IS MATTER ESSENTIAL?
THE NINTH LAW OF DISCIPLESHIP VIEWED THROUGH A SOMATIC LENS by Yuliya Smirnova
Given in the Blue Star Memorial Temple on Sunday, April 16, 2023

The ninth rule of discipleship states that: “He who despises his body because it does not radiate the light of his soul, despises G-d as surely as he who despises the soul and spirit of G-d.”

In today’s talk I want to speak with you about the body. Within much of theosophical literature the body is often referred to as a vessel. Even in our most recent study class this Friday (Teachings of the Temple, Volume II, page 250, entitled “Eternal Love”), we read about the relative meaninglessness of sacrificing the life of the physical body for the sake of a friend — for that is the mere shedding of a vessel. The ninth law of discipleship of the Temple of the People is one of the very few places in theosophical writings where I have found reference being made to the body as being equally as important as the spirit, in regards to how we relate to it.

I need to define a few terms for you before we get started because you will hear me use them throughout this talk:

1. Embodiment refers to the experience of being fully present and aware of one’s physical body and sensations. It involves a sense of integration between the mind, body, and emotions, and a feeling of being grounded in the physical world.
2. Somatic Psychology is a rapidly emerging field that combines theories and practices from several disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, physiology, and bodywork. It emphasizes the importance of paying attention to bodily sensations, movements, and experiences to live a more deeply fulfilling and authentic life, as well as to promote healing the roots of what ails us. Within this resides the core idea that the body is not simply a physical machine, not a mere vessel for our mind or our soul, but a dynamic and intelligent organism that generates, houses, and expresses our thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Simply put, through the somatic lens, the body is the Self.
3. Body-oriented mindfulness practices involve using awareness of the body and bodily sensations as a means of cultivating mindfulness. Mindfulness is the practice of bringing one’s attention to the present moment and observing one’s thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations without judgment or attachment. In body-oriented mindfulness practices, individuals are encouraged to focus their attention on physical sensations in different parts of the body, such as the breath, muscles, and joints. This can be done through various techniques such as body scans, mindful movement, and yoga. By focusing on the body, individuals can develop greater awareness of how their physical experiences are connected to their thoughts and emotions. They can also learn to identify areas of tension or discomfort in the body and work to release this tension through relaxation techniques or mindful movement. Body-oriented mindfulness practices have been shown to have a range of benefits, including reducing stress and anxiety, improving physical health, and enhancing emotional regulation. They can also help individuals develop a greater sense of embodiment and connection to their physical selves.

As some of you may know, embodiment has been an integral part of my spiritual journey since 2005, when I first discovered body-oriented mindfulness practices. Much like most spiritual people in the modern world, I grew up steeped in ideologies that relegated the body to the role of vessel; therefore the discovery that the physical body plays a central role in our capacity for Self expression was at once eye-opening as well as deeply healing when I first began practicing Vipassana meditation. My professional journey caught up to my spiritual journey about 10 years later, as my curiosity about the body led me down the path of somatic psychology where I discovered that our memories, emotions, and thoughts are imprinted and stored in the actual physical tissues — creating habitual breath rhythms, postures, and movement patterns that (when left unexamined) limit our range of expression and define the majority of our experiences in a self-sabotaging manner.

The body is a curious aspect of our aliveness, and I find it very interesting that loving the body is included at all in spiritual teachings which focus so much on striving towards a primary essence that is beyond the physical reality. This law struck me anew recently, in part due to my personal history of struggle with accepting that I’m a physical human being this time around, and in part thanks to the professional journey I’ve been walking over the last few years, receiving training in somatic psychology as an embodiment coach. It inspired me to engage with you today in a deeper dive, exploring the body of who we are. As I stand before you and speak, it is likely that your attention is currently engaged by the experience of your auditory consciousness, as well as your visual and thought consciousness. Your main sensing of your ‘self’ is likely limited to the region of your head and what is just above and in front of it. Unless there are other parts of your body that ache or bother you, there is a good chance that you are not currently sensing your body below the neck while engaged in listening to this talk.

