Pointing at the Moon

Since summer 2013, I've been blogging under Dear Americans, a record of my move to Canada from the U.S.. But I've been recording my thoughts about the mind-body connection, embodied spirituality, and living well for 15 years. As a sensual and creative person, who comes from a reserved, intellectual, and accomplishment-focused family, I was driven by a need to reconcile these two parts of myself. In my late 20's, I was busy obtaining a Master's Degree in Counseling, teaching yoga, working fulltime, and dealing with an autoimmune disease that affected my body and mind. Last year, I got married and moved to Canada, and am now on a sort of compulsory vacation. While I'm waiting for my immigration papers, I've done some reading about neuroscience and how the brain is affected by diet, lifestyle, sex, hormones, and mindful practices. While I'm not intending to dispense advice here, I am very excited to see that the connection between the mind and body is finally being understood, and I look forward to sharing both my personal experience, creative writing, and the exciting tidbits I find.

"Pointing at the Moon" comes from a Buddhist tale about a man who asked a nun to read a sacred text to him. The nun questioned the man's ability to understand its meaning, since he was, after all, illiterate. He replied, "the words are like a finger pointing at the moon. But the finger is not the moon. To look at the moon, it is necessary to gaze beyond the finger." I like this idea of spirituality as being intuitive, something best experienced first hand with our senses. I also like its reference to the Moon, because the moon is a symbol of feminity, and female cycles have been important to my spiritual and creative growth. According to ancient traditions, the feminine force is the material world, including nature's beauty and cycles, sexual power, and the body, in all its beauty and limitation. While Western Judeo-Christian culture tends to overlook the sacredness of the physical world, many of us are turning back to the body's wisdom and finding peace in nature. We are coming to believe that revering the body and nature, and taking solace therein, may be the key to restoring balance to our greed-driven society.

Coming into alignment with the body's wisdom, the power of gratitude, the rhythms of nature... these are powerful tools. Not just because of how they might help us in our individual search for health and happiness, but because through that search, we seem to become more generous, balanced, and thoughtful, and more part of a harmonious whole. Through the abundance of peace and soothing we can find within, we can feel less and less of a need to find it through consumerism, ambition, or aggression, as is the cultural norm.

This is not to say that Christianity, intellectualism, or straight-up Zen meditation are not good ways to find balance. My blog focuses on physical and emotional techniques, mostly because they're part of my own journey, but also because I believe there is a vacuum of information out there. While it has improved dramatically since the 1960's, sexual and emotional health still carry stigma and are kept under unnecessary wraps of secrecy and taboo. Much of this is for sheer lack of knowledge. Pointing at the Moon is one more voice to remove the secrecy, one voice in the movement towards a happy, whole expression of being human, warts and all.