This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Relaxing the Karmic Body

Good morning, good day, good week. Welcome. I am happy to be here. It feels quiet here at IMC and in our town.

The teachings this day, this week, will be about the body. This is something that I see as central to Buddhist practice. At least, it is in many different schools of Buddhism. If not explicit, it's implicit, and certainly in the teachings of the Buddha.

One of the things that we'll talk about today is the karmic body. One of the things we become aware of when we first start meditation is what can be called the karmic body—the body of holding patterns and intentions that come from the activities of the mind. The impulses, desires, aversions, and fears that we carry with us, and how they're transferred into our body in gestures, muscles, posture, and all kinds of ways. When we first sit to meditate, we become aware of this karmic body.

There are three sets of instructions the Buddha gives on mindfulness. This year, we did the discourse on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness^[1]. Last year, we did the discourse on the Mindfulness of Breathing^[2]. The third one is Mindfulness Directed to the Body^[3]. Each of them begins with the same exercise: to become attuned to the breathing, familiar with the experience of breathing in the body, a little bit centered and connected to the body through the breathing, and then to become aware of the body more broadly. Then, to relax the bodily formations, the bodily constructions, the bodily reactivity that has built up that makes up this karmic body. Sometimes it's the karma^[4] of the day that we can let go of, and sometimes the karma of a lifetime, the activities of a lifetime.

We'll do this first exercise today. Many of you are familiar with it. Since it's the common thread through all three of the Buddha's instructions on mindfulness, it's a good place to begin.

I love the way these texts begin, with going to the foot of a tree, to an empty open space outdoors, to an empty building. One sits down and sits upright. It is an expression of deliberateness. Deliberately going to a place to sit, and then with deliberateness assuming with the body a dignified, appropriate posture that, one way or the other, might express the dignity of being a human being. Not with tension, but an attitudinal uprightness.

Lowering your gaze and letting your gaze be relaxed, not looking at anything in particular. And if it's comfortable, gently, slowly, let your eyelids close.

Then, to center ourselves in the body, take a few long, slow, deep breaths—maybe three-quarters full, comfortably deep breaths. On the exhale, relax and soften the whole body.

Then, let your breathing return to normal. With a normal in-breath, feel the different parts of the body I'll direct your attention to, and then on the exhale, relax and soften.

Inhale, feeling the face. Exhale, relax the face. Relax the face almost as if the air around you receives your face and holds it for you.

Inhale, feeling the shoulders. Exhale, softening the shoulders, releasing the shoulders.

On the inhale, feeling the belly. On the exhale, relaxing the belly, softening.

On the inhale, having some kind of global awareness of your body. And on the exhale, a global releasing of your body.

Then on the inhale, you might feel your mind, your brain, for any tension there might be there. And on the exhale, gently relaxing the mind.

And then to settle in now, to discover the body's experience of breathing. Every day, the experience of breathing shifts. Maybe slightly, but it shifts, it changes. Becoming familiar with inhales and exhales. Receiving the inhale as it expands the body, the lungs. Relax and let go with the exhale, settling into your body.

As you exhale, let go of your thoughts, your thinking, so you can better feel, sense, and take in the body's experience of breathing. Letting go of thinking is preparation for a deeper connection to yourself.

And then as you're breathing, similar to how we began, on the inhale feel the whole body, the global body, in whatever way is easy, to the extent that's easy. As you exhale, feel how that global experience of the body changes with the exhale.

With no hurry, as if you have all the time in the world, feel your body as you inhale, and relax the tensions, the holdings of the body, as you exhale.

Without expecting much or being ambitious, as you exhale, soften the body, release the body. Letting the mind be still so you can feel your body better. So there's more room in awareness in which to release the body.

For these minutes we have left, put aside giving any importance to your thinking. Thinking is a source—one source—for the karmic body, the tensions we hold. Put aside your thinking the best you can and prioritize breathing gently, fully into your body, with your body. Relaxing the body, settling the body. Appreciating the calm of the body.