During this talk, I’d like to invite you into a somatic experiment. Soma is a Greek word that roughly translates to “the living body in its wholeness.” Inside of that shape we have our speaking and our language, we have our wounds and our healing, we have the capacity to look forward into the future and reflect on the past. So, instead of viewing the Self as made up of separate, independent parts — body, mind, and spirit — for the duration of this talk I invite you to try and experience yourself as one ENTIRE UNIFIED body, an experience where we don’t consider the different planes of our being as separate planes, instead attempting to experience them as they really are: completely interpenetrating and interconnecting through every fiber of the living tissues of ourselves. Shifting away from the Cartesian medical model of a compartmentalized taxonomy of being and towards a fully INTEGRATED experience of who YOU are in every moment, I invite you to enter this experience of wholeness using a doorway which you may have never considered a doorway until now — the doorway of body sensing. That is to say, if I invite you to bring your attention to sensation or to your breath (for example), you hold in your understanding that these various elements are informants that do not exist independently from one another. Our breathing informs our sensations, our sensations inform our breathing; our breathing informs our emotions, our emotions inform our breathing; our breathing informs our astral body, our astral body informs our breathing; and so on and so forth, opening to the idea that consciously experiencing each of these as part of one integrated whole can begin to connect us to a deeper intelligence and maturity within ourselves.

That being said, if in this moment I invite you to shift from your thinking/analyzing self into your feeling/sensing self, what is the first part of yourself that you sense? Is it the crease in your forehead? Or the tension in your jaw? Or your hands in your lap? Is it temperature? Or pressure? Or movement? Just notice whatever it is, notice the first aspect of sensing that comes online for you when you shift your attention. What tells you that you’re feeling what you’re feeling? Which part of the body do you become aware of first? What types of sensations do you notice first? Where is there life in your body? Where is there a lack of life? Are your legs restless, or calm, or numb today? Is your chest cavity heavy and constricted or light and breathing easy? What meaning are you making out of what you notice?
My sensing of my body as I speak here today is…
The meaning I make out of this information is…

Bringing our attention from thinking to sensing begs the questions: How are we able to do that? How did you shift from thinking to sensing about your reality? What is the deeper metaphysical meaning behind us having this capacity to sense? What could utilizing your capacity to feel and sense make possible for you spiritually?

I don’t know about you, but I find it peculiar that we are beings that have the capacity to willfully direct our attention, yet despite having this unbelievable capacity to choose to sense our experience, most of us spend most of our time on Earth willfully directing our attention away from our sensing capacities unless we are involved in pleasure seeking or pain avoidance behavior! I wonder what that takes care of for us? And I wonder what is the cost?

In the 17th century, French philosopher René Descartes developed a scientific and philosophical framework called the Cartesian model, a reductionist approach to understanding human experience which separates the body and mind into two distinct independent entities that can exist without each other. It is a framework of dissection and compartmentalization of the human experience, and it predetermined our given assumptions in the study of human medicine and psychology for over 300 years — those assumptions being that: 1) The body is not the mind;
and 2) The mind can study its own experience as a separate object, rationally and objectively. Cartesian dualism separates the body from the mind, and then further separates the body into all of its pieces and parts. Along with the scientific method, it has given us the marvels of modern medicine, where we can do microsurgery to rebuild the intricate bone structure of a fractured wrist, while also creating a phenomenon of such high specialization that your neurologist likely knows nothing about the health of your gut biome despite the fact that gut biome exudes a major influence on nervous system function. When we work with a personal trainer at a gym, they will be able to teach us exercises that build strength in any isolated group of muscles, while having very limited awareness of how to balance and integrate whole-body muscular function for each unique individual — leading many people towards a propensity for sport injury. The Cartesian model of self tells us “I think, therefore I am,” and over the last few centuries has had us forgetting that there is any other way to know and experience this world. The fact that this same period in history has seen some of the most devastating impacts made by us — devastating to the quality of life for humans, animals, plants, and entire biomes — is a powerful indicator of what the results of merely thinking our way through problems can do. Mind over matter is showing to be deficient in its capacity to nurture and sustain life. The last century can be viewed as a testimony to the fact that when humans as a species prioritize thinking to the exclusion of sensing and being, a disfigured form of progress emerges, a type of progress that comes with tremendous losses.

A person who spends his or her time in a lab solving complex equations and documenting detailed experiments often does so at the expense of his or her own body, distorting the healthy flow of their own life energy in the process of their work. The way we have structured most professional and academic fields has people ignoring their urges for food, for water, for going to the bathroom, in the name of productivity and achievement. These are only our basic needs to remain incarnated on this plane, and we ignore them to follow our mental to-do lists every day! On a subtler level, we ignore our longing for sunshine or to feel the wind on our skin, we ignore our need for fresh air. Yet, our tissues send us signals. Just like hunger signals and bathroom signals, our tissues send us signals through sensations — our aliveness (aka our soul) tries to speak to us through the sensations within tissues, nudging us to remember the living essence of who we are. So, when some researcher spends weeks on end ignoring the sensations of their need for sleep, for food, for water, for air and sunshine — and out of the morass of this spiritual starvation makes some scientific discovery — is it any surprise that the applications of such a discovery come with side-effects that are harmful to life in one way or another? In order to have life-affirming discoveries, wouldn’t it make sense that the people making those discoveries need to be in a life-affirming relationship with themselves first during their great revelations?

