Meditation on a House

Written By Emile Sorger

If my body is a house then it is simultaneously my shelter and my prison.  I am compelled to both maintain and escape it, but how is this possible?

I am sitting quietly in my living room as the sunlight trickles and then begins to stream in through the window.  It enters the room at an angle which causes it to increase unnoticed from moment to moment yet after several minutes, to have dramatically altered the ambience.  The window that it passes through is old and not fully functional, there is a severed rope within the frame which once was tethered to a weight which helped the window to open and close smoothly.  It’s one of a few windows in my house that has lost this functionality.

I am not thinking about the window at this moment, yet neither is it fully absent from my mind.  These little features and idiosyncrasies of my house have come to live within me.  I know this because when I imagine the window I feel small shifts in my body, stirrings of vibration that come in and out of being briefly yet not imperceptibly.  It is like this with many areas of my house, some of them unfinished projects like the window (a rickety porch, wiring in the garage, wall paneling needing to be torn out) and some of them sources of tranquility such as the west facing windows in our kitchen that frame exquisite sunsets between April and November.

I used to think that “the body as a house” was only a metaphor in the formal sense of the word yet now I feel that my body and my house are more closely connected than that.  Both are temporary, dynamic and permeable abodes for what I might call my spirit, and while my body is more constant, it is not absolutely so.  

One of my favorite descriptions of the experience of deep meditation by the Japanese Zen master Dogen Zaenji is:

“Body and mind fall away.  The illusion falls away”

In this simple and direct statement, Dogen speaks to the reality of consciousness beyond the physical form and in so doing invites his students into a powerful mystery of being.

I sense that the deepening connection I feel to my house is not one of materialistic attachment.  It is in fact an expression of the type of vulnerability which enables me to experience a broader and stronger flow of a life force, one which permeates further than my own physical and mental landscape would independently allow.  This somatic sensitivity is a way for me to care for and be cared for beyond my bodily limits and at the same time, to attend to external phenomena as tenderly as I would for my own physical form.  

When I broaden my consideration of other phenomena with which I am similarly intertwined, I immediately consider the close relationships I have with my wife and son, my parents and close friends.  In fact the multitude of influences which permeate my lived experience are vast and incalculable, even overwhelming.  Given this multitude and my interest in participating in the network of relational tensions with which it is constituted, I also yearn for a refuge of stillness to balance the inevitable chaos of living in the flux.  For this reason I am fortunate to have found spiritual practices such as meditation and especially so at a young age.  As Dogen points out, it is possible to release my identification with and ultimately even the perception of my body and mind, the two conduits by which I maintain relationship to the multitudes.  So while it is true that each time I blink open my eyes I return to the web of phenomena that flows in and out of my sensory consciousness, it is also true that the inner stillness that I have encountered remains a refuge in the midst of it.

Meditation can appear exotic in some contexts, however I offer it to you as though it were a cool glass of water on a hot day.  As though it were not the glass or the water itself, but the experience of drinking it with closed eyes, draining its entirety until nothing remained.

Emile Sorger
Emile practices yoga as a discipline, a conversation and a celebration of being. He began in the womb of his mother as a mysterious intelligence assembled his body in a profoundly elegant and organized way. Emile's childhood was characterized by inexhaustible physical energy coupled with a very serious interest in stillness and introspection, exemplified by his proclivity for climbing trees and sitting for long stretches in their highest branch. His formal yoga training began in 2005 at Goucher College where he studied yoga asana alongside meditation and religious texts. Resolving to immerse himself in spiritual learning Emile traveled to India in 2007 to study meditation, Tibetan language and Buddhist Philosophy. It was there that he developed a profound respect and appreciation for the potential for human evolution through the contemplative disciplines of meditation and yoga. After returning, he graduated college with a B.A. in comparative religions and enrolled in Charm City Yoga's 200 Hour Teacher training program. There in Baltimore he studied under Kim Manfredi and Will Walter who were able to guide him towards a more accurate and imaginative understanding of his physical form and ability to express his insights effectively. Since then has been greatly influenced by New York City teachers Dharma Mittra, Nevine Michaan and Abbie Galvin who continued to expand his understanding of the role and efficacy of yoga beyond its obvious applications. Since moving to Philadelphia in 2012 Emile has varied his approach to encompass a broader range of physical and spiritual practices, these include over a year of dedicated training in hand-balancing with Lin Junming of the Fu Jian Circus in China as well as over two years time involved in the 3 Doors Academy, a secular meditation program that centers around personal, professional and community transformation. His classes integrate traditional yoga sequencing with contemporary mythology, music and inspiration with the aim of creating a space in which students can discover and express themselves in their particular and universal form.
www.mysticalphysical.com
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