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#94: Body as an instrument

I was recently unwell in a way where a concoction of things, chronic and acute, had me in bed for a few days. Eight punishing issues were cropping up at once. I tried not to add value judgments, which helped reduce mental chatter and made it easier for me to go with the flow. I alternated work-in-bed, Netflix-in-bed, reading and rest based on what my body could handle. By the second day, the observer in me starting seeing each issue as a thread of human experience: gastric distress, back spasms, inflamed adductor, twisted pelvis and grief just to name a few. I thought of people who had dealt with these threads at one point or another. I examined the threads that were new to me.

For example: When people had back problems, I understood theoretically but not until this experience did I really “get it”. I felt from inside how completely debilitating a back spasm could be. How all bodily movements, not some, are silently supported by our core. I knew that our core includes our back and not just the abdomen, and that true abdominal strength comes from deeper muscles and not just the surface-level 6-pack muscle. Yet, not until this event did I patiently isolate and feel the firing of different layers of core muscles. I finally played with the exquisitely designed jigsaw puzzle made of bones, muscles and tendons from inside my animal.

There is sometimes a struggle in spiritual practice about whether it’s more important for us to nurture the spirit or the body. The body is seen as temporary while the spirit more lasting. And I absolutely get this wisdom; I’ve personally benefitted from feeding my spiritual wellbeing in dark moments. But…we are clothed in this earthly bodysuit till our dying breath. If we don’t have a body, we are literally not alive. Like all animals, we have sophisticated abilities for functional activity, growth, reproduction, and continual change before eventual death, and we also face periodic glitches. I have come to see that this glitch-ridden experience inside our frequently painful bodysuit is how we unlock our spiritual practices. Body is where the nuggets of insight, wisdom and empathy live.

We can’t each go through the countless human experiences to be had. But we can go through some. Some of us will face cancers, heart attacks, severe burns, while others will face chronic migraines, irritable bowels and weak bones. Some will have the ache of untimely loss, addiction, and postpartum depression, while others will have to care for a parent with Alzheimer’s or a schizophrenic sibling. Between all of us, we cover the entirety of human experience.

Modern tech would have you believe that intelligent life can operate without a body, while simply simulating the predictive capacity of the brain. What we completely miss is that true intelligence isn’t just prediction, it’s also compassion and resilience birthed from painful surprises. This is the valuable journey that a human body allows. Over time, we can become instruments of all that is tender and powerful at the same time. Like a tree that filters environmental toxins and releases oxygen.

“It is not our job to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves
Like the trees, and be born again,
Drawing up from the great roots.”― Robert Bly, poet

#93: Ecosystem awareness

Let’s start with an experiment. You can select any body part of your choosing; I’ll use the right foot as an example.

So, pay attention to your right foot. Really tune into it and wiggle it if you can. Slowly move it around to feel into the bones and muscles. Is there tightness, fluidity, achiness, a combination of these, or something else? Close your eyes now and continue to do this for 5 breaths. Really. Try it please and then move forward to the next sentence.

Now one question: When you were doing this, were you aware of your knee? Likely not, if your knee is pain free. This exercise is not about your body. It’s a simple way to note that when we become hyper-focused on one thing, we naturally lose awarenss of other things. It’s practically impossible to pay high quality attention to everything all at once. Working-caregivers know this struggle well. We can toggle attention from one thing to the next, but it’s hard to pay attention to everything all at once.

Yet, complex problem solving requires us to be aware of inter-related parts. It needs an ecosystem awareness. Some everyday examples of ecosystem awareness from my world:

  • My husband was replacing the faucet in our clawfoot tub. Mid-way he realized that his movements yanked the pipe connecting the faucet with the shower head, which yanked the curtain rod encircling the tub, which yanked the wall anchor that the curtain rod was tied to. His movement at the faucet split the wall anchor.
  • Years ago, I was cutting my nails while sitting on the balcony at my home in India. Upon seeing me, my Mom requested I do this in the bathroom sink because she didn’t want the sparrows to eat and choke on my sharp nail clippings.
  • When we moved into our new home in Seattle, I did the “Graha Pravesh Puja”. This prayer ceremony is done to bless a new home. I had never personally done this before and was blown away by the sense of connectedness embedded in this prayer. It wasn’t only to request blessings for us, it was also to thank every entity that made space for us in their ecosystem — the insects, animals and plants. I was also reminded to thank the humans that built this home in 1906 and those that took care of it over the decades.