This is how I now understand the ninth law of discipleship: It is not enough to simply be neutral towards the body, or to harbor no ill feelings towards the body. For, if to despise the body is to despise God, then to love God is to love the body and be in a loving mutual relationship therewith; and that kind of relationship requires that we listen to what the body is telling and demanding of us at least as often as we make demands of the body. Every time we ignore the life-affirming realities and needs of our living selves, every time we ignore the sensation-voices of our tissues, we are minimizing the importance of God in our lives as surely as someone who minimizes and ignores the soul and spirit of God. After all, what is God but the flow of life-force expressing itself through matter, the flow of life-force force moving through substance. In the case of our bodies, that means energy moving through our tissues, expressing itself as this sensation or that sensation, this emotion or that emotion, this thought or that thought, this action or that action. And our current world is a clear reflection of our neglect of this rule of discipleship. We orient ourselves externally — in the name of progress, in the name of love, in the name of service — neglecting to include the body of who we are in our considerations. To love the body of who we are is to cultivate a capacity to speak the language of sensation in a way that honors the flow of our own aliveness, a flow that can be sensed but can never be fully known by thinking. This puts us in a delicate and difficult condition, considering how many of us (especially those from a spiritual/religious background) have grown up internalizing a somatic shape that urges us (often subconsciously) towards the opposite extreme of body denial and abnegation for the sake of spiritual progress.

I don’t know about you, but from my earliest memories of childhood I can recall viewing my body as some sort of flesh prison. Partly because of the ninth law of discipleship, in the journey of my personal transformation and spiritual growth I have been trying to live into the question of “what does it mean to love the body?”

While I can study anatomy, physiology, and biomechanics and find myself in awe and wonder at the intricate complexity embodied through the function of our human organisms, I have a difficult time connecting with the same awe and wonder when simply BEING in, with, and through my own body. There are still many days when, like in my childhood, I long to claw off the fetters of the flesh, I long to throw myself over the edge of some cliff, to lose this sensation- heavy cloak and fly free (as some vague and distant memory seems to entice me to). In childhood dream life, for as far back as I can remember, I would regularly fly over the planet, playfully exploring its forests and mountains and plains. I would dive beneath tsunamis, breathing underwater and exploring the submerged caves of that murky world. And that dream life often felt more “right” to me than anything I would experience in my waking days, when the sheer weight of these physical tissues felt unbearable, felt like being crushed under my own gravity. I’m speaking of weight in terms of how heavy it feels even as I stand here before you, to be cloaked in muscles and cartilage and bone. There’s a deep nostalgia for a lighter cloak, and a sense of wrongness about having my consciousness stuffed into this dense material. I know that perhaps not everyone has felt quite so strongly about inhabiting an earthly body, but I also suspect that many people who are attracted to a spiritual path are partially attracted to the promise that it is possible to exist without and beyond this earthly cloak. From this common longing, it makes sense that we struggle to grasp the full meaning behind the ninth law of discipleship.

In trying to learn to love my physical existence (or to at least not be so disgusted and disdained by it) I began by looking for activities that I could engage in through this body that bring me joy. I discovered that the kinds of activities which bring me most joy are ones that take me out of my body the most. I loved running cross country, running so hard and so long until the pain of my body disappeared and turned into a sensation of floating. I loved dancing, dancing so long and so ecstatically that I could almost taste the spirit of flying. I loved reading, where the worlds I could escape to did not require a physical body for me to inhabit them. I loved bicycling across long distances, or hiking across long distances, and living on the edge of death so that I may taste life. Even my love for Vipassana meditation was initially based in the notion and hope that if I sat long enough in my discomfort, I would reach a place where I became free of the body — for that is how I used to understand enlightenment. It wasn’t until I became a mother, a reality that from its very start trapped me in the here and now of a very physical body experience, when I realized that in the name of learning to love my body, I had been continuously running from it. Being pregnant, giving birth, nursing my children all forced me to be in my body in a manner that I found to be the least pleasant possible (I realize that this is not the case for all women, so I’m speaking here only to my personal experience). And while intellectually I could tell myself that it is a beautiful thing that I inhabit a body that is blessed with the capacity to grow and sustain new life, at the sensation level and at the emotion level my experience of it all was overshadowed by a feeling of “cringe.” For the most part, I’ve moved through the experience with a significant amount of disdain, gritting my teeth and bearing it for the sake of my children while everything inside me says “ouch” and “ew” and “gross.” Since becoming a mother, I have felt myself become more dense, from the physical to the energetic level. When I stand at the top of a cliff now, I rarely if ever feel the exhilarating possibility of jumping off, leaving this body behind, and flying free. Instead I feel dizzy with my own mortality. When I see the bodies of my children standing near a cliff, a deep fear grips me. These emotions give rise to a secondary reaction of disgust, annoyance, and shame at my level of “attachment to living.” There is something inside me that keeps protesting these experiences, claiming loudly that “this is not how we’re supposed to live!”

