Body as Sangha Body

I'm returning to a primary practice of body awareness. Realizing that I have an auto-immune disorder or two has gotten my attention, and so my intention is to tune in to this body.

Sitting with awareness of the body was the first meditation practice I ever learned when I sat with Julie Wester at a weekend women's retreat -- my very first meditation retreat evah. I had no idea who she was at the time, and no idea that her root teacher was Ruth Denison*, or the significance of that to a feminist looking at what appeared to be just another patriarchal religion.

Anyway, when I first started going to Sanzen, Hogen Roshi suggested I focus my meditation on the practice of body scan. I did this as a primary practice for a few years. It feels very powerful to return to it again.

It is a bit like that movie -- Fantastic Voyage. In this movie, a crew of scientists gets shunken down in a wee little submarine, and they explore inside someone's body, and well, hilarity ensues, or something. Body scan consists of paying attention to each part of the body, each particle of the body, and shining the light of awareness on it.


And yet...

As the Shusso, when sitting with the community, my role is to monitor the Zendo. To be the one who responds when someone walks in late and needs assistance. To be the one who makes sure the evening's service positions are filled, so that things run smoothly. To be the one people can go to with their questions. All of the Shusso's actions are taken with the purpose of holding the container of practice, and cultivating harmony in the Zendo and in the Sangha.


It is different to broaden my attention in this way, but recently I've begun to look at it as a similar kind of body practice -- awareness of the Sangha body.

Sanghakaya

Ven Thich Nhat Hanh writes eloquently about the Sangha body - the Sanghakaya. He likens each individual to a cell or tissue in the larger body of the Sangha, using the metaphors of nature:

The Sangha is our body. It is like the beehive is the body of the bee, the anthill is the body of the ant. And when we are able to live in that spirit, considering the Sangha as our body, most of our suffering will vanish. Taking refuge in the Sangha is not an expression of faith, it is a practice.

Joko Beck has described that in the West, we don't have the Three Jewels (Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha), as much as we have "two jewels and a rock." Sitting alone in our houses, reading Dharma books, Chozen Bays refers to this kind of practice as "take the Dharma and run."

Sangha practice-- even just talking about Sangha practice -- certainly stirs people up. I have noticed extremes of romanticizing or scorning practice with a physical community. Certainly practicing with people can be incredibly supportive as well as incredibly frustrating. It usually does not run smoothly or work out according to our ideas of how it should. But it runs, and mostly in spite of ourselves.

The body metaphor continues to be apt:

“Herein, Bhikkhus & Friends, the Bhikkhu contemplates the body from the soles of the feet upward, and from the top of the hair downward: This filthy frame with skin stretched over it, which is filled with many impurities consists of:

Head-hairs, body-hairs, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, sinews, bones, marrow, kidneys, heart, liver, vomit, diaphragm, spleen, lungs, intestine, membrane, stomach, excrement, brain, bile, lymph, pus, blood, sweat, fat, tears, skin, tallow, spit, snot, joint-fluid, and urine.

Just as if a man with good sight would examine a sack with openings at both ends, filled with various kinds of grain; paddy, beans, sesame, on opening it would recognize its contents thus: That is paddy, this is beans, that is sesame, this is husked rice: Exactly so does the Bhikkhu investigate this body.”

When we investigate what the Sangha body is made of, it can be downright ugly, and yet, is a nothing short of a miracle.

But like Jon Kabat-Zinn has been saying to the people referred to his MBSR classes, some of whom with multiple diagnoses and many layers of suffering: "There is more right with you than there is wrong with you."

The Sangha body is impermanent and precious. It is interconnected and interpenetrating. Whole. Applying these insights in the other direction -- to the reality of this physical body -- helps me see this body in a different, larger perspective.



*Ruth Denison is a first generation female Vipassana teacher pioneered not only leading all-women retreats, but also practicing with movement and dance. Her biography, Dancing in the Dharma is a riveting story of many life chapters, including her growing up in Nazi Germany, her harrowing journey across Poland after the war, ending up in the epicenter of the counterculture in California, training with U Ba Khin, and at one point, using her training in body awareness to help Timothy Leary come down off a bad trip.

Coming Home Part II

What have 16 years of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival given me?

