Body, Heart, Mind Awake

Body, heart and mind are essential facets of our being.

Mind is usually taken to mean all kinds of mental activity, but what we’re interested in here is ‘mind itself’ – the awake, aware quality of mind.

Awakeness is here even when we feel sleepy and dull. How do we know that we’re sleepy and dull? We are awake to it. We’re even awake to our dreams, despite the body being asleep.

This quality of wakefulness, knowingness or clarity is intrinsic to all of our experience and yet it is mysteriously ungraspable and unfindable. To know it, we need to discover what Zen Master Dogen was pointing to when he spoke of ‘taking the backward step’.

This is essentially a step ‘back’, from identification with our everyday mind of thoughts and imaginings, into the immediacy and presence of our body senses, just as they are.

Our body is not what we think it is – not at all! When we take the backward step, body is not the rather solid, rather weighty object we imagine it is. It’s an unbounded, living, vibrating cloud of sensate energy.

This also opens the heart to rest in its own nature – limitless and boundless. Here, the stream of love and compassion which is already implicitly active becomes boundless and all-inclusive. Body, heart and mind are naturally and undividedly awake.