... As eyes weakened and clouded suffer pain when the clear light beats upon them, so the soul, by reason of its impurity, suffers exceedingly when the Divine Light really shines upon it. And when the rays of this pure Light shine upon the soul in order to expel impurities, the soul perceives itself to be so unclean and miserable that it seems as if God has set Himself against it and itself were set against God.5

While this experience is excruciating it marks a pivotal point. The pain of life being so terribly inconvenient reaches a feverish pitch. I realize that I cannot continue to live as I have. At this point many people make the mistake of committing suicide. They still believe that the only way to be happy is to have life work out according to our plans. They simply cannot fathom the utter nakedness of moment to moment awareness that depends on nothing.

In these moments I've realized that if I stop running towards success or away from defeat, if I give up now, accept my death before I die then there is nothing to fix, nothing else to do. Sometimes when I've felt that none of my dreams to be a successful therapist, writer, or even a respected person were going to occur I've asked myself what would happen if I were to die right now, give up all hope of becoming altogether. When I've contemplated this I've felt profound and seemingly unbounded relief, a relief not dependent on events working out as I'd wish them to. In that moment I am no longer collapsed in defeat. I am present. I am available to life. Its like riding a storm at its center where there is only quiet.

I experienced this kind of peace several years ago after being arrested for selling drugs. As the reality of a prison sentence bared down on me I felt the crushing fear that my life was over, that I could do nothing and was doomed to be nobody, to amount to nothing. I had never been so aware how much hope and anticipation weighed on my dreams of career and significant achievement. After a timeless period of the most intense agony I had yet experienced in life I realized that I could not prevent what was happening. So I gave up. I remember distinctly lying on the floor as I felt muscles throughout my body relax. As I lay there on the floor, I felt calm, peaceful, and present. The sensation of the floor under me the most significant object of my attention. After some time I understood that although my wish to have my life turn out successfully is strong, my desire to experience everything falling apart is even stronger. As this falling apart occurs I remember surrender as all my other options dissolve. The serenity and quiet I felt in that moment and similar ones is completely different than the joy of success. Its the sense of having nothing to hold onto, nothing to protect, or defend... The end of waiting...

Zen teacher Katagiri Roshi writes about this experience of quiet:

When we think about what real silence is, we have to look at it from two angles; the first is to see silence through human eyes and the second is to see silence through Buddha's eyes or the universal eye. The opportunity to experience real silence occurs when we have been driven into a corner and simply cannot move an inch. This seems like a situation of complete despair, but this silence is quite different from despair, because in the area of despair, the conscious flame of human desire is still burning. But real silence is the state of human existence that passes through this despair. How can we experience this silence? Without everyday life it is impossible to experience this silence.6

At this point the view and practice of meditation becomes invaluable. I've begun to see that there is no hope in the future and I intuit that the present moment can be experienced as whole in itself, but I need some kind of practice to function as a container. I need some path to remind me of and express my newfound discovery. How do I utilize everyday life as Katagiri Roshi describes it? The next section addresses this question. We discover silence by submitting ourselves to feeling. We feel the joy and the sorrow, the clarity and the confusion, that constantly changes and characterizes each moment. With this intention the richness of the Buddha Dharma and meditation practice reveals itself.




Genuine Heart of Sadness

Meditation practice reveals that the loss of or failure to achieve security that underlies the sense of defeat in depression is actually always occurring. In the article, "Depression as a Loss of Heart", John Wellwood explains that depression occurs because we have not embraced the fundamental inevitability of pain and loss:

Loss of heart arises from a basic sense of grief and defeat. Specific losses may be involved: loss of a loved one, a career, cherished illusions, material possessions, or self-esteem. Or there may be a more global sense of defeat carried over from childhood. In either case, the depressed person feels a sense of powerlessness and loss of control, and is unable to trust reality.7

We feel defeated or even betrayed by life whenever we lose or fail to achieve what we believe would guarantee us happiness. The futility of seeking security as I described it in the last section is understood in Buddhist terms to be true because of three basic truths about the condition of life. The three truths, understood as the essence of the unreality of security, are known as the three marks of existence.

