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Guided Meditation: Spacious Body

Hello everyone. Warm greetings from here at Insight Meditation Center. It's a dark morning; I think there's just a little teeny bit of a hint of light in the sky out the windows.

What I'd like to say today in preparation for this meditation is that one of the discoveries in doing mindfulness meditation, or maybe a lot of meditation that goes kind of deep or is concentrated enough, is how much our experience is mediated by concepts. Concepts that run quite deep in the mind, so we don't really realize that we're living in concepts.

To give a very simple idea, I'm looking here now at the camera for seeing you all on YouTube. It is on top of a bookcase with four shelves. I see it as a bookcase. If we go back in history maybe only a few tens of thousands of years, and bring this bookcase to the people who lived on the planet at that time, I don't think they would have seen it as a bookcase. I don't know what they would have thought about it, and I wouldn't know how they would use it. Maybe they'd put it down flat on the ground on its back and use it to store different things, or maybe to store kindling for wood. Maybe it was a kindling holder, I don't know, but they wouldn't see it as a bookcase, that I'm sure of.

And the idea of seeing a bookcase, I can do effortlessly. I don't have to think about, conceive, or have a thought "bookcase." It just is; what else could it be?

But as we sit and meditate, this subtle conceptual mind begins to quiet. And not seeing it as a bookcase in deep meditation is not a big deal particularly, or relevant. But what happens with the eyes closed, meditating, is that the concepts we have of our body begin to dissolve, begin to stop operating.

I think a couple of days ago I clipped my fingernails. And in my meditations ever since then, I have not thought once about my fingernails. But I could have. I could have thought, "My fingernails are now short. Maybe I didn't cut them quite right. Maybe they should have been more curved or rounded, or this way or that way." I could be having fingernail thoughts. But luckily for me, I was able to meditate without thinking about my fingernails.

I could think about my hair, and have thoughts about my hair and how long it is, and whether I should get a haircut or this or that. But luckily I did not have to think about my hair during meditation, and so my hair and my fingernails receded from attention, receded from awareness. It wasn't really in my experience. It wasn't really something that I thought about or perceived.

Partly, in meditation, to perceive fingernails and hair, I kind of need to have some concept or idea that's operating. But without them, they recede, they kind of disappear.

As we sit and meditate, if we sit in front of a mirror and look at our face, we have all kinds of face thoughts. But when we're sitting with our eyes closed, there are maybe very few thoughts about the face. The face can still be a concept when we think about it, but there's no direct seeing of the face because there's no mirror when the eyes are closed. The ideas of our face come from memory and ideas. Unless there is itching, or pressure, or tingling in the face, or warmth in the face—then we feel sensations. But those sensations can occur without the clear mental image or clear self-conscious thought about what our face looks like.

This is a way of trying to explain that as we meditate deeper and deeper, the definitions, the ideas, the concepts that we use for the body begin to quiet down. We begin finding that the body, after a while, has no boundaries. It has no edges. Of course, we have these things in the body, but the conceiving of it, the perception of it, quiets down. We are entering into a world where the body is not experienced as solid, not experienced as bounded, not experienced as something conceived or remembered.

It is just all these different sensations. But the sensations can exist without connecting them to a concept of that place. The warmth I feel at the moment in my hand, I can say "hand," but I can also just experience the warmth without any concept of hand. The warmth is just hovering in a certain kind of space, and exists quite happily independent of the idea of "hand." The edges of the hand disappear, and there is just warmth and other sensations there.

This is a direction that meditation goes. As the mind gets quieter—the conceiving mind, that thinking mind, defining mind gets quieter—the body begins to get more diffuse, lighter, wispier. There feels a feeling that there's lots of space in the body. The edges are porous, or the edges are diffuse, or they just disappear.

So, taking a comfortable, upright posture.

Begin with a very clear idea of having a body, and you assume a nice posture with this body of yours.

Within this body, aware of eyes. Enclosing the eyes within this body, a clear concept of breathing and where breathing occurs in the body.

Feeling what changes in your body as you take some long, slow, deep breaths.

Relaxing the shoulders on the exhale.

Relaxing the belly.

Letting the breathing return to normal.

On the exhale, relaxing the face muscles.

And on the exhale, relaxing, calming your thinking mind.

In the beginning of meditation, concepts and ideas of the body are useful. And then, to begin settling into breathing, many other concepts of the body are no longer needed. Letting them go in favor of being attuned to the sensations of breathing. The rhythm of breathing.

And as you breathe, let the attention receive, take in sensations of the body breathing.

Where, what part of the body do you feel those sensations? You don't have to think about it. You don't have to operate with an idea, concept, or image of "chest" to feel the movements there. Or "belly" to feel the movements there.

Just movements. Just pressure, release of pressure. Expansion, contraction.

With every exhale, quieting the thinking mind.

Or with every exhale, letting go of your thoughts. Letting them drift away like clouds drifting into the sky.

