Willa Blythe Baker

*Note: This auto-transcript is only lightly edited. You might find some typos! 

Tasha

Welcome to the pod for your mind and bod, consciousness explorers podcast. I’m your host, Tasha Schumann. And this is Jeff Warren.

Jeff
Very good to be here. So today our guest is Lama Willa Blythe Baker, who takes us through a very exploratory practice. This is truly the podcast for explorers this episode. In particular, she’s got like a PhD from Harvard has done like seven years of cloistered silent retreats. So she’s serious on that front. And as a Buddhist teacher, author, translator, she is the founder of the natural Dharma fellowship in Boston and the retreat centre wonderwell Mountain refuge in Springfield, New Hampshire. And she just wrote this incredible book called wakeful body, which we’re going to talk a little bit about today. Yeah, the book is sensational, she is sensational. We explore three different I guess layers of embodiment as how she would maybe talk about it, we end up in this exploration of awareness itself, this open ended non dual place, which was literally indescribable.

Tasha
As you’ll see in in the episode, took us a little to get around to putting it into words.

Jeff
Yeah, and I think a couple highlights just to mention our discussion of challenging emotions, and how to work with that, and sort of what’s realistic there. And then just this really interesting exploration of what waking down means. So how to wake down into our lives,

Tasha
and then also get really practical like, how, how is it to sit in the body mind when you’re experiencing something traumatic? Or, you know, what are the skills we can bring to that so that we don’t overwhelm ourselves. So it just kind of this conversation spanned so much and was really awesome for me.

Jeff
It really did. I mean, this could basically be a resume for the consciousness explorers, podcast, all the layers of things that we’re interested in. So enjoy, enjoy.

Tasha
Alright, so today, we have a very special guest, Lama Willa Blythe Baker is here with us today to talk about, among other things, her new book, wakeful body, but also to lead us through some somatic practices. So welcome very much on our show.

Willa
Oh, thank you so much, Tasha. So nice to be here. Nice to see you too. Jeff.

Jeff
Great to see you here. So can you say a little bit about the practice that you’re going to guide? So we have some context before we go into it?

Willa
Sure. Yes. So I’m a I’m a teacher in the Tibetan tradition of Buddhism. And I’m going to be guiding a practice that I’m calling ground. It is a mnemonic that allows us to enter a space of embodied awareness, and even potentially wisdom, just through touching base with the teachings that the body is always conveying. But to which we rarely listen, a little bit about the practice. So this practice of ground is a mnemonic and the steps that we’re going to be going through in ground, are: Ground, Relax, Open, Untangle, Nurture, and dissolve. Those are keywords and those keywords are reminding us what to do.

The first two G and R, ground and relax, are connecting us to the layer of embodiment, that is the physical body, the earth body, the body that we think of as the flesh and blood body, connecting to that and finding wisdom in the earth body.

The second two, oh, you open, untangle, are reminding us to connect to a second layer of embodiment. The subtle body or the energy body, which is to say connecting to our body, not just as a flesh and blood body, but also as a field of energy through which impulses and sensations are coursing, and and vibrating, connecting to our body on that kind of a level and tuning in to this vibratory aliveness that is also the body like tying your book to you called the subtle body, the subjective experience of having a nervous system or being in the nervous system, those like so I’m calling the body within the body, the body within the body, the subtle body, the layer, to use a poet’s terms, the Body Electric, right to be in the Body Electric, and to experience our body as an energy light field.

The third layer of embodiment that we’re touching into in this meditation ground, connects to the last two letters of the mnemonic, nurture and dissolve, nurture, and dissolve are reminding us to connect to this third layer of embodiment, which is awareness. Or some might say consciousness. Like in the continent, when I heard the name of your podcast consciousness explores, I thought, oh, third layer of embodiment, which is where my, my mind is going these days, that consciousness or awareness is embodied, and we can experience awareness through every part of our embodied life. We can experience awareness on our feet, we can experience awareness on our knees, we can experience consciousness in our belly, we can experience it in our heart, and that all of these parts of what we would think of as the body are vibrating with or permeated with an awareness that is aware of its own being. And, and when we really tap into that third layer of embodiment there is the sense of dissolving that happens naturally, where the boundaries between body and mind between self and world fall away when we’re resting in awareness aware of itself, those boundaries fall away. And I know that sounds a little bit mysterious may sound a little bit mysterious, I think it’s hard to conceptualise what it’s like when boundaries dissolve. When we try to talk about non duality language fails really, it’s an experience beyond language. And in fact, in meditation, that’s really what we’re doing right is getting to an experience beyond language.