Impermanence

The first mark of existence, impermanence, points to the fact that everything, every thought, emotion, relationship, or situation, everything that has a beginning, also has an ending. Typically, in our search for happiness we do not live as if impermanence were true. If we examine much of our motivation we find that we are always trying to hold onto what we like and get rid of what we don't like. I want to keep this house or this girlfriend because they make me feel secure and good. We feel betrayed by our relationships or life itself when it changes in a way we didn't want it to. We believe that circumstances are preventing us from being happy. Meditation reveal that this is always true. Every moment brings new arising thoughts and feelings and then they fall away. The simple truth is that the only certainty following gain is eventual loss. Our understanding of happiness or joy in life cannot depend on holding onto gain if it is to be true and sustained.

Egolessness

In The Myth of Freedom, Trungpa Rinpoche talks about the second mark of existence, egolessness.8 He describes ego as, "the effort to secure our happiness, to maintain ourselves in relation to something else. But he says that this is a moment by moment process, "a flicker of confusion, a flicker of aggression, a flicker of grasping." There is no fixed solid self. There is only this moment to moment appearance of a self caused by the struggle to become happy by holding onto what we want and trying to prevent what we don't want. We are perpetuating our suffering by believing that we are a fixed entity who needs to be saved, protected, and cured of suffering. The confusion is able to persist because we avoid at all costs the fear that is the heart of it. Rather than experience the fear directly, we try to fulfill the voice of fear that demands entertainment and security.

Trungpa Rinpoche says that there are two stages of egolessness. The first stage is characterized by the watcher or the sense that there is a witness to the passing thoughts and feelings. In my experience, in this stage I developed a notion that I could detach from pain, that I could watch it and thus not suffer it. Trungpa Rinpoche calls holding onto the notion of egolessness in this sense, "cheap escapism."

My sense is that this is the trap we fall into when we study the dharma and then try to use it to protect ourselves from pain. It is still the effort to protect ourselves from the experience of pain to say, "I am not this pain, I am the witness of this pain." It is the cultivation of feeling witnessing or feeling observation that I've practiced in somatic awareness practices that has taught me to begin to penetrate this mentalization of egolessness in meditation and in my life. In the section that discusses somatics later in the paper I will expand further how somatic practice can deepen our experiential understanding in this way.

In the second stage of egolessness the notion of perceiver is dropped as well and there is no longer any effort to detach from pain. Here is where the quality of being undone or "burned up" by the fire emerges. We cultivate a practice based simply on direct and immediate feeling. We recognize that we can experience life "vividly" and directly from and with our hearts or our whole body feeling. We can tolerate feeling, and ultimately we must. This understanding marks the transition from using spiritual knowledge as a remedy or cure for suffering to developing the courage to experience life as it is. It also signifies the end of spiritual idealism. I recently heard Naropa Buddhist Studies Teacher, Reggie Ray, say that Trungpa Rinpoche had said that depression is the most noble of the samsaric states, that of all the unenlightened states it is the state closest to true understanding.9 He must have said this because in depression there is the recognition that there can be no escape from pain. What is missing, though, is the courage or the confidence to experience fully, to feel fully. So there is the sense of defeat in the attitude of "no way out and no way through."

In an experience of depression a few years ago I had a powerful insight into the relentless demand of this experience of egolessness. I had become so depressed that I found I was incapable of doing anything at all for long periods of time. I was making a moment to moment effort to tolerate the weight I felt in my heart. I recognized that there was only this panic in my heart. I saw that the "me" that I take for granted as being the center of my "selfness" had no substance, no reliable continuity. It seemed there was only the chaos of thoughts arising and ending continually.

I found the experience very terrifying and realized that although I was still very motivated to understand the dharma, I felt that I had no choice, I also realized that I was terrified that I would not be able to tolerate what I discovered. That experience clarified for me the comment Trungpa Rinpoche often said that it is better to not begin the path, but if you begin it, it is better to complete it.

Pain

The third mark of existence is simply that there is pain. We age, we become sick, we die. Feeling pain is unavoidable. We become depressed because we do not accept and even embrace feeling, the quality of feeling that always coincides with the experience of life. We believe that for happiness to occur we would have to be experiencing something else. We would have to feel "good". But this is not true. It comes from a misunderstanding about the nature of happiness. Typically we equate happiness with feeling good and having a good time. But we have to understand happiness as something larger than the whimsy of how good we feel. In his article, "Sadness: The enemy of Depression"10, Eric Fromm makes the distinction between our conventional notions of happiness which he says is more accurately named simply pleasure and a richer understanding of happiness which includes an embrace of the fullness of all feeling, joy and sadness, pleasure and pain. Fromm eloquently articulates the inevitability and the naturalness of pain:

A person who is alive and sensitive cannot fail to be sad, and to feel sorrow many times in his life. This is so, not only because of the amount of unnecessary suffering produced by the imperfection of our social arrangements but because of the nature of human existence, which makes it impossible not to react to life with a good deal of pain and sorrow. Since we are living beings, we must be sadly aware of the necessary gap between our aspirations and what can be achieved in our short and troubled life. Since death confronts us with the inevitable fact that either we shall die before our loved ones or they before us- since we see suffering, the unavoidable as well as the unnecessary and wasteful, around us every day, how can we avoid the experience of pain and sorrow?

