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Guided Meditation: Calming the Body

Hello everyone, and welcome to our time together, our 30-minute meditation.

The theme for today is tranquility, to sit with a tranquil body and mind. I think of it as an ability to sit quietly without being in conflict with anything, without being disturbed by anything. And it's a remarkable state to experience because it can feel like one of the most noteworthy, remarkable forms of spiritual health. Maybe even sometimes mental health, even physical health at times, to sit with your whole system at ease, undisturbed, but alert and clear.

It involves learning not to be preoccupied with the little thoughts we have. The Buddha, in talking about his own practice, talked about not running after the little thoughts. I love this idea of little thoughts. They can seem so big, our thoughts, so huge and monumental and important, and maybe they're just little thoughts. Maybe thoughts by themselves are just floating ideas and memories and plans and projected fears into the future. So to sit quietly and tranquilly, to relax all that can relax, while all that can be alert can be present and clear.

It's not easy to accomplish, but the Buddha said that the nourishment, the food for tranquility is tranquility itself. So in other words, the ability to recognize maybe at first just a hint of tranquility and then build on that. Feel the tranquility as an alternative to preoccupation, an alternative to being involved with the thoughts that are distressing, or disturbing, or reactive to what's happening here.

So assuming a meditation posture, and maybe wiggling your body, swaying back and forth a bit, swaying forward and back, straightening up and bending a little bit, until you find a posture that for you represents a balance of tranquility and alertness. Tranquility and attentiveness. And attentiveness, alertness that's embodied, aware through the body.

And then to lower your gaze and letting your eyes be cool. If you ever feel any kind of coolness, quiet that's possible in the eyes as they rest in their sockets, not looking at anything in particular. And then to gently close your eyes.

And gently, maybe not a full deep breath, but a half deep breath. Gently, tranquilly breathing in more fully. And you might try at the top of the in-breath to gently hold your breath for a moment or two, so that when you do begin the exhale, it can feel like a letting go. A releasing, letting go into a quiet state.

And you might, with taking deeper breaths, pause for a moment or two at the end of the exhale so that when you do inhale, it's a welcome attentiveness. Welcoming the feeling of attentiveness, alertness, awareness of breathing. And here we have this wonderful alternation between releasing, relaxing on the exhale, and aware and alert on the inhale.

Letting your breathing return to normal. And on the exhale, soften the body. A global softening. On the inhale, as if the whole body expands and gets larger, beyond the boundaries of the body even. The exhale is softening, settling, releasing.

Softening the belly. Softening in the chest. Releasing the shoulders. Releasing, relaxing the muscles of the face. And quieting, calming the energy of thinking. Relaxing the thinking muscle.

And now see if you can find within your body someplace that there is a bit of calm or tranquility. It could be in the torso, the arms and hands, the legs, in the head, in the back. Anywhere where there's some feeling of tranquility, calmness. It doesn't have to be dramatic, just the place in your body where it's calmest.

And then see if you can breathe through that area of calm. Breathe with it. There's a way almost as if you're gently blowing on a small fire so that it grows. Adjusting your mind so the mind is calmer, quieter. Maybe even a stillness of mind as you're aware of whatever stillness, tranquility, peace there might be in your body, in your heart.

Whatever is not calm for you, see if you can let that recede to the background of awareness. Not to dismiss it, or to ignore it entirely, but to give time to your capacity for being calm. It's important for that also to exist for you in a strong way. And so to feel into calmness, tranquility.

When you exhale, letting go of your thoughts. Relaxing the holdings in your body. Letting go into the place within that is still, quiet.

Underneath your thinking, maybe you'll find a place of calm and tranquility. Breathe with that place. Breathe through it, breathe out of it. Let tranquility be the flavor of your meditation.

You might try having tranquility, the feeling of it, be at the center. Almost like that's who you are. If you're identified with your thinking more as who you are, switch to whatever degree of calm or tranquility, stillness you might have within. Let that be who you are, let that be the center around which everything else orbits. Taking refuge in the calm.

And see if you can let your eyes be calm and tranquil, cool, still. Either with your eyes closed, or if it's most tranquil to open the eyes gently, maybe gazing down 45 degrees, let the eyes open slightly. And with a calm gaze, relaxed gaze, be aware of the world around you. The extended world out beyond where you are. People in your lives, people in your communities, people far away, people you don't know. Gaze upon it all calmly, peacefully for a few moments. Not disturbed, not in conflict, just a calm regard. As if calmness, tranquility, is medicine for an agitated world. That your calmness is medicine for an agitated world.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may your tranquility be a way that you support the happiness, safety, peace, and freedom of others. May all beings be at peace^[1].

Thank you.

Dharmette: Kāya (3 of 5) The Tranquil Body

So here we are, and the topic is tranquility, and in the theme of the week of different ways of experiencing our body. It's possible to have the body be felt as a tranquil body, a peaceful body. And this is a remarkable feeling of health, of well-being, that everything is kind of right here, now.

It's an experience of the body that comes when we're not disturbed by anything, in conflict with anything, and we're not spinning out thoughts and ideas. It's a quieting of the mind, of the mental activities that are used to relate to the body. Because these different bodies I'm talking about have a lot to do with the state of the mind, the activity of the mind.

I've seen diagrams of the brain showing what parts of the brain are biggest or most active. They show that people who do the same activity over and over again, that part of the brain grows. I don't know if it physically gets bigger or just more activated. So that someone whose whole profession maybe is typing, spending the whole day typing, somehow the brain centers having to do with the fingers grow bigger. These brain centers that are involved with different parts of our body can grow and shrink depending on the usage in which we have it. As the activity of that center grows, then there's more orientation to feel and sense and experience and know that part of the body. But if the mental activities, the mental centers get quiet and calm, then the ways in which the mind constructs and remembers the body fades away as well.

