Frosty the Buddha by Will Johnson
Will Johnson is one of my spiritual teachers, and I love how he uses the body to undo the body. His wise and witty missive below embodies (forgive the pun) his philosophy and will enliven your practice of the Workbook for Students in A Course in Miracles (ACIM). Enjoy!
At the recent Urban Retreat in Victoria, which took place in the midst of an unseasonal winter storm (this is coastal British Columbia, after all; it’s not SUPPOSED to be cold and snowy), the image of Frosty the Buddha, the Bodhisattva of Alignment, was born. The aspect of our sitting posture that we first want to tend to when we sit down to meditate is the alignment of the upright spine, just as the Buddha suggests in his earliest instructional texts. Alignment–with its revelation that the gravitational field of the earth functions as a source of support for objects that are primarily aligned around a central, vertical axis–is a great benefactor and promoter of the dharma. It lets us relax and let go.
The first thing to remember about bringing alignment into your meditation posture is that it can’t be imposed from the outside in. It’s far more of an inside job. It needs to be felt into, first through kindling awareness of the sensations and feeling presence of the major segments of the body, and then through allowing these segments to begin spontaneously to self-adjust in relationship to one another. And this is where Frosty the Buddha comes in.
Consider the snowperson: three balls of snow of decreasing size, placed one directly on top of the other. Frosty’s lower body and base is the largest, providing a natural foundation for the upper segments. Frosty’s upper torso is much smaller in comparison, and his/her head is smaller still. And it doesn’t take a Buddha or the proverbial rocket scientist to know what every small child who has ever built a snowperson knows: if Frosty doesn’t want to self-decapitate, or lose the whole of his/her upper body, you better make sure that each of these snowballs is placed precisely one on top of the other. Indeed, Frosty’s very existence professes the wisdom of alignment.
So…, when you go to sit down, the first thing you might want to do is kindle the feeling awareness of the three major segments of the meditational body. Begin by paying attention to your largest foundational base which consists of your legs and pelvis, extending energetically even into your lower abdomen. Bring the sensations in every cell of this lower “snowball” to life (what the great 20th century meditation teacher U Ba Khin called “activating annica,” the bringing to felt awareness of the constantly changing vibratory experience of the body), and then feel this entire segment, as a unified field of sensation, all at once.
Now bring your awareness to your version of Frosty’s second snowball which forms your torso. Give yourself permission to activate the felt awareness of sensations, and then feel your entire torso all at once. And then do the same to your version and experience of Frosty’s head. As you sit in meditation, mindful of the image of the Bodhisattva of Alignment, feel how these three primary segments can be felt to start relating to each other, lining up, one on top of the other, naturally, effortlessly, spontaneously. Long live Frosty!
With your meditating body playing with upright alignment and the ever present dance of balancing that ensues (everything that you feel continues to shift and change from moment to moment), you can truly start to relax, again just like Frosty (s/he also moonlights as the Bodhisattva of Relaxation), no resistance, no holding yourself up or bracing against gravity, just dropping your weight through an aligned body. And, then, in order to stay relaxed, amoeba-like movement can start occurring at every joint of the body, expanding, contracting, in response to breath’s endless wave.
At this point, Frosty, being the eminently wise manifestation that s/he is, realizes that s/he’s done her/his job and that now it’s time for you to move on from his/her static image as you continue on your meditative inquiry and your body keeps relaxing and coming ever more unfrozen, as you begin to soften and melt the tensions in the body and the contractions in the mind, as you keep allowing the current of the life force to animate you through subtle movement. Frosty is, after all, frozen, and the next instructions from these earliest texts of the Buddha point us in the direction of coming alive through our breath and, ultimately, feeling how breath can cause subtle motion throughout the entire length of a deeply relaxed body.
Frosty can’t allow these motions to occur, but you and I can. So, thank you, Frosty, for all your inspiration, your sound advice, your insistence that alignment is a great supporter and propellant of the dharma, your implicit promotion of relaxation, your vision that ultimately we all melt away. And thank you as well for your insight in knowing that it’s now time to summon your good friend, compatriot, and tag-team partner, the Bodhisattva of Resilient Motion, to step up, take over, and be our guide as we continue on our way.
Now who might that Bodhisattva be, and what might s/he look like? Hmmmmm…, well, how about the image of the little Buddha figure I recently saw stuck onto the dashboard of a friend’s car; the neck and head of the Buddha were on a coiled wire so the Buddha’s head was constantly bobbing, moving, really going to town…?
All the best and greetings of the season,
Will (and his good friend Frosty)
www.embodiment.net