Your Physical Body

Set your body free

When you associate too much with your body, you suffer. You cannot find lasting happiness through your physical senses. You can only seek liberation through your mind. Only the mind has autonomy. If you try to find happiness through the body, sooner or later you will suffer.

The body is born and then inevitably it dies. It is not permanent and therefore it cannot be real, but we all plunge right into this illusion of the five senses. What we see, taste, smell, feel and hear through our five senses seems so real to us and for the majority of people this is the only reality that they experience.

The consciousness of most individuals on this planet is all geared into their physical bodies and their physical desires. Bodily conscious people seek pleasure primarily though the body. Some people are even prepared to risk death to satisfy their physical desires and cravings. Heroin addicts who use dirty needles and impure heroin usually know the risks they are taking, but their desire overwhelms them. There is nothing morally wrong with seeking physical sensations like this, but if you are a spiritual seeker this cannot be your primary goal in life.

Your body can become a tool for spiritual growth 

If you think that you are nothing more than a physical body, then you do not need spiritual training, but we all know on some level that there is more to us than this. If you contemplate on you and your body for a while, you will come to understand that your physical body cannot be who you really are. After all, you can loose an arm or a leg, or even all your arms and legs, and you are still ‘you’. If you look deeply into a mirror, you will know that your spots or wrinkles are not the real you. Your body keeps changing, but you still feel the same you.

From a spiritual perspective, your body is simply a crucial tool or learning device to enable you to learn and grow and to master life. You need a body in order to establish a path or journey, including the spiritual journey back home to the truth. Indeed without your physical existence, you cannot grow spiritually because you cannot learn from experience. So we can all use our bodies to develop ourselves spiritually. Through our bodies, we can return to our natural state of being in which we transcend physical consciousness and dwell in nothing but light, love, peace and bliss.

Combining energy work with meditation is revolutionary

Ancient spiritual wisdom rarely emphasised the need to cultivate the body as well as the spirit. Even today there are many teachers of meditation who advise their students to stay absolutely still for long periods of time and to ignore their bodily sensations, including severe pain. These teachers do not show their students how to meditate more effectively by strengthening and opening their physical bodies through disciplined holistic exercise. It is therefore revolutionary to teach people that to find enlightenment they need to change their energetic patterns as well as to still their minds.

If your body is not healthy and vibrant, you will find it extremely difficult to maintain a clear open mind during your meditations. If your body is not strong, your blood flow will be weak, your heartbeat will be irregular and your mind will become fuzzy and unclear.

If you want to learn to meditate effectively, I strongly advise you to raise your energy through some type of holistic exercise such as yoga or tai chi. A couch potato, or someone who is always exhausted, cannot meditate effectively, they just do not have enough energy for it. If the vitality within your body falls too low, you will not have enough energy to concentrate during your mediations. You really cannot afford to split your mind off from your body. Some people enjoy a form of meditation in which they disassociate their minds from their bodies, but if you keep doing this, you will rob yourself of your vitality.

Many spiritual seekers go through a stage of hating their body because of the limitations it imposes on them. They want to go beyond their body and escape the heaviness and duality of it. If they discover, for example, that they can escape from their physical bodies through an open crown centre, they just want to repeat this blissful experience. But if you go out of your body during meditation or deep sleep, eventually you just have to come back into it again. So it is far more sensible to embrace your physicality willingly, and use it as key tool for liberation.

I strongly recommend tai chi, yoga, and other bodily-based holistic practices, not as an end in their own right, but as a tool for awakening. I teach my tai chi students not to strive so much for the perfect posture as for self-mastery of their crazy minds. Through a combination of meditation, physical practices, and holistic energy work you can more easily learn to calm your emotions, still your mind and strengthen your spirit until you return home to your natural, enlightened state of being in which your physical existence ceases to be so real to you.

Once you reach this level of awakening, your physical body will become the servant of your mind, rather than vice versa. You will finally be free from all the suffering and trappings of collective physical consciousness. You will still be able to enjoy bodily sensations, such as eating a delicious meal, or making love to your partner, but you will not be so attached to these passing physical pleasures. Your consciousness will finally have transcended the imprisonment of physical existence, and although you will still function very successfully in the physical world, you will know that it is just a passing dream.