So GROUND.

Jeff
Alright, so now your The invitation is to do this standing or sitting do I think I’m going to stand for it right,

Willa
let’s try it standing if you can, and it can be done sitting it can be done laying down so no matter what your situation is, I’m going to stand

Tasha
Jeff, have you been working out you look jacked.

Willa
[Meditation begins]

[Meditation ends]

Tasha
Now I just want to stand here forever

Willa
is is untimely. Now moving from the energy body to the third layer of embodiment.

The awareness body

begin to contact the awareness body by moving up from the heart into the head and the

Jeff
I was thinking you were gonna have like a 10 minute silence there where my consciousness spread thin around reality. You’re welcome to kick things off Tasha, if you like or I can try to. For me, it was

Tasha
I found it really impactful to stand on the feet and made it much more vibrant and alive than sitting you know, it’s kind of your setup for as posture that’s not rigid, but you know, you’re not really wiggling that much. And I found standing I was just swaying. And as our attention was kind of moving up the body and opening up I was just allowing it it felt so good just like gentle movement of the hand and like I was kind of like a tree like I was just swaying in this breeze and, you know, allowing the body to do whatever it felt like.

Jeff
Yeah, also really enjoyed the invitation to stand in the ground got into the feet. I love the cue around. What can the mind learn from the body in terms of the kind of grounded stability and I felt that sort of lock in and then the relaxation, the invitation, kind of unwind these knots, so the day. The opening was really impactful just using the eyes as the kind of beginning of the opening and then moving it.

All down through just a sort of sweep of letting everything be here. And then just very naturally, what arose was becoming aware of these small entanglements, which, of course, was the next cue. And the subtle things I didn’t even realise I was bringing with me, I could feel something in the heart that just letting it be there, the some line of contraction, I noticed my own desire to want to control the proceedings somehow, or to manage things, you know, as the, as one of the hosts it was. So yeah, okay, that’s here. And it was sort of in the face. And it was, it was like this little mini seizure, but not a problem. Because the way you invited it in as just, this is just so what’s here, I didn’t need to change it. And I could see that little pranic, subtle body coagulation.

And then that just naturally went so perfectly into the next, again, the invitation to open the eyes, and brought me into this vivid sense of awareness. And that include the awareness included the body, and then it got very non dual, I could see my mind coming up trying to find a word or words articulated as it was happening. Now I just let that go. And one of the primary senses was just a sense of not knowing, I didn’t even know where the boundaries were, where I where I was, and your voice was so hypnotic, and slow, sort of some, it just supported that thing so much. And then I was just, I don’t even know how much time passed, and I heard your bell and

Tasha
I had a lot of the same experiences. And you said you had that experience of kind of not knowing getting into that space of everything kind of blending together. And then for me, it was like, not really like not knowing but and not needing to know, there was something that was very childlike about it, like I felt very connected to that childlike body of moving intuitively and being intuitively you know, so there was like this movement in my body, there was not really like a location, like a centre of where I am inside here, it was kind of like, everything was playful, like the wall was playing, I’m looking at the wall. And I was like, you know, there was no real separation was like, it was kind of like, you know, I’m the wall looking at me, me looking at the wall, and it was all joyful, just kind of like a wellspring of joy.

And I think the other thing, too, is, you know, this is a very strong, like, pointing out instruction, but done so differently than it’s normally done. Like in ZURB Gen contexts. Usually, it’s like, you kind of sit and you have the eyes open, and it’s diffuse. And you’re kind of allowing, you know, attention to seep out the eyes and just be everywhere. But for most people, that prompt, makes them kind of do this thing where they’re searching for what they’re supposed to find, you know, so you’re sitting there with the eyes open, you’re like, Okay, I’m diffuse, I’m going to get Dzogchen, or I’m going to get the state of Zen and you’re kind of there is this kind of knowing or scrambling for what is this thing that they keep talking about? I’m supposed to get, you know, and in this sense, it just happened. Like it just became, it wasn’t, you know, search for it, it just emerges from the body from what’s going on. So it’s very immediate.

