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Guided Meditation: Listening to the Body

Good morning, good day, and here for our meditation.

One of the remarkable tools that we have for meditation and for living a wise life is our physical body. This body of ours is a finely tuned instrument of perception. It's as if it's an antenna that picks up so much sense data from the environment and from inside of ourselves. Even if we don't have all our senses operating properly—as I get older, my eyes are not seeing as well, my ears are not hearing as well—still, it's a phenomenal apparatus that we have.

If we barrel ahead in our thoughts and activities, it's all too easy to not be attuned to this wonderful instrument, this wonderful antenna, this wonderful source, I would say, even of wisdom, because there's so much understanding that can come. What I'd like to emphasize for today is that when we have mindfulness of the body, when we're aware of our body, the body tends to move towards equilibrium, to have homeostasis.

The body will find its way to the midpoint, the balance point between stress and excessive relaxation or slumping. It will find its balance between pulling back and moving forward. It finds its balance in so many different ways. One of the ways it does it for people who are tense is you can feel the body wants to move towards relaxation, to release the tension. It's one thing to feel the tensions of our body, the holding we do; it's another thing to feel the momentum, the call, almost like the desire the tension has to relax, to release, to feel the momentum towards relaxing.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, if we're too slumped or too collapsed, if we really feel that and tune into that, we'll feel the body's movement and this almost-desire to be aligned, to be upright, to have its energy moving through the body in a good way, in an energized, alert way.

It's possible to tune into the body and follow the body's directions towards balance, its tendency towards equilibrium. We don't have to do so much of the work ourselves. Rather, our job is to tune into what is going on in the body, and the body will find its way or tell us clearly what needs to happen.

So, to begin:

What is the posture that your body wants to take right now? Putting aside ideas you have of what a good meditation posture is, if you feel your body from the inside out, what would be nice for your body right now? Whatever it might be, it will probably be temporary. Sooner or later, there'll be a time to be a different way. If we live in the policies in our minds about how we should be, we won't listen or hear or feel what the body is about.

Gently close the eyes.

Often on these morning 7 a.m. sits, I discuss beginning with a conscious effort to relax different parts of the body, sometimes with deep breaths. But for this morning, don't do that. Rather, let the body do it as it sees fit.

Take a little time now to scan through your body and check in with it. Are there tensions anywhere in the body? Are there places of holding, tightness, resistance? Don't do anything about it right now, but rather let it be there. Feel it well, sense it, until perhaps you feel that within the tension itself, there's a desire to relax. Then relax, but not before. Allow that part of your body to release.

There might be in the body a global bracing ourselves against life, by tightening up in fear of some unknown future, or life itself. Feel that, make space for it, give time to feel that bracing, that holding back. Just because your mind doesn't like it, don't start with the mind directing the show. Feel the body.

Or maybe there's some contraction or pressure in your body of wanting, doing, the eagerness of leaning forward, a restlessness. Make lots of room to feel and sense how that's experienced in the body.

There may be physical tension associated with thinking—pressure, constriction. Take your time to feel that until you feel that within that constriction, there is a request to relax.

Now become aware of your breathing. Be aware of your body breathing, and without any effort to do anything different, notice if there's any tension, resistance, or holding in the breathing pattern. Let yourself be okay with that. Your job is simply to know and feel any tightening or holding associated with breathing.

For the rest of the sitting, continue in a relaxed way with your breathing or with tuning into your body. If you wander off in thought, take that as an instruction, as a reminder to come back to feel your body. Settle into your body's experience of itself, as if you can trust the body will find its way if you have a clear, non-reactive awareness. An awareness without an agenda. Just aware. Listening, sensing, feeling, breathing. The breathing body, body breathing. The body itself.

Whatever you might be thinking now, consider that for now, your body is more important. The experience of your body is where the meditation will unfold.

And after these minutes of sitting quietly, has anything shifted and changed in your body? How does your body feel now? Might there be some movement in your body to sit more upright, to open up more, to be straighter? The healthy opposite of relaxing. What is the call within the body? More relaxation or more uprightness?

