The Four Foundations: Dharma is—Obvious

From “The Four Foundations” by Venerable Samu Sunim

Dharma is

Intimate,

Immediate,

Spontaneous,

Obvious

A dear friend once told me that I manufacture my feelings, that what actually is happening and how I’m responding are disproportionate. At that moment something clicked into place. Memories of movies flashed in my head, lines and behaviors I’ve adopted to try to “fit in.” You’d never know it looking at me—gymnast, dancer, head cheerleader—but my entire external expression was a performance. Internally I felt anxious, confused, constantly on alert, judging, envying, resenting those who made socializing look easy. I thought I was doing everything right, thinking my way through every encounter, drawing forward memories of lines that I found funny, becoming those characters that everybody liked. So when the time came to ‘wake up’ to myself, actually begin the laborious work of self-discovery, I did what I always did, I made up stories.

Traversing the layers of past, I yearned for a fresh perspective, to peel back the onion and create a new story. Before I was introduced to the work of Somatics I healed through talk therapy. Going back into the trauma and rewriting the old narrative. Stoking the fire with gasoline is what it felt like to an overly excitable nervous system sinking deeper into the web of meaning. 

If I wasn’t in the past talking my way to a new understanding, I was in the future feeling anxious about everything I couldn’t control.  No matter how many perspectives I was able to conjure about why my past unfolded as it had, I could not shake the feeling that my life had no meaning. The paradox of of this does not cease to delight me—no matter how many explanations I have for things, how much knowledge I gain studying topics that interest me, the more meaning I make of the world the more I experience the gnawing feeling of meaninglessness. 

So where do I go from here? The moments that life become meaningless and stories cease to entertain, an initiation begins. When two opposites come to meet and the point between where nothing and everything exist simultaneously, only surrender can touch here. Some call this initiation point the Dark Night of the Soul, some call it conscious growth. Having met this point countlessly, I can say the quickest route to insanity is meaning-making and the fastest route to resolve is letting it be. Coming deeper and deeper into living trust with uncertainty. 

These initiations are what woke me up to the nowness of the moment. The is-ness of experience. The world beyond my understanding of it. And this brings us to the fourth Dharma of The Four Foundations taught by the late Zen Buddhist Master, The Venerable Samu Sunim—Dharma is Obvious. The Obvious is what is actually here, what is happening right now. 

Accessing the now is met at the bridge between other and self, the internal world and the external world—feelings. Our five senses—touch, smell, taste, sound, and sight. Our body lives in the now. It doesn’t know how to operate outside of time and space like the thinking mind does, neither do feelings. There are countless practices and teachings that invite one into the present moment, and the most potent I have found are within body movement education, like Somatics. 

Practicing Somatics, we are invited again and again to sense the natural arisings of the moment through movement and stillness and catalogue the actuality of what is here. The thinking mind is such a brilliant storyteller, but its function in this work is awareness training. Why? Because creating mind-body awareness builds a somatic intelligence to discern what is real and what is story, what is body and what is now, and what is mind and what is changeable. 

It’s very common when beginning a Somatics practice to be pulled into the mind’s story about why something is. With the invitation to sense differences between left leg and right leg, notice if the thoughts pull awareness towards meaning-making. During therapy sessions with a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, I’m encouraged over and over to not be taken over by the story my mind has woven and to instead be with the arising bodily sensations of the moment. Through experience, I’ve found the Dharma of Obviousness to be a quality that softly and safely opens me up to feeling alive. A richness that no preconceived meaning can touch.

There is such a beautiful mastery in Obvious—it’s simple, clear, unassuming. Resting within the quality of Obviousness has a notable feeling of relief, a felt knowing that beyond all control, I am truly being cared for.