In the light of this understanding that pain is inevitable. We could say that the opposite of feeling good is not feeling bad as we are conditioned to believe; rather the opposite of feeling good is the inability or the refusal to feel at all...

Tender Heart

Abiding in the intention to feel with and from our heart, that recognizes that there is nowhere to go, nowhere else that will make things better, is the essence of meditation practice. Perhaps it is called meditation practice because after we drop the mystical escapism, meditation is just the conscious practice of feeling which is the gateway to being who we are rather than trying to do something about who we are or who we fear we are. And yet meditation practice also reveals the sense of quiet, vulnerable, goodness in being where we are that I have already begun to describe. In my own experience meditation reveals both the good news and the bad news at the same time. If I can tolerate the intensity of feeling that security is impossible to achieve and not succumb to collapse, I also find in sitting practice a tacit moment to moment recognition of my own perfection without having to become perfect. As I'm just sitting there I experience that same quality, albeit less dramatic, that I experience in the moment of accepting or surrendering to loss.

In Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving Kindness11, Trungpa Rinpoche talks about what he calls the "sore spot." Our sore spot is the open wound in our hearts. It is the pain we feel, the longing we feel in everyday life that I have been describing. It is exactly what we habitually try to numb out, medicate, distract ourselves from. Rinpoche explains in his book, though, that this ache is the seat of where compassion is born. In Sanskrit it is called Boddhicitta or awakened heart. This awakening occurs most simply by feeling the ache, deepening in our relationship to it. As we feel this ache, we maintain our relationship to the earth and to the sky. Rinpoche talk about the process as the joining of Shamatha and Vipashyana or mindfulness and spaciousness. Later, I'll talk about this in terms of Body Mind Centering practice.

So often when we imagine what spiritual awakening must be like we imagine some big impressive or at least dramatically relieving experience. But this is not what actually occurs. What really occurs is a humbling, a wearing down process. Rinpoche calls it a "gentling" process. When we can acknowledge that we are in pain and simultaneously acknowledge that we are whole, this makes us available to others and able to meet them compassionately.

Tonglen Practice

I wanted to write briefly about Tonglen practice because my understanding of it has changed since it was first introduced to me several years ago. Tonglen Practice is a meditation practice used to awaken compassion. In it the practitioner imagines with as many senses as possible that they are breathing in the suffering, pain, negative circumstances etc. of others and breathing out their own pleasure, joy, positive circumstances etc. It is called a practice of sending and taking.

I used to have some idea that the real reason I might practice tonglen was that the universe might be fooled my magnanimous gesture and give me more positive or desirable experiences anyway. Or I thought," tonglen is crazy, what good does it do for me to suffer so that someone will suffer less?" I thought that tonglen couldn't possibly mean that we want to take pain into our hearts for real. But it is actually great pain, great tenderness that reminds us to let go, that finally leaves us peeled raw and human, knowing less and defending less. So I realize the joke when, after trying to not be unhappy for so long, I give up. I remember that when things fall apart, the gift is precisely that I am reminded to let go. Tonglen is what it seems to be. It is really a practice of inviting the negativity and suffering of others into ourselves, not because we'll actually become rich, famous, or powerful if we do this but because it will keep us in contact with the earth.

Great pain is not punishment for being bad. It is an extremely potent opportunity to have our hearts break open. Through finding that we can tolerate more ache than we imagined possible we find a previously unrealized depth and breadth of being. We do not practice tonglen because we are trying to "win" the contest of spiritual growth. We practice tonglen because our desire to succeed and survive is dissolving and our desire to be free is growing. What I am discovering is that as the desire to "win" falls away, the more willing I am to be where I am. I am grateful to have this moment, in this body, whether I'm tying my shoes, washing the dishes, waiting for a bus, or delighting in the satisfaction that the literal ground is there beneath me whatever else is happening.

