Bodhi Manda Zen Center • Gabriel Clark • 510-653-1594 • • July 12-18

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Body Electric and a Bit of Buddha

by Steve Schwartzberg, Ph.D., Heart of Stillness co-facilitator

Here’s a great Zen koan: A master holds up a bell and asks his students, “What is this? If you say it is a bell, I will hit you thirty times. If you say it is not a bell, I will hit you thirty times. So what is it?” (A koan is a question that can’t be answered by simple logic. Zen masters use koans to help students move beyond the limits of rational thinking. From what I hear they use smacking students a lot, too!).

The answer to the koan is elegant and profound. Without uttering a word, the master rings the bell. The hearing, the receiving of the sound, is the answer. Without the sound, the bell is irrelevant. Why have a bell at all – why should bells exist -- if they can’t be rung?

This koan can return us to the experience of living, of whatever is happening in the moment. It aims to free us, even briefly, from our more habitual realm of thinking. Plus, it fits perfectly for Body Electric. Like the sound of a bell, BE can return us to the experience of our bodies and erotic energy, in a way that transcends words. You know this yourself if you’ve ever tried to describe Body Electric to someone who’s never been to a Celebrating the Body Erotic. The breath, the music, the camaraderie, the Taoist erotic massage – Body Electric is meant to be felt, experienced, and sensed, rather than discussed or analyzed.

As an exercise, try spending a few minutes today (or how about right now?) allowing the raw experience of this moment, whatever it is, to expand and deepen. Take a breath, and open your senses. Perhaps suddenly you’ll be aware of background traffic noise, or birds singing, or the wind whistling; perhaps you’ll notice you feel awake, or sleepy, or sad, or grateful; perhaps you’ll see the colors and shapes and objects around you with fresh eyes. When you step into the immediate, felt sense of being alive, you feel your own vitality more richly.

At its heart, this is the simple, transcendent aim of a meditation practice: to live more fully, and with greater awareness, in whatever is happening around (and within) us, moment by moment. And because quieting the mind is key to cultivating this awareness, meditation training is a process of simplifying, of de-cluttering, of cutting through the busy muck of our lives, of moving toward stillness.

BE’s Touching the Heart of Stillness: A Contemplative/ Erotic Retreat may be the only meditation training available anywhere that includes mindful, safe, and respectful full-body erotic exploration along with intensive meditation. Most meditation retreats ignore (or even malign) the body and sexuality; other BE retreats focus on other aspects of Eros. With Touching the Heart of Stillness, Michael Cohen and I have loved the unique opportunity and challenge of bringing these two paths together.

The retreat follows the rituals and rhythms of a traditional Buddhist monastic retreat, with long periods of silence and extensive meditation practice (with the addition, of course, of dedicated periods of touch). Because we have the good fortune to offer this training at the Bodhi Manda Zen Center in Jemez Springs, New Mexico, we even extend our contemplative focus to meals, which we eat in the beautiful simplicity of the ancient Japanese meditative practice of oryoki.

If you already have a meditation practice and would like to deepen it, or if you once had a meditation practice that needs a “jump start,” or if you have ever been curious about the delights and challenges of a weeklong meditation experience but have no prior training, please join us.

I ask: “Why meditate? If you answer, ‘To quiet the mind and open the heart,’ I will hit you thirty times. If you answer, ‘Not to quiet the mind and open the heart,’ I will hit you thirty times. So why meditate?”

Come. Experience for yourself the sound of this particular bell ringing.