And then, as we come to the end of the sitting, to appreciate what you can appreciate about your body. To appreciate the experience of being embodied, even if there's pain and challenges. Appreciate all the nerve receptors in the body that allow you to take in the world around you, even with your eyes closed. When we're not preoccupied in our thoughts, the sensitivity of the body can sense others and our environment in valuable ways.

May it be that as we go about our day today, that we stay connected to the body's sensitivity, discovering what the body recognizes, feels, and understands in our environment and our meetings with other people. Appreciating the deeper empathy or understanding or appreciation of others that's possible when we take them in with all our faculties.

And then to aspire to a day of goodwill. Aspire to a day of kindness, friendliness. Aspiring to offer—even in the smallest possible unseen ways, unrecognized by others—a day of being generous for others.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may we contribute to this.

Dharmette: Kāya (1 of 5) The Karmic Body

So, on this Monday, I begin the five-part series on the body. Mindfulness of the body is a core aspect of the Buddha's teachings. He repeats it often and with great enthusiasm, talking about how all kinds of wonderful qualities—tranquility, concentration, peace, whatever is wholesome and skillful, the different stages towards liberation, and liberation itself—are all founded, based on, or experienced with the body. To be more specific, through mindfulness of the body.

In my years of Buddhist practice, practicing in this country, in Zen in Japan, and in Asia, what struck me was how much the body was used in the practice. Certainly, meditation is meant to be a physically embodied practice. But also, in the monasteries, there's a lot of physical work, activities, chanting, bowing, and ritual that involve using the body. What gets awakened in the body through the kind of practice activities we're involved in was probably as important as meditation for me. I was not given instructions or told that this attention to the body, the engagement of the body, was important. But it slowly seeped into me and changed me from the inside out.

To give one example, in the monastery, we did a lot of bowing. Most often, it was just standing and bowing. It could be as simple as passing someone on the path while walking around the monastery; we were supposed to stop for a moment and bow to them as we passed. When people served us food, we always had to bow before and after being served. If we came into the meditation hall, we'd always bow upon entering. Just over and over again, lots and lots of bowing throughout the day. If you do that for months and years, something changes. This gesture of putting the hands together in front of the chest and bending forward a little bit is not just a physical gesture. It evokes certain kinds of emotions and certain attitudes within.

For me, it was an attitude of appreciation, an attitude of letting go of self-centeredness, and a certain feeling of reverence and respect. It wasn't dramatic that I would feel that, but there would be teeny feelings of it—sometimes unrecognized even, because I was busy living my life, doing my things. But slowly, drip by drip, drop by drop, those little gestures established those feelings in me in a deeper and more valuable way for my life. So, there was a transformation in the body of sentiment, of attitude, of feelings, and of sensations that I became familiar with. Multiply that by all the different things we did in practice, and a whole bunch of things would come up and change in the body. Meditation was especially so.

The way that I experienced my body, surprisingly, changed dramatically over the course of the years of meditation practice that I had. Sometimes it would change within a single meditation practice session. Sometimes it changed over years and years of practice. It changed so much that I came to appreciate that we have different bodies. What I mean by that is not that the material body changes, but the way we experience our body shifts and changes depending on our states of mind. How the mind is used, the attitudes, thoughts, perceptions, and intentions—all kinds of things come together to shape how we experience our body. The material body doesn't change in and of itself particularly, except in the ordinary ways we all know: exercise or lack of it, and aging. But the way that the body is experienced is very much conditioned by what is going on in the mind. With the very significant ways in which the mind begins to shift and change in meditation, the way we experience the body changes as well.

So this week, I'd like to talk about five different bodies that we can experience. Don't take this to be ontological, as if these are physically different bodies. The material body doesn't change, but what we're talking about is the experienced body, how it's experienced. Today, I want to talk a little bit about the karmic body. Tomorrow and throughout the week, we will cover the bliss body, the peace body, the insight body, and the liberation body. Each of these represents different ways the body can be experienced.

