Mercy to the Body of God

Exerpt from New Years Retreat 2010

I invite you to bring mercy to your body, to this interesting vehicle of embodiment, this amazing instrument of openness that’s been so harshed on. First by the outside and then we take over and mimic it. When we rest our hand on a place in our body that is in pain or tense, we put our hand on the whole of humanity. The whole body of humanity needs to hear the message from Presence, “It’s all right, it’s all right.” The message that is delivered in the moment, through the air, through the feel, through weight of your body in the chair, this benevolence here, right now. Not a fancy benevolence, a very basic, simple, is-ness.

There isn’t anything in creation that is not the body of the holy. There isn’t any difference between putting your hands on your flesh and putting your hands into God’s heart. There is nothing here but this, and there is nothing to hate or love but this. It’s not there’s the body and there’s the spirit and there’s this and there’s that. It is just one collage of holiness. Anything you hate or turn away from becomes your jail cell of separation. And so that hate and the feel of it has to be directly met, the feel of the killer in yourself, the feel of the curser in yourself. We’re so conditioned not even to notice it in our tones as we curse ourselves, as we curse objects, people. The feel of separation is one of tremendous harshness, tremendous casting out, and we’ve gotten used to that as a culture–that’s how we converse with each other, that’s how we treat each other on the road, that’s how we treat our bodies. We are all looking for a justifiable place to land this hate rather than actually turning around and feeling the harsh edge of it as it lives in us.

It’s like when Jesus said, “Forgive them father they know not what they do.” Our conditioning has it so that we are absolutely unaware of what we carry and what we perpetrate because we don’t know what we carry and we’re not conscious when we’re perpetrating. Those guys nailing Jesus to the cross had no idea they were doing wrong. So numb, and so appropriate an enemy—they probably felt like they were doing good, every hammer strike, sending the bad person away. And there’s probably no where that we are so harsh as on our own flesh, driving ourselves, denying ourselves, denying ourselves breath, pause, rest, time outside the incessant wheel of the mind. And it’s not like we can be blamed for it, we’ve been trained well. So first we just get to notice that we have a pet, a very dear loyal pet, that cries out in various ways we call suffering. Let our attention go to its cries, let it move the way it wants to, be kind to it. Just to notice that and drop out of the mind in this culture is revolutionary.