Ecosystems consist of organisms (or parts), their interactions and relationships, and the environments in which they interact. They are relational by definition and interconnected in complex ways. We all live in ecosystems that both impact us and are impacted by us. But it can be overwhelming to understand a system if we keep widening our lens endlessly. So we zoom out and define boundaries to know which pieces of the system we need to focus on for now. This allows us to see the key parts and grasp how they relate to each other.

Without some boundary, our attention doesn’t know where the container ends. Boundaries are a way to invite-in focus and remove overwhelm. But they are often arbitrary and defined by our limited perspectives. At some point in the process, we may be well-served by redefining or even erasing boundaries. Because our ecosystems and their interconnections never end.

“The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those that have not viewed the world.” — Alexander von Humboldt: German geographer, naturalist and explorer

#90: The discomfort of evolving

Most of us were raised within social structures that nudged us to make a living as an adult. We were told to aim for income in exchange for our talents and skills. To what degree we got to cultivate and use what was innately joyful varied on circumstances. Regardless, the questions of survival remained in the air through our teens and twenties…how will you land on your feet, how will you sustain yourself? We learned that the ideal trajectory was:  Brand name schools followed by brand name companies that, over time, lead to brand name clothing, cars, gadgets, travel and residential addresses. The hope was to work a few decades, build bigger moats of safety and bridges of access that we could pass on to our kids, if we had them. We wanted to pass along a better starting point in life so they didn’t have to start where we did, i.e. on the bottom of this safety, success and happiness mountain. We named this climb “increasing standards of living” and designed our organizations, schools and families around it. Everyone climbed their individual climb.

Then came the trickle of warnings from scientists, academics, and community leaders. They raised alarms about the unsustainability of our structures. They said that our collective climbs were over-extracting from the environment then dumping toxic refuse into it. The warnings felt distant to most of us compared to our everyday safety, so we didn’t really see or hear. Those that heard and tried to tell us more were considered activists. They lived on the fringes of our valued social structures, were typically intense people, and made us uncomfortable. They were hard to handle in heavy doses. They made choices and tradeoffs we needn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t.

The discomfort of current times is that those alarms aren’t distant anymore. The people raising them aren’t fringe to our lives anymore. They are our friends, neighbors and coworkers. They initially succeeded within the current structures but heard the warnings and started making the uncomfortable choices and tradeoffs. They too see that multi-layered extraction, depletion and pollution cycle. They see it impacting not only the environment but their own psyche and that of people they encounter daily. They see that we are depleting both the mountain and the climber. And that if we keep going at this rate, there won’t be any mountain left to climb or any climbers that give a shit about each other*.

They are asking the same question that was in the air in our teens and twenties; except this time, they want to play a different (infinite) game. They are asking if we can all make a living without crippling the planet and the people that inhabit it. They are silently around us, trying to build a bridge to the new, not just for themselves but for everyone’s kids too. Please listen with empathy when they speak and try to formulate their sometimes-broken thoughts. Don’t jump in to defend the current structure. They are not attacking us, our lifestyle, or choices. Like us, they carry fears of survival and alienation. Yet, they are taking on the discomfort of helping us evolve into the new. Before the current structure crumbles and takes us all with it.

*Two examples of extraction and not giving a shit from just this week, and I didn’t even go looking:
  – Over 1,700 environment activists killed in decade
  – China’s 24/7 fishing operations are depleting fish stocks off the Galápagos Islands

“Let me fall if I must fall.
The one I am becoming
will catch me.”—Baal Shem Tov, Jewish mystic and healer

#89: Beginner’s mind (forced)

I randomly tuned-in to the US open tennis tournament while at the gym. Not having followed tennis closely for a few years, these players were new to me so I didn’t know their styles and strengths. I wasn’t connected to the audio so could only see the score and the body language. I had chanced upon the tail end of the match; the final set and match point. The player in the lead was leading by a lot and had to take her match point serve. She kept starting the serve but not taking it. She would toss the ball but then decide to let it drop to the ground instead of hitting it. She did this several times, enough for me to pause and notice. She looked calm, she was ahead, she looked very strong, she could win the match in under 60-seconds. What was hard in that moment? And then I realized: she has the weight of expectations on her. I thought, wouldn’t it be great if she could erase any internal chatter and noisy history and just serve with a beginner’s mind? Shortly thereafter, she served, she won. This match was over and the screen moved to another match. 