As you're meditating, there might be parts of your body for which you have no perceptions unless you think about it. For example, you might not be perceiving the toenail of your middle toe on your left foot. Maybe during this meditation so far, there's been no perception of one of the knuckles on your hand, until you go looking for it.

If there's no backrest you're leaning against, the perceptions of your back ribcage are probably much more subtle than the front ribcage. Maybe there's a feeling of space around the subtle sensations of the back ribs. Edges are diffuse.

Attune yourself to how, within the body, there are plenty of locations where there's more sense of space than there are clear sensations. Where there are not sharp boundaries.

And becoming aware of the space between sensations of your body.

And in that place of space, diffusion, absence of concepts, might there be a feeling of peace? Stillness, maybe even safety.

If there is, stay close to that. Breathe with it. Content to rest for a few minutes in this spaciousness of the body.

[Silence]

And then as we come to the end of the sitting, to imagine, or feel, or sense that the body is porous. That it's mostly made up of space, at least the body that we directly perceive with the eyes closed. The body that is not conceived, but rather perceived through the senses. That perceived body is diffuse, spacious, open.

And that the words people speak travel right through that space, not touching anything. The things that we see in the world, in a way, just don't land in the space. The space is not troubled or agitated by anything.

And so the heart can be receptive and open, without reacting, contracting, or asserting.

In the spaciousness of the body, the heart can be kind. You can move in the world with simple goodwill. Looking upon all things kindly. Looking upon all things with the generosity of care.

With the spaciousness of the body, may we care 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 be free.

Thank you.

Similes for Meditation (4 of 5) Clean and Wrapped in Peace

So we come to the fourth talk on the similes for meditation. We're going through the similes that are used for strong concentration practice, for the jhānas^[1], or absorptions. These similes are particularly apt and representative of some of the deeper experiences and the clear phases through which we go as the mind gets really settled, focused, and quiet.

I appreciate how much these descriptions work for meditation well short of deep absorption. Meditation, even modestly settled, goes through phases. The body, the sense of the body changes, or the sense of self changes. As we settle even modestly, some of what the similes for deep concentration represent, or how they feel, can be experienced sometimes in lighter meditation. To recognize and feel it kind of supports the deepening, supports opening up to settling even more.

Part of the advantage of being sensitive to some of these shifts and changes in more ordinary deepening of meditation is that we're starting to get comfortable with it, to recognize it. So when the meditation is really deep, we're already somewhat familiar and we recognize it. We don't get excited, or sometimes people get afraid or kind of confused by it. We're already familiar with, "Oh, now I know this is just a deepening of what I've already had and know about."

So we come to the simile for the fourth jhāna. The fourth jhāna is a state of very deep tranquility and equanimity. In it, because the mind is so still and quiet, there is very little conceiving or making of concepts through which we see ourselves and the world around us. In fact, with the eyes closed, there are no thoughts, no conception, no perception of the world around us anymore because we're so subtle, content, and peaceful here that everything else recedes.

One of the things that recedes from awareness when we're quite settled and peaceful and the mind is calm is the sharp definitions of the body, the way we understand the body.

So much of the experience of the body is, in fact, mediated through concepts. Being self-conscious about the body often has to do with comparisons, one concept versus another. We compare our body with someone else's body type. Our body is too thin, or too large, or too small, or too something. It's possible to get really wrapped up in body consciousness and these ideas and concepts that have a lot to do with comparative thinking—comparing ourselves to an ideal, to other people, to how we were when we were younger. This is all navigating in the world of concepts and ideas, which belongs to the world of the thinking, conceptual mind.

The body in and of itself, in terms of its perceptions of itself, is perceiving sensations. The sensations of the body are free and independent of the concepts we have. In regular street consciousness, this might be inconceivable that we can experience the body without any concepts, especially if their concepts are so deeply ingrained in the mind we don't even know that we're conceiving them.

But there are very deep layers of the mind where conceptions operate even without words, even without images, it's just kind of there. All that can get quieter and quieter, and we can start perceiving the body without seeing it, without any clear sense that there is a body here.

The simile for this is a delightful simile of a person—I'll embellish it a little bit. The two earlier ones have to do with being in a lake. Imagine that you've gone for a nice swim in beautiful, clear water. Maybe you've been grimy and dirty, been backpacking or hiking or something, and you've been maybe days without a shower. Finally, you're able to go to this beautiful, quiet lake and clean yourself really thoroughly and well, and all the dirt and grime is off you.

You come back on the shore and you're very contented, very happy. There's nothing to do, nothing to be. You've arrived where you want to be. Someone gives you a completely clean, soft cotton blanket to wrap yourself around in. You're completely enveloped in this blanket so that no part of the body is not covered.

In a land where there are flies and insects flying around, you're protected from those in the blanket. You're protected from the sun, and nothing comes in. Maybe you're protected from the wind. It just feels so nice, safe, and protected inside this blanket.