Bodily Safety
I wrote about the feeling of bodily safety on my first post. This is one of the more obvious gifts of the Festival. Speaking of a different kind of bodily safety, I cannot quantify the effect of seeing real women's bodies, naked, in the showers (or out) every day for a week for sixteen years. Even women who would be considered conventionally beautiful; to see even those bodies and their curves and creases and stretch marks and imperfections -- it was surprising -- to be so surprised that is. I mean, I knew that real women do not really look like the women we see in media, but it was still a shock to see this full range of bodies, and none of them looking like any of the "bodies" I had seen in media. All of them beautiful. I had no other opportunity to experience this reality in my childhood nor my adult life. Not that I have it all together about that, but

I. Have. Come. A. Long. Way, Baby.

I have been given the experience of bodily safety from within. Internalized. I am so grateful.

Sisters
I didn't get to grow up with a biological sister. I was not a girly-girl. I started fighting against dresses at about age 3 or 4. It was clear to me that being one of the guys was a waaaay better deal. I loved softball through grade school, and junior high, but then the human gyroscope of puberty hit.

My aforementioned porn-addicted boyfriend in college had a wandering eye. It drove me batshit crazy, and because I didn't have what I needed at the time to kick him to the curb, I projected a bunch of the resulting insecurity and crap onto the other women he was attracted to. *sigh* It was a rough time. Untenable for long though, and the stars aligned for me to finally say enough! Just a couple years later, I heard on Day Stage THE song that summed this up completely, "As Cool As I Am" by Dar Williams (I am the others! oh do please listen):

And I must say here, that there is nothing -- nothing -- in this world like the feeling of standing with thousands of my sisters to the yearly anthem at Opening Ceremonies, "Amazon Womyn Rise"

Love
In 1997 I fell madly in love at Festival. Seriously. Madly. It was the kind of thing about which I had absolutely no choice. It was a knee-weakening, all-consuming, dizzy-making collision that had an impact on me from the very first moment like a speeding U-Haul truck. It would have involved a U-Haul truck, except that she was from another country, and had all of her belongings in a backpack, so there was no need. It was passionate and sweet and lovely until, for a variety of reasons some years later, it wasn't, and it ended. In my story with all the hindsight, there are no villains, and I would readily do it all over again; maybe just a few teeny changes there towards the end. Sometimes these chapters in our lives just write themselves. Those are the ones we learn the most from, I think.

And just for fun, here's a great FAQ sheet to address the annoyingly persistent myths about bisexuality: Enjoy.

Spirit
"She changes everything she touches, and everything she touches changes."

Ah, Puritans. In my DNA seems to live the presumption that the flesh is completely corrupt, especially female flesh, and the only hope of Grace resides in a distant and moody male God, and that Grace comes only from faith, which is invisible and uncertain in us flawed humans. According to Max Weber, the Protestant Work Ethic developed in this absence of reassurance from the (Catholic) church authorities of Grace from "good works"; so its only visible expression got channeled into the zealous pursuit of a worldly "calling" (work) and the only evidence for Grace would be worldly success. The Puritan asceticism, deep mistrust of any form of pleasure, and belief that "idle hands are the devil's workshop" all congealed in an anxious spiritual backdrop that I could never do enough to be okay. And I'm probably not working hard enough.

So...abandoning the disconnected body and spirit patriarchal white-guy-in-the-sky stuff was only possible because I was able to find an expression of spirit I could see, hear, smell, touch, and taste in the patterns of nature and my very own body.

The snake became a potent symbol for me -- the reclamation of the snake -- from the embodiment of evil and temptation to a potent symbol of wisdom symbolized in the shedding of skin, the natural cycles of death and rebirth. I found comfort in the seasons of nature, the inevitability and connection of death to life, the seasons of a woman's life, the appreciation of the four elements: fire, air, earth, water, (five if you count spirit), every aspect of this Earth and the acceptance that large natural forces exist internally in the form of emotions, and that these are just as pure and whole as a volcano or a gentle rainshower.

Without a local group of women to practice with, my yearly trek to Festival allowed me to be in community with others practicing in this way. I did workshops with Vicki Noble and Z Budapest. I got to experience raising a "cone of power" by toning with maybe 30 women and usually a singing or chanting workshop in the beautiful moss-covered oak grove of the Meditation Circle. It was incredible. And so healing. There is no hierarchy in a nature-based spirituality, but there is an ethical guideline, blessedly simple, "And it harm none, do what ye will." All this was so refreshing.