While this was happening, a story was unfolding closer to me on my elliptical machine. While I was watching, my run was picking speed. I was starting to break sweat, feeling fluid in my body after having taken a break. I glanced at the speed and distance to see if I was actually building stamina again and then the machine stopped. I was distracted by the match and had pressed the wrong button. I had done about 10 minutes, so not my full planned time. “No problem” I thought and started again with a clean slate. I tuned in to the body, checked for alignment and pain. My body felt good after a long time. Then I tuned-in again to speed and distance. Distractedly, I hit the same button after another 10 minutes or so and the machine stopped. I lost track of my speed and distance once again. This time I noticed…what I wished for that player, I was getting in a very forced way. I was getting unplanned fresh starts. I kept having to let go of my agenda and tune in repeatedly to the here and now, to my beginner’s mind. By the third set, I had stopped monitoring speed or distance as a gauge of my health. I was just feeling the increased stamina in my body compared to the last few times when I felt absolutely sluggish. In the first set, I was having my own micro moment of success and perhaps the pressure to outdo my past self. But the unplanned pauses and erasure forced me into a beginner’s mind repeatedly. I had no clue about my distance or speed, I just got to savor my strength that day.

Practicing beginner’s mind might be the most pragmatic way to experience the full-bodied potential and delight of our endeavors. The measurements and markers, while helpful, then become secondary. When we lead with the markers, we behave like brains on a stick and often exit the visceral experience of being alive. I know beginner’s mind is easier said than done…but it’s easier done after repeated practice.

“But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.

The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.” ― Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford commencement address

#87: The actual distance

If we zoom out enough on any interactive map, the cities of Seattle and Portland seem to merge. The ~180-mile, multi-hour driving distance gets erased. Someone planning a visit solely from the zoomed out view of a map might think they can cover key West Coast hubs from Vancouver, British Columbia all the way down to San Diego, California quickly. They might dream of popping in and out of Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles along the way to get a feel. But of course, no one really does that. We know a trip like that would require more planning, time and resources. We know this because we have experienced the reality of navigating our own cities and countries, with their roads and delays. If we’ve left home base to explore, we’ve likely experienced upset stomachs from novel food sources, we know that the same piece of luggage can feel heavier as the days go by, we get the strain of finding and relying on an unknown doctor or mechanic mid-travel. In short, we understand the physical, mental and emotional fatigue that accompanies any significant exploration.

But we seem to forget this wisdom while planning explorations related to daily life. In imagination mode, our mind seamlessly zooms out to dreamily plan our days with vibrant work and social life. On a bright and sunny Saturday morning, after we are well rested, it can daydream that we’ll go from epiphany to functioning business in a couple of years. That from here on, we’ll wake up fresh and early everyday. That we’ll have energy to meditate and move in the morning, then give our utmost focus to work, and have energy left over in the evening for family and friends. We might even imagine everyone around the table sharing a lovely meal with laughter. In those moments, the mind is doing what interactive maps do. It zooms out to see the highlights but doesn’t factor in the actual lived-distance between them. It doesn’t see us getting offroaded by home maintenance, echos of grief, unexplained allergic reactions or a sick child. It doesn’t factor in those happy faces needing our support or that meal needing our effort.

It’s a silently harsh experience to fail ourselves because our dreams took longer than imagined to manifest. When in our life’s geography, the highlights aren’t happening so close together one after another. Our daydreams should come with a caution like some maps do: “This map is not to scale”.


“If you can dream — and not make dreams your master
If you can think — and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same”― If by Rudyard Kipling: writer, poet and journalist