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Guided Meditation: Just Sensing and Sensations

So, good morning and good day as we continue with the mindfulness of the body exercises. The exercise we're doing now is usually called the four elements, and I prefer the four properties, but what's nice about calling it the elements is the way that it connects us to the natural world. The elements, or properties, are associated with the earth, with water, with fire, and with air.

These are all properties that are essential for life. We take them in, they animate us, and we animate them. One of the nice things about seeing this connection with the earth, with the natural world around us, is that for some people it begins to be an antidote to excessive self-preoccupation, excessive living in our head with ideas of me, myself, and mine. It is an antidote to conceit and an antidote to the constructive aspect of the mind that constructs an edifice, or palaces of ideas and concepts and selves and histories and all these things that are second nature for many people.

There's certainly a place for that in life—an important part of life to see the whole. But here, in order to free ourselves from some of the deleterious effects of this constructive activity of the mind, we begin to deconstruct it. We deconstruct the concepts and take us back to the elemental level, to the building blocks of our experience, to the core sensations, the core sense data that we take in through our body with which we construct much of the world that we live in.

Learning to tune in and get concentrated on these properties, these sensations in the body, can do a phenomenal job in teaching us how not to get caught in the constructs and the ideas. It's a way of freeing ourselves from them temporarily, to have a radically different experience of ourselves that gives a different reference point for living a free life.

So, these are sensations that we have. The elements, these properties, are known and experienced through feeling the different sensations in our body. To experience them just as sensations, independent of the ideas that are then built on those sensations. We'll start with a simple exercise that I kind of like to do. I hope that you're content to do it with me again, and we'll build on that.

So, just gently closing your eyes. Maybe taking a few moments of settling in, whatever way you have. Maybe a few moments of breathing deeply and relaxing. And when you settle in and relax into your body, you're relaxing into something which is quite a natural part of the natural world. As natural, and perhaps as wondrous, as a tree. As a bird flying through the sky. A gopher in the ground, a squirrel scampering up a tree, a butterfly flying in the air, a hummingbird, a river, an ocean. All the wondrous parts of nature, we're equally part of. Our body is all those things.

So then, to begin now with sitting quietly, begin sensing and feeling the sensations of one of your hands. Perhaps you can feel pulsing and tingling, maybe something that feels comparable to the flow of blood through your fingers. Feeling the contact of the hand against some surface—your legs, the other hand.

Perhaps there are sensations of some weight, heaviness, or lightness. Warmth, coolness. Maybe both on different sides of the hand. Certain sensations in the palm of the hand. Sensations on the back of the hand. Sensations of the fingers.

And if you become attuned to the sensations themselves as natural phenomena, you might even be able to feel the sensations independent of any idea of a hand. The way the sensations feel themselves. Sensing whatever is sensitive enough to sense, sensations are not really two separate things. Sensing and sensation occur together, and we're in the location where sensing and sensations occur together.

They occur before the mind has ideas, before the mind identifies it, certainly with something as complicated as a "hand" or "my hand." Or judgments: "this is a good hand" or "a bad hand" or anything. The sensations and sensing occur together. Almost as if for themselves, there is no hand; there's just themselves, the sensing. The sensations come and go, arise and pass.

The energetics of them originally derived from the energy of the sun. The solidity, weight, hardness, softness, are considered properties of the earth. Warmth and coolness are properties of fire.

Seeing if you can notice how different it is to experience sensations of your hand without ideas of me, myself, and mine. How if you go into "my hand" or "it should be this way" or something, it pulls you away into the control tower. But if you relax into the hand, into the sensations, and let them just be there by themselves...

And now, turning your attention to the area in your body where you normally experience your breathing. Not so much specifically focusing on the experience of breathing, but in that area of your body, have the same sensitivity to sensations as you had in the hand.

If there's movement, that's associated with the air element, the wind element. If there's temperature, it's associated with the fire element, the fire property. As your chest or belly expand, if you feel the expansion, the pressure, the contraction, that is considered part of the water element. Water holds things together, creates pressure. Sensations of hardness and softness, weight, are the earth element, the earth property.

The exercise is one of becoming attuned to the fundamental sensation level of experience, which is the building block of the more complicated worlds we live in. It begins with sensations. The sensing and the sensations occur together, and in the location where they occur, in and of itself, those sensations have no concepts, no ideas, no preferences.

