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Guided Meditation: Releasing the Body

So hello everyone, and here in Northern California, we greet you from a rainy place. Finally, it rained significantly last night, and it's still raining a little bit.

One of the great areas of discovery in doing Buddhist practice has to do with the family of actions—a family of things we do, or that happen—that involve letting go. Today, the topic is release. Letting go sometimes is not popular; sometimes it's misunderstood. In Buddhism, primarily, the profound movement of release, of letting go, is not letting go of anything that is real, but letting go of the ways that we cling to it. So, we're letting go of clinging and all the different variations of it. We're letting go of the kind of resistance that is also a kind of a compulsion.

When we say let go, let go, let go, we don't necessarily mean letting go of the thing, but of the holding to the thing. If we say let go of the body, it's more like the way that if you tend to an injured animal, and then when you're ready to release it into the wild, into its natural habitat, you let it go. Rather than it being a loss for the animal, it's a gain; it returns to its natural way. And so, to release our body, like you would release a bird into the air—to let go of the body so the body becomes free.

One of the really wonderful things about this liberation that's at the heart of Buddhism is that, in some very significant—maybe initially perplexing—way, we're letting go, we're liberating, not ourselves, but we're liberating everything else from ourselves. If it's all about personal liberation, it actually misses the boat. It's not really the full freedom. But to let everything go, to set everything free of our clinging, or grasping, or conceit, or selfishness, or self-involvement—this can happen with the body too. We let go of the body. We release the body. We discover how to let the body be without any clinging, resistance, tightening, or pressure that we exert onto the body.

For this sitting today, I'll probably use language like letting go, but hopefully with this introduction you appreciate that we're not letting go of the body, but rather we're setting it free from the ways that we interfere with it or live in a more difficult way with it.

To support the freedom of the body so that it's not restricted anywhere or collapsed anywhere, it's helpful to take a posture that is open, where nothing is collapsed. Usually, if you're sitting in a chair or cushion, it's helpful to sit with a spine straight enough so the chest is a little bit open. Maybe even the shoulders have a little bit of a movement of not being pulled back, but kind of allowing them to move back.

Lowering your gaze and letting your gaze be soft and relaxed. That itself is a movement of letting go: letting go of the involvement with the eyes, of being distracted by the mind searching, looking, trying to see. If it's comfortable for you, you can gently close your eyes.

Taking a few long, slow, deep breaths. As you exhale, appreciate the letting go that happens there: the releasing of the breath, the releasing of the inhale, the settling and relaxing as you exhale.

Letting your breathing return to normal.

Take the opportunity with the exhale to relax further. Relax the muscles of the face, releasing any pressure that's exerted on the eyelids, any pressure exerted on the forehead. Perhaps tightening in the jaw can be released. Maybe open the mouth a teeny bit to separate the teeth a tiny bit.

Relaxing around the mouth. If there is any pressure of the lips touching, can you release the pressure?

And on the exhale, soften the shoulders. Release the shoulders.

And relax the belly, softening the belly.

On the exhale, relax the legs, the thighs. And perhaps the arms, hands, and fingers. If you feel any pressure or tightness in the fingers, you might even slightly wiggle them.

All these steps of relaxation are movements of letting go, of release. Releasing the body from the influence of the mind, the holdings, clingings, and tightenings of the mind.

Settling into the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out.

As you exhale, relaxing the thinking mind, any pressure or tightening associated with thinking. Letting the mind, maybe the brain, spread out wide like the surface of a wide, still lake. With every exhale, the surface becoming calmer, the waves stiller.

And for every exhale now, letting go of your body. Releasing your body from the hold of the mind. Any clinging, grasping. Any preoccupation with the body, judgments. As you exhale, let go. Release.

Release your body from any ideas you have about the body. And don't worry too much about exactly what you're letting go of. Just on the exhale, release the body. Let go.

Letting the body be still. Like a gentle, sweet, unmoving body that from within is released, set free, with every exhale.

Anywhere in your body where there's even the slightest sense of tension, or stress, or pressure, see if you can release that. And if you can't release it, see if you can let go and make space around it.

In the last minutes of this sitting, whatever your mind is involved in, let it go. Release it. And then do it again and again. Let go, and then let go of the next thing, the next thing. Let it be a release, a relaxation. Deep to your very core, let go.

Let go. And if you're trying too hard to let go, let go of trying hard.

The more we release the body, the more letting go we have and the body is free, the more the body becomes porous. Nothing in the world that happens gets stuck in the body. Nothing that happens in the world gets caught in the body. The more we hold onto things, the more there's a way in which things get stuck in the body or impact the body.

To release deeply so we can be available in the world with love, with care. So that we can be present for whatever way someone else is, because we're porous, we're open, spacious. We have lots of room so we don't react, contract, retract ourselves.

May we go into the world dedicated to being present for others in a porous way, in a spacious way, that allows our goodwill, our friendliness, our love to not be agitated, contracted, or lost.

May our ability to be present and mindful support us in caring for the welfare and happiness of others.

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

Thank you.

Dharmete: Body (5 of 5) Liberation with the Body

This last talk on the week of mindfulness of the body focuses on release. Release is one of my favorite words for liberation or freedom because it has this idea of setting something free; it gets released. It has this kind of dual thing where freedom maybe has the idea of you can go do whatever you want, and letting go has a little bit more of the weight of what's been let go of. But for me, release is in between that, where clearly something has become free of something, but there's also the feeling of this opening up to just openness and a kind of freedom.

Each step along the way of this week, we have these five different areas of mindfulness. We have relaxation, recognition, respect, restoration, and now release. But each of the first four has within them something we're releasing. Relaxation, maybe, is the most obvious, where we're releasing tension, holding, maybe stress. There's something where something is letting go, and when we relax, some people don't maybe focus so much on what's let go of, but rather the goodness, the nice feelings of the relaxation, the comfort of it.

