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Guided Meditation: The Energy of the Body

Okay, good morning. So we'll go ahead and get started now with the meditation. Just settling in to where you are. Perhaps closing the eyes if that's comfortable for you. Having a sense of taking your place, finding the spot where you're going to sit or stand or lie down, and feeling into how it is for the body to be in that posture right now. Just an overall sense of the body.

Then bringing attention to the place where you're sitting, the place that's supporting you. The chair or the cushion, or maybe the couch or bed, and just feeling the balance of the body against that surface. And letting it support you, letting go of it to be supported by your seat and ultimately by the earth.

Finding some balance. Sometimes I rock back and forth a little bit or forward and back just to find that middle point, or something close, close enough so that it doesn't take so much effort to be upright.

And perhaps taking a breath that's a little deeper than usual, and then on the exhale letting the body soften. Maybe imagining it expanding a little bit.

Softening the face and the eyes. Even softening the thinking muscle in the brain if you can imagine that. And down through the throat and the shoulders, down into the chest area and the torso. It can help to imagine the spine as a support and everything else relaxing around that.

Softening down through the belly, into the legs. Letting go of any sense of bracing, and on out to include the feet and the hands.

If we've been busy up in our head thinking or reading something on the screen or talking, we may want to imagine bringing the energy down into the body. Letting the energy of the mind spread out through the body softly.

Perhaps sensing how there's an aspect of the body that is an extension of the mind. If we have an emotion or a mood or a predominant thought we've been caught up in, there may be some echo of that in the body. And we just notice that, just have mindfulness of that. You don't need to change anything.

So intending to use the body as the main object of mindfulness for this sitting. And if at any time that becomes uncomfortable or difficult, it's possible to remember the ground where you're sitting, feel that connection, or to open the eyes. But if you can, staying with the simple energies of the body. The various sensations it has coming and going. It's a very rich area of practice just to be with that.

Perhaps using the natural physical sensations of breathing as a gentle rhythm in the background, flowing through the body.

Exploring if the space of the body and the general stillness of the body can begin to calm the mind even just a little bit. Even if the body is not a very comfortable place today, there's a way in which its steadiness can support the mind. Often the body is moving a little slower than the mind, and that can be useful in meditation.

As we continue to settle into the body, soften the muscles, we may sense a kind of energy in the body. Not always, but maybe a kind of a subtle sense of vibration or flow. Warmth sensations a bit below the more surface-level sensations of muscles and skin. And just including that in the mindfulness.

And it may be that as we tune into the energy of the body, we sometimes encounter tight spots or knots, or areas that feel constricted or like a wall. Any of these are normal. And one way to include them in the meditation is to create some space around such a spot. Allow the attention to be broader than that, and not get drawn into the tight area. And just let it be in that broader attention.

That may be enough, or it may be possible to gently pass the breath energy through such a spot. But just generally giving it space, seeing how that is.

As we continue, widening the mind to include the heart. So bringing in a sense of care, of love for this body. Softening this connection between the mind and the body to a sense of compassion.

The body holds quite a bit. And as the body supports the mind, the mind supports the body. So touching in with the breath, breathing in and out. Perhaps smiling a bit in the mind. Feeling the mutual friendliness between mind and body.

If there's been any sense of ease or peace or appreciation emerging through today's sit, allowing that to pervade the mind and the body, even if it's just a little bit. Moving toward a unification, a wholeness.

As we gently begin to bring the mind out of meditation, you can imagine bringing our whole body and mind out into our life today. Remembering the way that we can bring space around areas that are tight. Remembering that there are layers below the surface going on.

And if this is true for us, it's true for others. So we can bring our wholeness and our gentleness and our understanding of how it is to be human into our interactions today. Perhaps with a sense of "just like me." Just like me, others have these layers, and others have a wholeness. We're connected in this mind and body of being human.

So we turn toward how we can help, how we can be supportive, how we can love those around us. How we can be at ease in all the ups and downs of the world.

May our body carry us through the day in a way that's useful and helpful. Offers some degree of peace to this world in whatever way we can.

May all beings be at ease.

