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Guided Meditation: Floating on Sensations

Hello everyone, and welcome to the meditation session. As we're doing the section of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta^[1] on what's usually called mindfulness of the four elements (I like to call it mindfulness of the four properties), I'd like to do a meditation on these four.

What it involves is first beginning with just settling in, in the usual way. And then, at some point, shifting the focus from the breath. I like to have the breathing as a primary focus for meditation—the anchor. But to let go of it to some degree and open the attention up to have the awareness, kind of in a relaxed way, gently, slowly, calmly let the awareness float around the body. To become aware of the different sensations in the body as they appear, as they call attention, as awareness floats in that direction.

So it's kind of random, maybe, and there's not much choice. Sometimes this kind of meditation is called choiceless or directionless. We're not necessarily directing the attention anywhere, but we are staying in the body to feel the sensations and just kind of move. The attention moves, or different parts of the body speak, and some of them become predominant and strong. We're resting there for a while, and something else, sooner or later, will get our attention and shift and change. Or if it's a compelling area of the body, it might be that the attention wants to stay there. It seems appropriate to stay there. But within that area, the attention kind of floats around and feels different things; it doesn't get fixated. It doesn't get zeroed in on something, but rather kind of just feels it around.

The analogy that's given is having a bowl, or a brass bell, and just taking a cloth and wiping it from all the different sides. So just kind of randomly be with something specific, floating around on it until something else takes in your attention. So it's mindfulness of the body, but with a kind of choiceless, floating awareness that takes in slowly, gradually, whatever wants to come.

So, beginning by assuming a meditation posture. It can be helpful if the posture itself expresses the intention to be present, to be here in this place, in this time. Sometimes a posture where we start feeling a strong, good foundation to hold the weight of our body and to feel that contact. Sometimes a posture that is sitting upright, alert.

Gently closing the eyes, and then gently, slowly, some little bit deeper breaths. Using the inhale to connect here to the body now. Letting the exhale be a time to relax and let go into here. And now, breathing in and breathing out, and then letting your breathing come back to normal. And for a few more breaths, relax your body on the exhale.

On your exhale, see if there can be a settling into your body, deep in your body, so that you're here in your body. On the exhale, relaxing the thinking mind, any pressure or energy to think, any tension associated with thinking. Perhaps an exhale that can be softened, ironed out.

And then gently, now letting your awareness be free to wander around your body. The whole body becomes the anchor to the present moment. The whole body is where awareness resides. But within the body, let your attention, your mindfulness, not be directed, but rather receptive and open to wherever sensations appear, wherever attention wants to go in the body.

There are a lot of sensations. Don't try to rush between them. Just in a relaxed way, settle for a moment in one place where there are sensations. And then, as the mind wants, as the body speaks, let the attention float somewhere else. Or if it feels nice, you can just let the attention rest in one place. Maybe gently letting the attention float in that particular area, taking it all in.

Noticing when the mind gets caught up in thoughts and ideas. See if you can set them tension-free again so it can freely roam through the body, in the body. Taking in whatever sensations appear and disappear, appear and persist. Whatever calls the attention to it.

Perhaps there can be a global awareness within which a more intimate mindfulness, attention floats around and touches different parts of the body as the sensations there become known.

Rooted in the body, letting the flow of bodily sensations be known in an open, relaxed awareness.

Settling, settling back and observing the flow of sensations in the body.

As we come to the end of the sitting, for the next few exhales, ride the exhale into your body more deeply. Ride the inhale to spread your awareness through your body.

For a few moments here, almost as if you let gravity settle your awareness deeper into the fullness of your body. And then, as if your body is an organ of perception like the eyes, and with the body you could feel or sense or take in the people of the world. Not through the eyes, not through the usual mind and ideas of self, but with a deeper... the body itself. In some way can know there are others on this planet.

Just as our body is made from materials that arise out of the earth, so do their bodies. Just as you have sensations in your body of pleasure and pain, so do they. Just as your body is the house which holds your heart, so it is for them.

And perhaps we could end this sitting with feelings of warmth and tenderness and care for others. Calmly, peacefully, from this place where we're meditating, a simple warmth and tenderness, gentleness, in which goodwill can glow, radiate from us.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings be free.

Dharmette: Satipaṭṭhāna (30) Choiceless Awareness of Sensations

Hello. This will be the last talk on this fifth exercise of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, the exercise on mindfulness of the elements, or what I like to call mindfulness of the properties: the earth property, the water property, the fire property, and the air property.

