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Guided Meditation: Body-Centered Mindfulness

Welcome to our meditation session together. As I sit here reflecting on all of you coming here and thinking about all of us gathering, I am aware there's a gathering of our physical bodies. We bring our bodies when we meditate. Our physical bodies are the important vehicle for meditation practice. While it might be silly to say there is no meditation without the body, to care for this body, to connect to this body, and to have the body at the center is so important.

Sometimes there's a tendency for many people to live in their minds, their thoughts, and their ideas, and it can create quite a divide between the body and the mind. The body is forgotten, disconnected with, and we can nominally be aware that we have a body. But to awaken in the body, to discover the body being more alive, is one of the great benefits and possibilities of mindfulness practice.

So here we are with our bodies, as our bodies, being our bodies. Following the lead of our body in establishing a posture that feels appropriate, that feels beneficial for being centered and at ease, if we can, in this body. But not only at ease; a posture that also allows the body to become more awake, more alive, and to explore through the body what it's like to live in this body, to feel your sensations of body.

As a way of entering more deeply into this body—sometimes the body is a difficult place to be, there can be pain and challenges of all kinds, but still to enter into it—you might take a few long, slow, deep breaths. The torso is stretched and expanded at the end of the in-breaths, where the in-breaths begin deep in the body and there's an expansion outwards. And a long, relaxed exhale where there's a coming together, pulling in, settling of this body.

As you take these deeper breaths to quiet your thinking mind, notice how, if you're thinking a lot about things—even about the exercise—maybe there's a way it removes you a bit from feeling and sensing the body from the inside. Then, letting the body, feeling the breathing, return to normal. Take a few moments to feel the simplicity of the body breathing. Even if you are still directing your breath unconsciously or unintentionally, it's okay. Just quietly familiarize yourself to the body breathing.

Then bring your attention to the top of your head, the crown of the head. As you exhale, feel the sensations there, soften, relax the top of your head. That kind of relaxing is further settling into your body. As if there's a refreshing flow of water flowing from the top of your head, over your body, out through your head. Let your attention settle and flow down to your head, your face. And as you exhale, relax the head, the face, the eyes.

Let the flow of awareness move down to your neck—the back of your neck, sides of your neck, the front. As you exhale, relax and settle.

Let the flow of attention move down into your shoulders. Allow yourself to feel very simply any tension or holding in your shoulders—not to make it a problem, but something to care about lovingly. And as you exhale, in whatever way you can, soften and relax your shoulders. Soften the shoulders.

Let the flow of awareness move down into your chest, ribcage, front and back. On the exhale, settle further, relax into your body, into your torso. In the whole area of your solar plexus, your diaphragm, relax, soften. And then the belly, soften the belly.

As you exhale, relax the small of the back. Relax the weight of your torso down into the pelvic cavity, all the way down to your sitting bones.

And then to feel your legs, the upper legs, the thighs, softening, relaxing any holding or tightness that might be there. The flow of attention down into the lower legs and feet, and similarly relaxing, softening. Notice any ways that you might be holding and tightening in the arms and the hands. As we relax tension, maybe there's more feeling of a flow of energy in the arms and the hands.

And then opening up the attention as wide as is easy for you throughout the body. Maybe letting the thinking mind become quieter and stiller to make more room for awareness to feel and sense, discover the body. Centered in the body. Noticing, if it happens, how being pulled into thoughts and fantasies—is it pulling away from being centered in the body?

And then we'll sit quietly, but breathing through the body, with the body. Connected to breathing within the body. As if the body is the source of deep understanding. As if the body is the source for freedom, for being at home, for where we discover the path to peace. For these next minutes, trusting the body, breathing in the body, with the body, through the body, with the mind relaxing, quieting, softening the mind to just breathe in this body.

Coming back to your body. And coming back again and again. Each time you return to settle deeper into it, be content to do so for however long you can rest in the body awareness. Resting there, and then doing it again.

And then coming to the end of this sitting. Once again, is there more you can do for these last couple of minutes to rest in your body? To center yourself in your body as if it is the source of all things. The source of your feelings, your thoughts, your intentions. Your experience of life begins here in the body, deep in the body.

Perhaps resting in the body is also the beginning of love, of kindness, care, compassion. To stay rooted in the body when we have impulses for kindness and care and compassion, so we don't lose ourselves in the object of our care, we don't lose this connection to our body.

And turning your attention outward into the world, maybe in a sense turning your body inside out, to be present for this world of ours while being rooted in the body. Perhaps we can wish that whatever benefit has come from this practice, that we share that benefit with others, in small ways, big ways. That the benefits we experience are expressed in a care for this world.

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 bringing this planet into a kind of harmony, an ecological harmony where all beings can be well.

Dharmette: The Dharmic Life (1 of 5) The Body as Your Monastery

As we begin this week, the theme I had in mind is practicing in our lives. You could say that all of Buddhism is about practicing in our daily life, in our ordinary lives. Certainly, so many of the teachings are completely connected and relevant to how we go about living our lives. But the orientation I have for these talks this week is for people who would like to live a more dharmic life.

Sometimes people consider it would be nice to go live in a retreat center or in a monastery maybe for a while, or find some way to live more fully in the dharma. It isn't always easy to do^[1] in a daily life where there's work and family and busyness and things to do. So what is it that we can do so that we receive some of the benefits of a contemplative life, a renunciant life, a monastic life? How could we have some of those benefits in the ordinary lay life that we live in?

For that, I want to talk about five different ways we can bring more practice into our lives or live more in the dharma, that I would like to believe are available to all of us. If you really pick these five areas up, you'd find tremendous benefit. Not only would you find the dharma, the dharma would find you. You would allow yourself to be a receptive receptacle for the dharma, and it might fill you in a wonderful way.

