Lindsey Dorr-Niro is a cross-disciplinary visual artist, arts educator, and Indo-Tibetan Buddhist scholar/teacher. In addition to having an MFA in painting from Yale, she has completed advanced studies in Indo-Tibetan yoga and meditation, including teacher training through the Yoga Studies Institute, which emphasizes the philosophical, psychological, and meditative practices of yoga. She recently received a grant from The Hemera Foundation to deepen her study of somatic meditation with the Dharma Ocean lineage.

About Ecstatic Absence:

The phrase or term “ecstatic absence” came to me about ten years ago in New York City, while attending a workshop with my primary Buddhism teacher. She asked us to describe the experience of “emptiness” from an embodied perspective.

The term “emptiness” or “shunyata” refers to the lack of inherent nature or “self-nature” of all phenomena. It is the lack—the absence of things existing in and of themselves or by themselves, separate from all else that is arising. The Buddhist worldview insists that all phenomena, including ourselves, are empty of self-nature—existing interdependently.

Of course, practically speaking, we live in a dualistic reality—that is, we perceive and experience things dualistically. We also reinforce or reiterate dualism through language which constantly reinforces and strengthens our perception of this apparent separation. However, Buddhism proposes, and reveals to us through practice, that non-dual states – non-dual forms of perception are also available to us through meditation and that it is this interdependence that is our actual basic ground. One of the fundamental tasks or practices of Buddhism is to repeatedly evoke or access the non-dual, such that it renders or our ordinary perception to be less ordinary—and ultimately, extraordinary. Here, we gradually begin to perceive phenomena more interdependently and with greater compassion.

What is becoming more clear in recent years, thanks to fields of human development like developmental psychology, interpersonal neurobiology, the Integral model, and various somatic therapies, is that in order for a state experience to lead to a new developmental stage, the experience must be embodied—it must be felt in and through the body. My own experience, when accessing non-dual awareness, has been a greatly expanded sense of freedom and attendant ecstacy. “Ecstatic absence” refers more specifically to what emptiness feels like in the body or how it is experienced “somatically.”

My initial studies of Buddhism, beginning in 2009, were rooted in the particularly scholastic Gelugpa lineage. Since 2017, I have also been studying the more practice oriented Kagyu and Nyingma lineages, with special emphasis on somatic meditation—mediation that emphasizes the body and embodiment as the path to transformation. From  2014-2019, I also worked with a somatic psycho-therapist to deepen my own personal healing, which is of course an ongoing journey.

Ecstatic Absence is the culmination and integration of all of this practice, study, and growth and it is an invitation to practice and evolve together.

The next Buddha is the sangha (community of practitioners).” – Ken Wilber