The Depth of the Body (2 of 4): Four Bodily Knots

So this series is called The Depth of the Body, and we talked yesterday about how the body is a place to feel many of the energies of life. The very process of life is occurring here. Many mind states impact the body in various ways, and we can get a lot of information through mindfulness of the body. It very much helps us to be less reactive and to have more wisdom in the moment.

But it can be that as we do more mindfulness of the body practice, we will start to encounter sensations in the body that seem to be longer lasting, and that may not be about something that seems to be immediately happening in the present moment. So we can encounter what are called bodily knots, where the energy is frequently restricted in a similar way. We always have a particular tight spot, you know, we sit down to meditate and after five or ten minutes we feel a sense of hardness in the shoulder for example. These things are very normal. I want to first of all normalize them.

And so in this case, we have the body informing the mind. We have something going on in the body that's quite normal. Very many people encounter this. And in the suttas^[1], there is a teaching about four kinds of bodily knots, and it's an interesting list, not so frequently taught, so I thought we could have a look at that today, at least as a start.

So here's Bhikkhu Bodhi's^[2] translation of this sutta: "There are these four knots. What four? The bodily knot of covetousness, the bodily knot of ill will, the bodily knot of distorted grasp of rules and vows, and the bodily knot of adherence to dogmatic assertion of truth."

Don't worry, we're going to unpack those into clearer language. And then it goes on to say that the Eightfold Path, what we practice in this tradition, is the way to understand and develop the mind to overcome these particular knots. So let's talk about these.

I think the first two are fairly easy to understand. So the first knot is covetousness or envious desire. My dictionary said it means inordinate desire, often for the possessions of others. And the sutta is saying that covetousness creates a bodily knot. So if we're fixated on wanting something that we don't have, it can create a tight spot in our body. In the language I'm using here, that would be in the energetics of our body. This might make some intuitive sense as if we're grasping for something, there would be an impact in the body, and we can also experience this.

And then the second knot is kind of the converse of that. So the bodily knot of ill will. If we feel aversion towards something or someone, energetically we may be pushing it away or resisting it in some way. And so then again, there's some contraction when we do that constriction. And this is also maybe quite sensible. So I encourage you to explore this in your own experience. If you're feeling aversive or uncomfortable or have some ill will toward a person, is there an impact in the body, in the sense of some tightness? And if we carry that for a long time, it may turn into one of these knots. It's a little bit longer lasting, if you will.

So then the third one is said to be the distorted grasp of rules and vows, which Gil^[3] would translate as practices and precepts. So this is actually not an unusual idea in Buddhist teachings. The Buddha knew very well that people can get hung up on conceptual understandings of ethics or of rules such that they become inflexible. And that's the problem, is when they become inflexible, we can have rigid thinking around various spiritual practices that we do, and even sometimes about the precepts. And if we have this kind of rigid thinking, that's what can bind us up internally.

A friend of mine was on the three-year retreat that is sometimes done in Tibetan practice, and one of the things they do on this type of retreat is they learn various rituals and then go through the process of learning them. And he got fixated on one of them, and he really wanted to perfect it, some kind of an offering ceremony. And he started correcting everybody else about what they were doing wrong. And he practiced again and again with kind of a furrowed brow to get it just right. And the other retreatants were getting irritated by this behavior, but he didn't realize he had gotten so fixated on it. And the spell was broken when one of the other yogis threw a vase at him. Luckily it missed, but the point was made, and he realized that he was really kind of grasping onto that. So if we're holding on to fixed ideas about our practice or even about the precepts, we can create a knot around that holding. It's interesting.

And then we come to the fourth one, and then I'll talk a little more generally. So that is getting stuck on a view of what is true. So the teachings say that a person with this kind of knot will assert, "Only this is true, everything else is false." And so it's easy to go to extreme examples of that, places where people have really gotten stuck on just one idea of what's true. But you know, we hold all kinds of things like, "There is only one right way to load the dishwasher. All other ways are wrong." Or any other such thing around the house. Have you ever gotten into a conflict with someone about these things? So I don't know if the thing about the dishwasher would bring about a bodily knot, but it might be that our political or philosophical views could do that if we're clinging to them quite tightly.

