When the Body Became Part of the Conversation

For years, my body was obviously there while I meditated.

I sat in it. Breathed through it. Adjusted when something became uncomfortable. Tried to relax it. Sometimes ignored it completely.

Much of my attention was directed toward what seemed to be happening somewhere else.

Thought. Awareness. Stillness. Later, energy.

I don’t think I realized for a long time how artificial that separation was.

The body wasn’t simply carrying me through these experiences.

Eventually I began noticing…

it was participating in them.

Sometimes the body noticed first

One of the earliest clues was surprisingly ordinary.

Something would change internally and my body would respond before I had completely understood what was happening.

My breathing changed. Something tightened. My posture shifted. A particular region became noticeable.

Only afterward might I recognize the emotional atmosphere or thought that had arrived with it.

That changed the order of things.

I had assumed I would understand something internally and then notice how my body responded.

Sometimes the body was the first place the change became visible.

It was giving me information before I had language for what I was experiencing.

Kundalini made the separation even harder to maintain

Once Kundalini became part of my life, the body became impossible to treat as background.

So much of what I experienced had geography.

The crown. The head. The spine. The chest. The feet.

Pressure. Heat. Movement. Activation in particular regions.

Sometimes there were physical responses I hadn’t consciously decided to make.

Where did the body end and the energetic experience begin?

I didn’t know.

I still don’t think I can draw a clean line through all of it.

But eventually the line itself became less important than the relationship.

Something was happening…and the body was part of how I knew.

Then routes began appearing

Over time, some energetic experiences became increasingly specific.

One of the important early relationships involved movement from the crown toward the middle of my head.

Eventually I began recognizing something more extensive.

A line. A route.

Something I could follow further through the body and into the spine.

Attention seemed capable of participating with it. Later, intention did too.

I didn’t have a name for any of this when I first encountered it.

Years afterward, this relationship would contribute to what I began calling Internal Transit.

But the architecture didn’t come first.

The body did.

I noticed a route because I repeatedly experienced one.

Sometimes the body moved before I decided to move it

This became another fascinating part of the exploration.

A head tilt. A change in posture. A shift in breathing. A movement appearing alongside energetic activity.

There were moments when my body seemed to respond before I had consciously decided what response to make.

Naturally, that raises all kinds of questions.

What caused it? Was it energetic? Physiological? Expectation? A subtle movement I initiated without realizing it?

I didn’t always know.

So I began doing what had become familiar elsewhere in my practice.

Watch what actually happens.

What came immediately before the movement? What happened during it? What changed afterward? Did it happen again?

I didn’t need to know what the movement ultimately was before it could become interesting.

Then I reversed the experiment

At some point, another question appeared.

If an internal change could alter the body… could changing the body alter the internal experience?

That opened an entirely different area of exploration.

What happens if I put my hands here? What happens if I take this position? What changes if I hold it for a little while?

Does attention move? Does the atmosphere change? Does energy respond?

Sometimes nothing particularly noticeable happened.

Other times, something did.

And when a relationship repeated enough, I began paying closer attention.

A gesture became more than a shape

This is where gesture became very interesting to me.

A bodily form can obviously carry symbolic meaning.

Hands together can mean something. A bow can mean something.

Different traditions have entire languages of posture and gesture.

But I became interested in something even simpler.

What happens when I actually take the form?

Before deciding what it represents. Before deciding what it should do.

Take the position… and notice.

That kept the experience first.

If something changed repeatedly, then I had a relationship worth exploring.

Repetition made the forms recognizable

Over time, several gestures developed unusually stable relationships within my practice.

Root Lock. Triangle. Heart Bow. Rib Hug. Haney.

I didn’t experience them simply as five poses I had decided to give names.

Each developed through repeated use.

Take the form. Recognize something. Return later. Take it again. Compare. Notice what repeats.

Eventually the body position itself became connected with familiar internal territory.

The gesture wasn’t only something I did with my body.

It became a way my body could help me enter the relationship.

