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Guided Meditation: Touching into the Body

Please gather yourself and prepare for our meditation together, perhaps taking a long, slow, deep breath, and on the exhale, allowing the body to soften. Close the eyes if that's comfortable for you, and just settle in to the sense of the body sitting, or if you're lying down, into the sense of the body lying.

Maybe feel how intimate it is to be in touch with the body from the inside. We do it all day, in a sense. I don't always appreciate the sort of close, warm feeling of that.

So, connecting in with the body. Perhaps softening the eyes and the eye sockets, the face, all the little muscles on the scalp, softening down through the neck and the shoulders, letting the shoulders drop down naturally. Down into the chest area, sensing the three-dimensionality of the rib cage: front, back, sides. Down into the belly.

Sensing how when we bring our attention into certain areas of the body, there's a way in which they come alive. Somehow they were waiting for the illumination of awareness to vibrate, to offer some feeling to us. Down into the hips, the legs, even feeling into the knee and ankle joints, and including the hands and the feet. So the body sitting.

Sometimes, as the stillness of the body settles in, the motions of breathing become the most prominent thing we can feel. Sensing the breathing body. The air coming in, going out, it's very simple, natural, and yet we don't always bring attention in an intimate, detailed way. Allowing the gentle sensations of the breath to calm the feelings in the body.

When we treat the body with this kind of gentleness and open attention, there's a response inside. If we treat the body as a friend, it may begin to feel like our friend. Sense that it's what's closest to us. So finding some rest in the home of the body. Even if there's discomfort or tiredness or stiffness, there can still be a sense that the mindfulness of that is helpful, supportive.

There's a way in which the body is also one of the ways that we can connect to the mind. There is so much information in the body related to the mind. You may sense that you have some emotions present, some mood that's coloring your experience right now. Feeling into how that is manifesting in the body.

Sometimes we feel heat in certain areas associated with our mental state. We feel tightness. Sometimes fear will cause us to raise the shoulders up in tension, or anger can be felt as heat and tightness in the stomach area. Many emotions are in the throat area.

Could we get curious about the way in which our body's current manifestation—the current feelings we have in the body—are related to our mind state, our emotions? Having that curiosity about the body is a way of not being so entangled in those particular emotions, but instead learning about them, being with them in a kind, helpful way. Perhaps allowing the in and out breathing to pass through any areas of tension. Just resting with this dynamic experience of the body.

And when the mind gets caught up in thinking, analyzing, remembering, planning, we can just gently reopen awareness to the experience of the body. The body is always in the present moment. And it might be interesting, in today's exploration of mindfulness of the body, to notice if, when you've been thinking, there was any impact on the body.

In the same way that emotions can bring tension and heat and other changes to the body, so too thinking has effects. It's interesting to learn for ourselves what those are. Do certain tensions appear, certain changes in sensations, when we've had a bout of thinking? So in this type of exploration, it's okay to get caught up in thought, because you're learning afterwards what impact that had.

And as mindfulness of the body deepens further, perhaps as the mind gets a bit calmer, we may be able to feel the sensations associated with thinking as it is occurring. Is there a particular place from which thinking seems to originate in your body? Often it's in the head. Is there a change in the sense of the rest of the body while there is a thought going on? Is there a change in how mindfulness feels when it is knowing a thought, or knowing the body when there isn't a thought present?

And as we stay with mindfulness of the body, we may begin to sense that the body also has deep sensations of peace available to it. The peace and ease that we've cultivated in our mind can be felt through the body, perhaps as a deep stability or as a beautiful space within the body. It's something that feels very true and reliable and beautiful. Perhaps a refuge.

So we may come to value the body, mindfulness of the body, as our friend in a way. Something we might bring with us throughout the day, helping us to stay balanced and open with the people we encounter. Perhaps remembering also that they too have bodies. They too work with this physical part of being. It's one thing that connects us with others.