Let go of ideas and thoughts and preferences, so you can rest awareness in the sensations themselves in that area of the body. Content to be with a dancing flow of sensations coming and going. Getting closer to them. The closer we get, the more they become a dance of sensations, all in the area of your body where you're breathing.

Notice the way thinking pulls you out and away from this natural phenomena of the body, the processes of sensations coming and going. Perhaps you can dip back in, like dipping into a pool of water, and settle back in to these properties and elements of sensations for a few minutes. Willingly surrendering to just sensations of breathing in the body. Gently noticing the different sensations that come and go.

Choosing to stay with the sensations, not the thinking.

And then, as we come to the end of this sitting, take a moment to appreciate how much of our body is part of the natural world. The majority of our body is water. Essential for our body is the air that we breathe in and out. We are, in a sense, continuing the energies of the sun in our digestion and the temperatures of our body.

We have within us atoms and molecules that have circulated around the world in many ways. Some of them have been in other forms of life before you. Some of them come out of the ground, absorbed by plants that we eat. Just about every part of our physical body is a continuation of the earth and the natural life of the earth.

Our body and all its elements belong as part of this earth. You belong here on this planet, in this world. And to believe you don't is to have lost touch with this elemental level of our life and its connection to the planet.

And as we come to the end of the sitting, perhaps you can appreciate that others belong here too. They also are the fruit of the earth, of this universe. To offer them the right to be here, to see them through eyes that appreciate them too as an important part of this natural world. To support others to feel like they belong on this planet. Maybe gaze upon others with respect and care and love, maybe even a reverence that's freed from our self-centered, self-preoccupied ideas.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings be free.

Dharmette: Satipaṭṭhāna (28) The Four Elements Perspective

So hello everyone, and I want to say that yesterday we had some kind of technology breakdown here, and we don't know what it is yet, but we have hopefully bypassed the area of the problem as we try to figure out what happened.

So maybe today can function then also as another introduction to this topic of what's classically called the four elements, the four dhātus^[1] in Pali. It is the aspects of our felt experience, the way we experience things that can be seen to be associated with elements of the physical world that's around us. And that, of course, I think can have very profound meanings, associations, and that sense of connection.

I prefer to translate this word dhātu as "properties," because "elements" implies to me some kind of molecule, some kind of something very essential, elemental. It doesn't have to mean that in English, of course, but I prefer property because property points to a property of something. Now this is the property of our body, of our sensations that we're experiencing.

So there are four, and they're always listed in a particular order: earth, water, fire, and air. The reason for that order is that the ancient Indian cosmology or geography believed that the earth is at the bottom, and then there's the water floating on the earth, and then above that there's the heat and the fires that come up into the air, and then there's the air. So it's a progression.

To do this meditation on the four elements, or four properties, is to take a very different lens, a different perspective for direct experience than what many of us normally live in, which is we live in ideas and concepts and ideas of things. For example, I have this big bell here, and I could just be thinking about it as a bell. "This is what a great bell, remember who gave it to us, it was a gift, and how wonderful that was to receive this gift, and how we've used it for so many years and different places we've used it and ways we've used it." I can be in that world, in the mind of memory, thoughts, ideas, bell. "And what this proves about IMC, that it's a really worthy meditation center because that is a good bell."

Or I could change the lens of my experience to not be in the ideas, the history, the memory. I can just feel the weight of it. I can feel the smoothness of it, the temperature of it—it feels cool to touch right now with my warm hands. I can feel some smoothness in it, and also there are little indentations on the sides that I can feel. It's kind of fun to have my hands rub across indentations, and they come and go.

I can get into the sensations independent of it being a bowl, a bell. The bell-ness of it doesn't need to be relevant. I can close my eyes and just be with the sensations, and it doesn't have to be a bell, it could be something very different.

So different lenses, different perspectives. We can think of it maybe as different magnifications that we do. A particular exercise I like has to do with a little kids' book my sons had. You turn the pages, and it's a picture of the same location but at different magnitudes of focus. I think they went by magnitudes of 10. Sometimes you started at the universe and went closer and closer in. You saw the earth, and then a little town, and then the lawn, and then the grass, and then the cells, and then you saw the atoms. Depending on what magnification you use, you see different things.

