“Everything is here,” the teacher repeats over and over again throughout class. It becomes my mantra as I move my body, feel my feelings and think my thoughts. As many minutes as there are in class, I come back to what is here. What is Now. And it becomes a doorway; a place where I can step through to see anything I need to see. Feel anything I need to feel. Understand anything I need to understand. Everything is here becomes the anchor, the truth and The Way. I am mesmerized. Through it I am made whole. Despite the thoughts that continue to ripple through. Despite the ache that just won’t go away. Despite the feelings and the judgments that rise and fall. It is all here. It is all me. And it is all that I need in this moment.

This is so not how it usually is. More often than is good for us, we are not here. We are not actually anywhere as we traverse between past and future, living as ghosts; neither here nor there. Through the past we solidify and maintain our stories, habits, worn out identities, and agendas of old. We smolder with the narratives of how we were wronged, what’s missing and how things should go. And when we are not in the past, we jump to later.Through our orientation to the future, we seek our release and plan our escape believing that down the road it will be different, better. We worry and fret our way into convincing ourselves that if we obsess enough about it all, we can bend the future to our will. In the meantime, we live lives where we are seldom where we are. We live lives never realizing that the peace that we all seek happens only when mind and body are as one; in one place at the same time.

It is the ordinary mind, the survival and fretting mind, the anywhere but here mind that leads this charge. But the body knows another way. This breath. This sensation. This sweep of the arm or turn of the head. It seems so outrageous and ridiculously foolish to suggest, given all of the cerebral information available everywhere and at any time, to reference the body as the source of wisdom. What could the body possibly have to offer us by way of politics or the news or the stock market? How will the body inform regarding climate change, the escalating costs of living or water problems? What does the body have to offer regarding what daily decisions to make regarding work, family and finances?

It cannot be told. Only experienced. It cannot be read. Only done. Given how we live and what we have been told this is no easy place to get to. We are so afraid. We are so distracted. We are so brain-washed. We are so not inhabiting the very ground of our existence.