And if we have made our body our home, somewhere safe, something that gives us useful information, something that supports us, then there's a way in which we also are supporting others. When we bring our full bodily presence into our life, we help others to stay connected and stay present in some way. We can't always see it, but it's a very worthy effort.

So perhaps as you go about your day or evening, you can consider how the body might come along with you as a friend, supporting you to be present, be of service, be more kind, loving, compassionate, generous—all of which bring beautiful feelings in the body as well as the mind. May all beings^[1] learn to be at ease in their bodies.

Mindfulness of the Body as a Friend

For those of you who may have joined a little bit later, you can see that Gil is not here, and I just want to pass along that he is fine. He was planning to be here, but then he had to travel unexpectedly. So as I said, everything is fine. My name is Kim Allen, and I'll be here for the rest of this week. I know that Gil was planning to speak this whole week on the topic of patience.

This Monday's topic of staying true under stress is perhaps relevant this week. It's always a bit stressful to have a rapid change in circumstances or a change of plans. That's something that we can all practice embodying this^[2] along with Gil for this week. And then I also thought that it might be more meaningful for you to explore the topic of patience if you have to wait until next week to do it. So we'll have a different theme for the next four days.

I'll be talking about different ways of using the body as one's field of practice. I'm calling this series The Depth of the Body, because we may not realize just how profound this very basic body is. So today I will talk about mindfulness of the body as a friend, a way that we can have a support for our practice at all times.

Tomorrow we'll talk about the four bodily knots. It's a list found in the teachings that's not taught very often. And then Thursday we'll talk about the body as a support for concentration, for the gathering and stilling of the mind. On Friday we'll talk about the body as a vehicle of insight, even liberating insight.

So today is mindfulness of the body, and the Buddhist teachings are just filled with ways that we can cultivate and get support from mindfulness of the body. In particular, there is a story about the time that the Buddha died. His cousin and attendant, Ananda^[3], was very distraught, naturally. He had been, of course, not only the Buddha's cousin, but he had been his personal attendant for at least a couple of decades at that point, and was very connected to him. It hurt him deeply that his cousin had passed on, and he wasn't sure what he was going to do after that. But he did eventually go on with his practice and became awakened. At that point he composed an awakening poem, as a number of the elder monks did, and this is a little section from Ananda's awakening poem:

I'm completely disoriented, the teachings don't spring to mind. With the passing of our good friend, everything seems dark. When your friend has passed away, your teacher is passed and gone, there's no friend like mindfulness of the body.

So it's interesting, right in that moment he came up with the idea of mindfulness of the body as a friend. I want to talk a bit about mindfulness of the body as a friend. There are many ways, of course, to engage mindfulness of the body. Many of them are talked about in the discourse called the Satipatthana Sutta^[4]—the most basic instructions that we have about cultivating mindfulness of all different realms of experience—but there's quite a long section about mindfulness of the body.

This teaching includes a number of areas. One of them is the simple mindfulness of breathing in and out, as we did during the meditation. One way this can be used is simply to calm the body. It's always available, the breath; it's something that we can touch into many different times during the day, or especially on the cushion. And it's often—at least as long as you haven't had difficult experiences with the breath—a way to calm the body, because it's a kind of natural rhythm coming in and going out. We can feel some ease through that. So this is one way that mindfulness can be seen as quite friendly.

There's also in this sutta the mindfulness of postures, so literally knowing whether or not you are sitting, or standing, or walking, or lying down. Whatever posture you're in, you just have conscious awareness that that is the posture that the body is in. I think it's a great way to start doing mindfulness of the body practice in daily life. For example, you could notice right now whatever posture you're in. Are you sitting, maybe? Take a moment to know that you're sitting. How do you know that? Because you can feel the body in that posture.

And you might notice that just bringing this to mind has a slight clarifying effect on the mind. There's a little sharpening of attention when we know the posture we're in. Since we're always in some posture, this is a great way that we can sharpen our mind up at any moment, bring it into the present if it's somewhere else, and just be clear about how our body is disposed, as the sutta says.

