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Guided Meditation: Comfortable in One's Skin

Hello everyone, and welcome to our practice and discussion of the Buddha's teachings on cultivating awareness. Cultivating a strong, stable, clear awareness with which to go through our lives.

It's a great pleasure to do this. It's a wonderful thing, and I find that the path to that, every step along the way, is wonderful. And then we come to this exercise in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta^[1], which some people skip over. Some people are perplexed by it, and some people don't like it. And that is meditating on the parts of the body.

I want to orient ourselves around this, or present an idea from the early texts that might be helpful, though at first people often don't like this. The idea is that—first I will say that the use of what we call imagination is included as a part of the path of meditation and the teachings of the Buddha.

It's very simple acts of imagination. But in doing so, he distinguishes between uses of the imagination that involve delusion, that are fantasy, that have no real connection to reality. For those, maybe we can use the word concocting. The word sometimes is translated into English as "conceiving." Giving birth to concoctions, to just imaginary ideas: maññati^[2].

And then there are those which are understood to be metaphors, similes, and very simple acts of imagination, of visualization, or reflection that point us in the direction of being present. They support us to let go of our preoccupations. It is imagination that helps us to let go of imagination. The imagination lets us let go of being caught.

So, imagine—maybe bring to mind some part of your body. Maybe something that is not too challenging for you, but where the body image of it is a concern for you. Maybe it's something simple—I hope it's simple. For example, your fingernails. Maybe they're too long today. There are times you don't get around to cutting them, and they're longer than you think they should be. And so you're concerned about the image of your fingers and your fingernails, and what people think about you. You're going to a very important meeting and you haven't had a chance to cut your fingernails, let alone clean them, and there's still dirt in them from working in the garden.

Or maybe it's something a little bit more challenging. Maybe you have concerns about the length of your fingers. They're too short, they're too long, or maybe they're too stubby or fat. You feel embarrassed and don't want to show them to people. You keep your hands in your pockets so people don't notice. It's a concern with body image. Just something like that.

Now imagine that you do something really wonderful. Maybe it's a wonderful hike in nature. Maybe it's wonderful exercise. Maybe you feel really refreshed, wonderful, and clean after a shower, or a deep satisfaction after intimacy. Or maybe you've worked hard—physical work, manual work—and you feel so contented, a little bit sore, but so contented and happy in your body. There's a vitality in the body.

Imagine yourself sitting down and maybe closing your eyes in a nice comfortable chair, just feeling the vitality, the surging of energy, the working and tingling of the muscles. That feels pleasant and nice—a deep satisfaction that feels embodied after doing this physical thing. A deep physical contentment, a job well done, a situation well experienced, very contented.

And now, with that kind of contentment, think about your fingernails being too long, or your fingers being too this or that. Notice how it takes you into a world of thoughts, ideas, concepts, and concoctions. It takes you away from the coursing of good feelings, satisfaction, and contentment in your body. It is a certain kind of alienation from a wonderful embodied feeling of oneself in one's skin. By going into the world of thoughts and comparative thinking, ideas of what's ideal and not ideal, how things should be and shouldn't be—these are two radically different worlds of relating to the body.

This parts of the body exercise recognizes that one world is not so satisfying, not so helpful to be in. If we get caught in the world of concocting and comparisons, sometimes we need some help to be able to come back into the lived body, where we fit perfectly inside our skin. The experience of the fingers or the fingernails, in and of themselves—the fingers don't care if they're short or long or stubby. The fingers just are.

In fact, if we just settle into the sensations of the fingers, unless you have arthritis or something, the sensations of the fingers just tingle and feel nice. They're totally happy whatever the fingers are. They don't mind what length or size they are. Fingernails don't mind if they haven't been cut for a while or if they are dirty. There's a different kind of way to live.

These 31 parts of the body^[3] are sometimes called unclean, and the later tradition titles this exercise "the repulsive"—they talked about the repulsiveness of these parts of the body. But the tradition, which I'll talk more about later, is not making a categorical judgment about the body. It's rather making a judgment about the way we get into the concocting world of attachments around the body. That is what the ancient world meant by unclean. In our world, we might use other language. We might say it's suffering, it's stressful. We might say it's alienating; it takes us away and makes us separate from our experience, from our body. We use different language than the ancients do, but the movement is in the same direction. It moves away from secondary judgments about the body. Seeing that as a problem, that's what's "unclean" in a sense, and then settling in for the body's experience of itself.

Assuming a meditation posture.

Close your eyes and just feel your breathing.

Feel your body. Feel what's happening in your body from me talking and you listening.

