There have been some questions in our Immersion Discord Group this month about the Non Directed Body Movement.  How much of it is letting go, and how much is intention?  What is it to walk that line?  The line between attention and intention? When I am letting go is that just another technique?  When I am “doing nothing” is that just kind of checking out?

Questions:

“NDBM – Tracking

In a recent email, in a blog you mentioned RE NDBM noticing neck pain and then your ankle tension, and then spiraling up your whole body. That’s sounds like a subtle “tracking” or noticing? Similar to in ZZ of feel the hara and how some other body part..not forcing but active tracking similar to vipassana or something. When I play with that, it’s helps fuel my curiousity and a relationality of dhamas. But it does require a bit more mental effort than my “do nothin, just feel the body” way of perceiving. I imagine there a slippery slope of mentally conceptualizing. The crux is what degree of non directed mental movement with what you described.
Separate NDBM noticing. My body just subtly moved on its own, yah. As you say “I am free lighting” it. Yet I notice another flavor of sensation. It’s not the mind saying your back aches let’s move. Instead, it’s like a subtle body craving. Like the body wants to move. But in my experience, it’s not a green light but an ember. And the body craving “ember” need me to blow on it intentionally to burn. If I were doing authentic movement , I would just honor the Eros of body. But I’m NDBM , I get stuck. Currently I don’t blow on it but wait for it to self ignite and unfurl. But I’m wondering if I may be shutting down a portal, those whispers of Eros from the body ?
 

Attempted Answer:

I guess I need to talk a bit about what the NDBM is for me.  At first the NDBM started out as an invitation to allow the body to physically unwind.   Like, if some old pattern was there in my system half resolved, I would give it time and space to resolve. This is often very counterintuitive and bizarre, as the system has been for perhaps a long time been in a pattern of strategizing how to protect us from the trauma of the original event/events. It is often a whole system shake-up and repatterning when something starts to heal out into this new way of interacting with the body.

But as I kept doing it, I started to get really curious about what was happening. It felt like there were infinite possibilities available, and yet it was still just me there existing in space, in the garden, with my feet on the ground.

I felt like I needed a bit of room to explore.  I needed unstructured time to feel.  I had all of this structured time in my life, sitting in the zendo, working, chopping wood, weeding the garden, cooking in the kitchen, going to see the Roshi, cleaning, rushing about, being on time… I needed breathing room. I needed time where I could look at my current experience, body and mind and environment, and play.  I needed a sandbox to play in and wonder and drop the facade. I was deeply suffering, and dropping this facade felt like such a relief. But that wondering took on a whole life of its own.

So instead of trying to formally meditate or to be spiritual or to do anything, I was able to take time and drop all of the patterns I was holding. Drop all of the shoulds, the agendas, the strategies, and find out for myself what was actually happening. It felt like a bottom line, baseline practice. What happens if I take off all of the accoutrements and see what is left.  And what if I don’t put the safety valve on my experience for a while. I felt like my life was one big stream of strangled urgency. And I decided I wanted to physically explore getting out of that stream. I was the most intense person in any room. And I needed to let that express. I was living a life trying to contain this bigger intensity, trying to fit in and be liked and loved and be worthy, but I needed to let it all loose, to wake the dragon and let it express. I needed improvisation to do this. Endless creativity. Daring. Courage. Curiosity. Honesty. Time. The ability to be completely clueless and foolish.  Breaking free of all of our ideas is a messy process. You find yourself out on a limb, you find yourself drifting into the unknown.  All of your ideas about it seem to be irrelevant, like they have nowhere to land.  Any thought about it seems absurd. You find yourself with nothing to hold on to…  

Part of what you see is that when you really let your body go, let go of the patterns holding it together, it spontaneously begins to open up. I mean the body physically begins to unwind and drop tension and align and harmonize with the environment. And it starts a process that keeps driving, further and further as it takes over your whole life. A bigger process takes over than your ideas about it. So you get a clear visceral sense just from the body that there is no need to try to control it. And then if you are honest and desperate enough and curious enough to face that process, it shows your cells that you don’t have to control anything outside of the body, or anything for that matter.

The feedback becomes clear. When I let go into this bigger process, I feel reality and am soaked in essence, soaked in this present shining event. To feel reality meet you is undeniable. You see there is nowhere to go and nothing to do. The cells begin to know it, even before your mind catches up and begins to get it.  

So you are there somehow, in a space of not knowing, not planning, not strategizing. Not “meditating”.  And it feels real and right. The very room you are in begins to gently embrace you. Reality begins to frame you as you meld with it.  You are in this unknown, but held, supported, joyous. 

And then you see what happens when you bring back control or manipulation into the situation. You feel like a bicycle gear grinding its way through space.  You physically feel sick.  So even what we would call practice feels wrong now. Your whole life has to adjust to this new process of letting go and encountering daily activities from this connected way of being.

And you keep exploring this over and over, over and over, and it’s like you are just uncovering a great mystery by letting go. Like kindergarten, you are discovering how to walk and talk and process life.  An endless exploration. Testing. Feeling into. More and more light is there. More and more freedom. You can be a fool as you let go into this bigger process.  

And this letting go into this bigger process requires an incredible amount of intensity and effort. This is not just a laissez-faire process. You begin to touch the root source of life, and that requires one to fully commit. Of course, at that point, there is no other way to go. There is no escape. And also, there is nowhere else to go to find it as it is right beneath our feet. It is a great relief to see you can’t go anywhere else to find it. But it takes a long time for all of this to gel and make sense and become natural.

Just feel and feel and feel things, feel life.  It’s okay if you don’t know what is going on.  It’s okay if your way of being is shifting. Just taking time to let down the guard over and over. And again, this is a big transition, and you’ll probably need reassuring that you can continue to let go and feel. 

I will also say that the NDBM is not real.  It is not real.  I am not teaching a technique. We’re just standing there bare to our experience.  I am trying to get people to taste the orange. I am not giving instruction about how it should taste.  I am trying to get people to find their own way to touch life.  

And, the NDBM is not for everyone. It probably requires someone physically oriented, perhaps a rebellious artist type, to latch onto it and let it drive them deeper into the unknown. 

To be continued… I will keep going with this description but want to stop there.  More in the next blog post if people like this one. Questions welcome! The questions help prompt good discussion.

Thanks for reading. Please share this with your friends who might find it helpful or inspiring. Hugs to all of you. You can do it!

For further reading on NDBM, please see these two posts: 

Deeper Dimensions of Non-Directed Body Movement

A great love affair Just standing around