So it's interesting, isn't it, that attachment to a view can show up as tightness in the body? And I encourage you to explore this if this makes sense. So in some ways we can't hide rigidity of the mind. It will appear in the body. Maybe it wouldn't be visible to others, but we will come to feel it.

So I think this list of four bodily knots has the potential to evoke compassion. We all have these knots to varying degrees because we're not free of these things. And we've created them by thinking that such movements of mind are going to bring us safety in some way. Maybe it feels like grasping after things, or pushing them away, or having fixed views about things will provide some kind of certainty or security for us. Which is what some part of the heart really just wants, it wants it to be certain, safe, secure. But if we do that in the wrong way, it can lead to a constriction. So it was sort of a good idea, but it was held in the wrong way. And a lot of practice is about untangling some of that that we've done with our mind.

So I don't think we need to analyze every knot that we have in great detail. I think maybe the top level point of this teaching is to show us what we're up against in a certain way. These are deep habits of the mind, and they get stored deeply in our energetic system. But by touching into them gently, we can start to unravel these knots. Not so much by analyzing them and figuring out why is this there and what caused that and what in my past led to this. I don't know that that is so useful. Sometimes, but not every time. Meditation practice offers us the possibility of unraveling these a little bit in a deeper way than language might get to.

So of course there's some care needed in doing this. We would want to approach these knots somewhat gently. And that was why I suggested staying connected to the ground or opening the eyes, definitely. We don't want to use covetousness and ill will in our approach to working with bodily tension. Covetousness being, "I'm gonna get in there and really make it go away," you know, kind of wanting to get it to be a certain way. And ill will is, "I'm gonna push it away or destroy it in some way." These are movements of mind that are not supportive, or probably only make the knots tighter. So we have to learn how to hold them with space, how to touch into them not for a long time, maybe just touching briefly and then go back to the breath or do some other practice.

But slowly over time, I hope to impart the idea that we can unravel these knots, because they of course represent issues in the mind, the very issues that meditation addresses. And for some people it's useful to work in the realm of the body. So if this is useful, I offer that.

But we might also make one additional point, which is that the sutta is not saying that every knot we have has to correspond to one of these four difficulties. It's very important that we don't just start trying to map like that. These are four possibilities, and of course there are other possibilities. One time Joseph Goldstein was practicing with U Pandita^[4], and he reported that his meditation was generally going well with lots of smooth pleasant energy flow in the body, except that he was experiencing a block in his neck. So, you know, like the word "knot" that I've been talking about today. And U Pandita looked at him and said, "Block, that is a judgment. You are experiencing tightness." So we also have to remember that the word "knot" might be a bit of a prejudgment in some cases. So we can feel tightness for a variety of sources. It's worth looking at these four because the Buddha identified them as the most common ones: covetousness, ill will, wanting and pushing away. And then also two ways of attaching to certain kinds of views or ideas. One of them being ideas of how to do practice and practices and precepts as it's called. And the other being views of what's true or what's right or what's correct. Those are areas where we get stuck.

But you know, it might be that we have something physical going on, or it might be that what we need to work with that particular tight area is not to judge it as something that's bad or needs to be gotten rid of in any way, and just hold it as tightness. Just be mindful of that very neutrally. So there are a number of, so many different ways to work with these. But if we use it wisely, this understanding of tension in the body, we can really expand and broaden our practice.

So I wanted to bring this in as a kind of a method or an understanding that is, at least for me, has been very very fruitful to try to find ways to work with tight spots in the energy system. So if it's of use to you also, I hope you'll explore and have some confidence that with care and with compassion there are ways to slowly over time loosen these knots just a little bit. And even if some of them just become a little bit loosened, then the body starts to open up. And kind of in the space that opens there can be room for more well-being, even a very deep sense of well-being.

So tomorrow we will continue our exploration of the depth of the body by using the body as a support for concentration practice, or for gathering the mind into this deep sense of well-being. So one more dimension of the body that we can explore.

So I wish you very well for the day or the evening, and please take care of your body. Be well.