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Does the Body Need to Be Conditioned for Enlightenment?
There’s a story that goes around in spiritual circles that you have to spend decades meditating in order to condition your body so that it can “hold” enlightenment. It’s said that you need to open up your channels and strengthen your sushumna (the main, central energy channel in the body).
This is total bullshit. You’ve been enlightened all your life and your body has been perfectly sufficient as it was. Not only that, but pretending to be a separate self, if anything, is harder work for the body. All the stress and anxiety that is fueled and perpetuated by trying to hold together a sense of separation is what is a strain on the body.
If anything, recognition of the already-present enlightenment is a relief for the body. The body is allowed to be a simple animal, to not have to carry the emotional weight of an imagined-to-be-real but unknowable past and future. With the recognition that what is happening is all that there actually is, there is relaxation and physical ease. When the bracing ends, the body is finally allowed to relax and naturally reset as the trauma-load is released in sobbing and laughing and shaking.
So the decades of meditation to strengthen the body must only be to strengthen it so that it can hold the tension of believing that it’s necessary to spend decades meditating to strengthen the body. This must be conditioning to enable the continual holding-away of reality with complex stories about unattainable endless states of not-what-is-happening.
Meanwhile, in this very instant, it’s possible that letting go happens. It’s possible that tumbling into what is real happens. And if letting go doesn’t happen then that’s also what is happening. That’s also what is arising and being allowed effortlessly.