Willa
You know, that irony is that it’s the only by giving up the search, that you find what you’re looking for. And we can’t find it because it’s already present.

And that’s true with the wisdom of the body. There is a process of discovery. But the wisdom is already happening. So we’re discovering something that’s already operative. And in some ways, that’s a great relief, because it means we don’t have to manufacture some special state of peace.

Jeff
That’s right. Well, actually, I wanted toask something about that, or make a comment about that. Because I as part of this experience we just had, towards the end, I was in this real state of spaciousness, and really strong equanimity and sense of space. And early on in my days, as a practitioner, I thought, Oh, this is it, I need to get back to this state. And at various times, in my practice, I get back to the state or I’d get back to it a little bit differently, it would be a little different. And it took me a long time to understand that it wasn’t the state that it was, you know, the way I would articulate and I’d be curious how you might describe it. It’s more like, it’s what I know to be true about who I am in that moment. That is what is that is what the heart of it is. And if and if and because I know this to be true of myself. There is a profound relaxing that then leads to or induces that spaciousness, but the spaciousness itself is, is more like a symptom or I don’t know what the word is. It’s like a secondary effect of the way I relaxed in my understanding. Is that is that make sense? Or how would I’m curious how you might articulate that

Willa
That makes so much sense. And what it’s reminding me of, is how important trust is in this process of experiencing the fruit of our meditation practice. That and I’m not talking about trust in a teacher or guru, or of principle or a doctrine, but trust in the, in your deepest experience, and that what you’re discovering, when the boundaries dissolve is your deepest possible experience of what’s true. What’s true for you, what not what’s true in an objective sense, but what’s true, from your subjective, touching into a vastness that is already present.

Tasha
And that’s something that we’ve talked about a lot, you know, consciousness explores, it’s like, practising how to be your own teacher in a certain way, you kind of triangulating between outside help, and then trying it out. And then that trust is to being your own teachers saying this experience, I don’t need someone to really explain it to me, I’m going to dig into it some more and find what’s there and trust that I’m not crazy. Right?

Jeff
But it’s weird, because it’s like, the confidence, it’s, yeah, you’re learning to have confidence in what you’re being shown. And yet, what you’re being shown is subtle, and, or it’s counterintuitive in some way. So how do you have confidence in a thing that isn’t quite authoritative yet, in the rest of your experience?

Tasha
You’ve had a glimpse of it or a taste of it. And yeah, it kind of goes against all of your conditioning. So you’re trying to uncondition yourself and, and see in this new way.

Willa
Right, see without a seer. Now, that’s really not something we were ever taught was it was even a thing, you know, in our sort of Western educational system that you could see without a seer, or that you could enter a non conceptual space, even, that that’s a profound discovery. And when you know, when you’re exploring consciousness, when you’re exploring the body to the body is so non conceptual, it’s like, if we want to know what are the wisdoms of the body? And one of those wisdoms is that the body while the mind is thinking and processing and creating all these stories, the body is on storied, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s carrying your history, it does carry our traumas and our nervous system, it’s carried carrying them. But there is a lot of the body that is just spontaneously present, spontaneously present. And it’s not trying to do anything, and it’s not has no agendas. So if you listen to that, oh, my body has no agendas, and it’s not conceptual, it can teach the mind that’s okay to be that way, you can be that way. And I own for the purposes of seeing, like, sometimes when I listen to myself speaking, I’m like, what, but the body and mind have never been separate. So even the fact that I’m saying body and mind, but in our experience, it seems like there’s a mind and there’s a body. So sometimes just for the perspective of experience, it’s okay to say that your body is teaching your mind. But ultimately, what your body teaches your mind is that we’ve never been separate. Me body and the mind.