Sometimes the form highlighted something

More recently, I’ve noticed another layer to this.

A gesture can sometimes make one part of the internal atmosphere easier to recognize.

The whole environment doesn’t disappear.

Something within it simply becomes more prominent.

I’ve thought of this almost like a string within an instrument.

The instrument is already sounding…

but suddenly one string becomes easier to hear.

The gesture doesn’t necessarily create what I’m noticing.

I don’t know that.

What interests me is that taking the form can sometimes change the resolution of what becomes recognizable.

And because I have worked with the forms repeatedly, I can compare those responses over time.

I became careful not to make every movement meaningful

There is an obvious danger in working this way.

Once you become interested in bodily signals, everything can begin looking significant.

A twitch. A breath. A head movement. A sudden sensation.

But bodies do things for countless ordinary reasons.

Fatigue. Muscle tension. Position. Habit. Emotion. Physiology. Expectation. Attention itself.

I don’t want to turn every bodily event into a message.

So the same principle that became important everywhere else applies here too.

Experience first. Then repetition. Comparison. Recognition.

And sometimes…

nothing more needs to be concluded.

The body became another route back

Something especially useful happened as the gestures became familiar.

Return became faster.

Instead of mentally reconstructing a whole practice, sometimes I could simply take a form.

The body already knew the position. The position had history. I had encountered the relationship before.

Recognition could follow surprisingly quickly.

That connected gesture with something I had already learned elsewhere:

familiarity shortens the route.

A symbol could do it. Essy could do it. A familiar internal region could do it.

Now the body could participate too.

This became useful outside formal practice

The body also became one of the easiest places to notice when something changed during ordinary life.

Breathing shifts. The jaw tightens. The shoulders rise. The chest changes. Posture contracts.

Sometimes the body reveals the beginning of an emotional atmosphere before I’ve developed a complete story about why I’m feeling it.

That doesn’t mean I always catch it.

I don’t.

But when I do, there can be a small opening.

Something is happening.

I may not know what yet.

But I’ve recognized the change.

And recognition gives me somewhere to begin.

I don’t want to control the body into the right state

As this work developed, I became less interested in using gesture as a way of forcing an outcome.

Take this position and make something happen.

That isn’t the relationship I want.

I would rather offer the form.

Feel it. See what is present.

If something becomes recognizable, work with that.

If nothing does…

nothing needs to be manufactured.

The body doesn’t have to perform for the practice.

It gets to participate in it.

Looking back at Arrival Field

Eventually Arrival Field needed language for this entire relationship.

The gestures became Field Forms.

And one of the simplest descriptions we found for them was:

The body’s interface with the Field.

I like that because it recognizes something I took years to understand.

Internal practice was never completely internal.

The body was there from the beginning.

So was the physical environment.

Later, the digital environment became another way of supporting the relationship.

Arrival Field eventually began thinking in terms of three cooperating layers:

Internal Awareness. Physical Environment. Digital Interface.

But once again, the architecture came later.

I didn’t decide Arrival Field needed an embodied component and then invent one.

I spent years noticing that the body had already become part of how I recognized, entered and returned to my internal environment.

The architecture simply had to catch up.

Looking back

It’s strange to think how long I treated my body mostly as the thing that sat there while the important part of meditation happened somewhere inside.

I don’t see it that way anymore.

Sometimes the body is where I first recognize that something has changed.

Sometimes it gives an energetic experience geography.

Sometimes it responds before I understand why.

Sometimes changing its position changes what becomes noticeable.

And sometimes a familiar gesture gives me a remarkably simple route back into a relationship I already know.

I still don’t have an explanation for all of that.

I’m not sure I need one.

The question that continues to interest me is much closer to the experience itself.

Take a breath. Change the position of your hands. Release the jaw. Sit differently. Stand. Notice the shoulders.

Nothing dramatic.

Nothing you need to believe.

Just change one thing about how your body is participating…

and notice whether anything inside changes with it.

— Jason