A field that’s permeable and open.
A few decades ago I did my first Vipassana retreat. Ten days of silence. No talking, no phone, no eye contact. Just meditating. About ten hours a day. The first few days are rough. The mind does not want to be still. It chatters and argues and produces an endless stream of opinions about everything. But after a few days something starts to shift. The thoughts get quieter. The concepts start to loosen. And then something strange happens. The body dissolves. Not literally. But the solid, bounded, clearly-defined physical object you’ve always experienced as your body starts to feel different. Less like a thing and more like a field. A cloud of buzzing, tingling, vibrating sensation. No hard edges. Just aliveness, everywhere you put your attention.
I think what happens is this. Normally we’re constantly labeling our experience. That’s my hand. That’s a pain in my knee. That’s tension in my shoulders. The label lands and the sensation gets filed away and we move on. But when you stop labeling — when you just feel, without reaching for the word — the sensation stays open. It doesn’t get packaged. And what you find underneath the packaging is this field. This buzzing, living, continuous thing that doesn’t have the neat boundaries the labels imply.
The universe is continuous. The body, it turns out, feels that way too. When you stop chopping it into pieces.
A while later I trained as a massage therapist. A year of learning to feel — into my own body, and into somebody else’s. We did palpation exercises where you try to feel actual structure inside another person’s body. Muscle tissue, fatty tissue, tendons. You’re feeling with enormous attention and care, trying to distinguish what’s actually there.
And something remarkable happens. The more present you are — the more embodied, the more your attention is genuinely in your hands and not in your head — the more you feel. And the person on the table feels you feeling them. You can feel that they feel you. There’s a feedback loop. A conversation, without words. Two nervous systems, actually in contact.
I also did some haptonomie — a therapeutic practice built entirely around this kind of contact. The therapist feels into you. Not just touching the surface, but actually present inside your body with their attention. And you feel them there. You can feel back. It becomes a genuine exchange. A meeting, through touch.
What I was discovering, slowly, was that the field I’d found in meditation wasn’t just inside me. It extended. It was available between people too. The boundary between my felt sense and someone else’s was permeable, in both directions.
Then I started exploring tantra and found the same field again, this time in sex. It’s available there too. Not automatically — you have to slow down enough to find it, and most people never do. Sex is the place we’re most completely in our heads. Most thoroughly performing. Speed, goal, achievement. Which is precisely why most people never touch what’s actually available.
Slow down. Bring your attention fully into your body. And then — this is the key thing — feel what your partner’s body actually feels like. Not in a general way. In detail. What is the quality of this tissue right here, under your hand? What is the texture, the tone, the temperature? What’s happening in there?
When you feel with that quality of attention, they feel it. Immediately. The body knows the difference between being touched and being felt. And the response is immediate and unmistakable. You don’t have to do more. You have to feel more. The attention itself is the thing.
And then I started working with heart opening. There’s an exercise I learned during tantra. You bring to mind something or someone towards whom you normally close your heart — a difficult person, an old wound, something that makes you contract. And you notice what that feels like. The closing. The tightening. The pulling in. And then you bring to mind someone or something you love easily and openly. And you feel the heart open. The difference is unmistakable once you feel it. It’s a physical movement. Not a metaphor.
And then you practice moving between them. Consciously. Closing, opening, closing, opening. Until it stops being automatic and starts being a choice.
I started doing this during sex. Deliberately opening my heart, in the middle of everything else. And my partner would respond. Immediately. Visibly. Enthusiastically. Not because anything changed in what I was doing. Because something changed in what I was being.
An open heart can be felt. Of course it can. We’ve all felt the difference between someone who is present with us and someone who is going through the motions. The body knows. It always knows.
What I’ve found, weaving all of this together, is that connection isn’t something you do. It’s something you allow. You slow down. You feel. You open. You bring your attention to what’s actually here rather than to the idea of what’s here. And the field that was always present between two people becomes available.
It’s available in meditation, sitting alone in silence. It’s available in touch, in a massage, in a therapeutic encounter. It’s available in sex. It’s available, I suspect, everywhere — we’re just usually too busy and too defended to notice.
The buzzing field is always there. Underneath the labels, underneath the performance, underneath the armor.
Feel for it.
With a little help from Claude.