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Guided Meditation: Following Sensations as they Appear

Hello everyone, and welcome to our meditation. Somewhat following the theme in the last few days of mindfulness of the four properties, elemental properties of earth, water, fire, and air, I'd like to suggest a little variation of what we did yesterday. Today, the instructions are to follow the sensations in the body, follow the trail of sensations that the body sends up. And if you're with a relaxed mind, kind of not fixating or focusing on anything particular, let your body take the lead so that your awareness follows, your mindfulness follows.

So, if you're aware of a coolness in your fingers, your awareness would go to the fingers. Then aware of a tiny cough, you'd be aware of a little cough. Aware of warmth in the chest, you would go to the warmth. Whatever appears in the body, if you keep your attention open and relaxed to your body, sensations appear. Some may persist and last for a while, but if you stay relaxed around it and just kind of aware of it in a soft, floating way, something else sooner or later will appear. As it appears, you follow that, you continue on the trail along those sensations.

In other words, you're not directing the attention to something new or some idea you have of what you should be paying attention to, except for sensations of the body. You're following the lead; the body takes the lead, and you follow. Maybe it's like a dance where there's a lead and a follower, so you just follow with awareness and see what happens when you relax into following along, with no other responsibility but to follow along and feel the sensations that appear. And then, at some point later in the meditation, I'll offer some little additional instruction.

To begin to settle into your body, to relax into the present moment, if it's nice for you, you can take a few deeper breaths. A clear kind of ritual recognition of being here in your body. Breathing in deeply, and extending the exhale longer. Your exhale will do that on its own, especially on the second half of the extended part of it. Are there more places in the body—the arms, the shoulders, the belly—that you can relax? Just a ritual connection as you breathe in, and a ritual of relaxation as you exhale.

Then letting your breathing return to normal, and continue with a few more just ordinary breaths. As you breathe in, feel some place in your body where there's tension, and as you exhale, relax and soften.

Breathing in, breathing out, relaxing into your body. And if you have any concerns, thoughts, pressure to think, feel that pressure as you breathe in. Without expectation, without force, as you exhale, relax the thinking mind. Letting go of your thoughts, and as you do, letting go into your body. Whenever you need to let go of your thinking, let that be the same as letting go into your body.

And then, for this meditation, let your awareness, your mindfulness, follow the trail of sensations that appear in the body with your mind relaxed. Be curious, follow what appears in your body. In whatever way the sensations in your body appear, disappear, appear, persist for a while, and then others appear—follow the newly arising sensations in your body. Letting your awareness follow them in a relaxed, slow way, floating to the next sensation that appears, to the next one, to the next one. The trail, the lead, is set by the sensations, and awareness follows.

Whatever new sensations arise, let your awareness go there. And then, when another new one arises, let it go there. Be sensitive to the new sensations of the body that appear. Sometimes it might include sounds appearing, sensations of the ears.

If you think about what's happening, you will miss the next arising of sensation in your body. See if you can quiet your mind enough that you can float between the new sensations that arise in your body in a light, relaxed way, where no one sensation is given extra emphasis or importance. It's just a new arising.

And now, for the end of this sitting. To have felt your body, the sensations of your body come and appear and disappear, is evidence that you are alive. This is the animated body. One day this body will not be alive. This body will be a corpse. And none of those sensations will be here. There will be no sensations for the body to take in, be aware of; no sensations to react to, or to cling to, or worry about. No sensations, and no awareness of sensations. No mind.

This wonderful, powerful gift of nature, to be aware, will not be here as well. What is it to sit in the middle of this living body, animated with sensations and awareness, without clinging to any of it? Feeling the uniqueness, the timeliness of this. In this time, in this moment, now is the only time and place where all the sensations, the awareness exists. The lived moment of the present. Aware, but not attached. Just aware.

And then, as we come to the end of the sitting, to know yourself as an animate being, alive with sensations, alive with the capacity to feel and sense. To be aware of the emotional life, of awareness and thoughts and memories and futures, with a heart that's sensitive to the comings and goings of life, the challenges and joys of life. And like you, other people are the same way. They too are animated beings with sensitivities of body and heart and mind, with capacities for their inner life to be happy and free, or suffering and caught up.

Knowing that others are in some ways like yourself in their capacity for happiness and suffering, open your heart of compassion and care, the heart of love, to all beings. Imagining how wonderful it would be if they could be happy and free, just as it would be wonderful for you to be free in this precious living life that we live.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. Thank you.

Dharmette: Satipaṭṭhāna (31) Skeleton Contemplation

So today we move into the last of the mindfulness exercises for the body, with the body. There are six of these exercises. It starts with breathing, then with mindfulness of postures, mindfulness of activities, mindfulness of the parts of the body, mindfulness of the elements or properties of the body, and now the mindfulness of—or maybe we call it the corpse meditation—reflection or consideration of a corpse.

This one begins with the words "as if"—as if we're viewing a corpse. Here, we're calling upon the imagination. Now, some Buddhists will go and spend time with corpses; this mindfulness of death is a time-honored practice in Buddhism. Most years before COVID, I would take people to an anatomy lab to spend time with a corpse. It's fascinating to be with a corpse, but to be with it in an anatomy lab, where we're seeing a whole different perspective on life and the body and people.

When I was a freshman in college, I took a drawing class. Halfway through the class, the teacher took us to the anatomy lab of the university. We went into the lab and there was this person laid out who had died, a corpse. It was the first time I had ever seen a corpse in that kind of detail and way. We were supposed to draw it, and we were there for two days. The first day I went, I drew the person's foot because, to me, that was the furthest I could get away from having to deal with this death.

