Take Refuge in Your Body

My beagle, Little Bit, can sense a storm gathering. The reason I know this is that Little Bit uses the language of her body to communicate her fear. From just the slightest shift in air pressure, her chunky little body starts quivering. Then, at the first clap of thunder, she springs off her stubby legs and miraculously torpedoes herself through the air, taking aim for the familiar protection of my arms. I am literally her port in a storm. 

All beings feel a need for refuge or sanctuary at various moments in our life. Some of us look for protection in material belongings, career prestige, financial investments; or we might look for escape in alcohol, food, or even over-exercising. An authentic spiritual path offers a different kind of safe haven. Instead of the temporary relief of an aspirin or a place to duck into when you want to hide from yourself, spiritual refuge offers a path toward feeling one’s own basic goodness. But first, like Little Bit, we have to start by feeling our mental and emotional discomfort: fear, frustration, anger, hatred, jealousy, pride, or any kind of negative emotion; which Buddhists call kleshas, or afflictive emotions.

In this way, one’s own body is a perfect vehicle in which to take refuge. When we humans feel an emotional storm brewing, the adrenaline rush of powerful feelings often renders us unable to control our body, speech, or mind. Holding our breath and quivering, we might find ourselves meeting heat with anger, anger with angry words. Or we keep our afflictive emotions inside where they fester. Grief in our chest, anger in our jaw, fear in our knees, all eventually reveal themselves via pain in our joints or reduced movement capacity.

Many of us understand that our body is the holder of emotions and we try to expel our kleshas through intense physical activity. By 5:00 am every morning, there is a pack of joggers pounding the sidewalk in front of my house, their miner’s lights shining in the dark. Others punch it out at the boxing gym, or spin it out in a cycling class that not only gets the heart pumping and the calories burning, but also takes you on a fantasy trip via nature slides and pretty music, so you never have to feel what you feel, emotionally or physically. 

All of this is exactly the opposite of taking refuge in the body. Instead of using the body to relieve stress, it is abusing the body to avoid emotions. Meeting aggression with aggression only creates more aggression and that’s what one is doing when one pushes the body too hard in an effort to remove emotional blocks and deny what’s going on in the mind. This kind of workout approach is like getting a shot of cortisone. The gym rat might experience a temporary break from the stress of emotional afflictions but the somato-emotional cyst will still be there.

Instead of trying to deny these feelings, taking refuge in the body means that we begin to make friends with our body. We begin to listen to our body and treat it the way we would treat someone we care about. Instead of pushing it too hard or being afraid to move it at all, we can walk the middle path of intuiting what is appropriate for our own body, which means for us. 

Lesson One:  Get More Friendly

We have so many goals for our bodies: lose weight, get sculpted, be more healthy, more attractive, keep that youthful glow! Like a dysfunctional love relationship where we expect our partner to meet our every need, we don’t relate of our body as our friend, but as the agent for achieving all of our hopes and fears. As if our body was not us. Separating mind and body like this is what the great yoga master, B. K. S. Iyengar, called “dis-integration.” Being integrated, in health and fitness lingo is the definition of “well-being.” In order for us to begin thinking of our body as the place where we feel good, it helps to shift our “goals” from wanting to jump higher and run faster, to feeling better and living a more, engaged vibrant life.  In fact, even if you do want to jump higher and run faster, the most effective way to achieve those goals is to connect to this feeling of well-being that comes from moving your body in ways that you like. 

Do this in small bites called Exercise Snacks. Get up and move around for 10 minutes here and there, throughout the day. Circumambulate the house/office, do three sun salutations, walk your dog, turn on music and play. Instead of unrealistic goals that almost make failure a given, this is just about feeling good more often. The fruit of the movement is in the doing itself. It’s not about doing it wrong or better, it’s just about moving and paying attention to your experience.

This is how you can slowly redefine your relationship with your body, from something outside of yourself that needs to be different, to a refuge that is always there to provide you an experience of integration and well-being. 

Lesson Two: Get Curious

We can take a lesson from the physical practice of yoga. The Sanskrit word for pose is asana, which literally translates as “to sit with what comes up.” Whether you are sitting or walking or jumping rope, notice what is coming up: joy, resistance, old memories, insights—include it all. When your mind strays, re-anchor it via the feelings of your body, emotions or your breathing. These sensations only occur in the present, so the body works as a perfect home base for the wandering mind. Notice not just what your body is feeling, but how you feel about what you are feeling. Try to be curious about what you notice without manipulating the situation. You will discover while your body has been changing all the time, your ideas about your body and what it can or cannot do, have become frozen. That’s an interesting insight, too. Maintaining continuous awareness in this way is called Mindfulness of Body; an effective yana, or vehicle for learning to be bigger than we think we are, for expanding our comfort zone, and for lightening up a little bit through the recognition of impermanence.

Lesson Three:  Start with Yourself

Grounding touch is a simple micro-practice for taking refuge in your body when you feel stressed and need a time out. It’s a method for connecting to your emotional state through your own body, using the warmth of your hands and the calmness of your breath to re-ground and stabilize your nervous system. You can do this anywhere, sitting on a park bench, walking from the elevator to your desk, even in the bathroom or stairwell at work. 

Stand or sit upright with feet firmly planted. Place one hand on your chest and one on your sacrum. Inhale through your nose for four counts, exhale through your nose for four counts; repeat. Feel the movement of your breath beneath your hands. Let your mind ride on the breath, like a raft on the ocean. You can also place hands on heart, belly, forehead, thighs.

Lesson Four: Do It for Everybody

Taking refuge in one’s body is self-care with a spiritual twist that recognizes that we cannot become enlightened without our body. That, if we want to be loving people, we must love our own body and take care of it just as we care for our other friends. Then when something frightening and destabilizing happens, we automatically take refuge in our body as a friend, as opposed to taking refuge in eating, drinking, shopping, or any other avoidance technique. We have learned to trust the refuge of our own body as a place of intimacy, and this allows us to be alive right now, available for whatever is needed in the moment. 

Originally published in Lions' Roar. Reproduced with permission.

Find out about upcoming programs with Cyndi Lee at Kripalu.