Body sensations are the compass of our lives. There is nothing esoteric or transcendent about this embodied spirituality. In fact, it is so human and so deeply ordinary that I spent a great majority of my spiritual pursuit ignoring it. It doesn’t feel mystical or divine, but it is the truth.
Body sensations are the compass of our lives. They tell us what to move towards and away from, and therefore act as our internal navigation system. When we follow this internal compass, there is an ease and a flow in life. When we ignore this compass, we end up lost on unpaved roads, and then we get frustrated that the roads won’t change to be what we want them to be. Essentially, we throw our compass out the car window and then get confused when we find ourselves lost somewhere we don’t want to be.
This all happens, in very large part, due to our unique set of conditioning. Our parents likely convinced us that our compass was broken, because they too were told that every human’s internal compass is fundamentally broken and therefore cannot be trusted. Or maybe our parents simply didn’t like our compass, because it felt threatening or because it didn’t align with what they perceived their own broken compass was telling them. And so they worked hard to teach us how to follow their broken compass instead, and we therefore never learned to use our own.
But the body is the place of truth. It tells us what repels us and what we want to move towards; put another way, it is our own unique lighthouse, ever guiding us towards it with its light. Going towards someone else’s lighthouse, or relying on someone else’s compass, is the cause of suffering.
The compass, unfortunately for the mind, cannot be made into an intellectual pursuit. It cannot be course-corrected by logic. It cannot be projected out into the future. I learned these things the hard way. It must instead be listened to moment-by-moment, and will therefore take us to unexpected places. This is a terrifying thing for a mind to let go into, because our authentic compass will directly challenge our sense of identity and who we believe ourselves to be, and may very well take us away from our idea of what we think we want, away from people we love, or away from our sense of security. As Nisargadatta Maharaj often said, "I am not the body."
This compass will take us out into the dark waters of the unknown — out beyond the land of the mind and its comforts. As long as we cling to either the mind, or to someone else’s compass, we will never blossom into the fullness of our own true nature.