You can imagine, for example, if there was a satellite video that you would watch, and it zoomed in on the neighborhood you grew up in. That would be kind of fascinating to see. "Oh, they've changed that, the house is no longer there, they've redone it there." Or, "That house hasn't changed at all. There's a tree I used to climb in. There's the house of my neighbor who was so unjust because I broke his window and threw my baseball through it, but he never returned it—my favorite baseball. And then there's the neighbor that used to give us cookies, and we always felt so safe playing in the tree in front of that person's yard." "I've come so far in my life since then," or, "I haven't come anywhere in my life since then, all my problems derive from that time." All these ideas come into play for a certain magnification.

But if we drop in to just the tree we used to play in, a whole different set of thoughts come up. But then if we go closer in to just a leaf, and beyond the leaf to the cells, and beyond the cells to the atoms, beyond the atoms into the subatomic particles—suddenly there's all this space and vastness between all the particles, and it's amazing. It's like looking into the great night sky and the amazing size of the universe. Depending on the magnification, we have a different relationship with what's going on.

If we're always at the magnification level where it's all about me, myself, and mine, and my ideas, my history, what's done to me, what wasn't done to me, what I should do—it can be tiring, exhausting. It tends to be the place where there's a lot of attachment, a lot of stress, and it can be a labyrinth. It could also be, in Buddhist terms, a cycle of stress where the very attempts to resolve it and get out of it—that level of life magnification—just spins the wheel more and more, and we just do more and more. It's like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. We're always trying to make things better and to solve things, but as long as it's based on ideas of me, myself, and mine, there probably is no real solution to a final happiness.

One way to find real change is to change the magnification level, to change the lens in which we see our experience. And that's not an easy thing to do because the attachments keep us in that certain magnification level, the level of these thoughts and histories and ideas.

So we're training ourselves to begin letting go of that place. Not to dismiss it or abandon it, but so that we're not so attached to it, and so we can see it in a fresh way. We can learn to be free. And also to connect to ourselves at a different magnification level that reveals a different level of experience, different kind of processes that, if we connect to them, are much more freeing, much more liberating. It is much more helpful for experiencing something vast and free and liberating, like really getting down into the particle level of the atoms and just thinking, "Wow, this is all amazing."

So this four elements meditation is this shift of magnification, a shift to a different lens of experience. It's very important to understand it's not a dismissal of other magnification levels, but for many of us, it's an expansion of the lenses we can use. So we're not always in one lens, one magnification level, but we have the ability to go between different ones. When it's helpful to go into this element level, there's a lot of wisdom to be discovered here, and also a fair amount of healing. Because some of the stresses that we apply to our system limit the healing qualities of the body and mind. But once we drop into this elemental level of these properties of the sensations, there's a freeing of this stress, and this whole physical and also mental system can operate much more harmoniously. It's remarkable what can start happening then.

So to shift our attention to the sensation level, it's really a sensation meditation, sensory awareness that we do. In Vipassanā^[2] practice, as was taught to many of us—the Mahasi practice from the teacher Mahasi Sayadaw^[3]—the instructions were to experience the movements of the belly as we were breathing. People thought it was a breath meditation, but in fact, the emphasis was not on the breathing. The emphasis was on the sensations that came into play as the body breathed. To feel all these sensations that come into play and get closer and closer, more intimate, like really get into the magnification where we are just there with the sensations and we're not there with the ideas and concepts and stories around them.

It can be quite relaxing and easeful to drop all the stories and just be with the sensations as they come and go. That is a core aspect of Vipassanā practice. So this four elements meditation is really central to this tradition, even though we're not always so explicit about it.

So that's what we'll do for a few days: explore these four elements and these sensations and how to work with them. Hopefully, you can appreciate this particular lens or magnification level of our experience and will find some fascination, delight, and maybe even some freedom in it. So thank you very much.

Announcements

I'll see you Monday. I'll be here Monday, and I won't see you, but I'll be with you.

A reminder that tomorrow morning, IMC and Zoom is hosting a mindfulness circle for Black-identified practitioners. So if you're Black or know someone who's a Black practitioner who would like to meet with other Black practitioners, it's a wonderful gathering—the third time we're doing it. So if it's relevant for you, you're very welcome to attend. The information is on the "What's New" on IMC's website. So thank you.