Recognition involves a kind of release as well, letting go as well. Recognition is very simple. It's just recognizing just how things are in the moment without the complications of history, without the projections into the future, without the complications of the complicated world and the complications of me, myself, and mine, but just allowing something to be itself. Allowing an itch to be an itch—just recognize the itch. It can be hard to let go of all the reactivity to it, but that's the goal: just an itch, an itch; a warmth, just a warmth; a twisting, just a twisting; a heat, just heat.

When I was in Japan studying Zen, one of the teachings I got there was something like, "When it's hot, just be hot." When the weather is hot. And when it's cold, just be cold. Whether that's exactly how you should live your life, I'm not saying, but it's the idea that in recognition we're letting go of a lot of the complications and just letting things be in their simplicity, the pristine simplicity of each moment. So, it's a lot of letting go.

With respect, we're letting go of disrespect. Disrespect here might mean having an agenda around things, being in charge, bossing our life around like it has to be this way or that way—I have to get rid of this, I have to make this happen, it shouldn't be this experience, it should be some other way. But respect is to just give permission for each thing to just be itself, to respect, to see again. So, there's a letting go that allows us to have this seeing again, just allowing ourselves to really be there in the simplicity of things.

Then, restoration: to allow things to restore. We're letting go of, again, ways in which we restrict ourselves, the ways in which we limit ourselves, or hold back, or resist ourselves, or box things in, or contain things. There has to be space for things to restore. Like if you have too many plants growing in a flowerbed, then the seedling that you want to grow will not grow in a healthy way. To allow it to grow well, you have to make a clearing so it has some light that comes through.

And then today, it's release. I think it's a profound topic, and it's easy to talk about it simplistically, or easy to talk about it as if it's an easy thing to do. But generally, in almost any circumstance we find ourselves, there's something we can let go of, something we can release. Maybe not what we want to release, but maybe we let go of the wanting to release. Maybe that's where the beginning of freedom can happen. And then we practice relaxation, recognition, respect, maybe restoration, instead of letting go of what's difficult to let go of.

So, one of the things we're releasing is the body from our ideas of the body. There is a tremendous amount of suffering in our culture around ideas of body, body image, and to be body conscious. Sometimes just to be frozen and caught up with how we're supposed to look, or how we don't look. And our society around us supports us in this very painful way in which the body gets this whole agenda, ideas of what it shouldn't be. So it's one of the great gifts for our body to do something like meditation and let go of all the ideas we have about the body, let it be itself.

The other day we did that exercise of mindfulness of the hand, where we're just feeling the sensations of the hand. Some people who do that exercise will see the difference between the ideas they have about their hand—that their fingers are too much this, or a little too much that, their hand is too this, too that, the fingernails are just not quite right, just all these things about the hand that the mind has ideas about. It can be kind of debilitating and preoccupying. But if we let go of all those ideas and just feel the hand for itself, the hand itself doesn't have a problem being whatever it is; it's just a hand. To free the hand to feel itself without the burden of all these ideas.

So, to learn to release the body from the ideas we have on top of it. Part of the release of the body is to release the tension that's in the body. Generally, most tension that we feel in the body, tightness and stress we feel in the body, is a byproduct of tension and stress in the mind. And so the poor body has to deal with all the stress and tension, and sometimes it becomes chronic and can be quite debilitating. So, to release the body from the hold of the mind, so that we again can allow the body to restore itself, or heal itself even.

To begin to appreciate how much we can release the body, let go. Not of the body, but let go with the body. Let the body participate in this deep process of letting go of all this unnecessary and maybe pain-producing, suffering-producing activity that the mind does. Meditation is one of the great laboratories to discover how this works and how to discover greater and greater release, relaxation, and depth.

There was apparently a debate in Buddhism at some point down through the centuries whether enlightenment happens in the mind or happens in the body. Probably, it's not a tremendously wise debate, because it probably happens in both places simultaneously. But the fact that some people would really identify the body as a locus for liberation, I find quite inspiring. It's also inspiring they found it in the mind; wherever it's found, or whatever that doorway into liberation is, is great. But many people don't consider that the body is kind of the location where freedom occurs.

Maybe part of this debate arises because, in the ancient Buddhist teachings of the Buddha, he emphasized repeatedly that there is no liberation without mindfulness of the body. He has all these synonyms for liberation, and some of them are quite lofty, like, "There is no attainment of the deathless without mindfulness of the body. There is no experience of the unconditioned without mindfulness of the body." That somehow this mindfulness of the body, and navigating through it, and discovering freedom through the body is such a huge part of this tradition.

As I began this week, I want to end with the idea that maybe sometimes we should think of sati^[1]—usually translated as mindfulness—we should think of it as body-fullness. How to live in a full body, in the fullness of our body, and take time to do that.

When I teach meditation retreats, I sometimes give the instructions to walk around, do the activities of the retreat at the speed of mindfulness. Because often we do the speed of the mind, and you get caught in the activity of the mind. Some people zip around kind of fast and do things quickly. But the speed by which we can stay present for our body, present in our experience, present for our body-fullness—so to do things at the speed of body-fullness, the speed of staying connected to your body, knowing what's happening in your body, don't get disconnected from your body—this is a great exercise.

You might, if you'd like, spend this weekend—before next week, we're going to do mindfulness of emotions, and it turns out that the more you're mindful of your body, the easier it is to be mindful of emotions. So you might want to spend this weekend reviewing or looking over, or practicing body-fullness. Seeing what it's like, whenever it's appropriate in your weekend, to operate at the speed of body-fullness. Mindfulness of the body.

Thank you very much, and I'm looking forward to being back here on Monday.