I am my body Barry Magid February 17th 2018

One of the clearest and most direct ways to investigating the Dharma and the nature of self is to concentrate on a simple phrase: I am my body. Our experience of the body's aging and illness and our resistence to those bring home the inescapibility of impremanence. Similarly the condition of the body is constantly affected by what's outside it - it is defined by its surroundings - revealing interdependence. There is a powerful desire to disembody our subjectivity into an abstract "I" that occupies the body. Indeed, religion usually goes in the direction of asserting - I am not my body. I am a soul or spirit that will endure eternally as the body dies. Instead, we should see that *I*, our subjectivity, is the activity of the body. The more we can allow ourselves to experience the body breathing, the body being, the body thinking, the body selfing... the more we'll bring home to ourselves, the basic realities of change and interconnection. The dharma is fully present, right here as we sit.

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