This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Breathing with the Whole Body

Good day, everyone. Nice to be here. Nice to be back at IMC. It was nice to be at IRC yesterday, I hope you enjoyed it. We're back at Satipaṭṭhāna^[1], and this awareness practice of Satipaṭṭhāna—foundations for awareness, for mindfulness—begins with a foundation in your posture. And then it goes into breathing. As we settle into the breathing, the instructions are: breathing in, experiencing the whole body; breathing out, experiencing the whole body.

And in doing so, last time, last Friday, I talked about doing it for the whole length of the inhale, whole length of the exhale. And that's one interpretation of this 'whole body' as the whole body of the in or through time of the experience of breathing. So there's a real continuity through time with just staying with the breath. Another interpretation is that it actually involves experiencing the body as a whole. And one way to do that is to have—using both central vision and peripheral vision at the same time. Whereas the centers of the eye you can have your central vision focused on something and have some sense of what's around it through the peripheral vision. So the same thing with attention to the breathing. There's a focus on the breathing, and that's a central focus, and then the peripheral is just open and aware to the rest of the body. And that's a very interesting dynamic to have both kinds of attention operating. And it takes a little more engagement, so that there's less space in the mind to wander off in thought.

The variation that I like of that is that—it especially works well I think if you feel your breathing in your body, in your torso—is find the place in your torso where the first sensations of breathing arise. Or maybe it's the place where you're centered most. If you're aware mostly of the breathing in the belly, it would be there, just there. And then from that place, feel the expansion that happens, the expansion of the torso. The rib cage expands, the belly expands perhaps, and the shoulders maybe lift slightly. Maybe the back ribcages also expand outwards, the space between the ribs opens up a little bit. So this expansion, but feel it almost like a wave of expansion that goes out through the whole torso, the whole body, that you easily experience. And even you can imagine that it kind of spreads out beyond the body.

And then on the exhale it all comes back. And there's this rhythm of expanding and contracting with a breath where somehow that feels like the breath kind of moves all the places in the body that the movement of breath touches. You're kind of opening to all of it on the inhale, and then opening or kind of allowing yourself to ride the return at the exhale. And this kind of rhythm of going out and in broadly through the whole body, the whole body that you easily experience with each breath.

And what's interesting to do—one very interesting thing that can happen this way is if you're feeling some strong emotions or moods. Like you feel anxiety or fear or sadness or happiness and enthusiasm or something. Prioritize that rhythm of expansion and contraction as if it goes through your mood, your emotional state, but untroubled by it. Don't get involved in your emotion, don't try to fix it, or try to judge it. Just like a matter of fact, you're just kind of walking through the weather of the day and your weather's not bothering you, and you just keep walking. You just kind of move through the sensations in your body connected to how youre feeling the emotions. And you just kind of massage it, you work through it without any concern about what it means or what you have to do or anything. Just kind of allowing it to be there, just moving that rhythm through it.

Same thing with sometimes there's certain levels of discomfort and pain. Same thing, just kind of feel it as the expansion comes, the whole, and then feel it as you go through it with the returning of the exhale. So breathing in, expanding the attention to feel the whole breath body, the whole experience in the body, and then the breathing. And then on the return, kind of follow that through the body as well. So hopefully this is understandable.

So, taking a posture for meditation, and gently closing your eyes.

And to begin the rhythm, you could do it intentionally and largely by taking some deep inhales and conscious long exhales. And with bigger inhales, maybe it's easier to feel all the places in the body that move and expand as you breathe in.

And you might even at the top of the inhale hold your breath for just a fraction of a moment. Just long enough that you can feel the pull, the draw, the desire to exhale. And then ride the exhale through your body, feel the return, the contracting, the pulling in all the way back to the place where there's no more sensations of breathing out.

Breathing in deeply. Exhaling fully.

And then letting the breathing return to normal, but continue with that rhythm. And now it's not as dramatic, but it's still, as you breathe in, feel it's almost like you're riding the expansion, riding the movement of filling throughout the torso. Sometimes I think of it as being a bird that's soaring, and it catches the updraft on the inhale. And then it glides through the air back to the ground on the exhale.

And since we're still beginning here, on the exhale you might also, for the next three or four exhales, relax whatever is being held or tight in your body, whatever is easy to relax.

And partly what you're experiencing is the impact, the influence that breathing has on the body. Allow yourself to be influenced by the breath. Allow yourself to expand as you breathe in, and to feel the sensations of your body. Allow yourself to release on the exhale, and feel all the sensations of your body that come into play as you exhale.

