The Four Foundations: Dharma is—Spontaneous

From “The Four Foundations” by Venerable Samu Sunim

Dharma is

Intimate,

Immediate,

Spontaneous,

Obvious

For someone who acts from precision and caution, the Dharma of Spontaneity often gets overlooked in my practice. The late Zen Buddhist master, the Venerable Samu Sunim posed from The Four Foundations, the third quality of Dharma is Spontaneous. From a somatic lens, we can look at this as the freshness of the moment, or the newness that arises when observing with a beginner’s mind.

How often do we enter our practice from a preconceived plan? Stepping onto our mat to perform Tree Pose from the thought of having done it before? Forcing our bodies into shapes from the memory of the mind? How many injuries, whether of the body or psyche result from expectations of how we think something should be? Our desire for control and exactness, an impatient willfulness to ‘getting it right’ calcifies the moment into a limited view of ego expectation. 

We miss our appointment with life, says Thich Nhat Hanh. 

We miss the greater mystery unfolding. We lose ourselves in the labyrinth of habit forms.

Spontaneity and neuroplasticity have relations in the field of somatics. Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to change its function and structure in response to experience, learning, and even injury. Altering movement patterns or changing up how we do things asks the mind and body to coordinate in new ways. Adding a side lean to Tree Pose or brushing your teeth with the opposite hand, for instance. When we change up our habits, when we consciously engage the mind-body connection with new and unfamiliar ways of doing things, over time we experience greater ease with life’s unpredictability. Building neuroplasticity and spontaneity into our practice and routines, I believe, is foundational to growing self-trust. Especially when control has been our system’s survival response to an unstable and unsafe environment.

After practice one Saturday, a practitioner shared how she found herself on the path of somatics. Familiar with pushing her mind and body to achieve her aims, she pushed past her body’s pain response and injured her back performing a yoga asana pose she’s done hundreds of times. She said it was her wakeup call to learn to be in relationship with her body in a more gentle and conscious way. 

Spontaneity as an embodiment tool is especially prevalent when navigating pathways of pain and trauma. The network of neuropathways that has constructed around the injury to ensure system function and survival has become hardwired, and in my experience, the practice of slow, small, and somatically aware movements trains our ability to sense these hardwired highways and choose whether we want to continue building the bridge towards pain or experiment with finding a sensation that feels pleasurable or neutral. When we move slow and with somatic awareness, we have greater access to sensation and meeting the threshold with choice.

This is just one way we can experience the quality of spontaneity—through the choice of moving in a new way. What’s held within that choice and the conscious navigation towards the unfamiliar is a sensation, it has a felt-quality. And the ask of any embodiment practitioner is to sense what arises within you when trying something new. What do you feel and where in your body do you feel it? What thought forms arise when the body-mind connection become momentarily lost and confused? My teacher calls these moments somatic bamboozlement and all that’s happening is the mind and body building new neuropathways and improving neuroplasticity.

What would happen if we moved through the unknown with curiosity instead of judgement? What would happen if we felt into our relationship with imperfection, messy, uncoordinated and we allowed that to be a necessary function for living the Dharma of Spontaneity?

Try this—when you go to create your next movement, whether that’s to stand or sit or even close your eyes to reflect, do so in a way that’s new to you. Do so with random intent. Try for the unexpected and track what you notice happening in your sensational body. This is your present moment relationship with the Dharma of Spontaneity.