We can have a very strong body image of some part of our body. Recently, I clipped my fingernails, and I might be self-conscious that I didn't clip my fingernails just right. Maybe it's a little bit uneven, and here I am with a few hundred people watching me and maybe noticing my fingernails. So my whole world starts thinking about my fingernails, and so that fingernail part of the center of the brain becomes bigger, more activated. In my mind, I have an image of my fingernails, my fingers, and I'm oriented around the image of it and the impact that has on other people. I'm operating under an image of fingernails, but if I let my mind become quiet and calm, that part of the mind that's busy and activated to think about fingernails, to imagine what they look like, to be concerned about their shape and their smoothness, that all goes quiet.

In my experience, fingernails kind of disappear from awareness. I sit here quietly meditating with my breathing, my torso grounded, feeling centered, quiet. And for 30 minutes, I wouldn't even think about my fingernails. Then in a certain kind of way, in experience, they don't exist. Of course they exist, but I'm not experiencing them. They fade away from attention. In the same way, as the mind gets quieter and quieter, the body begins to recede from its defined definitions, from its image that we carry with us. Subconsciously we carry images and ideas and projections and priorities about the body. We're in conflict with the body, we're adjusting it, we're reacting to the pain and pleasure in the body. There's a lot of subliminal, subconscious, and conscious activity going on in the brain in relationship to this body that we have. As those mental activities quiet down, the body begins to feel more calm and peaceful. It's almost like the puppeteer in the brain has taken a vacation and is not pulling and tugging and directing and being nosy into all the different things going on.

The body is just left radically alone. Not obstructing, not interfering, not activating, not thinking about the body. Leaving the body alone in a nice meditative way allows the body to move towards a kind of health. The body has tremendous movement towards homeostasis, to harmony, to subtleness, to release. The body itself just wants to relax, wants to relax the tensions that are being held there. And so as the mind gets quieter, our relationship to the body shifts and changes, and then the way we experience the body changes.

The body can have a very refreshing, peaceful feeling to it. The tranquility can be a feeling of suffused tranquility through the body, or suffused coolness or refreshment that exists peacefully. It's a more peaceful state than the bliss body, the joy body that we talked about yesterday, because that's still a little bit activated compared to now. That quiets down as well, and there's not exactly anything solid or too much solid in the body. It's more like a glow of peace, a glow of tranquility, of refreshment, and it's a very different way of experiencing ourselves. It's a tremendous gift to the body when we can no longer have the mind preoccupied by it, or reacting to it, or defining it, or having an image of it.

Some people find that the edges of the body begin to dissolve, and there's no clear sense of the boundary between the body and the air around it. Because the boundary itself, the shape of our body, the boundary we have, is part of the mental construct, the ideas the mind does that are based a lot on memory. But if we drop into the feeling body without all the ideas and reactivities, the feeling body moves towards subtleness and peacefulness and calm. It only gets activated if the puppeteer pulls the strings, if the cook stirs the pot. And if we're not pulling strings or stirring the pot, the body can go quiet and peaceful.

It's remarkable to feel the tremendous value, the wealth in a sense, that comes with this very deep sense of peace and tranquility. From the vantage point of that state of tranquility and peace and calm, it's possible to have a clear sense that many of the ordinary pursuits we have in our life, especially if they involve tension or anxiety or ambition or greed, are so much less valuable compared to the richness, the peacefulness, the texture of this tranquility and peace and calm that can exist. This doesn't mean that we have to stay stuck and always be tranquil and calm, but it does mean that we have a lesson, a dramatic contrast between different ways of being. We can begin appreciating how the puppeteer works, how the mind works in activating the body and prioritizing the body or defining the body or being concerned with the body in such a way that tranquility is lost.

So it's a really marvelous thing to have this shift in the body from the karmic body to the joy body, the tranquility body, where the experience of the body, the energies, the sensations, these qualities of well-being and of tranquility seem to emerge from the inside out and are not dependent on the ways that we relate to the body from the outside in. Individuals, families, societies have tremendous painful attitudes, beliefs, behavior, relationships to the outer body, kind of how it looks in terms of size and shape and color and race, and all kinds of things that people can have a lot of suffering over.

But the body's experience of itself from the inside out, what emerges peacefully when we're not tamping it down or constricting it with all these outside-in concerns and preoccupations and obstacles—what emerges, what flows, what can be there from the inside out—can feel like it's really independent of the outside-in concerns. If there's a liberation from the outside in, there's a liberation from the societal pressures on the body and judgments and ideas. Just to have the body have its own experience from the inside out, where its own flow of energies, flow of sensations can settle and open to joy and to tranquility, is a powerful lesson in freedom. A powerful lesson in an alternative way of living that's not outside in, it's not caught up in thoughts and ideas and images of how the body is and what should be. The tranquil body.

So you might, over this day, see what you can do through the day to let the body be more tranquil. Maybe it's how you sit in a chair. You can sit in a chair in a way that the body is more settled and easier to relax in a tranquil way. It's not necessarily slouching in a chair—I don't know if that gives us the most tranquility—but where do you feel the most calm and settled, rooted and grounded? And as you walk, as you do some work, as you talk, as you drive, look and see how you can do all these things with some modicum of calm or peace or tranquility and see what you learn in the process. And certainly what you can learn about what takes you away from the tranquility, but maybe for this exercise today, what you learn about the benefits of living a tranquil life.

So thank you very much, and I look forward to continuing this series tomorrow.