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Guided Meditation: The Four Elements

So just beginning to settle in for meditation, perhaps closing the eyes if that's comfortable for you, and sensing into the place where you're sitting. Your seat, your cushion, your chair, bench, bed, or couch. Just have a sense of being in the sitting posture.

Maybe connect in with that contact point where your seat is touching, and also your feet or legs against the floor, having a sense of stability. Sometimes we can even sense three-pointed stability. It's a very stable way to be sitting. Just relax and allow yourself to be supported by whatever you're relying on.

Bringing a sense of straightness to the spine, perhaps trusting that the body itself can find a posture that is both upright and relaxed—one that is supported from the inside, but not tense. As an extra support for our posture, we can gently soften areas that tend to be tense. So the face, particularly the eyes, and the jaw. Softening down through the throat and the shoulders, letting the shoulder blades slide down the back so that the heart moves forward a bit in the posture. Softening the arms, and then down into the belly area. Letting the belly fall forward, away from the spine, and also letting the low back muscles fall away from the spine. We just have the support of the bones without a lot of tension around them. Down into the hips, the thighs, the calves, and into the ankles and the feet. Just inviting ease to whatever degree is possible today.

For any parts of the body that don't feel at ease or that you couldn't feel very well, we just have mental ease about that. The body is fine as it is right now. We might open to the idea of the body as a friend. Just like our friend is fine as they are when they come to our house, the body is fine right now. You can just open to it mindfully with kind attention, feeling what it has to offer us right now through various sensations.

We may wish to tune into the sensations of breathing coming in and going out, just letting the breath be as it is. Or we may sense into the energy level of the body, the subtle sensations of having a body. Just rest for a moment and allow the simplicity of the bodily sensations to help calm the mind.

Today we will focus on the experience of the body, which is often different from our idea of the body—the concepts that we bring to it. The encouragement today will be to tune into something more simple, maybe more basic than what our mind does with the body. I'll offer a series of four perceptions that we may find in our body, four types of sensations that relate to how it's actually sensed.

First, you may notice in your experience of the body that there are experiences of hardness or solidity, the solid parts of the body, and the structure that's holding you up. There is some hardness there. Perhaps you feel it where you're touching against the cushion or the chair, sensing that part of the experience of the body is hardness or solidity. In the Buddhist teachings, these are related to elements; this would be the earth element. The corresponding feeling of softness is also part of the earth element. There are feelings all throughout the body of this hardness or solidity, and we can tune into those. We can understand that this kind of solidity is really the same as what we feel in external objects. The table or the cup that we hold also feels solid in a certain way. That's the experience, and it's the same—it's the earth element.

The second type of experience we have in the body is that of liquidity or wetness, the water element. We feel this easily in the mouth. Sometimes we can sense it in the eyes or if there's any sweat. This is the water element of the body. It's more subtle, but still, there are these easy places to detect it. The water element is also related to the cohesion of the body. In the same way that when we go to the beach and we're out on the sand, it's very dry, but as we walk towards the water, there comes a place where it becomes more solid and actually easy to walk on. That's where the sand gets wet and has enough water to hold it together. This is happening in the body also. The water element is the cohesion of the body. We can sense into that all throughout the body. This water element is really the same as the water in rivers and lakes, the water in our home. It's all the water element.

The third experience in the body is one of temperature, of heat and coolness. We may notice that the hands may be warm, or sometimes they're cool. Often the torso area is warm. As we tune into the quality of temperature, we'll find it variable throughout the body. This is the fire element. At different times, different parts are warm or cool. We can just feel how it is now, this quality of temperature. We can understand that this heat is the same as the experience of temperature we have externally—the warmth or heat of the sun, or the coolness in the shade. It's all the fire element.

In addition to the solidity, liquidity, and heat we feel throughout the body, there is also a sense of motion. The body is dynamic; it's not static. So there's a sense of movement, the air element. It is most easily discerned in the breath coming in and going out, which causes movement all through the body, but there are other movements going on. The gut is moving while it's digesting; we may tune into that. Other energetic sensations and literal movements of the muscles—all of this is the air element. Tuning into that sense throughout the body, we can see this is really the same as the blowing of the wind outside. The world of motion that we live in, it's all related to the air element.

