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: (2 of 5) Foundations of Vipassana - The Body

Let's see, where was I? I was introducing myself. My name is Mei Elliott, and good morning. Here we are in the midst of a week-long study on the foundations of Vipassana meditation. Yesterday, we focused on the breath, and today we'll be talking about the body. These are the basic meditation instructions one receives at Insight Meditation Center and many of the Western Vipassana centers in California and around the U.S.

I'd like to begin our sitting with a quote, and we'll have a little more silence in the sitting today than yesterday. The quote goes like this, this is from Kate Johnson: "The language of the body is sensation, and feeling is the way we listen." The language of the body is sensation, and feeling is the way we listen.

So let's begin our meditation with a stable, upright posture. Finding an upright and energetic space to be in, an energetic spine. Perhaps maybe some lifting in the neck, and pairing that with some relaxation, some ease.

You might start by connecting with your primary anchor. That might be the breath, a global sense of the body, or a sense of sound. For the simplicity of the instructions, we'll just talk about the breath. So go ahead and connect with the breath where you feel it most predominantly. Maybe in the chest, the belly, or the nose. Allowing the mind to collect and stabilize.

In order to support us in learning the language of the body, we'll spend some time exploring one particular area in the body, and we'll do this with the hands. Go ahead and choose one of your hands and bring your attention to that hand, and see what you notice. Because the body speaks in the language of sensations, you might feel tingling, or temperature, buzzing, or movement. Maybe there's a global sense of the hand. There's the whole hand being felt, not a picture of the hand in the mind, but a felt sense of the hand from the inside.

And as we feel the hand, we're not trying to make it any different than it is. We're not judging anything or telling stories about our hand. Just feeling. Feeling between the fingers, where the skin meets the nail beds. Just exploring the territory. Feeling the flesh of the hand, the muscles, and feeling the bones. If the sensations are pleasant, that's okay. If they're unpleasant, that's okay. It's just observing with a kind and gentle awareness.

You can move your attention to your other hand and explore in the same way, seeing what you notice. Exploring in this way gives us a sense of how we might feel into sensations elsewhere in the body. Listening for feeling: temperature, pressure, tingling, sharpness, softness, etc.

We can now let go of our focus on the hands. Go ahead and return to your primary anchor, coming back to the breath. From here, the way that you might incorporate more of the body into your meditation is by staying with the breath as the anchor. But when something else feels more predominant—maybe a sensation in the knee, tightness in the shoulder, coldness of the toes—when something else becomes predominant, you can allow your attention to let go of the breath and to go to that sensation, that new sensation. The mind can feel that sensation, and when it begins to lose predominance, then we return to the breath.

So the breath is still our home, but the awareness can venture out to other areas of the body when they call for our attention, and then coming back to the breath. You can go ahead and try that now through the meditation.

You can add a soft mental note. When breathing, you might make a quiet internal note, saying "in" and as you breathe "out." And then, as another sensation calls the attention, we might say "tingling," or "pressure." It's just a light mental note with the majority of the attention on the sensations being felt.

As we sit attending to our primary anchor, the breath, can we apply our attention to the breath and maintain contact with it? Aiming and sustaining, vitakka and vicara^[1]. Staying in contact with the full length of the inhale, and the full length of the exhale. Aiming and sustaining contact. When another sensation arises—heaviness, lightness, length, whatever it is—allowing the mind to connect with that new sensation and feel it completely. Then returning to the breath.

Thoughts and emotions may still arise, but for now, we allow them to fall to the background, letting them go. Dedicating our attention to the breath and the physical sensations.

By practicing mindfulness of the body, we can learn to be more present in the world. The body is always in the present. We can become more able to be with things as they are, to live with less greed, hatred, or delusion. And when we're able to do that, we can be more available, more kind, more generous, and more compassionate with others.

So may the goodness of this practice benefit all beings everywhere, so they may be happy, healthy, safe, and free.

Thank you.

Dharmette: (2 of 5) Foundations of Vipassana - The Body

Good morning again, everyone. It's so nice to be here with you. If you are just arriving, my name is Mei Elliott, and here we are in the midst of our week-long study on the foundations of Vipassana meditation. Yesterday was on the breath, today we're talking about mindfulness of body.

