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Mindfulness of Breathing (10) At Home with the Body

The third step of anapanasati^[1] is to train oneself when breathing in a short breath, to experience the whole body. When breathing out, experiencing the whole body. This idea of experiencing the body means really sensing and feeling with all the sense doors we have, this body of ours.

One of the ways in which I have felt encouraged and inspired to really tune into the sensations of my body is the idea that when I die and this body becomes a corpse, the nerves in this body are no longer firing. There's no more electricity; there's no more activity in the nervous system of this body. And if someone touches a corpse with their finger, there's nothing in that corpse which will register, pick up, sense, feel, or send nerve signals to the brain.

Everything that I sense, every sensation in my body, whether it's pleasant or unpleasant, is a symptom or a sign of being alive. It's not always going to be here. That sense that this is what living is, this is what aliveness is, this is a precious experience of being conscious and of being alive, encourages me and supports me to really be present. I feel delight to know that I'm alive when I feel all this.

To feel the body, to experience the body, is so important in Buddhism. There's a wonderful story that soon after the Buddha died, someone went to one of his leading disciples, his cousin Ananda^[2], who had spent twenty years as the Buddha's attendant. They asked Ananda, "Now that your teacher is dead, who is going to be your teacher? Who is going to be your good spiritual friend?" And Ananda said, "Now that our teacher is dead, our teacher will be mindfulness of the body."

He didn't say, "Our teacher will be our body." He said the teacher will be the mindfulness of the body. That is a remarkable statement. This wonderful, amazing founder of Buddhism, who had so much wisdom and realization—that his disciple, who knew him directly, would point to your capacity to be mindful of your body as having some equivalence to the Buddha himself. That's quite a statement about the potential of your body to really be your teacher, to be your Buddha in a sense.

But again, it's important to realize it's not the body by itself. It's the mindfulness of the body, the ability to have awareness coursing through the body, awareness sensing and feeling the body. As we practice meditation, ideally, the body becomes more and more alive, more and more conscious. There's more awareness of the body.

It's easy to be unconscious or unaware of parts of our body, to be disassociated from parts of our body. Some of it might be because we're simply too much in our head, thinking too much. For example, sitting at the computer for long hours is a kind of mental activity where many people lose track of their body and are not settled in it. There can be whole professions where the center of gravity is above the neck. So there is a disconnection and a kind of atrophy of the living aliveness of the rest of the body.

There can also be emotional difficulties where it's simply too difficult to be in the body, because to feel parts of the body is to touch into unresolved places or the pain that's there. People will stay maybe above the neck or above the waist and not feel what's happening. Breath meditation—Buddhist mindfulness meditation—can be seen as a reclaiming of our body. It's really opening up, filling out, and feeling our body so that over time we discover for ourselves how wonderful it is to be at home in the body.

We also discover how much mindfulness of the body is, in fact, a teacher for us. So much of the path of practice and the path to spiritual freedom is revealed through this living mindfulness of the body.

As we do so, in the beginning, what we begin experiencing is what I've called the karmic^[3] body. The karmic body is when our bodily experience or sensations—how we experience our body—hasn't really caught up to the present moment. This means that if we have some unresolved issues, unresolved emotions, or experiences held and trapped in the body, then as we meditate, in order for the body to really catch up to the present moment, we have to kind of work through that.

It could be as simple as this: if, through life experiences, you've learned to be tense, anxious, or afraid, and that fear translates to your shoulders being raised, then when we sit down to meditate, we feel the tension in the shoulders. Sooner or later, we'll start feeling that. That tension is a legacy of the past. In a sense, it's a continuation of how we were conditioned by past experiences, operations, thinking, and attitudes. They get stored, they get perpetuated, and they get locked in.

When we start feeling the shoulders being tense, maybe we can relax a little bit. As we settle, get concentrated, and are more and more here, the shoulders relax more and more. At some point, the shoulders no longer contain this momentum from the past. When that momentum is no longer there, then in my language, the shoulders have finally arrived in the present moment. They are here. All over the body, there might be holding patterns that represent ways in which we've repressed our body by not paying attention to it—the way we hold the body, the tension we have. All these things are part of the karmic body.

It is said that Abraham Lincoln observed that by the time a person is forty, they are responsible for their face. I think what he meant by that is that the chronic holding patterns of how we use the small micro-muscles of the face get locked in over time. Certain muscles get strong and developed, others atrophy, and so it subtly shapes the human face. I've seen that in people who had the same ethnicity but grew up in different cultures speaking different languages. You can see subtle shifts and changes in their face because, due to the language, they use different muscles to speak.

If we're always afraid or always angry, the subtle micro-muscles in the face hold that. The face can be a legacy of the past, the momentum of the past. But the face can relax, and we can catch up and be in the present moment. Part of mindfulness is letting the body catch up to the present moment. To do that requires being willing to feel and sense all that's in the body. To leave nothing out.

With this idea of being at home in the body, there are messy rooms—rooms that still need to be cleaned out for the house to be settled and for us to really feel at home in it. We have to be very patient with all that. This is where mindfulness of breathing can be helpful. In mindfulness practice, we really want to feel this body, feel the tensions we have, and feel the pains we have. Then, we can breathe with those discomforts. We breathe through them to help them relax, open, and soften. It's almost like when there's space and breathing room for the body, the body knows how to unfold, unwind, and relax.

This idea of breathing with the discomfort—rather than thinking about it, reacting to it, pushing it away, being discouraged, being upset, or going into fantasy to avoid it—is about really being here in this body and breathing with it. Opening to the body, feeling at home in the body, and learning to be grounded here.

I'll repeat what I said at the end of the meditation: many people thrive and benefit a lot from others offering their attention. It's a great gift we give to others to listen to them well, to attend to them well, and to pay attention to them well. But the attention that we give also conveys other subtle attitudes that we have. If we're always leaning forward, showing we're paying attention, but we have a little bit of fear or anxiety around it, or we're trying too hard to do something for them, we convey something very different than if we settled back. When we settle back and pay careful attention while conveying a sense of at-homeness, a sense of safety, and comfort in this body and in this world, it feels entirely different.

To convey to others, "I'm paying attention to you, yes, and we can be at ease and settled here"—maybe it is not very compelling to you how important that is. But if the reference point was small children, like a four-year-old, how you're paying attention in subtle ways is something those children pick up. If we're paying attention with anxiety, they learn the world is an anxious place. But if they see someone paying attention and being there, and that person is at home in their skin, at home in their body, feeling safe and settled, they learn something very different. They learn this is possible, too. It's possible to feel at home in this world and relaxed.

One of my goals in life is to be a cheerleader for mindfulness of the body. I hope that over the next few days and over the weekend, you really explore this. One of the ways to explore mindfulness of the body—without making it a big project to be mindful of the body—is to make it a study. Become aware of all the ways that you're not aware of your body, all the ways that you're wandering off from it and are not in touch. Notice that and become like an expert at recognizing it quickly: "Oh, I'm not in touch with my body. I'm not aware of what's happening here. I'm in my thoughts and ideas. I'm lost in my project."

Do that regularly, and just see what happens to you, independent of any need to actually come back to your body. Just notice how much you're away.

Thank you very much, and I look forward to continuing this series on Monday.