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Guided Meditation: Contemplating Dissolution of the Body

Good morning everyone, good day. A little further introduction to this idea of contemplation of a corpse. We know that one of the core practices of Theravada and much of Buddhism is the Four Foundations of Mindfulness^[1]. Within those teachings is this teaching on contemplating a corpse. I think of it as part of a triad of meditations: the one on the parts of the body, the ones on the four elements or properties, and now this one, the corpse. They come together because they all involve using something like the imagination. The word that's used, especially for the first two, for the action is to imagine or visualize something. Here also, we're not going to see a corpse literally, but as if we're seeing one, using the imagination.

Some people would protest that mindfulness practice is not about using the imagination; it's the opposite, it's about seeing directly what's here. That's true, but we live in imagination quite a bit without realizing it. Sometimes we think that we're in touch with reality, but it's really through the filter of how we interpret, how we imagine things to be, how we construct things to be. So here we're using imagination to overcome imagination, using imagination to somehow pop the bubble of the previous imaginations so that we can do this deep work of seeing things as they are.

In some sense, this corpse meditation is kind of a preliminary, supposed to help us be able to go into the next three foundations and really see much more deeply. With the parts of the body and the four elements, we're beginning to take apart what we take as a whole. With a whole, we tend to project on all these ideas of what the whole is. We're starting to see the parts, but you kind of drop the image of the whole, the idea of the whole, and see the parts of who we are.

This ability to look at the parts, then we use the corpse meditation. The classic reason for doing it is to overcome identification with this body, taking this body as "this is who I am" or "this is mine" in some way. We know that people are very body-conscious in the sense that they very much identify with their body, their physical body, and how it appears to other people. This body we have is all made from borrowed material, in a sense. It's given to us for the duration of our life, or not even that, because there's so much recycling going on even while we're alive. But all the material parts of this body are here temporarily. They've been recycled many times before and after these elements in our body are finished, they'll go into other transformations, other bodies, other living beings, and take other forms.

At some point, I will start dying, will die, and this body will be transformed. If we do a green burial and bury our body in the ground, fungi, worms, bugs, and different things will gently devour this corpse, starting from the outside perhaps, working its way in, bacteria. And if we get cremated, the fire begins on the outside with the skin and burns its way inward. In the old days, you'd leave the body out in the open and the birds would come and peck at it, and worms would crawl into it and start from the outside. So the skin would dissolve first. The flesh would dissolve next. The tendons next, they're harder. Eventually just the bones are left, and then the bones begin to bleach in the sun and get more brittle, and eventually they dissolve into dust.

So the contemplation of a corpse is to kind of follow this possibility for ourselves, this dissolution of the body, as a way of disidentifying as "me, myself, that I'm my body, and this is me" in some way, to soften those strong associations, but also to quiet the mind. Because the mind that is thinking a lot is the thinking that constructs many of the ideas we have about the body. As meditation goes deeper and deeper, the same kind of journey happens as a dissolution of the body after death. First, the boundaries of the body get soft. The skin and the boundary to the outside world begins to dissolve and gets very, very soft and open. Then we go in closer, and the experience of muscles, the sense of being in a muscle body, a flesh body, begins to fade away from consciousness. Then you get deeper into the body. Even the sense of hardness might be the last thing—hardness somewhere in the body, heaviness—and eventually that dissolves as well. So the meditative process also involves a dissolution. This dissolution of the corpse meditation is both a way of disidentifying and a way to begin preparing yourself for this deep process of meditation that can happen.

So we'll do some of this today. Taking a meditation posture. And the care that you give to your posture, the love and compassion you give to taking a nice posture, is maybe the context for doing this meditation. And maybe with the same care and compassion to gently take some deeper breaths. To connect to yourself more fully, to connect yourself more kindly.

Relaxing as you exhale.

Some people when they die, the first minutes after they die occasionally there's a lot of letting go of muscular tension they've been holding for a lifetime. It's good not to wait, to let go of the tension. Letting your breath breathe itself. Ordinary breathing. Relaxing. Letting go of the holding, which will let go as you die.

Letting go into your body. And then taking a few moments, a few breaths to just settle into ordinary breathing.

As you inhale, feel any tension in your mind, your thinking mind, any pressure or agitation. And with love, with care, on the exhale, relax the thinking mind. Soften.

And then whatever way that it occurs to you, feel the edges of your body, where the skin either touches the air or touches your clothes. As you exhale, imagine that you're relaxing that contact with the world around your skin. Maybe feeling the spaciousness, the space that's all around you.

