240927 - The body comes first

The body comes first. It is everything. I sit down to write, and my hands guide my mind to the words. I feel - and it is my body that feels. During sittings, my mind wanders. I bring myself back to the body; to the tenseness that I’ve learnt to correlate with a wandering mind, to the breath that anchors my existence, to the aching in my joints or the pleasurable waves I’ve come to acknowledge as the spreading of relaxation. Whenever I feel ‘bad’, scanning my body I see immense tension. Relaxing it, my mind relaxes. I wake up in the night, out of breath, mind racing, and I notice my stomach clenching, my knees pressed to my stomach. I relax, and restless energy spreads throughout my body. Sometimes it is bordering on unbearable, forcing me to move, to take action, and I give in to feeling what I feel to the best of my ability. The same restlessness, the same tension, I notice when I am caught up in restless action, in senseless activity and inexplicable storytelling. I walk through life and come to recognize a terrifying, freeing, truth; the body comes first. The weaving story that I tell myself ‘life’ consists of; all that which matters in the infinite complexity of symbols we term ‘meaning’ or ‘purpose’; all of it fades away as I recognize this one single truth. The body comes first. Giving it my attention, giving it my reverence, life follows. It guides me forward on the path which I have chosen to follow, through hardships and pain, when life is uprooted and everything is hollow; I remember my breath, I remember my body, and I know that it is all I need.