This is a Terms of Endearment (TOE) post. These are words that keep coming up that I find myself re-defining for my own relief, amusement, and insight.
It’s a two-fer today in my messy Buddhist practice. These words are on meaningful repeat in my moments of clarity, and spring up when I listen to this incredibly hard-working, zen-clear monk Ven. Pomnyun Sunim. He helps bring me to peace.
Imbue means to inspire or permeate with (a feeling or quality).
This term is pretty much right at the nexus of my own little left-to-right brain and past-to-present, life-weaving practice. That is, I’ve been trying to connect my left-brain, language-based experience of the world, with my felt experience of life and time.
“As above, so below; as within, so without; and as on left, so on right” and all that.
Backstory: for years I’d been working nearly exclusively on writing as a tool for supporting happiness, while crafting copy for my client’s marketing maneuvers, contracts for business relationships, and understanding humans. And all of this was highly focused on left-hemisphere type of meaning-making approach and only got me so far. In fact, this left brain, linear way of hanging with my homies basically crapped out spectacularly all at once. Probably because life is way too complicated to express is a simple linear way, or even in a set of ideas. For sure, I can say, this approach does not make for happiness…
So to recover from that, I’m now recalling – and calling up – ways my right brain and body also move me and support me, quite literally. My creative, irrational self soars with art, music, poetry and moves differently to comforts and stressors. This is my body on my right-brain and nature. This aspect of self also dreams and knows things, and dances and understands. It’s a creative side – that along with some other more material parts of me – knows things bone deep and can often read others’ bodies and minds, understands communications of beings long dead and not yet in form, but it can’t always make those knowings come out in simple words.
So imbue is a word the wise often use when someone asks a why question about their own discomforts. As in “why can’t I meditate?” or “why do I feel selfish, noble, ignoble, fearful, happy, etc.?”
The answer is always, “your brain imbues this experience with meaning,” then something like “animals don’t do that,” and “don’t expect so much of your ole human self.”
Without this mental act of imbuing, everything is just experience. All right-brainy, embodied and feeling, all passing by, all happening and artful, and all fine. Just is-ness. No judgement, no meaning. Maybe even no standards or expectations of how things should be. Because of this, there is also no suffering.
Bodhi Body
bodhi tree a fig tree native to India and Southeast Asia, regarded as sacred by Buddhists
Those of you who don’t know the story of Buddha, it’s very much worth learning. In short, Siddhartha Gautama was a son of a king: a privileged prince. He was spared all bad experiences as a child, had no trauma, no negative sights or sounds, foods, or illness. He had no scratchy sandpaper of life to wear him into understanding and acceptance of bad things happening to good people. He had it all: money, love, riches, comforts, power, and entertainment.
He lived a rarefied life made so by the loving hands, and lovely environment of his parents, his kingdom and even nature.
And he LOVED nature.
Then, one day a young man, he saw a poor, old broken body man, a sick man, a dead man, and it moved him. He had never seen –– or known–– suffering before. Not his own, nor anyone else’s.
Dawning of Compassion
It stirred something in him, and he began perhaps the most earnest spiritual practices ever recorded. After a number of trials following the teachings of gurus of various kinds, starving himself, nearly dying, following other paths and leaving them, he finally sat underneath a Bodhi tree for 49 days until he could figure out why this thing – suffering– existed and committed to solving his problem.
As the big guns came out and temptation-like questions arose in him, the last big one appeared: he was asked who would testify that he was worthy of enlightenment. He was silent, touched the Earth. And it shuddered.
And he came to enlightenment.
Every time I hear Bodhi Tree –and you know the type of tree is important– I think Body Tree. That is, the vessel we inhabit, our bodies, are made of the same stuffs of the Earth, are rooted in the energy of the Earth, and carry thoughts atop them much like a crown stretching toward the stars. Even tricky thoughts like desires, ideas of worthiness, and terrible temptations exist only in a smaller subset of us (our heads), not our whole “tree.”
We are connected to our planet via our bodies, and our bodies will testify for us. At least this is how I know this. So Bodhi means to me, quite literally, Body, as having been sprung up from the very planet we inhabit 1 and a most supportive aspect of our selves, a vehicle to peace.
My absolute favorite Buddha & Buddhism documentary/explainer was put out by PBS about a decade ago. I feel it carries not only the historical story, but also the energy of the practice. So it feels calming to watch it and shares the history and philosophy quite well.