Tasha
Yeah, and even you know, that the body carries our history with us. It’s carrying it now. It’s right here right now. So it’s not even the story of the past. It’s just where the past has led us. It’s like, even in carrying our history, the body is still present. You know, it’s like something that I’m always trying to when I teach Dream Yoga, and I’m teaching students you know how to bring that lucidity that they might find in in a lucid dream into daily life. And that’s one of the examples that I give is that, you know, the body gives us what it has right now. And that might be from past experiences or trauma. But it’s like, what do we make that mean? What is this dream like kind of story that we’re putting on top of it, you know, and just peeling that back and being like, this is where my trajectory has led me. It’s like right here, even that is present.

Willa
There’s a concept in Tibetan practice of the illusory body, you may know this is one of the practices that goes along with Dream Yoga, is this practice of our body as being like a rainbow appearing in space. And that’s another element that the body has, as its teaching for us is that it does appear in the here and now. And it’s also in flow. It’s always in flow. As soon as we try to pin it down as a thing. We see that actually, it’s much deeper than just being a fixed thing. It isn’t a fixed thing. The more we pay attention to the body, we know we notice how unfixed it is. And it can help us get in touch with that dreamlike nature of phenomena, just by noticing my body is is is this rainbow body it is a, it is a body of light and energy and space. And sometimes I’d like to think about, what would it be like if we could take our awareness and go all the way down to the subatomic level and see what is our body truly, our body is just waves and space. And that’s all it is. And Whoa, yeah, that’s like the most incredible thing to sit with that dream body. Yeah, yeah,

Jeff
That is such an important perspective. And it’s so fun to try to connect to that as you’re moving through the world in a sense of that deer in that unfolding flow. And at the same time, that unfolding flow can be really uncomfortable.

And then I guess we’re sort of backing up moving from this awareness now into talking about the subtle body a little bit. And I think over the years of meditating, I’m hyper aware of the subtle body of the all the flows of emotional mood and energy and,

and at times, the simple paying attention to it has actually made it worse, the instruction to just open with the energies of what’s there is, as I open there, I guess it’s some kind of subtle entanglement, so happening, it just shoots me into hypomania, or some of the other challenges I’ve had, it’s taken years and years to figure out how to work with that. And I just wondered if, you know, this is just opens a whole kind of discussion around, I know, I’m not alone in this, you know, it’s the most common thing ever to sit down with our experience of being a body and a body, that energetic body, and all of a sudden, what’s under the surface is there and a lot of that for a lot of us, it’s our traumas, and and we can’t hold the space for those. So anything about that that? You want to say? And I know it’s a big conversation, but yeah, fantastic.

Willa
No, I’m so glad you brought up that element of the subtle body, that when we start paying attention to the subtle body, and even or the scene make it simpler, when we start meditating, everything that we’ve ever experienced, will come to visit, again, we’re making space we’re really making so much space and we’re being with self are being with the relative self. And even more so when you have an embodied practice. And you’re making a practice of consciously bringing attention down into different parts of your body or into the whole body or into the subtle body, the energy body, like we just did, on tangling, even using a word like untangling is invites us to be suddenly pay attention to the residue of what’s present, all of that’s going to come to visit. So that is one of the most profound things about meditation, that it makes the space for us to see what’s really there. And then to deal with it to learn how to cope, to learn how to be friend, is my word that my favourite word, learn how to be friend, what is difficult in the self. And I do have a suggestion or or recommendation for when those moments happen. The trick of befriending is to make a lot of room and space for whatever’s arising and to to recognise first that we have strategies for how we usually encounter those energies.

So look, let’s take an energy of anxiety, this low level anxiety in the self or in the body that I encounter, when I’m sitting on the cushion or when I’m standing and doing the practice of ground. My usual relationship to that would be to suppress to avoid, escape, soothe, fix, our strategies are to do something to make it go away. And that actually, ironically, is the problem that we don’t need to make it go away that if we befriend it in a way that is skillful and slow, it will self liberate. We don’t have to make our anxiety be liberated, it will self liberate, when it feels safe enough with us that we’ve made room for it, it will subside on its own. So there are five steps that I recommend as a way into befriending and those steps are to pause. When you notice something there you notice that sense of I’m not I’m uneasy, the mania is coming or the or the fear is coming or the anxiety is coming or the depression is coming. And you can feel it in your subtle body to pause. And so that means just to stop what you’re doing and to turn attention there.

