This is a follow-on to the last post with a note from ‘today’s Alana’. It reflects more recent contemplations on this idea– body as ticket to desired future – that has been a recurrent theme in my practice over the years. While the contemplations in the last  blog helped soften me, it remains hard for me to let go of the ticket because I am still attached to the trip. Because, definitionally, I need an Alana body in order to have the next moment with an Alana body. The other day Eric said something that really hit me, “sure you need an Alana body to continue a story with that Alana body, but so what?” My want for the story doesn’t dictate my getting it. That I can’t continue a life with something once conditions dictate I part ways from it doesn’t change the reality that I will lose it.

We had gone to see Cirque de Sole the other day. And I considered the precarious situation of the performers; they have built a life, a livelihood, an identity by honing their bodies. But all it takes is a fall, a break, an injury and their career is over. The identity of themselves as an elite athlete, honed over years, is over. It’s just further evidence this body can’t really be who we are.

I internalized this and considered my own body more closely. Lately I have needed to go on hormones for perimenopause. Without them I couldn’t sleep and I was anxious and depressed; my entire outlook on life, my way of behaving and being in the world had changed. I like to think these behaviors and outlooks are core parts of ME, who I am, but clearly these traits are super dependent on a little hormone. Now, I am so dependent on the little hormone pill that makes me ‘normal’ again. For the performances and myself, the circumstances of the body dictate how and when we can use it. Our bodies’ are only usable by us, in the ways we want to use them, when circumstances allow.

 I thought on it more and realized that for the performers, what a career ending injury really means is an end to their story. An end to the narrative they tell themselves about what tomorrow will be. My attachment to my body, to this life, is exactly the same. I want this body for a story that happens next: To help me continue to be, to prove who I am. But it is just as subject to breaking as these circus performers’ hanging on bars and balancing on poles. And if it is subject to something so little to destroy my whole dream and sense of self, is it who I am?

It is easy to look at the performers and see the body forces us to alter our narrative of who and what we are in this life. But as I think on it, I see the same thing plays out over multiple lives: I cling to this body because it is essential to my Alana story, I need it for what happens next. With an injury, I adjust, accept limitations, recast the story under the new terms the body allows — I can’t be a yogi, but I can do pilaties. I can’t do pilaties as I have long covid, but at least I’m alive, I can figure a new story. But death is the same, I just accept the limitations, find a new rebirth to recast the story in terms the new life allows. This, zooming-out, to see what is true in one life is true across countless lives. 

A few days later I was again considering the idea of the body as the ticket. In other words, I can say the body is the tool that allows me to write my story. I thought about  slaves –for them, the body is actually their bondage. Because of their blackness, their being owned in a society that allowed ownership of them, their body guaranteed their story, their lives, weren’t theirs to tell, to create. I considered someone with trapped-in syndrome, completely conscious but paralyzed; their body isn’t a tool to the fantasy life they imagine, it is a cage. I considered a friend who recently committed suicide when he got a cancer diagnosis, suddenly his body was forcing a turn in his story he couldn’t abide by and so he killed the body to avoid the new imagined future. To avoid a new identity as sick, out of control of a body he had honed and prized for years (he was the friend who taught me about body building).  

When my house in Montreal flooded, I considered how the house wasn’t a shelter. It can, at times, in certain forms, be used as shelter. But that can change so quickly. It proved shelter is not what a house IS. It’s just what it does some of the time, when the circumstances are right. I can use the house as shelter when it is in a 4e arrangement that protects my 4e body. When it is moldy, in a 4e arrangement that endangers my 4e body I can’t use it at all. It is in fact anti-shelter.

When a 4e body is in an arrangement that doesn’t strain credulity for me to keep using it as a prop, an actor, to tell myself the fantasy story, then I can use it to imagine all sorts of futures. When it has died, de-formed, disaggregated enough that it is no longer a credible prop, a leading actor, for the story I imagine I can no longer use it at all.

When I claim these objects, in truth I am only claiming one state, one side, of them. Once they shift to become traps, poison, I want nothing more than to renounce my claim. My friend committed suicide to renounce his. Because these objects shift through many states, ones that are helpful, ones that are harmful, ones in which we drift out of each other’s stories (karma), the claim is also anicca. The claim is something that I will ultimately renounce when the state of the object is no longer desirable to me. When it strains credulity for my own mind to use it as a prop to further the fantasy that pre-exists the object or my claim on it. Not only are these objects conditional, my claim on them is as well. And what is conditional has to be anatta. Arising based on causes, existing based on causes, ceasing based on causes that prove absolutely nothing about me