Coming to the end of this sitting. Sometimes we come to a place through meditation that we're not living from our mind as much as we are from our body. And not so much from our body, but from the body's sensitivity and antennas, and the body's resonance with the world around us. Where things like kindness, friendliness, and love seem to well up from the body independent of the policies, beliefs, and ideas of the mind.

As we sit here in the last minutes, is there any, even slight, place of kindness, tenderness, love, or goodwill that you can find in your body? Maybe for yourself. Maybe for the people in your life. Maybe the kind of goodwill you might have for even people you don't know. If there is such care, love, or compassion that arises from your body, from your torso, your heart, or even if you just wish it did—wishing that that was the case is very significant. From this place, or this wish, give words to that kindness by repeating quietly to yourself:

May others be happy. May others be safe. May others be peaceful. May others be free.

Dharmette: Respecting Anger (3 of 5) Diffusing Anger and its Expression

Good morning, good day, good evening. We're continuing with this discussion of anger.

As I said, anger is a sign, or a message. One way of understanding that is that it's a sign that something is wrong somewhere. Some wisdom is needed to not assume automatically that what's wrong is out in the world, or to assume automatically that what's wrong is within oneself. But it's a sign that something is off, that something needs attention. One of the first things to do is to learn from it, to find out what it is, to stop and take a good look at what's really going on here. When we meditate especially, this is a great place because we don't have to say anything to anyone or do anything in the world. You can just really be present and feel it and be.

We want to learn from it. One of the things to learn is how anger motivates us. That's part of the danger of anger—that sometimes anger comes with very strong motivation to do something, to say something very forcefully to someone, or to act forcefully. When the motivation has the upper hand—and that's why, for example, when expressing anger or speaking angrily, people lose touch with themselves as they say it. The motivation is so strong and so powerful that they don't really know what's happening in their body, their hearts, and their minds. Sometimes, in extreme versions, they're kind of possessed by anger and haven't really touched into what's happening here. This losing touch with oneself when we're angry is a great hindrance, a great shortcoming.

The wisdom, the clarity, the ability to act and speak wisely in the world happens a lot from being grounded in one's body, from being present here. That can happen even when we're angry, and that way we won't lose ourselves in the anger. Training ourselves to be in the body and stay present helps us to think of anger as having a motivation in it. So ask yourself: What is the motivation here? What is the desire? What's the wish that you want to see happen? Regardless of what the degree of anger might be—it could be irritation, it could be annoyance, something relatively mild—what is that?

This becomes particularly important when anger, annoyance, irritation, or hostility has become low-key and chronic. It has nothing to do with any particular incident that's happened, but rather it has become a way of living, a kind of attitude which we have. The whole assessment of chronic anger or hostility is very different than the consideration of incident-specific anger, where there's something happening right in front of us. Chronic anger that goes on for a long time is particularly debilitating. It tends to have a powerful force that causes people to actually not be in touch with themselves. They might feel the opposite because the energy of anger is so strong that they feel humming with it, but actually, there's such a big cost. We lose something.

The Buddha gave a list of the downsides of being angry, especially chronic anger, maybe to motivate people to do something about their anger and not live this way. He said that the ill effects of anger include looking ugly, being in pain, making mistakes, the loss of property, falling into disputes and disgrace, loss of friends, and then a rebirth in hell. I don't know if that motivated some of you, like, "Oh wow, all those things can be there with chronic anger," this kind of persistent stream of it.

One of the ways to respect anger, I believe, is not to give in to it as a motivational force to say or do something, but rather take the time to feel it, to know it, and to feel and know it in the body. The body can process this. The body knows how to unfold, relax, open up, and reveal. Sometimes when we take the time to sit down and feel anger in the body, it gets stronger. There can be murderous rage that arises. But when you're sitting still, maybe whatever has happened is so powerful that something is erupting inside of us. If we're not acting on it or expressing it, meditation is about letting that eruption happen, or letting the whole thing dissipate and dissolve.

