Embodiment

This time last week I had the good fortune to have been invited to lead a retreat in a retreat centre in Brittany. Weather was a bit like this actually, a bit windy but some cloud, bright as well. And the sort of broad theme or the The intention for the retreat, which was a 2-day, 2.5-day retreat, was to invite people to investigate the nature of self, and the nature of self in relation, in particular, to the other. This was a sort of starting point. And I think it was a very successful retreat in a number of different ways, and the themes that came from the retreat have been occupying my mind all for the rest of this week. And one thing that it's sort of been leading me to think about is is broadly embodiment, in terms of what we embody, and this sort of sense of our encounter with the other. That can be things, conditions generally, other people, how, well, in Buddhism we say that we're conditioned by that relationship and exposure to the other. And also in Buddhist psychology, we focus on the fact that self is, in a sense, not only an illusion, in a way. But also that if we can talk about a self, it's sort of a place of comfort. You'd all be familiar with the terminology of comfort zone, and it was a word that came up during the course of the weekend, people stepping outside of their comfort zone. What it led us to explore was that when our sense of ourselves meets the other, there's an opportunity there in which we will step outside of our comfort zone. Now, Buddhism will say habitually we don't. What we do is we we try to make the other something like ourselves, or to somehow be the way that we need them to be in order to retain a sort of defensive, a defensive sense of identity. So, of course, that's all very well, you know, it's good to be in a place of comfort if self is the comfort zone. But if we are, you know, I think we probably would all have a sense that it's not necessarily a place of growth, a place of creativity or openness to what the world has to offer us. And we can get stuck in our habits and routines And the invitation of the Buddha is really one in which he's saying, "Well, you know, look beyond that, step beyond that, step out of your comfort zone, see what the world has to offer." But it's, I think, one of the things that people identified is that there's a fear. You could name it as a fear. That if you expose yourself or are open to the other, then in some ways you're risking the potential to be changed, maybe quite radically changed, to know the other deeply in that way. And so we don't do it that often. We sort of retain the defense because that's a sort of, well, that's not comfort in a way. But maybe it's a place of growth. And so what I'm thinking about in relation to this is that, you know, we can think about experience being on the one hand living in a conditional world, and on the other hand, sort of an intuition of the ultimate. And from a, from a kind of conditional point of view, those fears and defenses will be in place. But from the point of view of an intuition of the ultimate, we know that there may be potentially riches to opening up to the nature of the other. And so there's the conditional relationship, the conditional world of the relationship between self and other, and then there's something that transcends that, which In the tradition of Pure Land Buddhism, we give a name to it of Amida Buddha. We think of the Buddhas as being representative of that, of what is ultimate, and in the sense of what they give us, we experience an unconditional support and love and wisdom given to us despite our fallible nature and our often our inability to connect ourselves with another person in a way that is loving and kind. So what I was pondering was about, we talk about the Amida Buddha as the Buddha of infinite light, infinite light and love. But how do we embody that love? We often talk about being a reflection of that love. So we could be a reflection of that love for the other, or in our relationship to the other. But there's a sense of the importance importance of somehow embodying that. You know, when we open our hearts, can we actually trust? Can we trust that it is safe for us to do that? And in this sense, I think Buddhism spiritual training is one in which we expose ourselves again and again and allow that process of the Buddha's, that love to come into our hearts over time. So there's great value in our intellectual understanding understanding of things. There's lots of things that we can investigate from that point of view. But really the Buddhist path is one in which we just keep coming back and exposing ourselves to Amida, who is the other that transcends the conditional relationship between self and other. And this is why, I guess, what it's led me to reflecting on this morning also is how we do things in certain ways in the shrine room physically. You know, we have our liturgy and part of the process of some of us beginning to learn learning the liturgy by heart is a kind of gradual embodiment that goes into our hearts. And likewise, the way that we conduct ourselves around the shrine could seem sort of highly structured and formalized, but it is also a kind of embodiment of the transition of transmission of what is at the heart of Buddhist teaching. It is literally enacted, it is literally embodied, rather than known from a cognitive sense. So these are my thoughts. This morning on this beautiful September day. Namaste.