And maybe you feel the porousness or the soft boundaries of the edges of your body, and what's beyond the edges of your body, and what's inside. Breathing with its soft boundary. Breathing. Letting go of the skin being yours, that you're defined by your skin.

Like a corpse loses its skin—it gets eaten or dissolved or burned—so let go of your skin. Let go of that boundary place and feel deeper into your body.

Maybe the warmth of your flesh, the substance of flesh through your body. Maybe it's a warmth, maybe a coolness, tingling, pulsing. If flesh, which right now is still alive with the sensations, this too will begin to dissolve and break up and decay and disappear. When your body is a corpse, the flesh will go.

Relaxing this flesh. Relaxing a sense that it's yours, that you're defined by your flesh. Imagine that your corpse is dissolving and the flesh is disappearing.

And then more deeply, all your organs in your torso all dissolve. All are eaten, they're burned up. These too are not our possession, not what defines us. All the elements return to nature.

Imagining a large empty cavity in your rib cage and your torso as all the organs vanish, decompose.

And then imagine that all you are left is skeleton. Hard bones. And this skeleton is not your possession; it's also borrowed materials. It too will dissolve, this too we have to let go of.

First the skeleton, all the tendons decay, decompose. And then bones fall apart from each other and lay in a heap on the ground. Disconnected bones. There's no more shape of the body. Body shape has disappeared. A heap of bones.

And over time the bones break into pieces, are brittle. Slowly, slowly they turn into dust. And as the bones turn into dust, they blow away in the wind across the land. Falling into the soil on which new life grows.

Let go of bones. This whole body dissolved, is gone. The absence of body. Vast space. Vast openness in all directions.

Whatever way that you might be more settled or calmer in your sitting now, maybe more peaceful, cozy... let go. Let go of everything, but let go into that calm. Let go of your body, your skin, your flesh. Let go of your bones. Feel the way that letting go is a better alternative to holding on and being tense. Let go.

And as we come to the end of the sitting, imagine encountering other people in situations where it's safe to do so. Safe, comfortable situations. Meeting other people and letting go fully. Just letting go and being present with your care, your love, your goodwill, your warmth, your non-defensiveness. Free of impatience or desires or wanting things different. Just with people.

Offering something profound. A presence of attention that wants nothing, needs nothing, just there to be present. And perhaps to care, to love.

May our care spread out into the world. May it be that this practice of letting go deeply is a support for the welfare and happiness of ourselves and the whole world. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings everywhere be free.

Dharmette: Satipaṭṭhāna (33) Corpse Contemplation

Thank you.

So, contemplation of the corpse. In Theravada Buddhism^[2] sometimes it's understood that one of the best practices at the time of dying is the four foundations for awareness, for attention. It's the one that's most conducive towards liberation, towards freedom. And that's one of the best times—better late than never—to become free. So sometimes this text that we're studying becomes read at people's bedsides when they're dying. Sometimes in Pali, they don't understand it, but somehow it's meant to be beneficial, and sometimes it's read after people die. So this text has a connection to death and dying, and here it's at the center of it with this contemplation of a corpse.

I offered a small guided meditation on this as a reference point. I don't know if I set it up well enough in the short amount of time we had, but I'd love to see some comments in the chat, probably brief comments, about what it was like. If you were able to follow along with the dissolution of the body kind of meditation. I'd like to know how this was received or what you learned from it, or what benefit came from it. So take a couple of minutes here and I'll say a few words until they start appearing.

I think here in the West, many people will emphasize the importance of the value of mindfulness of death and dying, the corpse, because of how it makes us really—here we go:

Daunting. Freeing. Got a sense of no self. Very powerful. Got to the point, to the big question, who am I? Made me smile. Freeing. Love. Preparing for my death. Freeing, we are not the body. I found it profoundly freeing. I now notice a dissolving of attachment. Very beneficial, but do it again. Very powerful, tangible perspective.

And they're going very fast now.