When I went back the next time, I realized what I'd done, that I'd been avoiding it. So, I then decided to draw the face, to really be there with it. The teacher explained that the reason he took his drawing classes to the anatomy lab is that after the visit, everyone's drawings would be stronger. I never asked him what "stronger" meant, but apparently, he appreciated that somehow something shifted for people.

So, this time-honored way of being reminded of our mortality, of really knowing that we're going to die. It's easy when you're young to operate as if, "No, I'll never die," or "I know I'll die, but it's irrelevant." But at some point, to really consider and reflect, and look death right in the eye and take it in, and consider it for the purposes of becoming free in this life, for the purposes of somehow connecting to this lived experience of ours, so that we can live freely in the midst of this lived life.

The contemplation of death is not a glorification of death, but it's meant to do a variety of things for different people. There are different benefits from contemplating death. For some people, I think it helps them to really show up and be really present in an acute way for this life, like: now is the time we have to be aware, to practice, let's not put it off.

The direction the practice is going in each of these exercises is to be able to be very deeply settled, peaceful, and undistracted. To be able to settle back and just observe things arise and pass away, until, observing the arising and passing away of phenomena, the changing flow of experience, something inside lets go of the clinging and the grasping.

When the sutta^[1] introduces this corpse contemplation, I think it's good to understand that it's for the purposes of really getting concentrated and settled, and being able to observe in a deep way. It's not meant to be disturbing, though it might initially be disturbing; it's meant to develop concentration and a peacefulness. It doesn't work for everyone, but knowing that that's the purpose, we orient ourselves around this contemplation with that as kind of a north star.

How is it we contemplate the corpse that supports this? Well, one clue is that it is a little bit of a visualization or imagination, and maybe a compelling one. Rather than going and finding a real corpse to look at, it may be a little bit less disturbing, less challenging to imagine one. You could imagine it lightly, or in a way that's not so disturbing—just imagine there's a corpse.

For beginners, I think what's nice is—there are nine of these contemplations—to start kind of in the middle and to contemplate a skeleton. So, if you come across a human skeleton in an anatomy lab or a museum or somewhere, contemplate it.

When I was practicing in Thailand with a famous teacher named Buddhadasa^[2], he was really into practicing and teaching outdoors. But because it rains there, he had a big meditation hall, a Dharma hall, that had open sides but a roof to protect people from the rain. It was a big roofed area. In a respectful way, hanging from the rafters were a couple of skeletons. One of them had a sign under it, and the sign said, "Miss Thailand 1936."

I imagine that's been up there for all those years for a good reason in the Dharma hall, a place where teachings and meditation happen. I suppose it's to remind people that any preoccupation with beauty, attachment to physical beauty, identifying with that, holding onto that, and being preoccupied with that—it's only temporary. Underneath that, and at the end of that, there's the corpse, there's a skeleton.

In what way is that not gross? In what way is it not disturbing? In what way can we contemplate that skeleton in a way that's beneficial for us, that supports us on this path of freedom and liberation? It's easy to be disturbed; it's easy to protest. It can be much more difficult to put that aside gently. Not rejecting it, but just putting it aside. If we want to benefit from these exercises, we don't benefit if we protest; we benefit if we do the inner work, asking, "How is it that this can be helpful for me?"

The text begins, "as if one is viewing a corpse," and then each of the nine contemplations ends with reflecting, "This body too has a nature like this, will become like this, will not avoid this."

In other words, the contemplation of a corpse is for the purpose of realizing: this will happen here to me, this too will happen. In what way does this realization, this discovery, taking in this true thing, benefit us? Where's the wisdom of that? How does that guide us in a good direction? How does it wake us up? How does it help us shed the distracted mind, the preoccupied mind, the mind that's involved in things that maybe are not really to our benefit?

How does it create a kind of seriousness, a kind of aliveness, a kind of dedication? And in the context of this meditation, how does it even create a kind of love for being present now, so that we can get really settled here, really clear that this is the place where the meditation is, here in the present moment, here and now?

I'll describe more about this contemplation of the corpse later, but for now, I'd like to encourage you to contemplate a corpse. I don't know about where you live, but around here this last Halloween, the population of skeletons increased dramatically! [Laughter] I've never seen so many Halloween skeletons, and some are still hanging in different places. The last one I saw a week or so ago, someone had outfitted the skeleton with mountain climbing gear, with shoes and belts and everything, and had it climbing underneath the eaves up onto the roof of their house. All these fun things people are doing.

But maybe contemplate skeletons. Maybe consider your skeleton that right now is clothed with tendons and flesh. Consider that someday your skeleton might be without flesh. Someday, maybe your skeleton will be all that's left in terms of ashes if you get cremated.

You might consider this and think about it in a certain way, but the exercise is to consider in what way you can do this so it's beneficial, so you're not getting depressed or upset or horrified. Rather, in what way does this light some kind of greater present moment awareness? Some ability to really say, "Okay, here I am, no question about it."

When there's a skeleton, there's no animated life, no awareness, no sensations. Nothing we see, nothing we hear. How to rest in that, and be free in that. So that's the homework if you'd like to do it, and then we'll continue this tomorrow.

If you're on YouTube, I placed underneath the video, in the description section, one of the contemplations. You can see the text of the skeleton one.

Finally, what I'd like to say is to just give you a heads up: since we'll maybe be here Friday, next Monday the 21st of February we won't have the Monday 7 a.m. YouTube. We'll take a break. What you might do is go back and re-listen to, and follow, one of the previous videos on the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta. Kind of refresh yourself on some part of it, maybe a part that was more impactful.

I'm going away. I'm going to my father's 91st birthday, so I won't be able to be here that Monday, but I'll be back on Tuesday. So thank you, and I look forward to our time tomorrow.