The first of these five is to be more connected to your body, to practice mindfulness of the body, to center yourself on your body. It is one of the things that I delightfully and surprisingly discovered in practicing in different Buddhist traditions. One way or the other, they all seem to emphasize being grounded and connected to your body. Sometimes it was not explicit, but it was clear you had to bring the body along and practice with it.

When I was practicing Zen, I don't know if there was a really active discussion about mindfulness of the body, but so much of the practice was embodied. You sat in a particular posture that really required you to be embodied to sit in it. If you were eating, you did it in an embodied way; when we ate more formally, it was a practice. We would walk in ways that encouraged more embodiment and connection to our body. When we were doing work, we were instructed to really put ourselves fully into it and be connected and involved in the work. Being absorbed in the work, but in a way that our body was really there for it.

There was all this emphasis on just being in your body. I learned so much about being embodied by working in the monastic kitchen when I was a Zen student, really being present with my whole body as best I could. It wasn't always easy to be connected to whatever physical work I was doing in the kitchen—it was all physical work—and to do it with both hands, full body connected to doing it, absorbed in the physicality of it. I did it for a whole year, and it really did wonderful things for me in teaching me how to be in the world in an embodied, engaged way.

People would teach me, when I was doing Zen in America and also in Japan, to do things with my body enthusiastically. I had a tendency, maybe, to use one hand, to kind of be there for it, while part of my body was not involved, having other thoughts and kind of half-heartedly doing things. That did not go over well in Zen. You had to be really there wholeheartedly.

One way that was emphasized a lot in Japan was that you always did things with two hands. If you picked up a pot of food, or you picked up a tool, or if you gave someone a gift, whatever it was, you'd always do it with two hands so you were fully in it. It feels different to give someone a gift with two hands than to kind of just say, "Here you go," and only give part of who you are. But to do it fully... I love the anjali^[2]—putting the hands together and bowing—because it brings these two sides of who we are, the left and the right, together. All of us are involved. That is different than shaking hands, which involves only part of us. I think shaking hands is a wonderful thing when people get to do it again, but it has its own value and wonderfulness. I don't want to diminish its value, but there's also something valuable about really coming together and offering all of ourselves in that greeting, in that respect.

Then, to becoming more attuned to the sensations of the body. These sensations of our body are not senseless. To feel like there's no sense and no meaning, no value in being involved with the senses of the body, in fact, makes the body senseless. We get disconnected from the sensations. But we can value them, because they are the carriers of so much information. They are the expressions of our attitudes, the expressions of our emotions and feelings. They are the expressions of our reactivity and our response to what's happening in the world around us. There are layers and layers of subtlety that we can be aware of when we're really connected in our body.

If we're not connected at all, then just a little bit of connection to the body will provide the early warning signals of feelings, sensations, attitudes, and information about what's happening in the world around us that is often there before our thinking mind is aware of it. The first sensations of anxiety, the first sensations of anger, or sensations of love or kindness or warmth towards someone. There are all these different things that sometimes come through the body that, if we're busily thinking and wanting and reacting and thinking about what's wrong, we don't really pick up.

One Zen teacher I studied with talked about the body being an antenna, and the more you tune yourself to that antenna, the more information you pick up. I would emphasize not just the antenna to the information outside of our body, but also what's inside. If we're not really a divided being between the mind and the body, the body is a really rich repository of intelligence, of responsivity, of feelings, of emotions, of information that's so helpful for our lives.

So to spend more time being sensitive to the sensations, sensing what's happening in the body, begins kind of shifting the emphasis from thinking that the mind is going to solve everything to allowing the body to participate. Allowing the body to receive and experience, and to help process what's going on. Some of the difficult emotions we have can be well processed in the body if we allow the body to feel. It can be difficult; sometimes we feel all these things more acutely, and that can be painful in a sense. But there's an art to learning how to keep opening the body in a wise way, in a supported way, in a compassionate way that allows the body to support us to become free, to free up things, to release things.

Part of that is because any holding in the mind, any attachment and clinging we have, often gets expressed in the body becoming tense, muscles being held tight. And that tightness tends to numb the body. But as we become more aware of the body, it tends to free the places of tightness. First, we may become aware of all the tension we hold in our body, but that's a stepping stone for the body to begin releasing itself and opening up.

The more we can practice being in our body when we do things, really being present, and the more we can become sensitive to the sensations of our body, the feelings of our body, what's going on in the body—that is a way of starting to live a more dharmic life. To let the dharma, all the benefits of mindfulness and wisdom, begin showing itself and accompanying us through our body, through our life. The less we're connected to our body, the less the dharma accompanies us through our life, unless we're quite good at the cognitive aspects of keeping it in mind and thinking about it. That can be useful, and for some people maybe that's the primary vehicle. But for most people, I think there is tremendous benefit to being rooted in the body and connected to what's happening in this body of ours.

So if you would like to live a contemplative life, a dharmic life, in your ordinary, everyday life, and avoid having to go become a monastic to live a full-time dharmic life, then your monastery is your body. Your temple is your body. So keep coming back, being in your body.

I'll continue on this theme tomorrow with a whole other area that you can focus on if you like, that's part of daily life. In the meantime, in these next 24 hours, maybe you will experiment and give more emphasis to your body and what's happening there, and how you use it. Feel the sensations, notice what's happening if you allow your body to be in a more receptive mode to feel all these sensations that we have.

I hope you enjoy. If not now, I hope this mindfulness of the body will bring you to great enjoyment, a great delight in having this physical body. Thank you.