The process helped with reducing fear of death. Calming. I pictured myself decaying in a field of flowers. Felt like a deep knowing of our mortality. The rising of deep compassion. I thought I'd be afraid, but it's going so fast, ended up in a puddle. Beautiful, spacious, onward leading. First revisiting, then very peaceful. Freeing. An insight into true reality. Very spacious, hard to come back into my thinking mind. I felt like I was in outer space. Reassuring connection to nature and the universe is powerful and comforting. Body is not myself. Connected, was very light, non-attached, free. Powerful, helpful, new and different. Dissolving into space. Was able to follow, peaceful. I want to go back and listen to the whole series, thank you. We'll have green burial. Just following breath. Pouring in teaching, but I was not so ready to take it this too to my heart. I wasn't into it. My body was blown into the wind, identification with itself disappeared. Spacious, really good work. The sense of increasing space awareness was quite profound. Each layer became more and more spacious. Very calm, body just a vessel. The experience of emptiness relieving.

Great. Well, thank you for those who wrote that, and I know that this wasn't going to work for everyone. For those of you who might have found it not so peaceful or nice, hopefully you can just put aside this part of this. We'll leave this behind in a way as we move to the second foundation next week.

Reflections on the Practice

Before I go on, I just want to mention that I won't be here Monday, so we won't have the 7 a.m. sitting this coming Monday, but we will start again on Tuesday. And that's when we start with the feeling tones, the second foundation for awareness, for mindfulness. This is often considered kind of the pivotal part of the Satipaṭṭhāna^[3], and I'll talk a little bit on how structurally and in different ways it's pivotal to a huge transition that's going to happen in the practice as we go from the body to the mind.

I was going to say that many Western dharma teachers will talk about mindfulness of death as a way of really cherishing that we're alive, and really then appreciating we're alive and enjoying it and being with it more fully. That's certainly a wonderful thing to do. I think the tradition tends to focus on it more in the way that it helps us let go of attachment—attachment to self, attachment to the body, and in particular, attachments to concepts and ideas. All these things, all attachments, will keep us from really sinking in deeply into this Satipaṭṭhāna, into this awareness practice, that word of cultivating and developing.

Some people though find that this contemplation of the corpse is a very engaging visualization practice. Some people who visualize well find that they get really concentrated by doing this. The contemplation is actually nine parts, and so having this structure of nine parts of dissolution, going through it over and over again, some people get very concentrated. That's one of the things that supports this awareness practice, is concentration. The idea is to get it concentrated enough so we can do the refrain^[4], so that we don't have to worry about the mind wandering off anymore, and we can just settle back and observe our experience in a deep way, and then we let go of the corpse meditation at that point.

One of the things when we step back in this deep concentrated state and just observe, is the arising and disappearing, the arising and dissolving of sensations, experiences, thoughts, feelings. This contemplation of the corpse prepares the ground for that. Sometimes it's disorienting for people to see everything dissolving, appearing and dissolving and disappearing. That can happen when the mind is very, very still and quiet and not organized around ideas and concepts and attachments. So this corpse meditation prepares the ground also for the deeper dimensions of the refrain, deeper dimensions of the practice as it opens up. To make it a little easier, more comforting, or easier to go through when everything just appears to be arising and passing and arising and dissolving.

Satipaṭṭhāna helps us to appreciate this life, to live in the lived experience. The only place we can know we're alive is here and now, and the sensations of our body, our thoughts, our feelings—they're like the manifestation of life, of being alive. To really appreciate that, we show up for it and we're present for it, not missing it by being in our thoughts and ideas and being too busy. And then to begin being present in such a way that we feel it more acutely, we feel more sensitively the arising and passing of things, so we can let go of the attachments we have. As we let go of more and more attachments, Satipaṭṭhāna becomes better and better, it becomes richer and richer and more wonderful, and occasionally a little frightening, but the corpse meditation prepares the ground that it's okay to let go, it's safe to let go, we can let go of everything.

So, thank you. And thank you for the comments that you wrote. I wasn't able to read all of them as they came so fast while I was sitting here, but when we finish now I'll go and read them all and see what you said. I look forward to being here on Tuesday to continue with Satipaṭṭhāna.

Given that what we did today was a contemplation of a corpse, of dying, maybe you should be a little bit careful with yourself for the next hour or two, or for the day, as this can be very tender and touching and sometimes challenging and even disturbing. So care for yourself and err on the side of maybe being slow and calm, loving, caring. Do some nice things for yourself. Go walk around the block and get yourself a little bit more grounded if you need to. And if you feel spacious and wonderful, stay close to it. Stay close to this spaciousness and peace. One of the great things to do when you're peaceful is to then practice, live your life at the speed of peace—meaning go about doing things, whatever you're doing, at the speed of peace so you don't dissipate the peace, so you stay close to it.

So thank you all.