How Non-Directed Body Movement Shaped Who I Am, Part 2

Part of a series of a few posts on my history and what I Teach

Introduction

In part 1, I introduced Non-Directed Body Movement (NDBM). In this post, I’ll share how the practice helped me to connect with zazen in the Rinzai Zen monastery, and how it has shaped me as a person.

Zazen and Non-Directed Body Movement

Life in a Rinzai Zen Monastery is tough. Waking up at God awful hours, meager food, sitting in a cold zendo hour upon hour, basically living outside, braving the cold with a shaved head. You are confronted by the elements, and by your stuck places.

Zazen, or seated meditation, is the foundation for practice, and we would sit anywhere from five to eighteen hours a day. Zazen takes a year or two to learn how to do, even sitting for several hours every day. It takes a long time to truly learn to focus.

For me, zazen was a bit like being on a rollercoaster. I would sit down and all of this energy and intensity would explode out of me. I was just trying to hold on for dear life. Lots of pain, lots of emotions. People think meditation is relaxing, but often, if we are honest, all of our stuff starts to come up.

Sometimes I would connect with zazen and dive into a process of unfolding and unfurling. My sussokukan (extending the breath out all of the way) would naturally open and my whole being would unify. Samadhi would naturally show up. Other times, I was a chaotic pressure cooker of intensity. Not knowing how to get myself going in one direction.

Two practices helped me to consistently get into zazen. Zhan Zhuang and Non-Directed body Movement. I’ve written before here about Zhan Zhuang.

In zazen we run up against our stuck places. Our bodies are an energetic field, and as the body begins to open up, the parts that we are stuck begin to show up. At first, our sense of how to do that is very basic. We get lucky sometimes but mostly we have no idea what is going on or how to feel what is happening. It is like a hose which is kinked. In zazen, we slowly learn to unkink the whole system. This takes a type of creativity of internal process. An inner sophistication begins to ripen. It is something we can work on for our whole lives.

As I mentioned in part one, I had been introduced to the practice of Non-Directed body Movement back in Missoula, Montana. A couple of years later, in the monastery I did NDBM along with Zhan Zhuang every day. These two practices began to bleed into my zazen, and my general orientation to everyday relating.

I was always burning hot there in the monastery. The environment of the monastery is like an oven turned all the way up. At one point I urgently went to the Roshi and asked him what he wanted from me. He told me, “Get into your body right now!” And so that was my task. I worked to creatively get into my body.

As I was a kind of pressure cooker of intensity, I found that I needed some time each day to feel into what I was experiencing without a lot of external stimulation. I would run back from lunch and lean against a wall for a few minutes to sleep, and then go out for an hour and stand in the garden. Just to feel what was happening. Just to process all that I was feeling.

I saw that I needed to let go of all of my ideas of how to be in the body, and to experience what was coming up in the body in present time. It was a kind of an amoral time of listening without judgement. And when I listened, my body spontaneously began to open up. These openings were completely unpredictable and often odd. They were never how I predicted them to be. And if I began to have a strategy of how I wanted my body to open, the process of opening would be derailed. My thoughts about it would even be like a kink in that opening process. Emotions came up, strange sensations, old memories surfaced, and the energy of the body began to open.

These openings would bubble up in the standing, and they would create an inner momentum in my system. That momentum would then continue as I went to the cushion for zazen.

So the internal listening, feeling the body open up gave me a type of inner sophistication of feeling, and it created a momentum of opening which both transferred to my seated zazen. When I arrived on the cushion, I was not there wondering what I was supposed to do anymore, I was deep into an internal unfolding which just kept going, now in a seated meditation position. I could feel where the stuck places were, creatively sense into how to release them, all the time that this momentum was knocking on the door of these stuck places.

And as this process kept going, the energy of the body opened up more and more. I was opening the gates, releasing the horses to run free through the system. Becoming more and more vulnerable.

I started to see that the same awareness I brought to allowing the body to open could be used to allow me to meet the environment I was in. Where there was a stuck place, a hard place in the fabric of my awareness, I felt it and creatively watched that hard edge dissolve or unfurl. And then I felt unified with the environment. The environment around me was like a fabric of felt-sense I learned to meld into. So when I was in the garden, I began to feel the flowers inside of me. I began to feel the flowers as me. As one continuous felt-sense.

I found that anything I tried to control was in the way. Any hard edge I created about how I was relating to life showed up in this energy field. Letting go, letting go. No control, and everything began to come me. Everything changed. My whole relationship to life changed from trying to control to letting everything come to me. Just as I needed to receive the opening through the body, I saw that the environment around me began to fill me up.

That same meeting and releasing of barriers could be felt in my relating to people. So where there was some edge between myself and another, I felt into that and experienced it naturally melt.

And this translated to the Ki (Qi) work of may Rinzai training. I saw that Ki was not something other than the relating of life and life. Everything is ki, and everything is softening. My softening was harmony of the environment. My harmony was harmony with people. Inside and outside ceased to be relevant.

At that point, the same awareness from the NDBM, the dropping of strategy and allowing blockages to unravel, started to become just what I am always doing in my daily life. Even the idea of a self began to drastically change. Where I felt a self was usually the place of a barrier within this greater context of unity.

So the physical feeling into how the body wanted to open up, that process bled into my whole life, and taught me how to feel into how to meet life. Over time I saw that this was all trying to happen all of the time. It was not something I was creating. I noticed that the world opened up to me, reality opened up to me the more honest I was. It was not even about Zen. It belonged to no religion or tradition. It was just the way of life.

Zen Master Dogen said:

“To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.”― Dōgen

That’s a bit of how Non Directed Body Movement shaped my zazen and how it has shaped me as a person. Now, the three practices of Zazen, Zhan Zhuang, and NDBM are all the same for me. They are all part of a process trying to happen. These days I feel like I am just being led by the Way. This is much of what I am teaching these days. More to come on that in upcoming posts. Thanks for reading. Please keep practicing. Please stay fascinated. You can do it!

Photo by the one and only Christian French