Sometimes what keeps it going is the telling ourselves stories, repeating the injury that's been done, or the repetition of certain trains of thought which keeps the anger, annoyance, and irritation going. To sit quietly and feel it in the body is an alternative to all those stories. Then you can allow the body to do what it wants to do, for the deeper process to do what it needs to do. It might be an eruption, or it might be dissolving. It's not your job to choose which it is, but to really be attuned to see what needs to happen here. Hopefully, be quiet enough, still enough, or go for a walk long enough, that you allow the whole process to maybe come to some completion.

In ordinary life, especially with incident-specific anger where we have to kind of act on things, it's very useful to learn how to defuse^[1] the anger. Learn how to be with the anger so that it doesn't automatically trigger motivational actions where we say or do things. Here again, train ourselves so it's second nature to be mindful of the body, so we feel what's happening. The body can be a source of stability. Come back to the body and just sit and be, or stand and feel your feet on the ground.

The body can also be the means by which we defuse some of the energy of anger, some of the intention and motivational force of anger that interferes with our ability to really be attuned more deeply to what's happening. We can attune to the deeper emotions that might really be the bigger issue, be more attuned to the situation we're in to take a better look at what's happening, and be more attuned to ourselves. If the anger arises because of a story we're telling ourselves, we can question the story: Is that the right perspective that we have?

Tune into the body and find ways to defuse some of that energy of anger by relaxing, breathing deeply, and relaxing on the exhale. Breathing and feeling the expansion of the rib cage in the torso is a way of grounding yourself in the body and feeling something that's really primary—the primary experience of breathing. Notice your posture when you're angry. Maybe the posture is one that doesn't lend itself to defusion, to settling. If both hands are in a fist, maybe it's not that difficult to relax the fist, to open the hand, and doing that is part of the defusion process—settling it, quieting down.

Defusion is not the same thing as repression, denial, or escaping from it. Defusion is settling some of the ways in which we're getting disconnected from ourselves, feeling more deeply what's happening, and being more present. It's settling the motivational triggers that might come with anger so that we're not speaking from the anger or acting from the anger, and we can kind of feel and sense what's going on.

Find out where you are. Each of us probably has our own specialty of where in the body anger is most expressed. It might be tension and tightness in the belly, it might be in the chest, it might be in the face or the jaws, it might be in the hands. Sometimes it's the eyes. I've seen angry people whose eyes feel so tense, fixed, and locked in. It might be in the forehead, and there are places where we get headaches because of all the tension associated with irritation and anger. Wherever your place is, get to know it so that when you go about your life and there's an incident of anger, you know to go to that place and maybe relax and settle.

Learn skills of defusion. Learn skills of being grounded in the present so that anger doesn't get the upper hand, so that you can learn from the anger rather than act on the anger. The expression of anger is not something we want to do very often. I once asked one of my Buddhist teachers if it was ever appropriate to express anger. The teacher said, "Yes, once in a blue moon. Once in a great while, like once every five years or something." I don't know if that guideline is the right one, but it was fascinating to me—this idea that there might be a time, but not that often.

Having the ability to step back has the advantage that if anger involves something that needs to be addressed in our life, it's often addressed much more usefully when motivated by other emotions, feelings, and ideas than the motivations that come from anger itself. It's not denying the incident was anger-producing; it's not denying the difficulty of the anger. But it's questioning the motivational value of anger. It's very rare that anger is useful as a motivational force.

Some people are quick to defend anger because a lot of good gets done in the world with anger, people are motivated for justice and fight for it. So maybe that's good, but it's not so healthy for the person who's angry. I feel a little sad when people justify anger for that reason. What I wish they would do instead is find an equal or even stronger motivation from compassion. Don't justify anger if there are better motivations to get the job done.

So, defusing anger. For this next day, if you find yourself irritated, annoyed, angry, rageful, simmering, resentful, or whatever you might feel today, see what you can do by tuning into your body. Like we did in the guided meditation, tune into what's going on in the body really well and see what the body wants to do. See if the body wants to relax, see if the body wants to be energized.

If you do this during a walk—as I've said before, I process strong anger with walks—does the body want to walk faster? Does it want to walk slower? What does the body want to do here? Also explore: Where can you relax? What settles you into the emotion? This is a personal skill that each person needs to learn for themselves: How do you defuse anger?

Thank you.