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Mindfulness of Breathing (12) Relaxation and the Fourth Step

So, as we continue through the Buddha's teachings on mindfulness of breathing, today I want to introduce the fourth step of the first tetrad of 16 steps of Anapanasati^[1]: 16 steps of breathing in mindfully and breathing out mindfully.

And this fourth step is, one trains oneself experiencing the whole body, one relaxes the whole body. One trains oneself to relax the whole body.

And so, a few things about this: to relax or to calm. Many translations have the word "tranquilize," one tranquilizes the body. Now, it has a little bit of unfortunate connotations in English, the word "tranquilized," but calming, relaxing.

And when it talks about relaxing the body, the whole body, it doesn't really say it that way. It says one relaxes the bodily formations, the bodily constructions, the ways in which the body has come into play based on the activities of the mind. So one relaxes the physical manifestations of our mental state, of mental activities.

Certainly, we can feel that in the breathing. We get excited, and the breathing gets maybe more shallow, or more chest breathing rather than belly breathing, or faster. And then we relax more and are not so excited; we calm down, and the breathing shifts and changes. The excitement that we feel and that is expressed in the breathing is called in Buddhism a bodily formation. The word "formation" or "construction" is what's been created, what's come into play by the state of the mind that we have.

And much of what we experience day to day in our bodies is surprisingly a manifestation of something about how the mind is. The state of the mind, the quality of the mind, the activities of the mind, the preferences of the mind, the selection process of the mind—whatever the mind is involved in has a big impact on how we experience our body and how the body is activated. So this activation of the body is what we then relax.

So this is a very nice part of this mindfulness of breathing practice where we have some agency. We have some involvement where we relax, we soften, we actively tranquilize and calm the body down.

As you know, I often teach that at the beginning of a meditation, to feel the breathing and then with the exhale, relax the body. This is kind of an expression of this aspect of the instructions of the Buddha. But in his classic instructions, this relaxing the body is step four.

I interpret that to mean don't be in a hurry to get too actively involved in relaxing the tensions and the activities of the body. Take your time with it. A lot of the relaxing that comes with meditation just comes from sitting still, being quiet, getting concentrated, and letting go of your thoughts, and the body itself settles down and gets calm.

You don't have to be the doer of it so much. In fact, to be too much the doer—the one who's making it happen and responsible for it—can actually lead to tension itself. And also it's kind of a dead end for the purpose of meditation. To really be able to go deep into meditation, we have to learn also how to relax the agency. Relax the doer, the one who wants it differently and is trying to make something different happen and fixing things.

It's best not to try to fix anything in meditation, but rather just be with things and to breathe with things. So the Buddha's instructions on relaxing the body, the bodily activity formations, is number four, the fourth step. And it's really good to take your time with the first steps. So take the time with just recognizing the experience of breathing. What are the sensations there? If it's a long breath, know it's a long breath; short breath, short. All the different ways in which breathing is experienced.

And then after you do that—partly so we get concentrated and feel like we're more in the present, the flow of the present moment—then open up the awareness to experience more fully, more globally, the experience of breathing. The first global, wider experience of breathing is the full breath body, the full experience of breathing. It can be the full experience of breathing through time, really staying a continuity of just staying. One in-breath, the next out-breath, the in-breath, and just staying and staying.

The other fullness is throughout the breath body, the full range of ways in which breathing impacts the body, affects the body. To feel that rhythm or that impact and effect in the body: the whole rib cage, back and front, the shoulders, the belly, whatever it might be that you feel. Or the radiance from that. Sometimes there's a glow, or a radiance, or a warmth, or a tingling, or a vibration, or something that seems to kind of spread beyond the normal boundaries of what we experience as breathing. And we start feeling this wider kind of glow of goodness or pleasure that might be there.

And another meaning of feeling the whole body, the global body, is to feel the wider context of the whole actual physical body that we have, and breathe feeling all that. Or if there are particular parts of your body that have strong sensations unconnected to breathing, stay with your breathing, but breathe with those strong sensations. If your knee hurts, breathe with the pain in your knee. Accompany it with your breathing; breathe through it.

So all this getting to know your breathing, the sensations of it deeper and deeper, learning to open the awareness up over time, supports the natural global awareness that tends to come as we get more focused. And after doing that for quite some time, then at some point we might be ready to do the fourth step, which is a much deeper letting go. Real kind of now, there's not so much the self involved perhaps. There's not so much trying to escape discomfort, or trying to make ourselves better, or all kinds of self-centered or self-preoccupied ways in which we're practicing.

We start feeling, because we feel deeply, the natural movement of the body to relax. It's the body's deepest request to be at peace, to be peaceful, to be calm. To not always have to carry your tensions and live with all the tensions of daily life, concerns, fears, anxieties, desires, and hostilities—all these things that we carry in our body. The body wants to have a break. The direction and directionality of the body is towards release, towards relaxing, to being settled, to being calm. Then the body settles by itself. It's remarkable to be with someone who's just died. You can sometimes see their face is completely relaxed in a way that they weren't when they were alive, because their face carried with them so much of the tension of daily life unconsciously, and maybe not so obviously until you see, "Oh, that's what the relaxed face is like."

And so that's the direction the body wants to go: towards relaxation, not holding it tight. And we can feel that—I call it a longing or a request, or we can feel the possibility contained in the body. It wants to relax; it wants to settle. And so we want to wait. We don't want to always be relaxing in meditation. We want to do the basic breath meditation, staying with the breath, feeling the body, and settling in, letting the mind become quieter and quieter. And with that quiet mind and this somewhat subtle body, you might then feel something subtle, something quiet, a little whisper in your body in a sense, that is the potential, the movement, the edge of where the body wants to settle even more, to relax. And then really let go. Soften as you exhale. Let go. Let go. Let go.

And it's really a wonderful thing when the deep, deep release happens in your body. So we'll spend a couple of days on this relaxing and releasing of the body on the four steps of Anapanasati. And it continues to be part of the whole aspect of mindfulness of breathing that is really centered on the body, really getting to know the body deeper and deeper and well, and learning to read and sense and feel the body.

So in these days that we are still really centered on the body, I'd encourage you maybe in the next 24 hours to spend more time feeling your body, becoming intimate with your body, the sensations of your body, the postural positions your body is in, and your breathing in your body. Just make it a full study and appreciation and valuing of your body and what's going on. And maybe operate at the speed of mindfulness of the body. Maybe be a little bit careful you don't spend too much of the day with the mind going faster than your ability to stay grounded in your body, and see what that's like. See what is evoked for you in that context. So thank you very much.

Announcements

I have one announcement. Many of you know we have this website called AudioDharma that's completely run by volunteers. Various iterations of it over the last 16 or 17 years or so have been built on platforms that IMC volunteers and support people have built for us and put into place. It was getting to be a little bit antiquated and not really up to date. It constantly needs to be maintained so the whole thing doesn't collapse.

And so a whole new crew of volunteers have been putting a lot of time into creating a new AudioDharma platform to restore all these talks of ours. They have a better version that they would love to have some users try out, evaluate, and help us understand how to make it even better and more functional for everyone. If any of you would like to be part of that, at the top of this chat—probably at the end of the chat—and also if you're on YouTube itself, underneath the video where it says some information about IMC, it says "AudioDharma User Survey" near the green bodhi leaf with a link to SurveyMonkey where the survey is. The survey is also on IMC's home page in the "What's New" section. On the bottom right-hand side of the page, there's a "Reflections from Gil" section, and I put the link there as well. So anybody who'd like to spend time with that, it would be appreciated and be helpful as we keep developing this website that's been so meaningful for so many people. Thank you all very much.