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Guided Meditation: The Body Freed of Identification

So hello everyone, and a special welcome to your bodies.

The theme of the week is the different perspectives by which we can be in our bodies, experience our bodies, and how this perspective can change radically depending on the state of the mind. The fact that our experience of the body can be so radically different depending on the mind suggests that our experience of it is not stable. Any particular experience of the body we have is conditional, is contingent. It is the coming together of various factors, including the state of the mind and meditative qualities of our mind. Our relationship to this changing, shifting, amorphous experience of the body can be one of peace—a kind of radical peace. We can be peaceful about the body, not troubled by it.

There is a teaching about the body that has brought a tremendous level of peace to some people, and maybe it brings that peace when the mind is already quite tranquil and peaceful. So it might require a certain state of mind to hear this teaching so that it really penetrates or releases something. That is the teaching that this body is not yours. Your hair is not you, your face is not you, your body shape is not you, your teeth are not you. You can go on and on with the list.

In some ways, it flies against the convention we have of identifying with our bodies, and it's certainly true to some degree these are part of who we are. But when the mind is quite peaceful, we see that the activity of claiming this body to be me, the activity of identifying with the body as "this is who I am," is unnecessary. In fact, to do so is agitating. To realize this body is not me, to cease, to give up the incessant identifications and kind of defining oneself by one's body, can be very freeing.

So that's a little bit of the background for today's meditation.

So to begin, with this body that you are the caretaker of, this body that you've received from all the elements from this earth that have combined to build up this body. We are made of parts of the earth and will return to the earth when we die. So this body that we care for, assuming a comfortable, alert meditation posture.

Feeling the weight of the body, the substance of the body. Feeling how the weight of the body settles on what supports it: the chair, your cushion, the floor, wherever you are. Feel how your weight is received by some object that's holding you up.

Lower the gaze of your eyes to 45 degrees down. And then gently closing your eyes and taking a few long, slow, deep breaths, where our volition, our decision to breathe deeply, is directed to the body through inviting the body to take some deep breaths. And to relax on the exhale.

Letting your breathing return to normal. And on the exhale, relax and release whatever holding that can be released. Whatever tension you have is not you. You are not your tension, because if you were, when your tension releases, where are you?

Relaxing the face, the shoulders, the belly, the arms, the hands. Wherever you can relax. And as you relax, see if you can feel like you're relaxing into peace or tranquility.

Feeling the in-breath, the out-breath. Feeling the body expand and contract as you breathe. In a sense, you are not your inhale, because if you were, then you wouldn't exist on the exhale. You are not the exhale. But the inhale and exhale is where you can relax and focus, and ground yourself in the changing nature of the present moment.

As you exhale, see if there can be a letting go of the thinking mind. Letting go of thinking. A calming of the thinking mind, the settling of the mind.

It is a gift to the body to leave it alone. Not always, but sometimes in meditation just to leave it alone without judgments, without claiming it as mine and for me. Without being at war with it, opposed to it, wanting to fix it and change it. Just leaving the body alone to have its own experience.

And it's to give the body this freedom from our attachments, freedom from our projections and entanglements. That's possible to do in meditation. Especially if we can have insight, understanding that this changing, shifting body is not you. You are not your body.

You are not your face.

You are not your eyes.

You are not your hair.

You are not your feet.

You are not your legs.

You are not your torso.

You are not your arms and hands.

And as it's not you, to let go of defining yourself by your body frees the mind of the body and frees the body of the mind.

Letting go of all identification with the body, so the body can have its own experience, and you are not defined by the body.

One of the things we can learn from meditation is to give time and space to the body to settle, to open, to heal. We can offer our patience. We can offer our non-identification, non-reactivity. Learning that meditation is a training for doing that in our life with other people. To give others the gift of space and time, our patience, our non-identification, non-reactivity.

To make room for others by speaking a little less, being more attentive. Being quieter, stiller, just so we can take in and feel and sense others in a deeper way. And maybe the gift to them is that they can relax and feel comfortable, feel safe, feel heard, and feel respected.