What energies are coursing through your body? What sensations, what tensions are in your body?

And are there thoughts, ideas, concoctions in the mind that keep you at a distance from feeling the body in and of itself?

Maybe you can relax the thinking mind, calm the thinking a bit. Calm your activity to feel and sense the experience of your body from the inside out.

This difference between what's concocted and what's felt and experienced applies to the breathing. Whether the breathing is comfortable or uncomfortable, let the breathing be the breathing, independent of thoughts, ideas, judgments, expectations. As if each breath is just what it's supposed to be. Each inhale, each exhale. With a relaxing into your breathing.

Perhaps as you exhale, relaxing the shoulders and belly.

And then feel, or imagine yourself, physically content. If you felt deeply satisfied and contented in your body, where would that contentment and satisfaction reside? Independent of what you think, what is the body's own experience of that contentment, that vitality?

Whatever is happening in the body, the body is enough, just right for itself. What energy, tingling, vibrations, sensations would you allow yourself to feel, if this embodied experience at this moment was just right? Just the thing that's supposed to be happening, whether comfortable or uncomfortable.

Maybe as you breathe you can feel your skin over your torso, your chest, your belly, stretch or move on the inhale, and settle back on the exhale. Maybe your skin pushes against your clothes as you breathe. Feeling your skin. Letting the skin have its own experience, independent of what you think. Just skin feeling.

And whatever is inside your skin fits perfectly within your skin, like a good pair of shoes or well-fitting clothes. Inside your skin, there is your flesh. Maybe it also moves in the belly or elsewhere in your body as you breathe. Breathing with the flesh. How the flesh, the muscles, feels itself—its own experience sitting here.

And then deeper than the flesh is the bones. The structure which holds all the flesh. Some of the bones move as you breathe—the rib cage, maybe in the shoulders or the spine. We can have thoughts and ideas about our bones, but what would we like to feel, or sense, or imagine? How the bones experience themselves, knowing your bones without those thoughts, judgments, and fears. Just bones.

And so freeing yourself from body images you might live by, gently breathe with the experience of skin. Breathe with the experience of flesh. Breathe with the experience of bones. Letting each have its own experience free of judgments, thoughts, ideas. Letting each one help free you from a kind of alienation from the body that the world of self-image and bodily perfection might do to you. Sitting here, content and peaceful with the body as it is: skin, flesh, bones.

As we come to this end of this sitting, imagine that you're comfortable in your skin. Imagine that your body is at home in itself. Your body is perfect the way it is. And the body has the capacity to feel itself, to be at home in itself, independent of the stories, thoughts, ideas, and predictions you have about your body. Even if the body is uncomfortable, maybe there's a way in which you can still be at home in your body. At home in your skin, in your flesh, and your bones. At home in some deeper, embodied way.

And now imagine that when you look upon other people, you don't look upon them based on their attractiveness, or your judgments or ideas of how their body appears. Rather, with an act of imagination, you look upon others as they would be if they were at home in their own body. As if their body is perfect, no problems. If they were at home in their own skin, comfortable in their skin, their flesh, and their bones—imagine looking upon people that way. How nice it would be if they could be comfortable in their own body.

If everyone could have some deep acceptance of their body, free of the cultural conditioning, ideas, thoughts, and the social comparisons that are made. All the painful ways in which we relate to people's bodies and skin, objectifying people. Imagine how great it would be if all the people you know and all the people you meet could feel at home, happy in their body, safe in their body, at peace in their body. An embodied freedom.

May it be that how we look upon others supports this as possible. May we regard others kindly, caringly. May we regard others, seeing them in ways that support them feeling at home in themselves, comfortable in themselves, in their own body.

May all beings live happily in their bodies. May all beings feel safe in their bodies. May all beings feel peaceful in their own bodies. And may all beings be free with an embodied freedom.

May the way that we regard others support this as possible.

Dharmette: Satipaṭṭhāna (27) Body Free of Stories

Today will be the last talk on this fourth exercise of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta.

I think it's easy to overlook this part, which I did for many, many years. It's easy to be dismissive, especially for a Western audience, because it refers to the body as parts, as unclean. It's not in the original text, but later editors added a title for this exercise that refers to the repulsiveness of the body.

Many people in the West are even more reactive to that: why would you see the body as repulsive or unclean? Perhaps I shouldn't try to guess at what the ancients were doing and thinking when they had this. But I do know that the Buddha sometimes talks about our bodily form, our bodily feelings, our perceptions, our mental activity, concoctions, creations, and something that we often call consciousness in the West—he sometimes has very negative language for it.