In the final section of this paper I'll talk about how Authentic Movement and Body Mind Centering relate to discovering the "ground" and to the workability of our practice being to simply feel with our whole bodies the fact of our situation..







There is only one truth.

It is being where you are.

And where you are is where your body is.

-Australian Spiritual Teacher Barry Long




My Body is Where I am

Nearing the end of such a long paper, I find that I am cautious about both repeating myself overly much and also about turning something that is actually quite simple and ordinary into something obscure or mystical with too much mentalization. This is perhaps a fitting state of mind with which to introduce body awareness practice and to discuss its usefulness in the moment to moment living or embodiment of what I have discussed so far.

No doubt much of what I've already written is familiar and not in and of itself life changing. Certainly I have spent many years reading different authors' writing that was more passionately, more eloquently, more thoroughly, and more profoundly written than this paper. But when the smoke clears and the dust settles after filling ourselves with just a little more to think about, it is finally our moment to moment relationship to our experience that makes a difference. Its not what we can remember or how well we can say it. This has been a hard won lesson for me, one that I'm still developing. For me spiritual understanding was always either some profound bit of knowledge that I could walk around with and show off, or it was some impressively etheric and otherworldly penetration of far off realms.

This mentalization or etherization of understanding was the basis from which I practiced meditation. I sat there either trying to remember what it was that I had understood to be so profound about life or I sent my attention upwards even higher, hoping for a repeat of the last amazing experience I'd had meditating, sleeping, or on psychedelic drugs. If none of these experiences occurred I soon felt that I was doing something wrong at worst or was doing it right but just had to wait for the "good" stuff to come back at best. In any case I soon grew bored and agitated or sleepy and entranced, almost literally asleep. I thought that was real meditation practice. Didn't real meditation happen in the context of a slightly altered, slightly drugged, "hypnagogic" state?

In these final sections I'll write about how I've begun to practice a more present and more ordinary approach to meditation and to moments throughout the day. I've leaned that there is nothing in particular that I need to be thinking about that equals wisdom or practice; there is nothing to remember. If I'm opening the refrigerator door, then that's what's important. If I'm mowing the lawn, then this is what's happening. As Katigiri Roshi said, we need everyday life to experience silence. The added quality that I'm learning to bring to my everydays is a simple quality that emerges when my whole body is there, engaged, not trying to be elsewhere. This is a capacity that has come slowly over the last few years in the practice of the following disciplines.

Unfortunately, I cannot go into great length about either practice. The intent of this paper is not to provide an exhaustive or even particularly detailed description of Authentic Movement or Body Mind Centering. My intention is to describe some of the applicability of these practices to one with a prior interest in meditation and a desire to experientially understand the basic ideas presented in this paper.

Authentic Movement and The Lion's Roar

As I've discussed, at the root of depression is a multilayered rejection of what we're actually experiencing, how we're actually being moved in our thoughts, emotions, and sensations. There is a basic attitude that the truth of our sadness, anger, fear, or whatever, is too terrible, to horrible to be related to directly. Describing the alternative which has abandoned the reluctance to "let it all hang out", Trungpa Rinpoche describes the confidence to fully participate with all of our experience as the Lion's Roar:

The "Lion's Roar" is the fearless proclamation that any state of mind, including the emotions, is a workable situation, a reminder in the practice of meditation. We realize that chaotic situations must not be rejected. Nor must we regard them as regressive, as a return to confusion. We must respect whatever happens to our state of mind. Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news.

After three years practicing Authentic Movement I have begun to feel a confidence that whatever state I find myself in, whatever storm or stagnant pond are my thoughts and thoughtless feelings, there is a movement to it, a movement I can follow. And as I'm able to follow this movement, I can appreciate its fundamental "workability". I've found over the years that what's preventing me from enjoying this workability all the time is that what I'm really experiencing doesn't fit my culturally inherited notions of who I should be and how I can express myself. We're all so committed to the appearance of "civilized" behavior.

At first practicing Authentic Movement was a dramatization of the same thing I did meditating. "I should look this way when I move. I should feel that way. I need more muscles. I need more energy..." But over time I began to actually discern the difference between the movement I thought I should be doing and the quality and direction of movement that was already within me, waiting to be followed. Sometimes the movements and sounds are extreme, sometimes subtle. Their size is not important. What is important is the celebration of my own being, the celebration of its actual manifestation as this particular bodymind in this particular moment. What I begun to reclaim is spontaneity. And this spontaneity can appear lying, sitting, standing, walking, or in any of the "chaotic" possibilities that exist in between.