The karmic body is the body that we have shaped through the activities of our lifetime, and especially those which are volitional—those that come from the deliberateness of the mind. This is as opposed to, for instance, having a particular profession that uses your body over and over again in certain ways. That shapes the body, and maybe we can consider it karmic, but it doesn't necessarily come from the attitudes of the mind. Or, for example, people's faces are a little bit different because of the languages they speak. Different languages engage different micro-muscles in the face over a lifetime, so there are subtle differences in people's faces depending on their language. Those aren't necessarily karmic; I don't know what to call that.

But the karmic body has to do with our attitudes. It involves the tensions that we hold and the holding patterns in our body. When there is anxiety and fear, we hold our body in a certain way. If that fear is chronic, that tension gets built in and becomes almost hardwired into us. If we spend a lot of time being angry and the anger is chronic, that also affects the micro-muscles of the face around the eyes, the shoulders, and different places. If we're oriented more toward desires—if we are searching and looking—the eyes, the face, and the movements of the body shift and change to express those desires. If it's anger that we express, the body takes a different stance and posture. Confidence, generosity, and love all shift and change all kinds of things in our body, not just the muscles, but also the chemicals of our body and how the neurons fire.

When we sit down to meditate, for many people, what we're encountering is our karmic body. We can experience it initially as a lot of the tensions we hold in our body: the shoulders, the face, the belly, the hands, anywhere at all. I discovered in my early years of meditation that I carried tension in my thighs, and that tension traveled up and affected my lower back. That tension was a little bit of bracing myself against something going to happen. I've known people who have a tremendous feeling of wanting to bolt out of meditation, and so that feeling of escaping and running away might be encased in their bodies. It shapes the experience we have of this body of ours.

Sometimes the pain we experience in the early stages of meditation practice is karmic pain. A very common place to experience that is in the shoulders. Shoulders that are held high—like mine were when I was younger—begin to hurt as they release. It could be that there's a certain kind of despair we're experiencing, so we collapse and kind of give up. That certainly affects the musculature and feelings in the chest, but it also makes a big impact on the upper back. As we sit in meditation, we might feel the legacy of sitting a certain way for a long time. Some muscles are tired, some have contracted. Working with that is working with the karmic body.

Knowing that this is what it is hopefully gives us a lot of patience, compassion, and understanding. This is often what we're working with when we first start meditating: the karmic body and karmic breathing. Our breathing has been affected by our emotions, attitudes, experiences, traumas, and the challenges we've had in our life. This is what we're slowly working with, relaxing, and breathing with. We can contribute to some of the relaxation, though we don't want to make it too big of a project to relax all the time. Some of it just comes with sitting quietly, meditating, letting go of thoughts, and being present in a sincere way, here and now. It gives the body a chance to unwind and things to release and soften. Slowly, it's wonderful to watch meditators over a few years and see the evolution into what is sometimes called the yogic body. The body of a meditator—you can see it in how they sit down. There's a comfort level, an ease, and an embodiment there that has evolved over time.

As the karmic body begins to recede, at least temporarily—sometimes as we get concentrated, the karmic body recedes—other kinds of experiences of the body enter into the foreground. But then, as the concentration leaves, the karmic body returns, and we are back in touch with the tensions and holding patterns we have. That massage is part of the process of healing, opening up, and coming to some resolution of the karmic body.

So, as you go about your day today, see if you can notice what I'm calling the karmic body. Notice the holding patterns you have in your muscles, but also in your posture. How is your posture affected by your attitude? By your desires and aversions? By your confidence or lack of confidence? Where are things tight? Where are things holding?

Maybe even some of the physical pains you have that really come from physical conditions, a small percentage of them might be from karmic activities we've done. The activities we've done have expressed anger, impatience, being in a hurry, desire, greed, resistance, all kinds of things. Because we were acting that way, maybe something got injured, and now we have to live with the aftereffects. This is part of the karmic body we have to work with. But we're not stuck in the karmic body. To some degree, this is what practice is about: finding freedom from that karma. And we'll talk about that over the next few days. Thank you.