Because you're inside, completely enveloped in this blanket, no one can see the body. The soft, gauzy blanket means the body is not seen. But inside that blanket, the person—you—is completely feeling clean. There's a purity, a cleanliness. There's a radiating feeling that can happen after you're really clean, perhaps from a shower or a bath, and you're very content and kind of peaceful. A feeling of everything is good and everything is right in the world.

So that's the simile: this person enveloped in a clean cotton blanket, with no part not covered. In this deep meditation, the blanket shows us that we can't see the body. We don't perceive the body in ordinary ways. The body gets diffuse; it kind of disappears. There might be individual sensations here and there, but they almost disappear entirely.

Remember the simile from yesterday: there are still things in the lake. The lake still has a certain substantiality. There's water in it, and there are individual lotus flowers floating in the lake. So there might still be sensations in the body, they're just floating in the lake, floating in this kind of spaciousness of the water.

In this fourth simile, there can be almost no sensations at all of the body. It's almost like the body disappears except for this feeling of cleanliness, of refreshment that's come from the bath. This feeling of being peaceful, being tranquil, this feeling of being equanimous. Just, "Everything's okay." The work you had to do has been finished. Nothing needs to happen, there's no next thing. Contentment. There's no reactivity of the mind, no being for or against anything. Just very, very content and deep.

There's no clear sense of rapture or pleasure or joy or delight. There's something that feels more satisfying, which is this kind of feeling of deep cleanliness, purity, and peace that seems to radiate kind of where the body used to be.

And it's a lovely experience. I've known people, and I've done this, where the body seems to disappear in these states. You kind of begin doubting, "Do I really have a body anymore? Has my body really disappeared?" And then opening the eyes to see, looking, and, "Oh, the body's still there. It didn't go away." Because the sense of the body disappearing is so strong that you want to check and make sure you're still there.

One of the important lessons in this simile, and also the kind of meditation that can be a little bit like this, is that as meditation deepens, we're experiencing ourselves, experiencing our life, free of many of the ordinary concepts that we live with on automatic pilot. Some of these concepts that we take for granted, that we believe define reality—"this is what's really happening"—turn out to be provisional. They turn out to be just concepts, conceivings of the mind, and they're not inherent. They don't have to be there.

When a lot of these concepts of ourselves, our body, and what's going on bring us a really heavy burden, or bring a lot of suffering and distress, it's kind of surprising and radical to have all those concepts disappear and stop, and to feel this deep peace and contentment without anything in the world having been fixed. Without any challenges in our body having been fixed. Because somehow there's a different way of experiencing life, or a different way of experiencing that is not mediated by the concepts that we are usually navigating or struggling with.

That puts a little question mark after the concepts, after the struggles we have. "Is this really as real as I thought it was? Is this really as substantial and necessary as I thought it was? There is another way here."

The Buddha, in the suttas^[2] and the discourses, talks about himself as an old man, an 80-year-old man. Back in ancient India, there was no pain medication. There were none of the kinds of medications that we have that can make aging so much easier. There was no palliative care in hospitals to reduce the pain.

He talked about how much his body hurt and was creaky, and that he was bent over in his old age, his back. And that the only place that he got relief from all his pain was to go into this deep state of meditation that the simile is for. I imagine that's where he got refreshed and renewed, so that he could continue going on with his life with this creaky, old, painful body. It kind of lifted it for a while and refreshed him.

This kind of meditation is very useful for us and can help a lot. But the biggest help for people doing mindfulness meditation is that it can begin to free us from the authority, the hegemony of concepts and ideas. We see them as provisional, conditional, contingent, not always necessary to live by. This is kind of a paradigm shift that meditation can take us to, and hopefully, in doing so, help us be much wiser navigating in the world of concepts.

So, thank you. We have one more simile, and that'll be tomorrow.

Announcements

I think sometimes people go away on Friday, so we don't quite have as many people here. So maybe I'll make an announcement today and tomorrow about the next few weeks.

Next week, Kodo Conlin^[3] will be leading the 7:00 AM while I'm on retreat. And the following week, May Elliott will give the talks also when I'm on retreat. They're related to each other, they're married, and they're both in the IMC's teacher training program. They're wonderfully promising young teachers, and they have a little similar background as myself in that they have also been practicing with the San Francisco Zen Center, have a Zen background, and Kodo is actually a priest there, like I was. But they are also very deeply personal practitioners, and now in our personal insight teacher training program, they're a delight, and I think you'll enjoy them quite a bit.

And then the following two weeks after that, I'm going away for Thanksgiving, and then I do another retreat, so I won't be here for four weeks. But you'll be taken care of somehow during this time. I think it's very supportive for all of you when you show up for each other here, so I hope that you offer that support. I'll be back in the beginning of December, but I'm here tomorrow.

Great, thank you.