The topic at hand is the physical training we do in Chosei Zen. But I would turn that into a question: How do you develop a refined sense of all that lives inside your skin? Another way to ask that is: How do we heal the mind/ body duality most people live with? 

In our line of Zen, the form that healing takes on depends both on your age, constitution, and your motivation to train. As a teenager you have a great capacity to recover quickly from great physical exertion. So, with any luck, you’ve been challenged with some difficult tasks. Can you run for 22 miles over hill and dale, in the winter, in less than three hours? Can you split this immense pile of logs into firewood in three days? Can you make 10,000 sword cuts each day for 7 days?

With that kind of effort, you exhaust all unnecessary muscles, leaving you dependent on only the muscles that actually accomplish the work. And you find that your hara is the fundamental source of power. You exhaust any ability to think. 

All well and good, but bodies change, bodies age, and for some bodies that quality of training isn’t appropriate. So then what? Now the lifelong work is to develop a sophisticated awareness of how your breath works, how your neuromuscular system works. If you saw my June fundraising note, you read how that awareness has been front and center for me over the past 15 months as I learn how to walk again. Here is some of what I have found:

• Many of us start with workouts at a gym, where you can focus on strength. With strength development, you can isolate on individual muscles or muscle groups and begin to understand how they work.

• Many of us also value bodywork, most often of deep tissue, leading to more awareness of our muscles. You often find that you stored emotions and memories within muscles and tissue. There are stories you have told yourself, consciously or unconsciously, about your body.

• There are other valuable forms of bodywork that build awareness and understanding of your bones and joints. As your body continues to lose chronic tension you begin to sense how your skeleton works and why. “Oh, that’s what happens to my left clavicle when I shift my pelvis forward.” You learn how forces are transmitted through your body and a sense of integration comes alive.

• There are also forms of bodywork that involve very slight movement but continue to uncover a sense of how the muscles, bones and nerves of a single joint work together.

Ultimately, what seems to happen is that as I understand the world inside my skin more and more, the less and less it seems distinguishable from the world outside my skin. It will sound strange perhaps, but this ache in my left ankle joint isn’t all that different from the fresh wound where a strong wind blew a branch off of a walnut tree. And that Zen phrase we invoke so often – interpenetration without obstruction – is no longer words.