The Wisdom of the Body

There was an experiment done by the University of Iowa some years ago where they made a gambling game that consisted of four decks. Each of the cards in the decks either awarded money or detracted money, and the task of the player was to make as much money as possible. Unbeknownst to the player, some of the decks provided great gains, but even greater losses. So in essence, these were "bad" decks, and the only way to win the game was to pull from a "good" deck.

It took 40 to 50 cards of sampling from all the different decks before a participant caught on and could consciously avoid a bad deck. Now, during the game, a participant would be hooked up to electrodes measuring biometrics, and this is where the study got interesting. Despite not being able to identify the good deck until about 40 or 50 cards, the participants' bodies showed a stress reaction when they hovered their hand over a bad deck only about 10 cards into the game.

This stress reaction happened long before the player consciously recognized that the bad deck would produce a losing hand. Ten cards in, the body reacts. Forty to 50 cards in, the player can consciously name the pattern. Somehow, the body was exhibiting stress signals—some sense of risk or danger associated with that deck—30 to 40 cards before the thinking mind caught on.

For me, this points to the wisdom of the body. The body is giving us signals all the time, and what could we learn from the body if we really trained in listening to it? It has so much to teach us. Again, the quote that I shared at the beginning of the meditation: "The language of the body is sensation, and feeling is the way we listen."

The Movies of the Mind

It's hard to listen. We're so often distracted. I used to live at Tassajara^[2], a secluded Zen monastery in the Ventana Wilderness, and in the valley where the monastery was located, instruments would play to call the residents to the meditation hall. So when we'd hear the han^[3]—this wooden block being hit—we would know that it was time for zazen^[4], for meditation. One of my friends would often remark at the sound of the han, "Oh, it's time to go to the movies."

I thought that was apt, because sometimes sitting in meditation can feel a lot like sitting down to a fantasy film, or maybe a drama, or a horror film, or if we're lucky, maybe a romance. Our habits of rumination are a lot like watching blockbuster hits. When we sit down to meditate, often it's hard to attend to the language of the body. It's hard to actually hear it because it's drowned out by the films of our mind.

As we become more settled, then we begin to enjoy the peace and ease of simplicity. The peace and ease of resting in the body. We realize that the blockbuster hits, no matter how enjoyable they seem to be, are actually pretty agitating. Being lost in thought, replaying these movies, is a little like being out on the tiny limbs of a tree, being blown about by a storm. This is an analogy that Gil^[5] often shares. It's like we've lived our lives on the tiny branches.

As we learn to be still and present, it's a little like coming off the tiny branches closer to the trunk of the tree. It's a little more stable. We're blown about less. And eventually, we can come right into the heartwood, where we're not blown about by the worldly winds^[6]. We don't need to be blown by them. We don't need to be blown by praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and pain, fame and disrepute.

Making Our Home in the Body

The more that we live in the thought world, the more we lose touch with our life as we experience it through the filter of our thoughts and our perceptions. So we end up lacking a sensitivity to our experience. Given that, we then seek greater intensity, and we want louder, and bigger, and tastier experiences. We need that greater intensity in order to feel anything. Without training in being in the body, once we get what we've been seeking, we don't really know how to be present for it.

The Buddha stressed over and over the importance of the body because, of course, the body is always in the present. The mind, with its many distractions, stirs up a lot of trouble, but the body is always here. Our practice is just learning to land in it, learning to make our home in the body. In this practice, you'll often hear teachers talking about letting go, but what are we letting go into? We're letting go into the body.

How do we do that? How do we feel it? It starts by making contact, just being here. Learning to love the simple ease of whatever is seen, or heard, or smelled, or tasted, or touched.

To do this without getting lost in commentary about the body is difficult, and it can help to be curious. This is something we talked about yesterday when talking about mindfulness of breathing: the way that curiosity is like glue for the present. It keeps us connected to the present. If we can get interested in sensations and how things feel, we can think about it like being a scientist exploring the inner world.

Exploring the Inner World

In the early 90s, there was this cartoon on TV called The Magic School Bus. In it, Ms. Frizzle, the zany science teacher, would take her students on these unlikely field trips inside the human body. She would do this by shrinking the school bus down to the size of a peanut, miniaturizing the students, and then they would drive the bus into a bowl of Cheetos or something like that. Then poor Arnold, the one student who always missed the school field trips, would grab a handful of Cheetos and inadvertently ingest the school bus. From there, the field trip would begin, and all of the kids in the science class would learn about the anatomy of the human body while literally coursing through the digestive tract or riding on a blood vessel being pumped through the bloodstream.