Just like sitting practice, Authentic Movement practice affords the opportunity to practice experiencing and expressing who we are. In particular, though, I want to stress how this practice has changed the way I approach meditation. Rather than waiting for something to happen or waiting for my being to finally accept the "rigor" of meditation, I've begun to relish sitting. I've begun to relish the opportunity to remember, "Oh, this breath, this ache, this twist, this heartbeat, this is life happening right now.." In writing about Authentic Movement, Janet Adler quotes an Indian Saint, speaking about the body in mystical experience:

To transform, you need to go down into the body, and that's terrible... Otherwise nothing will ever change, it will remain the same...I seek my way downward- That's what I can't find. The way I am seeking is always descending, descending- it's never going up, it's always descending, descending...12

Authentic Movement provides a wonderful bridge from the suppressed, rigidity that refuses to let our aliveness show because its not predictable, orderly, and what everyone else is doing. What it reveals is a vitality that can radiate authentically even in the practice of sitting absolutely still. Of course I'm not saying that we have to do Authentic Movement in order to meditate properly, but we can dance with the changes instead of ignoring them. This is the "Lion's Roar".




Body Mind Centering and the Ground

In his book, Depression and the Body, Alexander Lowen has a chapter titled, "Grounding in Reality."13 In it he describes in detail, the body energetics of depression. His primary point is that although we identify depression by the "depressive" part of the cycle, depression is actually part of a larger cycle of depression and elation. This cycle of elation and depression perpetuates because the person experiencing this cycle has no ground, literally no contact with their sense of support that originates in the feet, pelvic floor, and the belly. The depressed person has become stuck in the notion that to be "up" is to be happy and to be "down" is to be unhappy. Just as I explained earlier in the paper depression exposes a cycle of unrealistic goals, that is goals that do not acknowledge the three marks of existence, followed by a pervasive sense of betrayal and defeat at not being able to sustain the "high".

Body Mind Centering practice teaches us how to recognize the body pattern of structure and energy that is the real basis for our mental and emotional states. In this section on BMC I will write about what BMC reveals structurally and energetically in someone experiencing depression. I will follow with a description of how this understanding can benefit grounding in meditation practice and an understanding of Buddhist teaching.

Support from the Lower and the Middle Way

As long as we fuel our lives by the thought that this or that achievement will make us happy, we are holding up, literally, the hope that we can climb or dream ourselves out of our situation. We think happiness means going up and not having to come back down. But the joy in being where we are is that we discover the true satisfaction of giving up trying to escape the ground. The ground has an infallible capacity to support us if we will descend to it. This is the Buddhist understanding of middle way. We are no longer riding the roller coaster of gain and loss. Trungpa Rinpoche talks about surrendering the effort to achieve happiness through our own accomplishment:

We must allow ourselves to be disappointed, which means the surrendering of me-ness, my achievement...Such a series of disappointments inspires us to give up ambition. We fall down and down and down, until we touch the ground, until we relate with the basic sanity of earth. We become the lowest of the low, the smallest of the small, a grain of sand, perfectly simple, no expectations. When we are grounded, there is no room for dreaming or frivolous impulse, so our practice at last becomes workable. We begin to learn how to make a proper cup of tea, how to walk without tripping...14

I was recently participating in a Japanese Tea Ceremony and the woman performing the ceremony said that she had become very simple in her mid-life. She found that she no longer had hope of doing something big or amazing. She simply wanted to devote herself to learning how to properly pour a cup of tea. I realized as we spoke that I too have been formulating a much simpler intention for my life. I want to learn to let the weight of my body drop to the earth, literally to the ground beneath me. Simple Physics may tell me that this is already so. But I have discovered that when I live as if it is my "job" to achieve my own success in life, I am not living as if this is so.

Body Mind Centering practice has enabled me to recognize the literal physical and energetic changes that occur in relation to my weight and the ground when I do not trust the ground to hold me up. So now when familiar panic and despair arises I literally turn my attention to how even the possibility for this moment is being provided by the ground beneath me. All that I may experience becomes a gentle tug downward to remind me to trust the ground instead of my "own" efforts. Having practiced BMC for three years now, this is not a metaphorical practice meant to explain some spiritual ideal. Its beauty is the simplicity of its literal truth. What I find is that as I drop to the ground my whole body and being opens, no longer trapped by the impossible task of creating lasting security and happiness.