Another very simple way to be mindful of the body is mindfulness of actions. This gets more specific to knowing what it is we're doing at a given moment. The sutta lists all kinds of things: knowing that we're extending our arm or pulling it in, knowing of course which posture we're in, knowing if we're talking or not, knowing we're eating, chewing, swallowing, even urinating and defecating. Everything is included, nothing is left out of what it is that we're doing.

This is, of course, yet another way to connect in and just be present, but I would say it goes farther in the case of knowing our specific actions. This practice becomes a basis for ethical action. When we are noticing what we're doing, we can't help but be more aware of the quality of our actions. Even when we bring in the supposedly neutral awareness of what we're doing—just knowing, "Yes, I'm raising the cup to my lips and having a sip of water"—it's very natural as we do that to also notice the quality of that action. Are we doing it in a hurried way? Are we angry while we're doing it? Do we have an intention of harm in some way?

These things become much more available when we have mindfulness of actions. So this is really our friend, right? Looking out for our ethical quality. Just recognizing what it is that we're doing as we're doing it is a great support for bringing more wholesomeness into our life.

As we get more familiar with these top-level actions—these ways of being mindful of the body—and of course they can go very deep, I don't mean to cast them only as surface level; they can go very deep, but a new layer starts to get revealed when we tune into the subtler aspects of the body. There's a kind of energetic presence to the body. Often we feel it maybe more in meditation, but as we practice that, it becomes more available in daily life.

Sort of like the way we can't really hear birdsong or quiet music when we're standing on a busy street, we don't always feel these underlying energetic sensations of the body if we're rushing around in our daily life. But as we learn to feel them on the cushion, they become more available to us off the cushion.

These energetic sensations are where those emotional feelings are housed. The rush of energy that we feel when there's anger coming up in the mind, or the kind of slight heaviness that we feel in the body when there's sadness or depression—this is great information. If we carry mindfulness of the body throughout the day, it can help us connect with our mind. Sometimes in the press of being with other people or being on the computer or something else, our mind is going very fast. If we aren't tuned into the body, we can miss some of what's going on for us, and then we may react in ways that we don't understand or regret later. The body has a lot of information in it, and if we practice that on the cushion, then we'll be able to bring that more into our interactions.

One area that I emphasized in the sit that I have found very meaningful in my own practice is to check in and tune into the relationship between thought and the body. It's not often emphasized, but thinking actually does have an impact. In particular, I've noticed that when I am thinking a lot on the cushion and I'm trying to meditate but my mind is busy, each time I return to present moment awareness—whatever my object was—I notice that there are kind of tendrils of tension that run down from the head down into the shoulders and the chest and into the neck. I can feel these ways in which the thought has tightened up certain channels in the body somehow.

If we can tune into that a little bit sooner, we may not get lost in thought quite as easily. And also we may learn to think in ways that are a little bit more healthy. Sometimes the extreme tension that comes in with thought is because we've really gotten wrapped up in a story about ourself, or a thought of revenge, or some other kind of thinking that's not actually very helpful for our practice.

There are kinds of thought that are more helpful than others. For example, thoughts about the Dharma or thoughts about ways that we can be helpful or support people. It is still thinking, but it is more conducive to our practice, more in line with wholesomeness. Those kinds of thoughts, you will notice, don't produce quite as much tension in the body, in the belly or the chest or the throat. So again, we have information coming in through mindfulness of the body that we might not have if we try only to see the mind. The body is a great gateway into the mind. So this is, once again, our friend: mindfulness of the body helping us out in our practice, helping us to learn more about this experience of being human so that we can bring forth the best of that in our life.

Once we start to see the body as a helpful experience to pay attention to, and we gain some skill in tuning into a variety of aspects of it—like physical feelings, the quality of our actions, and the more subtle energies that tell us about emotions and thoughts—then we're setting the stage to explore many other Dharma practices that use the body. Those are going to be the topics that unfold as we go on with the week. We'll continue with that tomorrow, and I look forward to seeing you then if you can come. Be well.