That's all to say that I sometimes think about mindfulness of body as a little like being on a field trip with Ms. Frizzle. When we're exploring the body from the inside, I sometimes think of it like I'm one of those miniature scientists exploring the inner world. And like Ms. Frizzle, when we sit and practice being in the body, we actually are within it. We're entering into the human body and exploring it from the inside.

We're like, "Wow, you know, the jaw feels like this when it's clenched," or "When the stomach produces sensations of hunger, it feels like this," or "This is what it's like when the mouth feels dry." Can we bring the same curious, clear, non-judgmental attention that the scientist has to our exploration of the body?

Working with Unpleasant Sensations

Now, sometimes when we're investigating the body, we encounter something difficult. We encounter something painful. I want to say a little bit about working with unpleasant sensations. As you practice in the body, you may notice that some sensations are hard to be with, or that there's pain. This is a natural experience, of course, and our job isn't to reject or hate the discomfort, but rather just to be aware of it. Can we practice being non-reactive to that which is uncomfortable?

What's so powerful about that practice is that in doing so, we grow our bandwidth for being with the full spectrum of difficulty of human life without being unskillful in our reactions to it. We grow our ability to be with what's uncomfortable without reacting unskillfully. When unpleasant sensations arise, we might bring our interest to the pain. We might explore the sensations that make up this idea that we call pain. Sometimes when we explore closely, we find that there are only moments of aching, burning, pressure, or tightness. It's kind of a kaleidoscope of sensations, and that there isn't actually something there, something fixed called "pain," just a kaleidoscope of sensations. Sometimes that can unlock some of the rigidity that the mind holds around our idea of what the pain is.

That's a great practice to do if the discomfort isn't too extreme. But if the discomfort is really intense, you can also allow the attention to go elsewhere in the body, somewhere more comfortable to rest, to a more neutral sensation. This is a way that we can resource. Say if the back hurts, we might allow the attention to go to the breath. Maybe go to the breath in the belly, or go to the feet, or somewhere that feels neutral. Another place that we can go if there's discomfort in the body is to pay attention to sounds as our primary anchor and give ourselves a little spaciousness.

Of course, it's really important to know the limits of our bodies and to respect those limits. Not pushing ourselves to sit in or hold postures that might exacerbate an injury, for example. So it's always okay to consciously choose to move, to shift postures, to readjust during a meditation period. Doing it mindfully, doing it with awareness, such that we can be present and also that we can be compassionate with ourselves.

Enjoying Pleasant Sensations

Unpleasant sensations aren't all we find in meditation. We can also experience incredibly pleasant sensations. The body can be filled with lightness, with ease, with relaxation, or spaciousness. If an area of the body feels pleasant, you can allow yourself to enter into that sensation, to feel it fully, and to be nourished by it.

Our renunciation practice doesn't mean that we can't experience what's beautiful. Suffering comes from clinging, from craving, not from meeting what's pleasant. You can enjoy a pleasant sensation. If there's a pleasant sensation in the body, you might enjoy it kind of like sliding into a bath and just allowing yourself to soak there and really take it up. Allow your attention to rest in the pleasantness. And then, of course, when that sensation goes—because it will—not clinging to it, not grasping after it.

Review of the Practice

I'd like to end by just doing a little review of how you might continue practicing with the body, which is what I talked about in the meditation. When we sit down to meditate, it can be really helpful to start with mindfulness of breathing. We're directing our attention to that sense of inhaling and exhaling. Then from there, we expand our meditation to include other sensations in the body. The breath is still our primary anchor, but we can begin to include sensations elsewhere as they present themselves. We still have a preference for the breath, but when something else becomes strong in the body, then we allow our attention to go to that sensation. We feel it until it's faded away, and then we return our attention to the primary anchor of the breath. That's a little bit of what your practice could look like at this phase of the instructions.

I hope that these teachings have inspired you to let go into the body, to let go of the narratives of your minds, and maybe come in off the tiny branches and enter into the heartwood of your life.

I hope that you all have a wonderful day today, and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow for a discussion of mindfulness of emotions. Thank you so much, everyone. Take care.