Closely connected to the practice of allowing the ground to be our support is the practice of staying awake through our endpoints. Our bodies endpoints are our head and face, our hands, our feet, and our pelvic floor or our seat. Maintaining an awake embodiment of our endpoints enables us to track the quality of simple participation and presence as we submit to being where we are. In meditation practice, the tendency is to drift into fantasy or sleep. Endpoints remind us to be right here. Also I've found that during sitting practice or at any other time in life when the intensity of my emotional state seems overwhelming, I remember endpoints and in this way remember to allow my whole body to act as a resource to contain and embrace the experience. In a certain sense this is the heart of meditation practice, allowing our whole body as it is act as the container for the intensity that burns away our habitual effort to escape to somewhere else.

Case Study of Bob and Mary

This past semester I worked with two people in practice sessions aimed at applying Somatics to psychotherapy. The first person I worked with was Bob, a longtime spiritual seeker and meditation practitioner. Bob's approach to spiritual understanding was characterized by the mentalization of his understanding of egolessness (the first stage of understanding) that he was not identified with his thoughts and feelings but was identical to the formless unchanging presence that is unaffected by changing circumstances in life. He complained though of a lot of back pain and a persistent mood of depression. I saw very quickly that Bob's mentalization of egolessness was causing him to fight against his own heart and feeling level awareness of his body. He often spoke about how "fine" he was, but I always had the impression around him that he was drowning in an overwhelming sense of panic. As we worked together I encouraged him to notice the quality he felt in his belly rather than trying to maintain his view of "enlightenment" in his head. Over time he was able to begin to relate to his vulnerability and "tender heart" and in moments would seem to rest finally in his belly and the sadness he felt there. He found the work we did to have an almost magical ability to facilitate "enlightenment" as he called it, but all that I did was watch how much more room he had to drop into his feet, seat, and belly, and encourage him to allow his attention to drop there.

The second person that I worked with, Mary, had been a Zen meditation practitioner for many years. She explained to me that she was extremely stuck in her life and had no sense of where she was going and was able to feel little more than a constant low grade numbed panic. As I watched her relationship to her body I saw that she had turned her meditation practice of "stillness" into an effort to freeze her entire being. Rather than experiencing the quiet of relating to the ground her practice had become to try and forcibly quiet her being until she could sit still for endless hours. In our work together I showed her that even in sitting practice we have a radiance that is our birthright that comes from embodying and expressing our feelings. Meditation is not "still" because the feelings are being suppressed or starved. Meditation is "still" because the resistance to feeling has fallen away and we can deeply feel even while not overtly moving our bodies. I worked with her to gently unwind her "clamped" refusal to feel and reclaim her "heart" in her practice.




Conclusion-It's Not a Big Experience

As I finish this paper I find that there is not a lot more that I want to say. An image comes to me of what the final moments of my life might be like. In the end will I care what I knew, what I did, who I impressed? Everything will have slipped away and I'll just be lying there as I've done every morning and ever night of my life. We can't know or have anything for certain but we can embrace the unending paradox of life in our every step, breath, and gesture. I once heard Zen teacher, Charlotte Joko Beck, say that her understanding was nothing profound, she had simply gotten tired over the years of listening to her thoughts. They had ceased to impress her quite so much. No matter what else happens, the ground will always be there. And trusting the ground we can have the freedom to look up finally and see the sky, which too has always been there. Its occurred to me that its much more difficult to contemplate depression, our inherent desire to be free, the significance of this tradition or that one etc. than to just sit down, look around, and smile. If I find that I'm not waiting to find something else, something extraordinary, what's right in front of me is pretty nice.




1 Chogyam Trungpa, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior (Boston: Shambhala, 1988) 42.




2


3 "Criteria for Major Depressive Episode," DSM-IV, Fourth Edition ed.: 327.




4


5 quoted by Roberto Assagioli, Sacred Sorrows , 158.




6


7 John Wellwood, "Depression as a Loss of Heart," Journal of Contemplative Psychotherapy IV (1987): 125.




8


9 This conversation occurred between the author and Reggie Ray in a private meeting. (Spring 96.)




10


11 Chogyam Trungpa, Training the MInd and Cultivating Loving Kindness (Boston: Shambhala, 1993) 14-17.




12


13 Alexander Lowen, Depression and the Body (Middlesex: Penguin, 1972) 41-62.




14




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