Noticing my visceral reactions of body attachment in motherhood, and the visceral reactions of disdain to my visceral reactions of attachment, moved me away from body-focused meditation and in the direction of studying embodiment methods as part of my own healing. Because I recognized that I was not alone in my struggles — there is an epidemic of people do not know how to reconcile wanting to live lives that are productive, successful, creative, or spiritual with the reality of having a body — I made the commitment to dive deeper into learning to love this body that is my living, to cultivate a real tenderness towards all the intelligence it contains. I began trying to speak kindly to the body, to touch and hold with reverence this enlivened flesh, to study and become fluent in its language.

For me (and perhaps for some of you too) the most frustrating thing about living embodied is the sheer time and effort it takes to accomplish anything, and at the same time how fast the time passes, how quickly we get tired. Every little action (in order to be done well) must take time and energy, and there never seems to be enough supply of either in our lives. In my journey to embodiment, the first lesson I’ve come across is the necessity to slow everything down. If I am to take action while fully inhabiting the body of who I am, every action must take longer initially. It reminds me of the principle behind taichi: to get good at doing the martial art, you practice doing the movements very slowly. Working on my own embodiment has revealed to me that this is the path to mastery of any action or skill. I believe that many of us who gather in groups for spiritual nourishment may share a common longing for mastery, fed by subconscious somatic imprints (or skandas) which house within our tissues vague and distant memories of existence on subtler planes with subtler bodies, where our thoughts and ideas come to effortless, perfected fruition simply by our imaging them. We remember (not consciously, but on a subtle level) living into a world, living through a body that was by all intents and purposes simply more effortless. So we come into this earth world with a longing for what we can’t have here.

This planet, this world, is a place of learn-by-doing, an experiential playground instead of a virtual world of ideation. The only way to learn to ride a bicycle well here is by getting many skinned knees, and the longer we live this life the less appealing having our knees skinned becomes, so we slowly but surely find ways to stop learning and start praying to be brought back to the world where nothing has to hurt anymore. The grave mistake that I see in this is that by craving for the other subtler world, we never embody fully on this denser world, and therefore never fully live the lessons that would allow us to move on to other subtler worlds more permanently. And most of our cultures and religions encourage this by promoting ideologies about this world that tell us this is just a temporary world for us (and one filled with traps of sin and misfortune at that). Across many religions and cultures we get the message that our home is elsewhere, and we must bide our time and avoid mistakes that will keep us trapped here so that we can return to it sooner. This creates a humanity with an avoidant approach to living. We learn that we don’t belong here (in one way or another), and that this world holds dangers of “trapping” us in its sinful illusions. Our vague subtle memories resonate with this cultural/ religious narrative. And it cements our focus on the idea of avoiding getting stuck here, and waiting to be delivered somewhere better. Is that really a way to live? Is it possible to master the lessons for our incarnations when we are hyper-focused on avoiding making mistakes and waiting to get the heck out of here? It reminds me of the mood that pervades many inner-city schools, where the students never achieve literacy or academic mastery because all day they just try to stay out of trouble until they can go home. In my opinion, this is what keeps us stuck here more than anything else. We get held back, year after year, because we never apply ourselves to fully living the lessons we are presented with.

We don’t have anyone to blame for this. As a friend of mine once said while listening to the wails of an inconsolable baby, “Man, incarnating is a bitch.” Inhabiting a body that has so many sensory inputs and outputs, that is interwoven with so many other subtler bodies, that has this peculiar meaty density, is no simple matter and we don’t have many working role models for those who incarnate masterfully. As social beings who learn by imitating what we see, we are at a disadvantage from the get-go because what most of us have been seeing for millennia are minimally embodied ancestors who taught us to notice our body only to the extent that it helped us survive. On the few occasions in history where some of us got to see a human living with deeply embodied mastery (such as Krishna, Buddha, Osiris, Isis, etc.), we were so enamored with the beauty and mystery of their living that we turned them into Gods and failed to pay attention to how that level of embodiment happened.

