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Mindfulness of the Body (1 of 5) The Conscious Body

Introduction

Thank you. So that I won't forget later, I want to apologize for Friday. Some of you were coming to the Zoom community meeting we had after the morning sitting, and I set up the Zoom room with the wrong account. We have a 100-person account and a 500-person account, and I used the 100-person account, so some of you tried to get in and the room was full. I'm very sorry for that, and I missed having you there. The first chance we have, maybe in a few weeks on a Friday, we'll do another one, and I'll be sure to do it the right way. For this next two weeks, I'm also teaching a two-week retreat, so when this finishes at 7:45, I need to get ready for the retreat each day.

Mindfulness of the Body

The theme for this week is mindfulness of the body. Over these last three weeks, we've covered three important areas of mindfulness: mindfulness of breathing, mindfulness of thinking, and mindfulness of emotion. Now we come to mindfulness of the body. Perhaps one of the rationales for that sequence during this last month is that everything we learn about mindfulness of breathing, thinking, and emotions sets the stage to really be able to enter into mindfulness of the body.

For the Buddha, mindfulness of the body was one of the most important practices. He emphasized it tremendously. He talked about how much goodness, how many benefits come from mindfulness of the body. He taught that it's a protection from all kinds of unsavory forces that come our way or arise within us. It's an incubator for some of the best wholesome qualities we have. It's where we can discover the path of Dharma that unfolds, the deepening and opening of the path. The Buddha even talked about awakening itself in this way: that there is no awakening without there being mindfulness of the body. There is no experience of the deathless without mindfulness of the body.

The Conscious Body

Some people find it perplexing that the body is emphasized so much. For some, the body is just a hunk of meat that's useful for carrying us around, and the body is kind of senseless and pointless. But as meditation practice deepens, the body makes more and more sense, in that it becomes more sensitive. This heightened sensitivity and attunement with the body provides a tremendous amount of information: a freeing of energy, a vitality, and a steeper sensitivity to where freedom can be found, where clinging and contraction exists, and how to release it.

What's very interesting about the Buddhist teachings on the body is that when he talks about the body, he's not talking about the physical body in and of itself, but rather the physical body in how it's experienced. It's the experienced body that we're practicing with in meditation, not strictly speaking the physical body. It's the sensate body, the somatic^[1] body, the conscious body, the animated body.

Although he doesn't do it explicitly, in one set of teachings the contrast that the Buddha seems to give is between a corpse that has no sensations, no thoughts, and no consciousness, and the subjective experience of the bodies we have. All the sensations we experience are there because we're alive; they're part of our animated system, the vitality of our nervous system.

From a Buddhist point of view, the mind and body are not so separate. Perhaps the mind spreads out throughout the whole body because it's how we're conscious and aware of the body, which is the only body that we actually can know. A researcher, scientist, or doctor might know something about your physical body, but from the inside out, how we experience, feel, and sense our body is a deep subjective experience.

Dropping Into the Subjective Experience

Of course, we can live in our heads, in our thoughts and ideas. Because of that, we can treat the body as an object and think about parts of our bodies almost as if they are external from us. We sit in the control tower with all kinds of ideas about the body—we don't like parts of it, we like parts of it, we have concerns with it—and it's treated like a thing that we can think about. It puts us back in the world of "aboutness" that we talked about some weeks ago; thinking is often about "aboutness." We're thinking about the body and are therefore a little bit removed from the body itself, from the subjective experience of the body.

Meditation is to drop more and more deeply into the subjective experience of the body, into how the mind is aware of the conscious body. It turns out there's a world of difference between the body that we're aware of from the inside out and the body that we're not aware of. The breathing that we're mindful of is very different from the breathing that we're not mindful of. It's almost like we have two bodies: the body that we go about in without much consciousness, attention, or centeredness, and the body that we are very conscious of, where awareness diffuses the body and we're centered and aware of what goes on.

These two modes are so radically different it's almost like we have two separate bodies, and I kind of believe that to some degree they operate differently. The more conscious and relaxed we are, the more the whole system works in a healthy, harmonious way.

For the purposes of meditation, this deep subjective experience of the body starts giving us a feedback loop or an understanding of how we're changing, how we're developing, and how meditation deepens. The experience of the body is not a fixed thing. Our subjective experience of our body is intimately connected to the state of our mind. The more concentrated we are, the more the experience of the body changes.

People who don't meditate might feel or sense their body as a solid hunk of hardness with clear boundaries. But as the mind gets concentrated and still, more mindful and more sensitive, the body becomes more fluid, more receptive, softer, more spacious, and more open in a fantastic kind of way. It stops being hard or fixed.

Relaxing and Softening Tensions

One of the things that was interesting for me in my early years of meditation was that my body would get very relaxed and soft, but there would be some little lump of hardness or tension somewhere in my body. I would go over there, bring attention to that, and with time it would begin to dissolve as well. It was like I was going through the layers in the body of where tensions were held.

When I first started meditating, I had a lot of tension in my body. My stomach was always tense, my jaws were tense, my eyes were kind of tense, and my shoulders were much higher than they are now. As I began softening, I started seeing the more subtle places of holding. Then they would dissolve, and as they dissolved, the sense of the body being hard and lumpy receded. The body started feeling like a dynamic, fluid, open field of energy with lots of space.

Is that experience of the body more or less accurate than the experience of the body we have walking around being tense, upset, and feeling hard and boundaried? They're all just products of the mind, to a big degree. The quality and state of the mind isn't necessarily right or wrong in a sense, but one is conducive to greater freedom, compassion, and love. This ability for the body not to be tight and armored opens up so much potential that's needed to awaken in order for this path of practice to unfold.

Meditating with Receptivity

In this last guided meditation I did, one of the primary points I was trying to make is that the more relaxed the body can be, the more receptive it is. This idea of meditating with receptivity is a very important quality for meditation. Meditating with assertiveness—like, "I'm going to make something happen," or "It's all about me controlling and directing my meditation"—tends to create more tension or limitation. It doesn't create the room for receptivity.

Instead of being assertively focused, we can focus on being receptive and relaxed. As we get concentrated, for example on the breathing, it's a receptive concentration and a settling. The word that is often translated as concentration in the teachings of the Buddha is samatha^[2], which literally means to settle, though it is often closely connected to samādhi^[3].

So there's a settling that can happen when we're receptive to relaxation, receptive to settling, and receptive to taking in and experiencing what goes on. In relationship to breathing, we're receptive to the influence that breathing has on us. Breathing is not a neutral or just a mechanical thing; it's at the nexus of so much of our whole life. To sit and allow yourself to be receptive to the influence breathing has on you allows the breathing to condition and open your body. It begins showing you more and more how wonderful the conscious body is—the somatic body, the body that is suffused with awareness from the inside out. It becomes a place to rest, a place to trust, and a place where greater and greater freedom can arise.

Thank you for this. That's the theme for this week: mindfulness of the body.