Sometimes he says it's impermanent, it's empty, it's vain, it's a tumor, it's an illness, it's a dart^[4], it's a burden. He has a long list of things which are very negative. If you read it out of context, it's like, "Wow, these Buddhists are completely world-negating and opposed to the body, and treat the body as a boil, a blister, or a sore."

But the context of these teachings—about how these things are a sickness and illness—uses the phrase "as if." There's a particular context to it. The context is some of the deepest sense of well-being, happiness, and joy that can be experienced in meditation. The joy of deeply being absorbed and concentrated that comes with deep, concentrated meditation. For some people, this is the pinnacle of joy and happiness that they've ever experienced in their life in a sustained way, when they drop into these deep concentrated states, or jhāna^[5].

In that context, where there's so much well-being and happiness, we are cautioned to be careful not to be attached to the body, to perceptions, to feelings, or even to consciousness. Any attachments, any preoccupation, or any fixation on them in that context just feels like a drag. It feels like, "Why would I agitate, muddy, or lose this deep sense of well-being, where the whole body feels beautiful, glowing, alive, and settled?" Finally, I'm at home in my body, and it seems like a wellspring of well-being. Why would I separate myself into the world of concoctions, the world of immense stories and ideas, and shoulds and shouldn'ts? Even ones that are celebrating the body, because the celebration of the body is also a separation from it all.

So in that context, the Buddha said, with all this well-being, relate to these areas as if they're a drag, so you don't get attached to them. This way, you can stay connected to this well-being that is onward-leading, and that leads to liberation from all attachments.

In terms of these 31 parts of the body, the fourth exercise where it talks about being unclean, I interpret it in that way. It's in a context of developing greater and greater well-being and happiness, being at home in one's body, feeling comfortable in one's skin, and just settling in and experiencing it independent of the concoctions, stories, interpretations, and opinions we have. It feels so good to do that, so why get involved in the opinions? Why get involved in all these things?

When is it helpful in being present for the body to really see that there are certain ways of relating to the body that are undesirable, maybe "unclean," because it mires or dirties the waters of attention and our experience? As we get into the 31 parts of the body, more and more we begin to free ourselves from concoctions. We're using our imagination a little bit, visualization, and inner sense to focus. If you do the practice steadily, systematically going through each body part, you're developing greater embodiment and presence in the body. You also develop a greater sensitivity to the way the mind concocts stories and ideas, and how we can let go of that to stay with the body.

This is phenomenally useful as the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta keeps going deeper and deeper into the basic practice of mindfulness of body, feelings, mind, and dhammas^[6]. We begin to loosen up the grip of stories and ideas, and some of them are very connected to the body. This is one of the functions of the 32 parts of the body—to free us from that grip, but also to increase our sensitivity to the concocting nature of the mind, the story-making of the mind. As we go deeper into the Satipaṭṭhāna practice, we're becoming freer of this concocting nature of the mind. But we'll see that when we start tomorrow on the four elements, we're still using the imagination to some degree for that.

We're still learning these lessons. Tomorrow we'll start the four elements, the fifth exercise. The core, original Vipassana (insight) instructions—which much of the Western insight movement is based on, coming from Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, and Sharon Salzberg^[7], and those of us who went to Asia to study a particular form of Vipassana practice called Mahasi practice. It's named after the teacher Mahasi Sayadaw^[8], and his practice was really centered on the four elements.

He wasn't always explicit about it, and it wasn't conveyed to the Western practitioners, but the foundation of the modern Western experience of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, and the teachings of Spirit Rock and Insight Meditation Society (IMS), was this four elements meditation. The pedigree or the lineage we're in is one that really centers on this, and so I'll start talking about that tomorrow.

The last thing about the parts of the body meditation: there's a wonderful Vipassana teacher in Santa Cruz named Bob Stahl, and every year he does almost a year-long course on the 32 parts of the body meditation. It's very popular in Santa Cruz. I mention this—though many of you are not close to Santa Cruz—to show that people who do this practice find a great love for it. Maybe you'll try it out, memorize the list, or some of the lists (usually people memorize them in groups of five or six), and then just practice it like we did today with the skin, flesh, and bones, but using the different parts.

A couple of little announcements. Today I posted on YouTube—in the description of the video, there is the text for the 31 parts of the body. There's also a link we'll keep in there to go directly to the page on IMC's website where we have my translation of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta. As we go through this, if you want to see the reference point I'm using and my understanding of this text in the translation, you can find it there. You can also find it directly under the resources menu on IMC's website.

So thank you, and I look forward to starting the four elements tomorrow.