As we rest in these flowing sensations, just open your perception and let it move between solidity, liquidity, heat, and motion. Feel the body as the union, the dance, and the sum of all of these, knowing that the body is part of nature. It's one more process like all of those we experience externally. We may sense a certain ease and lightness in perceiving the body this way. It's so natural, so simple, not very personal. It may even bring some happiness. Can we just rest in these simple experiences of nature?

Reflections on the Elements

As we practice seeing the body in terms of these four elements, which highlights the experiential aspect of how the body really feels, we free ourselves from various fixed ideas we might carry about our body. We let go of things that are more concepts or ideas instead of the actual experience. This shift—moving from what is conceptual, idea-based, and abstract to what is actually real in our experience—is much of what we do in practice. We discover that we have many fixed ideas about ourselves, the world, and other people. If we can just open to more of what the actual experience is—the sensations, the reality—we become freer. We can have a freer response to these things.

As we go out into the world, how else might we have this light feeling, freed from our usual ways of seeing things? Would there be some way, even just a little bit, to see things more as just nature? How might this more useful way of seeing be supportive of other people? Maybe this kind of ease, flexibility, and willingness to meet the experience could open a space for more kindness, more compassion, and more willingness to be a little flexible. Sometimes, even relaxing and opening a bit brings a surprise that we couldn't have anticipated. When we look back, we think, "Ah, of course."

May your openness to your body, seeing it in a different way, be supportive to the people around you and to the whole world. As we go out into today, or the afternoon or evening, keep in mind that there can be a difference between the actual experience and our ideas and concepts. Try to tend toward the actuality of the moment. May this bring peace, lightness^[1], and kindness into the world.

The Depth of the Body (4 of 4): The Body as a Vehicle of Insight

Today we come to the final talk in our series on the depth of the body, and we'll talk about how the body can play a role in insight practice. I'm amazed at how fruitful it has been and continues to be to work with the body both on and off the cushion. Actually, troubles with my body are what got me into meditation, and even after many years, I can say that it just goes deeper and deeper. The Buddhist teachings support this idea. It is said that practicing with the body in the right way can lead all the way to liberation from suffering. There's quite a lot of potential there, but to do that, we need to take a dharma perspective in looking at the body.

Despite living in our body for many years, we may actually know very little about it from a dharma perspective because that's not necessarily our usual way of seeing it. We could start to ask questions like, what is the body, really? The sense of the body is so different at different times. Imagine how different you feel when you're hungry, sick, tired, or sleeping; when you're meditating, or when you're doing a headstand. All of these are very different experiences. Is it even correct to say "this is the body," much less "my body"? It seems like it's a different thing from moment to moment.

Body practice is wonderful because it can be approached at any level. We've explored a number of them this week. The body is immediately accessible at a surface level, and there are times when it's the most obvious part of our experience. But also, with certain practices that we do often in meditation, the body can open to deeper and deeper layers. It can become very subtle, and it can eventually reveal new perspectives on experience.

Through dharma practice, we are learning to see the body in new ways. Maybe this is our greatest teacher, and it's very close at hand. Our greatest teacher might be right here with us. The body that we see in the mirror—with its eyes, nose, shoulders, skin, hair, and round belly—is just one way to perceive it. We are strongly conditioned to see our body in this very conceptual way because we've done that for so long, and that is the perspective supported by other people and society around us. Many of the classical body meditations and contemplations are designed to undermine or break down these habitual concepts. They are designed to get us to see things in a different way—not because this conventional way is wrong, but because it is only one possibility, and we limit ourselves if we just use one.

When we do this, we start to see the body differently, and it becomes more accurate to begin seeing the body more experientially. That opens a path toward wise understanding. The body can be a vehicle through which we start to understand more deeply how things work.

We can take the example of what we just did in the meditation: the four elements meditation. If you're interested in where that is found, it's in the key instructions that we have on mindfulness in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta^[2] (MN 10). This practice of the four elements asks us to touch into the experience of the body, which is actually a mixture of different experiences. The ones highlighted are the solidity, liquidity, heat, and motion found throughout the body. These are not fundamentally different from external experiences—the things we encounter all the time in the world around us. In the cup I'm holding, I have some water. It has a certain temperature. It moves when I shake the glass. Right there, we have the four elements.