May it be that what we learn from meditation, in some way or other, in many ways, we can think and reflect how it could support us in our interpersonal lives. How the benefits of meditation can be shared with others out into the world, rippling out from us wide and far.

May our meditation practice of our 7:00 a.m. community spread from each of us into the world to support the happiness of others. Support others to feel safe. Support others to be peaceful. Support others to be free.

May we live for the welfare and happiness of everyone, including ourselves.

Dharmette: Kāya (4 of 5) The Insight Body

So far we've talked about the karmic body, the joy body, and the tranquil body. And today I want to talk about the insight body. That is the way that the body is experienced under the gaze of mindfulness and when there's deep insight. When there's a real ability to be very quiet in the mind—very little mental projections or discussions going on in the mind—so we can settle back and just observe the body in a deep way. To observe the body unencumbered by our ideas of the body, unencumbered by our preoccupations, our fears, our judgments of the body. To kind of clear the inner sight, the mind's eye, to perceive and sense the body in and of itself.

It's a careful sensitivity to the changing, fluid quality of the body's experience of itself. Our senses, the nerve endings that pick up all the different sensations that we feel in our body, are operating kind of all the time. But certain things come into prominence and then are there for a while and then fade, and something else comes into prominence and then fades. There's a constant shifting of what comes into experience in our body. On top of that, the body shifts and changes. In the course of a single meditation practice, maybe the body has gotten relaxed, maybe occasionally it's gotten more tense; it shifted and changed. Maybe over the course of a year or two, your body has gotten older, and certain things have shifted. There are changes about how you are, and you can feel the changes as time goes on.

Part of the insight body is to have a quiet mind, a relatively quiet mind, a focused mind settled here in the present moment, that's observing the changing nature of the body. At some point we realize as we sit down and relax that in fact all the so-called experiences we have of the body, all the ways in which we can know and feel the body directly, are constantly shifting and changing. It's a kaleidoscope, it's a process, it's a constant flow. It's a stream of sensations, a stream of experience that's shifting and changing and moving.

When this first happens in meditation, it usually comes when the meditation is somewhat concentrated, often happening in the wake of something like the joy body. There can be a lot of joy and subtleness, maybe even some peace that comes first, and that allows the thinking mind to quiet more and more. The advantage of that is the thinking mind then is not projecting its ideas onto the body. The mind has a lot of ideas, some of which are not so accurate. Ideas of permanence, like "this is always going to be this way," or "I'll always be this way," and "the body will be unchanging." And then the body changes. Sometimes suddenly in an accident or an injury, sometimes it's slow and gradual.

I've been blessed with being able to sit cross-legged into my old age, but I have wonderful colleagues, deep meditators, wonderful meditation teachers who started this way when they were young, sitting cross-legged, and now they sit in chairs. It's fine to sit in a chair, but it's just an example of how the body changes. So we're kind of there to feel and sense and adapt ourselves to the changes.

But the changing stream of experience, when it's an insight body, is not the changes that we see over an extended period of time. Rather, it's kind of like looking at a river and seeing that the surface of the river, the current, is constantly shifting and changing and flowing. So at some point, this body of ours, without the projection of thoughts and ideas that we overlay on it, begins to reveal itself in its native capacity, its native expression. Which is all this changing, fluid, moving field of sensations that the nerve endings take in and process, with each nerve ending taking in a particular data point. And then we feel the individual data points coming and going: there's a sound, there's an itch, there's a feeling of warmth, there's a tightness. And then we feel into these deeper and deeper, and we find that within each one, there's something that's constantly in flux and moving.

A fascinating place for some people who do vipassana^[1] practice is to do this with pain. I've done it with a variety of pains, but knee pain is most classic for me. To bring my attention very carefully—that non-reactive attention. The attention is not afraid or angry or reactive to the pain, not projecting ideas that "oh, it's going to hurt forever," or "I can't do this," or "this is terrible, I'm probably going to have to have my leg amputated." All these kinds of ideas. Or self-pity, which was one that I used to have when I was younger: "Oh, poor me that's in pain." But to somehow have the mind where that kind of projection or veil between us and the pain is put aside, and just experience the pain in and of itself and find out exactly where it is in the knee.

