The Body Is the Medium of Awareness

This past weekend didn’t unfold the way I expected.

Actually, I had planned it very intentionally.

I wanted a weekend devoted to listening.

On Friday evening I was supposed to hear Mitchell Bettine perform outdoors. If you aren’t familiar with him, he’s a remarkable percussionist, gong player, and composer whose work I’ve admired for years. Unfortunately, Chicago had other plans. The smoke from the Canadian wildfires had settled over the city, the air quality was poor, and the performance was canceled.

Disappointed, but still wanting to spend the evening immersed in sound, I booked a hammock sound bath instead.

Then on Saturday, a good friend and I went to hear Laaraji and Arji OceAnanda perform at the Seventeenth Church of Christ, Scientist (which, despite what almost everyone asked me afterward, has nothing to do with Scientology).

If you’ve never been inside the building, it’s breathtaking.

The sanctuary is modeled after a Greek amphitheater, with seating that gently wraps around the room in a broad semicircle. The architectural centerpiece is an extraordinary pipe organ whose polished pipes rise dramatically toward the ceiling, becoming as much a work of sculpture as an instrument. It doesn’t simply occupy the room; it defines it. Before a single note is played, your attention is already being drawn upward by its quiet grandeur.

The acoustics are extraordinary.

Every sound seems to linger just a little longer than you expect.

It’s one of those spaces that quietly changes the way you listen.

Without planning it, I ended up spending nearly an entire weekend inside contemplative spaces.

And neither experience went quite the way I imagined.

The hammock sound bath was beautiful.

The sounds were gentle.

The room was peaceful.

Everything about it should have invited me inward.

Instead, I found myself negotiating with my own body.

The hammock moved almost imperceptibly throughout the session.

Not enough that anyone else would probably notice.

Just enough that every few minutes I felt the beginning of motion sickness.

A slow wave of nausea would arrive, and I’d have to remove my eye mask and open my eyes until it settled.

The hammock also wrapped tightly around me.

Comfortably, at first.

But eventually my arms began falling asleep.

I became aware of my shoulders.

My elbows.

My hands.

Should I move?

Should I wait another minute?

Would shifting disturb someone else?

The following evening felt like it would be entirely different.

And in many ways, it was.

Laaraji and Arji OceAnanda created an incredibly spacious performance.

The room itself almost disappeared.

Each tone seemed to bloom into the architecture before dissolving into silence.

It was beautiful.

But then…

There was the chair.

About twenty minutes into the performance my hips started talking.

Then my lower back.

Years of dancing have left their mark on my body, and every minute I remained seated they became a little louder.

At one point I noticed a young woman quietly stand up, walk to the open space in front of the performers, and lie down on the floor.

For a moment I thought about doing the same.

Twenty-five-year-old Matthew probably would have.

But I was with a sophisticated friend. We had dressed for an evening out. I was wearing linen trousers and a crisp cotton shirt, and throwing myself onto a floor that had just been crossed by a few hundred people suddenly felt less appealing than it might have years ago.

So I stayed where I was.

And my hips kept talking.

I left the weekend thinking about something I hadn’t expected.

Actually…

It wasn’t a new realization.

It was an old one that I had quietly forgotten.

Back in college, I became fascinated by how differently my mind worked depending on what my body was doing.

I stopped writing first drafts sitting at a computer.

Instead, I’d go for long walks through the woods carrying a voice recorder.

I’d compose while walking.

Then I’d return home and write everything out by hand.

Only after that would I sit at the computer, and by then I was usually refining what had already become the final essay in my mind.

Even then, I understood that movement mattered.

I knew changing my body somehow changed my thinking.

But looking back, I realize I interpreted that relationship backwards.

I thought I was finding tricks to improve my mind.

I never stopped to consider that my mind wasn’t operating independently in the first place.

This weekend reminded me of something much simpler.

We don’t merely think with our minds.

We experience the world through our bodies.

My hips weren’t interrupting awareness.

They were part of the way awareness was unfolding.

The nausea wasn’t competing with the experience.

It was part of the experience.

The tingling in my arms wasn’t happening outside perception.

It was perception.

Once I saw that, examples began appearing everywhere.

How differently do I listen when I’m hungry?

When I’m exhausted?

When my neck and shoulders are carrying tension?

How often have I mistaken irritation for someone else’s fault when what I really needed was sleep?

How many conversations have I only half heard because my body was asking for something my mind refused to acknowledge?

We often imagine awareness as something that lives somewhere above our physical lives.

As though the body is simply transporting the mind from one place to another.

I’m not sure that’s true.

I’m beginning to think the body is never merely carrying awareness.

It’s participating in it.

That reminder has quietly changed the way I think about my own work.

People sometimes compliment the spaces where I lead sound baths.

They notice the architecture.

The furniture.

The tatami mats.

The blankets.

The bolsters.

The eye masks.

The artwork.

The incense.

The tea afterward.

The feeling they have when they walk through the door before a single note has even been played.

Sometimes they ask why I spend so much time thinking about those details.

The easy answer is because they create a beautiful experience.

But I don’t think that’s actually the reason.

Beauty matters.

But beauty isn’t the goal.

The goal is creating the conditions where attention can naturally deepen.

Every pressure point.

Every draft of cold air.

Every uncertainty about where to put your shoes.

Every distracting smell.

Every question about what comes next.

Each one quietly competes for that attention.

None of them is overwhelming.

But together they occupy space.

I don’t believe a thoughtfully prepared room creates presence.

I don’t think incense suddenly makes someone mindful.

I don’t think a comfortable mat guarantees a profound experience.

But I do think something else is true.

A thoughtfully designed environment asks less of the body.

And when the body no longer has to keep negotiating with its surroundings, awareness becomes available for something else.

That reminder stayed with me all week because I think we often misunderstand what contemplative practices are trying to do.

We imagine meditation as an attempt to rise above the body.

To quiet it.

To ignore it.

To transcend it.

As though the body is something standing between us and awareness.

This weekend reminded me of the opposite.

The body isn’t an obstacle to awareness.

It’s the medium of awareness.

Everything we experience arrives through it.

The warmth of sunlight.

The ache in a hip after years of dancing.

The smell of incense.

The vibration of a gong moving through the chest.

The softness of a blanket.

The embrace of another person.

Even silence.

None of these exist for us apart from the body.

They are revealed through it.

Perhaps that’s why I care so deeply about creating environments that feel intentional.

Not because beautiful spaces are inherently more spiritual.

But because every unnecessary discomfort becomes another conversation asking for the body’s attention.

A hard chair.

A room that’s too cold.

A hammock that keeps gently rocking.

An arm that’s fallen asleep.

None of these make contemplation impossible.

But each one quietly divides us.

I’ve spent years believing I was creating peaceful environments.

Now I think what I’ve really been trying to create are spaces where the body no longer has to negotiate.

Spaces where your shoulders soften without thinking about them.

Where your hips stop asking to be moved.

Where your hands naturally find a place to rest.

Where your nervous system can stop solving small problems for just a little while.

Not because comfort is the destination.

But because when the body is finally allowed to settle…

The world begins to reveal itself again.

Not to a mind floating somewhere above the body.

But to a person fully inhabiting it.

Perhaps awareness has never lived solely in the mind.

Perhaps it has always lived in the conversation between body and world.

We don’t simply bring our bodies into the world.

Our bodies bring the world to us.

The body isn’t an obstacle to awareness.

It is the medium of awareness.