What we fail to notice, and what we fail to believe when we are told, is that embodiment happens through practice. And practice is any thought, word, and/or action repeated. From this point of view, we are ALWAYS practicing something. This stresses the importance of approaching daily life as an embodiment practice. Our living is a practice, in the same way that a gymnastics class is a practice, a dance class is a practice; in the same way that a soccer team attends lots of repetitive practice before a big game. Our life is a collection of moments where our repeated words, thoughts, and actions culminate in the mastery with which we are able to live through big and important life events. This is the essence of embodiment work and somatic practice; this is the essence of the application of the ninth rule of discipleship. When we begin to realize that embodied mastery is strictly a result of intentional focused practice that includes everything that happens in the body, and that we are always practicing something, it becomes easy to see why encountering true mastery is such a rare occasion.

Forget about spiritual Mastery — even if we consider mastery within any particular craft, we can see that it is rare to encounter a master of dance, a master of art, a master of architecture. And the cause of this rarity is that most people do not tenaciously and meticulously practice any craft. In fact, when people begin to honestly assess what they spend most of their time practicing, it becomes abundantly clear why they consistently achieve only a fraction of what they dream about. Many people are most actively in the practice of placating the people and circumstances of their life that keep them small, disembodied, and just getting by. Many are too afraid to let go of the old familiar practices of “just doing our jobs” and then taking it easy when our work days are over. Many of us lack the tenacity and perseverance to fully commit to intentionally practicing in every daily opportunity to embody the ideals we hold as sacred — because tenacity and perseverance must also be practiced to be mastered. We hold our ideals as existing somewhere above the region of our heads beyond our reach, and practice yearning for them more than we ever practice BEING them. We yearn for compassion, for wisdom, for truth, for patience, for beauty, for kindness. At the same time we miss at least 50% of the opportunities we get to practice BEING these things. And so we embody the shape of beings that are always yearning for things outside of ourselves, when all the while we hold in our body the potential to embody everything that we are yearning for, simply by expressing that shape through our tissues.

Take a moment to sense yourself now. Sense into what I have been speaking, and what kinds of physical sensations your listening to me has generated. Some are expressing the shape of nodding along, some of your eyes are bright and radiating, while some foreheads are creased with eyes downcast and heads shaking. This is your embodiment in this moment. Which of your ideals are you expressing? When you consider expressing through the body the ideal of unity, what shifts in your posture, your breathing, your sensations? When you consider expressing through the body the ideal of patience, how is that shape different from the one of unity? What changes can you track in your breathing, posture, or sensations? How about compassion?

As you can see, embodiment is more than merely the proper physical care of the body. A person may have a healthy exercise routine and nutrition schedule; a person may even daily spend time meditating, praying, re-aligning their chakras, decalcifying their pineal gland, and might even consider themselves an enlightened guru — while still missing the mark on embodiment. Embodiment is more than the sum of its parts, and it is a doorway into living more deeply, fully, presently, authentically. It is a language of sensation that informs us about our place in the world, if we but develop the literacy to read the signs. Embodiment begins with the acceptance of the fundamental truth, which I believe the 9th law of discipleship tries to impart to us, and which in short can be summarized as:

Matter is more than a vehicle for Spirit. The body is more than a taxi for the mind.

So many of us spend our days trying to live through the body, without ever learning how to live IN the body, and WITH the body. We wake up to consciousness every morning, within the same tissues, and just take it for granted as we move about our day. We miss the gateway entirely, the entry point into subtler existence that comes from getting curious about the language of sensation, posture, and movement. In the book, The Way of Transformation: Daily Life as Spiritual Exercise, Karlfried Graf Durekheim tell us:

“The destiny of everything that lives is that it should unfold its own nature to its maximum possibility. [A hu]man is no exception. But [she or] he cannot — as a tree or a flower does — fulfill this destiny automatically. He is only permitted to become fully what he is intended to be when he takes himself in hand, works on himself, and practices ceaselessly to reach perfection.” He goes on to say that “…our inner task, if it is to prosper, must be the fruit of a human being’s complete maturity in all his [or her] aspects.”

The act of living must become our curriculum, and the body (with all of its sensations, moods, postures, and narratives) must become both the classroom and the pupil in order for embodied action to transform into embodied mastery.

— Yuliya Smirnova Given April 16, 2023 Blue Star Memorial Temple