Here I am in the lush, earthy-smelling, dark green, damp Pacific Northwest forest of eastern Oregon.
I am sitting in my little cabin, in bed with my trusty laptop, and my newly written worksheet on The Body.
Fourteen people have come together to contemplate painful beliefs about the body, including eating, pain, accidents, mental illness, weight, aging.
“The worksheet” as you know, if you’re familiar with The Work, is the place where you write out your most despicable, vicious, frightened, depressing, nervous, unhappy thoughts about whatever it is you are thinking about.
It might be a person you know, your parents, your child, the weather, the government, that country, this world, your house, your work, money, your body.
Even if you’re not super familiar with The Work….step one on the way to discovering freedom and a life without stress is simply identifying the painful thoughts speeding through your mind.
These are thoughts you think that don’t feel good. Images you picture that don’t feel fun or sweet, that may be horrifying or extremely sad.
Memories that appear that are desperate, dreadful, or disgusting.
There are a lot of thoughts in the mind that feel downright awful when you think them.
This is the beginning of The Work…identifying these difficult, troubling, worrisome thoughts.
Then, once they are out in broad daylight, right there on the paper, they can be examined rather than avoided or brushed under the rug.
In our workshop full of people, we all wrote a Judge Your Body worksheet after considering a time when we had an objection to something going on in the body.
A situation occurred, and we saw our body as a problem, some part of our body as an irritant, or a major fear.
For me, my body grew a tumor on the right leg. Cancer! It also has a cellulite-y butt, an aching right foot, a left hip that gets stiff, and graying hair.
And yes, I know the mind is right here, close as close can be, watching the whole thing, inseparable from this body, a part of it…and yet we can so easily separate the body from whatever it is I think of as “me”.
It seems like there is my body, and then there is my mind, which notices, thinks about, critiques, and finds solutions for the body.
The mind, I notice, has had judgments, opinions and assumptions (happy ones and unhappy ones) about the body since I was very young!
So this evening, I’ve brought myself this gift of reeming the heck out of this body, telling it what I REALLY think about this situation.
No holding back…this is letting it rip to the fullest throttle.
Question One on the Judgment worksheet: What is it about your body that angers, confuses, or disappoints you, and why?
I mean REALLY, REALLY enrages you, scares you, gets you mixed up, disappoints you, freaks you out, makes you feel nauseated?
Well…since you asked….
I am frightened with this body because it’s going to die. It feels pain. It’s vulnerable. It can never be absolutely perfect.
This situation sucks! Who thought this up anyway! We come into a body, it runs into things and things bump into it, it grows and moves and operates itself somehow through some amazing and mysterious life force, and then decays either a little or a lot, and dies either sooner or later.
Stuff has happened, and will happen again, that HURTS. I don’t have control. I don’t even get how the thing actually works, or why it’s doing what it does.
And after being in the body (which I’m not exactly sure I am in, depending on what “I” is) and being here on planet earth, I have to die after all that! Jeez!
I OBJECT!
But wait.
Instead of objecting over and over again (which I notice has never worked so far to change the situation) and ask if it is really true for me that it’s upsetting that this body is going to die?
YES! If someone asked me right now, like a waiter in a restaurant: would you like death…or would you like life?
I’d say LIFE. Duh.
So can I absolutely, beyond any shadow of a doubt, know that it is upsetting to die?
Can I know that it’s final, difficult, painful, tragic, that I’ll leave all the people I love forever, that I’ll never be connected to them again, that it will hurt?
Oh, well, now that you put it that way. I can’t actually KNOW with complete absoluteness that dying is upsetting. Or separating, final, painful.
I haven’t actually done it, in this lifetime. Yet.
Come to think of it, I have NO IDEA if it’s true that death is upsetting.
I know that the way I react to the world and to my life when I believe that dying is upsetting is that I cling to this life, I think people with great health, youth, and vitality are lucky, I think signs of aging (meaning…on the way to death) are bad. I think my cancer was frightening.
The way I react to the world when I believe death is upsetting is that when someone I really love dies I feel very, very sad. I miss them.
Who would I be without this thought that death is upsetting?
What if I couldn’t believe that this situation of being alive, in a body, is disturbing (in a bad way)?
What if everything is going unimaginably well with this body? What if it was a good, good thing that it’s had the “flaws” it has appeared to have, the accidents, the distress, the injuries, the pain, the ugliness, the signs of death?
What if death is so dang awesome it’s going to be the adventure of a lifetime!
Fabulous! Can’t wait! So lucky if you find out your dying sooner than later! Woohoo!
“Each separate being in the universe returns to the common source. Returning to the source is serenity.” ~ Tao Te Ching #16
Of course you may not be thrilled about death, or life, every moment. But to begin to examine this idea called death…that we will all experience…opens up our minds to Great Investigation.
We feel fear, sorrow, angst, paranoia, impermanence, we imagine what we’ll miss in the future when we consider death, so sure it will hurt either emotionally or physically.
But not to brace against it, or resist this situation of living in All This, being here, apparently being alive just for awhile, knowing death is coming…
…what freedom. How incredible.
Joyful laughter arises. I know nothing.
“It’s good to realize you will die, that death is right there on your shoulder all the time.” ~ Pema Chodron
Love, Grace