I do understand that tracking my breathing will not help, altogether, at the very moment of death. I am confident that when awareness of breathing stops, and when breathing itself stops, then there’s more of dying to experience, thereafter, on the subtler planes. So a deeper training in Presence is necessary. (Try the Dissolution of the Elements practice, to see how this can be).
Nevertheless, I have learnt much from my breathing. I’ve learned, for example, that any kind of body – the gross body, the feeling body, or the subtle energy body – is a self-organising process within a larger mysterious process, which we call life. Every body is of that larger life.
Grounding myself in the body, sensing into its condition in all its situations, helps me realize what the Japanese Focusing trainer Akira Ikemi means, when he talks about com-bodying, rather than em-bodying. In a paper (Sunflowers, Sardines and Responsive Combodying: Three Perspectives on Embodiment) Dr. Ikemi writes:
“The English word ‘embodiment’ may have a dualistic connotation originating in Western culture. An exact Japanese translation of this word does not exist. The word may have come from a cultural background where the spirit was assumed to be incarnated or ‘embodied’, encapsulated in our physical bodies. The prefix ‘em-’ denotes a ‘putting into’. Thus far, this paper has described a sort of ‘com-bodiment’, where the body points beyond itself ‘altogether with’ (com-) the universe. The body is seen as a processing-generating itself with the whole universe at every moment of its living. This view of the body will be referred to as ‘combodying’.”
Ikemi advocates “seeing bodily living as generating its own living together with the universe, and emphasizes the person’s reflexive awareness with which one can make sense of, and change one’s combodied living.”
My Oxford English Dictionary says of ‘com-‘: “The sense is ‘together, together with, in combination or union’, also ‘altogether, completely’, and hence intensive.”
The way that I think of it is, that each body is made up of all which is not the body. Consider what the gross body would be, without its direct participation right now in the biosphere’s carbon cycle, its nitrogen cycle, and its water cycle.
Or, what would it be without the oxygen generated by the forests of the Amazon Basin? There is no body apart from gravity (even for astronauts), or apart from the unseeable electro-magnetic and nuclear forces. Your body includes all that.
Breathing is always of the nature of inter-being. The body is not one thing, and the environment another. They are in each other. Right now, feel into your body, and say gently to it, “I understand that you are a part of the water cycle.” See how the body responds to that acknowledgement. See how it shifts your sense of yourself, to have the bodily feel of your unity with life.
If we are to save ourselves, as a species, and to flourish with our fellow species on this little blue planet, we need to explore this, to know intimately, to feel it intensely – the nature of this body as always together-with.
We don’t live in our bodies, but in our thoughts. Our bodies need re-minding. Did you know that the Buddhist word for ‘mindfulness’ – sati – means ‘remembering’? Buddhist ‘mindfulness’ includes a remembering that the body is already-always a ‘minded’ body; that it is a body-mind, is a bodily being-together-with-all.
So, what makes death such a big deal? Is it not because we cling to encultured patterns of ‘body’? The various kinds of bodies, however – the gross, feeling and subtle bodies – are each patterns of experiencing at differing levels of subtlety, a fact which only mindfulness can reveal, illumining the body at ever more and more subtle levels.
An important perspective on this is that: As I come to know myself in this way, my perspective on death changes. What does death mean, at the different levels of experiencing ‘body’? And, what is death, then, if it changes from level to level?