A Dancing Buddha from Utah
He was a body made of light, dancing the tai chi
Esalen Institute, on the Big Sur Coast.
Sometime in the '80s.
Couples straight out of advertisements for strengtheners of the cosmic spinal column laze in bathtubs, and above the Pacific look at the moon rising “outer China crost the bay.” The most significant event of the century (according to the Esalen Catalogue at least) has been taking place here. Asia and Europe were meeting in California and blending to create a new, creative thing. Esalen was at the center of the new consciousness.
It is the path to consciousness to be torn between two polarities, unable to move in either direction because, as soon as you do, you realize you’ve made a mistake and start back the other way. The only way out is through the middle, where you leave the cross and make a third, creative choice. This is moving to the abstract.
We’d come to Esalen for a three-day workshop. I knew the instructor, who studied with Rolf, among other master bodyworkers. The focus on bodywork at Esalen and around Northern California was part of an absorption of Asian culture and consciousness.
The bodywork from the East Coast schools was an adjunct to allopathic medical practices, focusing on knowing the anatomy and physiology and doing interventions.
The Esalen massage was about getting in contact with what is beneath the patterns of the conscious mind. It wasn’t so much about biology as mixology, about the shift of consciousness to the balance point between masculine and feminine into a conscious place.
Dub Leigh was a bodyworker I knew in San Francisco, who called his method Zen therapy. I went to his studio to see how he worked, and it was almost all trigger points. He gave me two sheets of paper with muscle charts on them and told me to shade in where I had pain. It wasn’t long until I understood that each point refers to pain in a predictable way, so if you know where it hurts, you know where to push.
As I got to know Dub, I learned that he’d been in the furniture business in Utah, with an old Mormon family. He’d lost a little girl, and the pain overwhelmed him. He’d go on drinking binges, holing up in a motel for a few days, killing the pain. He saved himself from death by alcohol by going to a monastery and sitting zazen. It began his journey into body consciousness.
We arranged that I would bring him any of my clients that I didn’t know how to fix. I would observe, and he would explain how he was fixing the problem. In this way, I learned to work at his level, or so I thought. He said he was doing a workshop at Esalen and I should come up for it. That’s how I came to be having an energetic experience of being awake in that realm, which is also awake, just not at the same time most of the time.
Dub was in the room but in a diamond body.
He was doing movements to display his energy body, which appeared to be made of points of light. He was showing me what a light body looks like. He was doing tai chi moves.
At breakfast, I told my companion, Bianca, what I’d seen. She was more a dreamer than a stalker, so she told me what she’d dreamed. The Persian man in our group (we’d had an introductory meeting on arrival) was in a Volkswagen, and Dub levitated it into the air and then let it crash with the man inside it.
Dreams are facts.
There was a Persian man in the group, and he had a real meltdown. He seemed to be terrified and inconsolable. The group was full of practitioners, and a couple of them had longed for this opportunity to do an onstage rescue.
“Leave him alone. He’s all right.” Dub spoke sharply, stopping them from interfering.
“How do you know he’s all right?” One asked. She was yearning to intervene.
“What’s wrong with him?” another asked.
“It’s his mother.” Dub said.
“His mother? How can you know that?” She sounded angry.
“Because it’s always his mother.”
I thought that was one of the best spontaneous vaudeville routines I’d ever witnessed and I never forgot it. I never forgot Dub, either. He was a big man with a Buddha belly, but he was also light on his feet.