The Four Foundations: Dharma is—Intimate

From “The Four Foundations” by Venerable Samu Sunim

Dharma is,

Intimate,

Immediate,

Spontaneous,

Obvious

After class one Saturday, a practitioner shared that she went somewhere else in her mind mid-practice. Her body was engaging the movements and her mind was engaging her task list. She became aware of this through the reminder of re-engaging with the Dharma of intimacy. Inviting her eyes to follow the movement of her thumb as it glided across the ground, bringing awareness to the sensations of the blanket underneath her palm, her task list disappeared and her body and mind became one. 

I see this a lot observing my fellow humans, which helped me to observe the same within myself. We place our awareness in a multitude of places simultaneously. Eating while watching television. Scrolling socials while holding a conversation. Listening to music while exercising. The mental stimulation has grown along with technology and what we lose is the fullness of any one thing. Accessing fulfillment becomes almost impossible, leading many to seek more stimulation to fill the growing ache.

Somatic awareness supports the re-engagement or re-connection of the seeking mind with its feeling counterpart. The body is constantly sending sensory input back to the brain through our senses, and by attuning the mind to observe this information, we form a feedback loop through the mind-body connection. It’s like the body saying to the brain, can you help me with this? and through our mind’s awareness, telling the body yes, I got you. But if the mind’s awareness is engaged with recalling a conversation with a friend and the body is trying to communicate its growing desire to rest, the divide between the two ultimately leads the body to scream through symptoms and chronic pain patterns.

Thus, to be in intimacy with ones practice is to train the mind’s awareness to seek out and observe the internal sensations as the body’s source of communication. The more we listen, the greater the neural pathways grow that feeds back to the body that it’s being heard. By training awareness towards how a movement makes us feel, and listening with the curiosity of a beginner’s mind, we can access new movement patterns that supports rather than hinders our healing process. When the mind’s awareness is fed back unto itself and the body feels heard, the seeking nature of the mind for excess, stimulation, consumption, and other external sensory-input dims. The fullness of the moment reveals itself, and complexity gives way to maximum enjoyment of life’s simple pleasures (at least for me it does).