Number two is notice what does noticingmean, so not just noticing what’s happening in my mind? What are my stories that are making me feel anxious? What is the script that’s not notice, and noticing is noticing how it is arising in the body. Because we’ve trained a lot in working with the mind all of our cognitive behavioural therapy, trainings, or if we’ve been in therapy, we have trainings for what to do with the thoughts or not to believe the thoughts or to rescript the thoughts. But there’s another way we can address that. And that is from the bottom up, instead of from the top down. So noticing is noticing where is my emotion in my body? Oh, it’s this constriction of the heart, because then actually, we start to identify what this is, is it’s an energy, it’s a not, our energy is not, it’s somewhere in in our subtle body or in our nervous system. History is lodged there and it’s not. So noticing, where’s the knot in the body.

Third, breathe, breathe space around that knot. And that’s, then we’re starting into a practice of inhaling, making room for around that knot. And then fourth surround once you’ve breathed space, surround that knot with loving attention. So you breathe space around it, and then you pour your loving attention into that space. And that loving attention. That’s that maybe for most people is the most challenging thing initially, because we may not have developed a loving attention yet, we may not have discovered a loving attention yet. It’s actually innate to who we are. But we may not have discovered the loving attention. So at first we’re like, where’s my loving attention. But But one way I like to work with that is if you think of you’re not kind of personify it. My beautiful monster is way one of my teachers, Rinpoche talks about it. Hold your nod as your beautiful monster, and then you can love it, and then surround it with your loving attention, just like you’d love a little gremlin. It’s awesome.

Tasha
I always just imagined it as a kitten, like a little kid. Like just, you know, you couldn’t help but give it your love.

Jeff
I always think, can I live with this the rest of my life? In other words, can I have? Can I truly accept it without any subtle agenda that in the accepting I’m about hoping that we’ll get rid of it. You know, it’s like your one eye open. Accepting. You’re like, Yeah, except you. Are you gone yet? Yeah.

Tasha
We have about 15 minutes. Yeah, 15 minutes before we gotta go.

Jeff
Can I just be with this? I welcome this thing for ever. And ever. And I know, sometimes I need to back off. I need to just open my eyes and reground in my resources, because it’s just too fierce right now in there.

Willa
Yeah. Very, very similar strategy to, to what I’ve been working with, too. Yeah, yeah. And then just for the sake of those five steps, pause, notice, breathe, surround and be friend. And that’s the last one and befriending is just what you described, having having that attitude that. If it’s your friend, you don’t want it to go away? You can’t, you know, it’s like, yeah, they’re getting rid of the agenda to make it go away, but actually be like, yeah, come and have tea with me. And you know, one thing that really helps me a lot with a friend is remembering that if you didn’t have this anxiety, or you didn’t have this beautiful monster, how would you have? How would you relate to others that have that beautiful monster? How would you find empathy for them? If you didn’t have it yourself? So actually, it’s kind of a blessing to be a mess sometimes.

Jeff
It’s mind blowingly mature, what you’re asking. It’s like, can you actually accept this true human being that you are? All the hard things, all the good things, whatever is here? Can you really live with that as your baseline?

Tasha
Yeah. No, I very hard to say yes to that. And the thing that I encounter the most, you know, when people are touching into this, or even when I’m touching into this for myself, is this like, lack of trust that you can do it? You know, you’re going in, okay, I’m going to do these five steps. And then something comes that overwhelms, you know, and before you can even give it that loving kindness or that loving attention, you just kind of recoil, because there isn’t trust that you can hold it, that you’re strong enough or capable enough, or whatever it is. And, you know, for a lot of people that’s they’re like, Well, I tried meditation, not for me, because of that lack of just a surety that you can do it.

Willa
That’s right. And there’s a time for it. And there are times when the when the irons are too hot, you can hold the irons and then then you just have to have to wait a little bit and give it some time. You know, it’s not like our traumas aren’t real at all. They happen to us and then we really have to have to be gentle

Jeff
or get other forms of support to maybe for me there was a time in my life comes around where I’m I need some extra support with this I need to work with a trauma therapist or some mme, someone who can help hold the space with me. Absolutely.