Magical Moments

There have been so many thousands of magical moments. This is really the biggest gift of Festival, these ordinary and extraordinary moments. Here's a random few:

• Walking past the African Dance workshop in the Community Center tent, feeling the heat and power and joy emanating from it.
  
• In workerville, after getting off my shift a little early and catching much of the Indigo Girls' show, then showering alone under a full moon during their encore and hearing "Closer to Fine" live.
• Unbelieveable thunderstorms at night, wondering if the tent would leak, enjoying the chorus of appreciation throughout the woods after every lightening strike and thunderclap.
• Seeing the amazing womyn who cook the food in enormous iron vats over a firepit in the heat of summer in their heavy gloves, jeans and longsleeved shirts, hats and hankerchiefs covering their faces.
• Tarot readings with clearer significance after a week of quieting down.
• The damp, wooded, shady fern-embraced path from Waterworks Way to Tubman Trail. My favorite walk in the whole Festival.
  
• Every single show with sign language interpreters, sometimes more amazing than the performers themselves.
• Walking all the way to the parking lot after night stage performances were over to use the phones at night. Only slightly intoxicated, calling my sweetie, and then lying down in the meadow watching shooting stars streak through the clear sky.
  

Obviously there are too many to mention. I could think of a thousand more. Multiply that by the thousands of womyn who attend. That's a lot of magic.

Michfest 1995

little altars everywhere

I'm not sure I even remember exactly when I began to consider keeping an altar as something other than a heathen and graven-image-bowing thing to do. But once I did, it became a primary spiritual practice.

This is the altar upstairs which we face for our daily meditation practice.

Protestants generally tend towards the spare, quiet, and restrained. There is usually only a cross at the front of the church. The emphasis is on faith, aligning one's deeds as closely as possible to the words of the Bible, and one's personal relationship with God; God being defined as one / all of the Holy Trinity: Father, Son, Holy Ghost. Nobody and nothing else.

The Catholic crucifixes were seen as maybe a bit showy. Jesus was supposed to be inside our hearts. And images of Mary? Well, it had been made clear to me that she was not part of the Holy Trinity, and therefore not to be specifically prayed to, let alone all the saints for whom Catholics have altars, light candles, and say specific prayers. Since I did not grow up within the Catholic Church, I did not have any such relationship with religious iconography, and in fact, had some mistrust of it.

This is our wooden statue of Mary,
acquired when we were searching for a spiritual home,
and practicing with St Andrew's Catholic Church --
a congregation fiercely focused on social justice.

Looking back, I find the root of that mistrust in the versions of the Bible that I heard from the pulpit and in our Bible stories.

Exodus 20 (King James Version)

1And God spake all these words, saying,

2I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

3Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

4Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

5Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;

Then specifically regarding images of gold and silver, or even carved stone altars or stairs:

23Ye shall not make with me gods of silver, neither shall ye make unto you gods of gold.

24An altar of earth thou shalt make unto me, and shalt sacrifice thereon thy burnt offerings, and thy peace offerings, thy sheep, and thine oxen: in all places where I record my name I will come unto thee, and I will bless thee.

25And if thou wilt make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stone: for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it.

26Neither shalt thou go up by steps unto mine altar, that thy nakedness be not discovered thereon.

I read all this to my spouse, who grew up Catholic. He was a bit horrified, being unfamiliar with this "jealous God" I had come to know in childhood.

This is Patrick's little statue of St. Francis.
He watches over the animals' food area in the kitchen.

His transition to Buddhism was quite smooth. This makes sense to me: The similarity of the liturgy continues to be quite striking -- the smells and bells, the standing sitting and kneeling, the chanting, even down to the mala / rosary beads.

Before this would ever be possible for me, I required a feminist intervention in my 20's. I made several rounds of critical inquiry into the patriarchal underpinnings of the Christian church before I could even begin to look at different forms of spirituality. While it was painful to see the religion of my childhood from this different perspective, I was able to question many of my beliefs and assumptions. It helped me see why I was having so much difficulty in some areas, and Christianity began to prove inadequate to my spiritual needs. This questioning, as I recall, was fueled by no small amount of anger. I had had enough of the white-guy-in-the-sky. For me, it was balancing to learn about the Divine Feminine from the writings of feminist theologians like Starhawk, books like The Feminine Face of God, and The Laughter of Aphrodite.