Where the focus is on that rhythm of movement through your body, let that be the center, so that you're not centered in your thinking, reacting, and preferences. Also, you're not centered in your emotions, but you're not ignoring them either. If there's a mood or emotion, feel it in your body and let that rhythm stay with a rhythm where the rhythm moves through the physical sensations of how you feel.

Like the waves wash up on the sandy shore over and over again, without any concern with the sand or the weather or anything, just keeps washing up and down. So see if you can ride the breathing, feeling your whole body as you breathe in, whole body as you breathe out, in that rhythm of expansion and contraction. As if it's forever untroubled by anything that it moves through, any way it feels.

And then as we come to the end of the sitting. If you're feeling the inhales as an expansion through the body, imagine that your care continues as you expand out across the land, out across the world. As if your heart can be open and expansive, and touch all the places, all the suffering in this world. And as you exhale, you return deeply inside yourself to touch the place where you care. Where your compassion, your love resides, your tenderness. It's in that rhythm of breathing in and breathing out, expanding as you breathe in, expanding outwards to the whole world. As the inhale comes, coming back, the sensations return, touching your place of care, friendliness, kindness, back and forth.

And may this meditation we've done together serve for our ability to care for this world. To care for our friends, our family, our neighbors, our strangers. To care for the whole world, so that maybe in some ways known and unknown, intentional or unintentionally, we live for the welfare and happiness of all. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings everywhere be free.

Dharmette: Satipaṭṭhāna (6) Breathing Aware of the Whole Body

Good day. And so we continue to explore, and I hope you explore, your capacity for awareness, for attention, and how the attention to breathing can be supportive and helpful.

And one of the ways it's helpful is that the more you can be connected to your breathing, following the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out, the less mental energy, attention is available to feed thinking. If all our attention, energy, mental energy goes into thinking, we reinforce it. And if what we're thinking about is not helpful, it's maybe debilitating even, that we're reinforcing that unhelpful kind of trains of thoughts. But if we pour our attention into the simplicity of breathing, then that is considered in Buddhism to be very wholesome and helpful, that leads to all kinds of good states of mind. Some people might feel like their concerns, what they have, are so important that they have to think them. Some people can't help because there's so much energy in thinking, so that even if they don't want to, it's just like the mind gets pulled into it so strongly. But it helps maybe to consider that sometimes we have to retreat from certain challenges to get refreshed. To put ourselves in a good state of mind so that we can come back and address them better.

That's one of the functions of meditation, is not to withdraw from life and not be part of it, but rather to step away in a sense by closing your eyes and meditating, not being involved in the usual things. But more importantly to step away from the mind's preoccupation with things long enough to get refreshed, long enough then to return with a better kind of inner eyesight, better wisdom as to how to address it.

So the rhythm of breathing is a place, so there's something about rhythms of things that it's easier to kind of stay and follow. Like the rhythm of the waves washing across the shore, some people just can watch it for a long time, just watching it, something about it that you wouldn't be if you're just at a completely still lake and the water is not moving. It doesn't have the same kind of absorption in it as the movement. So like a flowing river, for example, it's possible to watch that for a long time. Or watching a fire in the fireplace, just watch all the patterns of moving and coming and going and appearing and disappearing. It's much more stressful if you just fixate your attention on a single point someplace and then don't move it. There's something about the eyes moving gently and the mind moving gently, kind of following something lightly without doing work. And rather than stress, just kind of getting very relaxed about it. And so with the breathing, the idea is to kind of find that place of relaxed attention, like you're watching the river flow by, to watch the movements and the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out. And so if you're too focused on being concentrated and bear down on it, that's actually stressful. But if you don't have enough attention on the breathing, the mind will want to wander off into thought.

And the middle way between not having enough attention and having too much kind of tight attention is a kind of alertness of the mind that's relaxed, a kind of engagement with the breathing that's more like a play or more like love than it is like work. And so it does involve some kind of getting absorbed, getting involved in it, settling in. And that's one of the reasons why sometimes I give these images that go along with it. Like today I gave the image of the bird soaring on the in-breath. And somehow, as the updraft of the inhale, as the movements of the body that go up, to expand, occur, if you imagine that like your wings are catching that, then maybe it's a little more compelling to kind of 'oh, ride it,' and then sliding down again with the exhale. That might give a kind of a sense of how to do this without a lot of work but stay really closely connected to it. Or the image I like a lot is also, as I used, the waves washing up across the sandy shore, back and forth, back and forth. So I don't know if that works for all of you, but it's something that works for me in terms of helping me kind of find the right balance between not being tight or forceful in the attention, but also not too lax with it, just right there.

And it's with time, it's self-reinforcing. With time, as more attention goes into breathing and less into thinking, the mind finds itself more and more easy to get absorbed, to be present for it.