It's fascinating. As we get closer to it, maybe it's a little square centimeter. It may be it's not always in the same place; it's moving around, it's pulsing and sparking and shifting and dancing around. And we get closer and closer, we see that it's not the solid pain that we might have thought it was from a distance when we were reactive to it, concerned about it. It's not a solid, unchanging pain.

In fact, maybe we shouldn't even call it "pain" because pain is kind of an abstraction, an umbrella term. Underneath that label, there is pulling and stabbing and burning and pressure and tightness, all these kinds of more particular sensations that are intense. Because of the intensity of it, we call it pain, but pain is made up of many different kinds of sensations. Not every pain, but the different kinds of pains we have are made up of different sensations that are intense.

To bring our attention just to that particular sensation and see the dance of it, the spark of it, and the movement of it, and see that it's not so solid, sometimes it's a lot easier to be present for. It was very difficult to be present for something that we're kind of apart from. But we see it through the pain, it's much easier to feel it on a deeper level underneath that idea. The pulsing, searing, burning, sparking, stabbing, intense feelings—it sounds terrible, these words—but sometimes it's a lot easier than just relating to it as "the pain."

Even more difficult is when we relate to the pain as "my pain," "I'm having pain." When we add the baggage, the association of "me, myself, and mine" to the pain, we're adding another layer of obstruction, which is accurate enough but it's not really needed. It involves a different order of mental activity which keeps us removed, keeps us reactive, and actually increases the level of pain sometimes. You might experiment with feeling the shifting, changing, pulsing nature of pain and see the difference between viewing it as "my pain" or viewing it just as "pain."

But it's not just pain where we see this shifting stuff. That's an interesting exercise to do it with, but even pleasure. You could feel pleasure as a meditative pleasure. If you really tune into what it's like, it's a stream, it's a flow, it's a glow, it's a shifting and changing phenomenon. The insight body is when we experience the body, but everything is flowing. Some people would describe the body as being like sand, or rain, or snow kind of flowing down. All these little particulates, a flow of particulate sensations that are flowing and moving.

And when it gets really deep, this kind of insight body, the boundaries of the body, the shape of the body has no meaning anymore. Oftentimes the body feels kind of boundary-less, or it's irrelevant, the sense of boundaries of the body and the shape of the body. All the ideas of the body fall away, just settling into the raw data that the senses provide that are constantly shifting and moving.

In that raw data, in this insight body, that's where there's a particular, unique flavor to the insight into not-self. We see that the whole body experience is just a flow of these sensations. With any one sensation, it becomes clear: that's not myself. If that was the case, when that sensation disappears, I would disappear too, in a sense. But you realize that's not the self. This freeing up of the movement of the mind from "this is me, this is myself, this is mine" is very freeing for the mind, very relaxing and peacemaking. To begin recognizing the not-self of this whole field of the body sensations as it flows is part of the insight body.

Part of that insight body also is to realize that any clinging to it is pointless or is painful. It's not really necessary. And that's kind of like if you have a waterfall of water coming down, and you put your hand in the waterfall to grab some water, you might get a little bit on your hand but you're done. It all gets squeezed out, and you can't really grab a handful of water. So you realize this movement of grabbing doesn't work.

This insight body, when we're seeing this radical nature of change, is a powerful way of learning not to identify with our experience and beginning to have an experience of life without the filter or the burden of identification. It's a powerful lesson in the possibility of non-clinging. That the things we cling to are unreliable, unsatisfactory, that it just brings more suffering to cling. And to see that for oneself when we're sitting in the insight body, then it's obvious. It's not logic, it's not rational. It's not because you've reasoned it out, and not because you read it in a book. It's just so clear and obvious: this is how it is.

And that's the direction that insight meditation is going someday—really beginning to taste or feel this insight body. That is again a very different way of experiencing the body than the karmic body, which tends to be the one that solidifies and carries the burden of all these projections and reactions and identifications that we have. So the insight body.

I hope you come to appreciate and value and care respectfully for these bodies that we have. And by not identifying with it being "mine," it is also part of this universe for you to care for. Care for your body, care for yourself. Thank you.