I have sailed more than 40,000 miles on the Pacific Ocean in a small (35-feet) cruising sailboat. I grew to crave long ocean crossings (up to 33-days with no land in sight). On the infinite spaciousness of unbroken ocean, nondual embodiment spontaneously became a tangible experience, centered within the internal space of my body.
There is no stillness aboard a small boat on a large ocean – movement is constant and flows in multiple directions, even when conditions are perfect and the boat sailing at its most comfortable. After several days out of sight of land, on our first Pacific Ocean crossing (2800 miles: Cabo San Lucas, Baja Mexico to Hiva Oa, Marquesas Islands), I found myself increasingly distressed by the constant movement. I felt would give anything, anything at all, if the relentless movement would stop. Stop! Even five seconds. Stop
Five days out I felt close to abandoning my 2-decade dream of sailing to the South Pacific. Exhausted from the motion, sobbing in deep despair, I fell asleep on my bunk. Upon awakening, a transcendence seemed to have occurred – I felt like I was the quiet center in the on-going storm of movement. Even while our small boat continued to toss in a dozen directions at once, I remained centered in a vast unified stillness.
I felt completely whole. I experienced myself as the center of immanent steadiness, like a transparent ground, pervading me, the boat, the ocean, the clouds. I felt connected with but unmodified by all the movement of oceanic life even as the cacophony and beatitude of a small boat at sea flowed everywhere through and around me. Inside my body, I was undisturbed by, even while intimately engaged with, the movement of the world and my tasks in life. At sea, I found myself living deeper, more subtly, not carried away from my center by the relentless movement.
'Even while our small boat continued to toss in a dozen directions at once, I remained centered in a vast unified stillness.'
It took a while to adapt to this experience. I’d practiced yoga and meditated so I had some inkling of nonduality and spiritual transcendence. But this wasn’t at all like my teachers had described. I wasn’t meditating. My whole body and being felt unified with, part of, an infinite, unchanging, spacious stillness.
The experience was unexpected and transcendent in beauty and depth, but it also felt ordinary, like a normal way to be, As the boat glided and rocked, I moved fluidly and with grace, almost dancing through my daily (and nightly) on-watch tasks. Through the tumult of storms, what might have felt like fear was now a grounded excitment in my union with the elements. One with everything around me and at the same time whole in my being/body.
Everything changed when I stepped onto land. The chiaroscuro of life engaged my conscious awareness and filled all my experience. On land I no longer felt myself the center of unchanging pervasive space, unified with all life. On land, the movement of life engaged me, and it kept my focus mindfully upon aliveness and change. I had lost the unchanging ground of stillness; I could find it in meditation and sometimes in dance, but it never revealed itself as part of a wholeness disentangled from the movement.
After that first 2800 nautical miles, the next 25 years found me going to sea as often as possible and, when on land, avidly exploring nondual, spiritual, somatic and embodiment methods to help me realize that center-of-grounded-stillness I experienced crossing oceans. No study or practice pointed me to living a felt experience like my nondual embodiment at sea. The spiritual perspectives told me everything in the universe was changing and therefore aliveness and emotions were illusions, or that I needed to give up myself in service or love. Embodiment and dance methods either expanded me out of my body or taught me to ride the movement, not to embody the stillness.
Being on land was a constant disappointment – the ongoing support of that infinite stillness seemed out of reach.
At sea, I wasn’t separating my mind, my perceptions, my heart or my body from experience. I was immersing myself in experience and discovering my whole being as the unchanging ground pervaded by all that changes. I had uncovered a pervasive steadiness more subtle than the movement of mindfulness.
In my seeking support for my embodied experience at sea, I found the Yoga Heart Sutra which translates “form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” This exactly describes my perceived experience: everything around and in me is both transparent (emptiness) and substantial (form) at the same time. Everything is known as infinite wholeness: stillness and movement, unified yet disentangled. My experience at sea was this kind of essential nondual embodiment awakening.
Eventually I found a method, The Realization Process, founded by a woman, author, choreographer, and psychotherapist (retired), Judith Blackstone. The work is creative and precise, and practitioners (there are 1000s of them now) include in their experience of the world an attunement to the unbreakable ground of being from their center.
Whether or not RP is for you, the important information here is that everything is not moving. This is an illusion created by a cultural perspective that values thought over experience. When you locate your center inside your whole body (rather than just in your head or mind) you can experience a unified field of unchanging spaciousness. This “ground” cannot be measured because it is not matter or energy (even at quantum levels) and therefore never changes. This stillness, this Ground of Being, is a thing that is not a “thing”. For now (until science figures out how to measure it) we only have the feeling of it in our own bodies. Please, check it out. This level of your being is waiting for you to find it.
