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Guided Meditation: Well-Being Arising from the Body

Greetings from Redwood City at the Insight Meditation Center, a center which is now beginning to feel to me as if it has no walls. It spreads out into all the places where people are offering their good morning, their greetings, and their wonderful statements here and there. [Bows]

So thank you for being here. For me personally, one of the consequences of these years of doing meditation practice—Buddhist practice—has been that I now have a friendly relationship with my thinking. I will often enjoy my thinking, and I think of my thinking as a friend, and myself as a friend to my thinking. That wasn't always the case.

Thinking is often a source of a tremendous amount of human suffering. Psychologists sometimes say that one of the leading causes for depression is rumination. There are certainly other reasons for it, but the self-talk—what we tell ourselves, the images we conjure up if we think more in images—can have an influence on us. When there are ideas, thoughts, and images that are frightening, anger-producing, or desirous, it lingers or affects us. It affects our mood, inclination, or habit formation, and can affect our body or muscles. It can create tension. Probably one of the leading causes of tension and stress is, in fact, our relationship to our thinking.

We might be in a hurry to get somewhere, but it's the hurriedness^[1] of the thinking—the mind that's reaching forward and wanting. One of the things that begins happening in practice is we start having a different relationship to the thinking mind. One of the opportunities, one of the possibilities, is that thinking no longer becomes center stage. It's no longer the basis for how we see the world, understand the world, or especially ourselves. Our thinking is not the source of where we think we are, who we think we are, or how we create or construct the idea of who we are. What feels more at home is being centered in the body, or centered in the deeper experiences of our senses—to be centered more at other sources of intelligence, other sources of feelings and sensations, than the thoughts we can tell ourselves.

That's not to dismiss our thoughts, but to create a very different context for relating to them. So, one of the ways to become happier is to not grant a lot of authority to thinking. Do not believe every thought. Do not hold on to, engage with, or pick up everything that we think. Don't give thinking so much importance. If we do that, then we may begin to drop into a fuller range of our human capacity for living, for sensing, for experiencing, for understanding, and our greater capacity for happiness.

There is a happiness we can experience that is not dependent on what we're thinking about—the happiness of intimacy and connectedness, of being rooted here and really feeling the life flow moving through us. Getting out of our way, not overlaying layers of tension, stress, interpretations, and reactivity to this wonderful capacity for our inner life to flow and open up.

Guided Meditation

Take a meditation posture. Perhaps a meditation posture that would allow you to shift your center of gravity from the thinking mind to the sensing body, the experiencing body. The body's capacity to feel its own aliveness, to feel the flow of sensations, to feel its weight, to feel how the body is positioned with gravity in the contact of your body against your chair, your floor, wherever your body rests and is touching.

Be aware of the body's capacity to experience breathing. In whatever way, very permissively, whatever way the body experiences breathing, let it be that way. Any tendency to judge it or feel like it should be different belongs to the thinking mind. You don't have to stop thinking those, but just let them recede to the background and not give them so much importance, if you can. For these minutes now, give importance to the experience of breathing.

Even before you think you're meditating, perhaps you can familiarize yourself with how the body experiences breathing. As if you're a friend who's come to visit your friend, breathing, and you ask, "How are you?" Generously and kindly, you attune yourself to your friend by getting to know the friend of breathing.

As you're experiencing your breathing, are there simple ways that you could relax as you exhale? Without too much ambition, just simple. Maybe relaxing some parts of the body that are breathing. Maybe the rib cage can relax as you exhale. Maybe a relaxation around the diaphragm. Maybe a relaxing of the belly. There may be some relaxation of the muscles of breathing as you inhale. Maybe it's only a teeny bit at the top of the inhale; there's a softening that lets the inhale continue for a fraction of a moment longer.

Breathing sits at the nexus, at the crossroads of so many aspects of our humanity, our human life. To be interested in the experience of breathing is to be interested in something quite important about being alive, having feelings, and even having happiness and joy.

If you happen to find any tension or pressure associated with thinking—maybe a bit in the forehead area, behind the forehead, between the ears, the face, or jaw—perhaps as you exhale, you can soften, relax, and let go of that tension and pressure. As you let go and do that, does your thinking mind become quieter?

As you exhale, let go and relax. If your thoughts are difficult, relax around those difficult thoughts as if you're a caring and compassionate friend. It's okay. So you're not centered in your thoughts; you're more like you're centered in the care and kindness as you relax and soften.

As you exhale, let go into the body breathing. Let go into an intimacy with the physical sensations of breathing. Let that be what is important, what is valued for these moments. Trust that simplicity of just staying with breathing. Come back to your breathing more than you trust or need to be thinking and investing in the importance of thinking and solving. Let thinking become quieter, receding to the background. In the foreground, an intimacy with breathing, with the body. Allowing it to be as it is, untroubled by whatever way your body is breathing. Being with it kindly and compassionately, here and now.

Breathe as if breathing is the doorway to deep feelings of belonging, being at home, and being free to happiness. As if breathing is the entryway, the way to be free of our thinking.

As you're sitting here meditating, really drop into your body. Lower your center of effort^[2] more fully into the torso, the body, your immediate experience, and feel any sense of well-being that there might be here. No matter how small, or in what corners of your being, feel your well-being. A well-being that's not dependent on what you're thinking, that maybe resides in some place deeper than thinking, more intimate than thinking. A well-being that you have to let go of thinking to feel more fully. See if you can breathe with the well-being. If you can allow the well-being to spread through your being, wafting like a wonderful smell.

Closing Reflections

And then as we come to the end of this sitting, once again feel within you whatever sense of well-being there might be. It might be a little bit more calm or settled, a little bit more intimate with yourself. It might be a warmth or a glow of happiness, joy, appreciation, or a sense of gratitude.

Consider how this sense of well-being can be a source of caring for others. It can be a source of friendliness and generosity. Caring and generosity are not so much something we think about logically, though it's fine to do so, but something that is connected to what's deeper than thinking. It's connected to that within us that doesn't suffer—the place within where there is no stress, no worries.

From there, allow yourself to look upon the world with kind eyes—relaxed, soft, and kind. Consider how you might act on kindness, act on generosity. How you might today act on a sense of friendliness or compassion. Perhaps it's as simple as sending an email to someone that you know would appreciate hearing from you. Maybe it's as simple as picking up trash around your neighborhood. Or maybe it's finally getting around to sending a donation to some cause that is helping people during this time of great strife and economic challenges.

There is something that can be freeing—and we'd like it to be freeing—to let your meditation practice be connected to how you live your life. In the bridge between the two, that can involve thinking. That's one of the useful areas in which thinking can help ourselves and help our world.

May our thinking be for the welfare and happiness of all, everyone.