Now one of the things that can help also with the breathing is, in the current instructions, it's not just the breathing, but to ride the breath, be with the breath, and experience the whole body. We experience the whole breath body as all the different ways in which the movement of breathing comes into play in the body. Both coarse, the bigger ones like the movements of the chest perhaps or the diaphragm or the belly, but also more subtle. Like it could be the back rib cage, if you're very sensitive you can feel little movements of the spine as you move, maybe the upper spine can move. And sometimes I can feel it right down into my hip joint, I can feel ever so slightly an alternating sense of pressure and release of pressure as I breathe in and breathe out. The shoulders can move. So all these places in the body, and so this expansion into that breath body experience, the sensations of breathing.

And as we become aware of all that, chances are sometimes that that's also a place where you feel your emotions. Maybe you feel sadness in the area of the heart, and so that's also in the area of this expanding of the chest as you breathe. And so include that as part of experiencing the whole body. But include it not as an emotion at this point in the practice, but as just more physical sensations. It's almost like, you know, as the waves wash across the sand, maybe there's some seaweed there that's on there and it washes around, or a sandcastle someone built, and it mostly washes around it and is kind of untroubled by it, but just comes and goes and washes around it, to the side of it, and slowly the sandcastle dissolves. So maybe some of the difficult emotions dissolve if we just kind of let it rock, let it move, or let it be washed over. But the more important thing than it dissolving is to have the experience of feeling this physicality, the sensations of emotions, without being troubled by it, without making a story about it.

When we feel emotions as emotions, many of us have ideas, beliefs, concerns, identifications with it that make it sometimes more complicated than it needs to be. And to just feel the emotions, there's the physicality of it in this rhythm of breathing in and breathing out moving through you. And just feeling back and forth, back and forth, and no matter what happens, not being concerned with what happens with the emotions, just be concerned about moving through it and back and forth. And maybe it's a little bit like... I like the idea of petting a cat. So whatever is going on, the sensations, the awareness moving through the body, it's like just stroking a cat, stroking a cat, whether it's difficult or not. And so what we're learning here is how to be involved with breathing without getting pulled away into the world of the mind, and thoughts and ideas and concerns.

And as I've said before, this is not meant to be a denial or pushing away or dismissing of how we're feeling. But it is very respectful to feel the physicality of it without adding all the stuff on top of it. And also it's a way of becoming refreshed or creating more clarity so that we have a more useful way of being present for the challenges of our life. Then sometimes the usual way we bring along so much baggage with us as we go along. So learning to breathe through experiences, learning to breathe with experiences is one of the great skills that can come from this practice. And so whatever is happening, breathe with it, breathe through it, stay grounded in your breathing, and learn how to breathe with it, breathe through it. And you might find that you end up being more balanced that way. You might find that you become less reactive that way, less tense that way. Just breathe with whatever's happening.

So in these teachings of the Buddha, the Buddha begins by emphasizing taking a supportive meditation posture and establishing awareness with the breathing. So this is where we're anchored, this is where we're going to be rooted for the meditation. And the breathing, of course, it's not easy to be rooted there, but that's the understanding. And then become aware of what breathing feels like, the sensations of breathing. Get more familiar with it, and hang out with breathing and stay with it, and especially the rhythm of the breathing. And then as you get settled into it, then as you breathe in, feel the whole breath body, feel the whole influence that the movements of breathing have on the body. And as you exhale, feel the whole influence.

And why I use the word influence is that there's a lot of different ways in which breathing can affect us. Not just the physical movements of the body, but there's a kind of relaxation, there's an opening, there's a softening. There are all kinds of good emotional impacts that breathing can have. And so just to have the sense of allowing yourself to be influenced by it. Being open, rather than being the one who's directing the show, be the one who's receiving the full experience of breathing in throughout the body, the full experience of breathing out throughout the body.

So I hope that this kind of encouragement around breathing and exploring it and discovering it encourages you to take your time to become more familiar with your breathing. And more familiar with the skill of breathing with things and what's happening. Breathing through and breathing with the whole body, staying connected there even sometimes when you're talking or engaged in work. What happens if you're breathing with that experience? And even if you've meditated for a long time, I think there's always room to discover more and find greater value with breathing.

So if this appeals to you, you might spend the next 24 hours more with this experience of breathing in, experiencing the whole body; breathing out, experiencing the whole body. Just really feeling that experience. Get familiar with it, make it second nature to be connected to it, and discover all the things that open up when you're with your body, with your breathing, that maybe wouldn't open up if you just stay kind of locked into your mental concerns and thoughts.

So thank you, and I look forward to being here tomorrow.