There are two main aspects of you – the superficial construct you mistake for ‘you’, the habits of thought, reference and identity you’ve woven into a most remarkable disguise ever since you were born, so clever it’s even fooled you, and the background presence within you, the Tao, of which you’re a manifestation and expression.
The superficial aspect, the construct or ego as Freud called it, is necessarily enthralled by the external world, by all the shapes and colours and swirling lights, by all the drama of the coming and going of others going on in front of you. This pulls your consciousness into the front of your body and the front of your head, leaving you fairly unaware of the back part of you. The front of you also happens to be where you process the feelings and thoughts associated with what your constructed self perceives or experiences happening to you – the feelings get processed in the solar plexus region, the thoughts comprising an ongoing internal conversation with yourself go on in the forebrain.
This causes you to get so enmeshed in the conflict of feelings and thoughts you actually mistake yourself for them – you become the drama. And your only way out of it seems to be by making the external world conform to some fantastical notion of how life should be. This naturally proves ineffective and leaves you constantly wanting.
However, if instead you train yourself to start occupying the back of you, you’ll find something remarkable and radical happens. Start training yourself to lean up against your shoulder blades, the frontal aspect of your spine, your hip bones and your sacrum, and you find yourself in command of the experience of being you, from moment to moment, rather than vice versa. You now have the feelings being processed in the solar plexus along with all the inevitable friction that causes, but now this is going in in front of you, in the solar plexus, You’re now able to accommodate the process comfortably – you’re able to preside over your experience rather than it preside over you.
Then if you also allow your mind to slide backwards inside your skull, so rather than being enmeshed in the noisy conversation going on in the forebrain, it’s now nestling up against the rear wall of the skull, like a little Buddha leaning back and taking a view, you’ll notice all that noise in the front has quietened down. Then, as thoughts arise in the front, you’re able to simply watch them pass by in the sky of your mind like clouds, with no need to jump on any of them and see where they go – you just sit and watch the clouds go by.
Learn to do this at first by sitting still with eyes closed, body relaxed, breathing slowly, and tilting the torso backwards just a millimetre or so, to give you the impression of leaning back inside, then tilting back the head likewise and feeling the mind slide backwards along the ‘floor’ of your skull. This is meditating Taoist style, interpreted Barefoot style. And it’s a most important practice. But equally important is training yourself to remember it as you’re out and about doing your daily rounds, dealing with people and situations. Because by remembering to sink back and occupy your own rear while engaging with the external world, you become the Tao, the Buddha, the Christ consciousness, or however you want to name it, while in the midst of action.
And like this you not only transform your own reality; you elicit a contagion of enlightenment for everyone in your orbit.
In practice you’ll find yourself swinging between the two states – the externally referenced superficial construct of self in the front and the background presence (in the back). But in time, the more you remember to keep sinking backwards, the more that becomes your default mode, until eventually you’re pretty much the background presence or Tao all the time.
Barefoot Doctor is a seminal figure in the global consciousness movement, originator of spoken word metaphysics set to beats and sound healing tones on the dance floor and conscious clubbing, author of 16 books, including HANDBOOK FOR THE URBAN WARRIOR, travels the world encouraging the awakening and runs online trainings in the above along with live online satsangs and provides a plethora of useful information.
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