Tasha
They’re all like, little things in our toolbox. Right?

Jeff
Yeah. So this, you know your book really? Well, it’s about waking down. And there’s a line that I love that you say early on, you say the path of waking down does not transcend it metabolises. So, which is very vivid. So for our listeners, what do you want to say about how to metabolise down how to wake down? How to think about this, as they take it with them into their day? Whether it’s practice, like, what do they need to know. And in addition to all the amazing stuff was just?

Willa
Well, I think, yeah, the path, a path of waking down his path of beginning to notice that you are an organic living being, and that you don’t have to fix that. But that it’s enough to gradually meet yourself as you are. And to trust that the wisdoms that you need are already present in your body mind. And we were just talking, before we got on the podcast, Tasha and I about this term, body mind, right? That actually maybe what we need to wake down really is to, to begin to dissolve the separation between body and mind and to live more in a more integrated life and that way, and you can see, we can see in our own lives, the way that we get caught up in the head or in the in the space of thinking, thinking, thinking and trusting are believing our thoughts. That actually what if we started to believe our body more than our thoughts are to learn to trust to trust that there are wisdoms there? You know, our prefrontal cortex does not have all the answers the prefrontal cortex has gotten us as a society as a culture into so much trouble don’t tell the neuroscientist. Yeah.

It’s it’s an amazing machine. Our brains are amazing machines. But but there’s a wisdom to to the body and and an inseparability between body and mind and then, and the waking down is to come into that truth. You know, I used to think, early on in my, in my life of meditating, that our meditation practice was about transcending our suffering was about getting out of samsara, getting out of the pain of existence, escaping the pain of existence. And in fact, even the, the words of the sutras are sometimes worded that way. But I’ve come over time, and really through the, through the Buddha’s wisdom, to trust my own experience. And, and in my own experience, I don’t know that freedom is found in in escaping from what we are and who we are and how we are. That freedom is found in metabolising. Our pain skillfully, that is using the energy of our emotions, and creating a constructive way of channelling them and unleashing that energy and not demonising the energy, but seeing it as pure in the way that we see a here a hurricane is pure, the storms are going to reach through this human, this human existence, the storms are going to come from the outside, and they are going to come from the inside. And that peace is not found in escape. Peace is found in process. So that’s what I meant by waking down to begin to embrace that we are in process and to embrace our entire body mind as a natural phenomena, and and and loving it into freedom instead of judging it into freedom.

Jeff
Wow, that was so freakin beautiful. I think that’s not a bad place to wrap up our discussion.

I have so many things that I still want to ask.

Like we barely we barely scratched the surface here. Yeah, I have like I have just like this list of quotes I love from the book. And I’d like to have had them all written down just in case I could bring them up. So we’ll definitely have to have you on again. So before we finish, I just always love to, you know you’re such an amazing person and want to give our lives

Tasha
There’s ways to connect with you and see what you’re doing. You know, we’ve already talked about the week full body, your new book, which I think everyone should check out. But is there any other ways that people can practice with you or continue this, you know, this kind of embodied practice with you?

Willa
Well, yes, I do offer some courses on the wakeful body, I’ll be offering a course this year, it’s a six month course that will go through ground one part per month, g r o u n d and a month devoted to each of those mnemonics that we’ll be using the book as its resource, so please feel free to join me for that. My website is www.naturaldharmafellowship.org. And I also have helped to found a retreat centre up in New Hampshire, called wonder well, mountain refuge and you’re always welcome to come join me there. Especially once retreats are back in full swing.

Tasha
Awesome. You will see me they’re gonna come to you.

Willa
Oh, great.

Jeff
Well, Lama Willa, thank you so much. What a pleasure it was to spend time with you how much practice with you.

Willa
Thank you so much, Jeff. Thanks, Tasha. It’s so good to meet you. And I look forward to meeting you in person one day. Yeah, that’d be amazing. To be continued.

Tasha
Thanks for tuning in to the consciousness explorers podcast. Don’t forget to subscribe. And if you’d like this episode, give us a five star rating on Apple podcasts. See you next week for a whole new adventure.