At some point in my tumultuous twenties, I saw a photograph of the Venus of Willendorf.

Circa 20,000 - 30,000 BC

By then I had already logged no less than a decade of body image problems, and if not self-hatred, definitely self-mistrust and downright fear of fat. To see this large, round, undeniably, unapologetically womanly figure referred to as a "Goddess," and imagining a culture actually venerating this form -- even if that was just speculative -- this caused a shift so strong and powerful, and led to a sense of inner knowing. I knew deeply that the veneration of this female form was safe. Not just safe, but necessary.

Ah, my twenties. During a fiery breakup of a three-year relationship with a guy who was addicted to pornography, having reached the very end of my willingness to engage in the contortions required to fit into the iron maiden of the Beauty Myth, and having no idea what would come next but entirely willing to make that leap,

This is an actual iron maiden -- a medieval torture device.

I birthed this Venus figure of clay:

I seem to recall already having some semblance of an altar upon which to place it. I think it was was an orange crate next to my futon. Or maybe it was my paternal grandmother's coffee table. I was not unaware of the irony since she was the most pious of all the relatives I knew.

Here is a recent sample of what is on my grandmother's coffee table altar.

It was Kwan Yin who helped me make the transition from Goddess-based spirituality to Buddhism.Kwan Yin, Kannon, or Avalokiteshvara is a Bodhisattva. A Bodhisattva is kind of like the Buddhist equivalent to a Saint. One understanding of a Bodhisattva is that it is a human person who forgoes their own enlightenment, remaining to assist all other beings until they all reach nirvana.
The embodiment of compassion, Kwan Yin is known as "she who hears the cries of the world." She is usually depicted with a bottle, either holding it up, or pouring it out, which is a symbol for her tears of compassion, or pouring out the waters of compassion. As a mental health therapist, I readily identified with her. Taking inspiration from Kwan Yin in the daily work of listening compassionately has been such a source of strength and relief.

I learned of her at my first meditation retreat-- a women's Vipassana retreat at Breitenbush Hotsprings. Before even stopping at home, once I had returned to Portland, I acquired this statue of her from a store called Healing Waters and Sacred Spaces, which I happened to learn when I got there, that Kwan Yin is kind of their "patron" Bodhisattva.

Here she is on my dresser. The painting of eggs is by my mother --
it was just a simple still-life she was practicing with
when she was taking a painting class, but I love it.

Once I was able to begin the practice of keeping an altar, it became an important part of my spirituality. Altar practice, for me, is just a beautiful reminder. It is a way to infuse sacred into everyday.

This is the Buddha who lives on our living room mantel.

Patrick spontaneously created this altar
which I walk past every day on the way to my car.
He is the one who usually freshens the flower offering here.

This is in our kitchen right above the sink.

Here is Bodhidharma,
currently greeting all who come through our front door,
and hopefully not scaring people away!

I like to change the altar cloths to reflect the seasons. I like to dust the statues, and dust around them. I like to freshen the flowers. Taking an ikebana class (Japanese flower-arranging) has inspired many beautiful flower offerings. Often, the state of my altars reflects the state of my spiritual practice.

I like the fact that we maintain evidence of our spiritual journey in the various little altars around the house. I read somewhere that regarding religion and spirituality, you can't subtract; you can only add. I like the idea that perhaps the Christian God is not actually jealous -- that implies insecurity. I am working with the idea that God or the Goddess or sacredness or Buddhanature is actually in everything. Altars are just a gentle reminder of that.

Self-Image

An old struggle, I welcome the confidence, or maybe it's the simple familiarity of my thirties.

While I acknowledge nothing is permanent, and there really is no solid ground -- my body will change slowly or rapidly. Nevertheless, I have worked at dismantling many of the damaging beliefs and assumptions about women's bodies, and mine in particular.

It has taken me quite some time to find some semblance of self-acceptance, and I appreciate any relief from the obsession with The Beauty Myth. It's like the relief you get when there has been an annoying hum of a broken refrigerator, a constant irritation that you don't notice until it falls silent.

So what a treat to see so many sweet and candid discussions about body image. Amazing what it takes for us to access compassion and open-heartedness on this issue. Thanks to my brother Brad for forwarding this gem to me!