It's interesting to consider: when I take this water in, at what point does it become part of my body as opposed to outside of my body? Maybe it already is because it has disappeared, but on the other hand, it's still just in my belly. Where is that dividing line? We don't need to get deeply philosophical into this, but when we start to look just a little bit more carefully, we immediately see that there are questions about the division between internal and external. It can get subtle and not as obvious as we think. When we divide things up conceptually into words like "internal" and "external," those are nice words, but where do they really shift from one to the other? Where are the boundaries? It's not so clear.

When we look at our experience, we also see that these things are shifting and changing. There is continual change about what is internal and external in breathing every single moment. We start to see the inconstancy, impermanence, and changing nature of the body, of experience, and of this internal/external divide. This leads to important insights, even at this very basic level of experience, into anicca^[3] (impermanence or inconstancy), and then also toward anatta^[4] (not-self). I mean, really, what part of this is yours? This is worth exploring because it is an area of a lot of suffering.

All of this is beginning to take a dharma perspective on the body. We meet the actual experience of the body rather than our concepts about it. We start to ask questions around the edges to play with the ways our concepts might be restricting us. For example, we have concepts like "knee" or "back." Usually, when we talk about pain, we say, "my knee hurts." As Joseph Goldstein^[5] says, "There is no sensation called knee." And it's true! If you look into what is hurting right now, there isn't one experience called "knee." That is a concept. But when we look at the actual experience, we see that the pain is tension, heat, pulling, or sharpness. These are words that are much more specific than the concept of "pain." We can meet our experience at that level, grounding ourselves in actual sensations, and we'll find that our experience of that pain changes. Our response to it and our possibilities of how we can be with it also open up. We are learning flexibility around experience, and this has a lot to do with freedom—having a freer response than when we are locked into only one way of seeing things.

As we experience that the body is ever-changing from moment to moment, it is very natural to understand that the body is not going to last forever in this form. It is quite finite. Certainly, it has undergone a lot of change to get to the point where you are now. Isn't your body very different than it was 10, 20, or maybe 50 years ago? Yes, of course. And it will continue to be different. That's called aging. Eventually, something will end there. It is important to begin contemplating in these directions. We do it gently, as everybody is in a different place regarding how they want to approach the finiteness of the body, but one of the easiest ways to start turning our mind in this direction is simply to notice endings of all types.

Everything ends. Our normal, non-dharma way of perceiving is that we like beginnings, so we rush on to the next new thing. We prefer what is new and young to what is old and decaying. So, we can start noticing things that are decaying or ending in very simple, external ways. We can notice leaves dropping from the trees as fall begins. We can notice flowers wilting. We can also notice when gatherings of friends come to an end. Pause to recognize endings. Begin to flavor the mind with the notion that there are beginnings and there are endings. This is taking a very simple, realistic dharma perspective on life—seeing the reality of how things are actually coming and going.

There are times when it will be challenging to stay with reflections like this. If that's the case, you don't have to. But it is fine to touch into this from time to time—to consider that the body is going toward a certain end. At some point, we may need patience to really take in the reality of the body, its ever-changing nature, its finitude, and its impersonality. These can be challenging to see into. Sometimes we have the sense, "Whoa, is this what I signed up for?" Yes, it is. That's what having this body entails.

Truly, the body is our friend. It is always in the present moment, and it is always honest. The mind can be very tricky, but the body is pretty honest. It gently but persistently serves as a very deep dharma teacher. Our closest teacher is very close at hand, and who could ask for a better friend? As we talked about earlier this week, Venerable Ānanda^[6], the attendant of the Buddha, said there is no friend like mindfulness of the body.

I hope you have gained some deeper appreciation of the depth of the body and its potential power in our dharma practice. We want to learn how things work and gain the kind of wisdom that will help us live well and serve the world well. The body is a great vehicle and a great teacher for that. Perhaps you will honor your body in some way today. What a gift it is that we have this teacher for the short time that we do. So much appreciation for your presence and your dharma practice. I wish you all very well. Thank you.