This is a meditation on mindfulness of sensations. So, the basic sensory awareness exercise of just being present for the sensations that are direct and immediate as they occur for ourselves. There's a variety of ways of practicing this. One of the ways is the way we did in the meditation today, which some people find easier than meditating on their breath. That is to just be grounded in the sensations of the body. If the mind wanders off, come back to the body and the flow of sensations, with the attention not directed to any specific part of the body, just rooted in the whole body. Floating and roaming around, touching into the present moment with the different sensations as they flow through and come into being.

Some people find that their breathing actually works as a better anchor to the present. If they stay there, they can develop their stability, their concentration, and their mindfulness. And there, too, it's a sensation meditation. It's the same meditation, but now we're aware of all the sensations that come into play as we breathe. So technically, this four elements meditation is what we're doing in Vipassanā^[2] when we're tuning into the breathing. Now the attention, though, is in a much narrower, smaller area of our body, just in the area where the breathing occurs or where the breathing is predominant. We're there with the flow of sensations, and we let the attention kind of float within the location where we're focusing on the breathing, letting the sensations come into that floating awareness. As we get quieter and quieter, and the breathing gets stiller and quieter, it's easier to kind of just stay with the simple sensations that come and go as we breathe. It's still a sensation meditation, it's still this four elements meditation that we're doing, but because it's more rooted in a particular place, some people find it easier. The mind doesn't wander off as much, and it's easier to settle in. It is simpler that way.

And as I said, some people find it simpler to do the whole body. Sometimes in mindfulness, what I like to teach is that we are rooted in the breathing; that's kind of like the default. That's the place we cultivate stability and steadiness of mind to stay in the present moment. But if some other sensation arises in the body that's more compelling, then we contentedly, relaxedly let the attention flow to that other place and then begin doing the sensation meditation in that place—in the knees, or the back, or wherever the sensations might be strong. And there too, the idea is not to fixate the attention, but rather to let it roam around. It's like you're touching a cave wall in the dark and you can't see it, but you just let your hand go around and feel the wall, the texture, the temperature, or whatever it might be.

The direction that we are going with this kind of sensation meditation is the same direction as all the different exercises of Satipaṭṭhāna. That is to be able to be steady, stable enough in the present moment that the mind is not wandering off anymore. We're right here in the present moment, and we're just feeling the experience. Because the mind is now stable and not wandering off easily, then we can settle back and just observe the experience. This idea of observing the experience is meant to be a peaceful experience, where we're not interfering or making a lot of work. It's very receptive, just observing it as the flow of sensations, the experience as it comes through.

In particular, as we settle back and there's more stability in the present moment, we see that everything is passing, everything is moving. I don't know if it's a good analogy, but if you take an old film that's made up of all these little squares, and you have each frame come in front of a little slot... If you just settle back and watch, you see that they just come and go. One comes, one comes, one comes, and you see they come and they go. So in some kind of relaxed, flowing way, we start seeing more and more things just come and go, and come and go. This opens up to deeper places of letting go, of not clinging. So that's the direction we're going.

How do we get there? If we look at the simile that's used for this particular exercise—doing the four element meditation, being aware of the sensations in these four categories—it's like a butcher who has cut up a cow and put out the different pieces of the cow for people to come and buy. At this point, people are not relating to the pieces of meat as the cow; it's just pieces of meat. They see the pieces of meat independent of the cow. I think maybe it's an unfortunate graphic analogy for many of us, but the idea is that we often are living in thoughts and ideas that we take as our whole self. How we identify ourselves in a particular way... some of the identities are accurate enough, but if we live in the whole identity, then we miss the parts.

This is a meditation to not be in the idea of the whole, but rather to begin tuning into the particular elements and parts that make up the whole, or to which we apply the concepts and ideas. For example, if I was to think, I'm a lousy person, that's a generalization of the whole. If I then feel the sensations of my hand, the sensations themselves are just sensations, and there's no lousiness in the hand. It's just sensations. Whether I think I'm a great person or a lousy person, whatever it is.

The idea is to have an experience of ourselves where we drop below the coarser identities, the coarser ideas of who we are. Because often those ideas are sources of suffering, and even if they're sources of happiness, they can limit us. To drop into this deeper, settled, relaxed, observing place—observing the present moment as it flows by. So by beginning to look at the sensation level of experience, we're looking at the parts, in a sense, of the cow, not the cow as a whole. We're looking at the parts of ourselves, not the generalizations of who we are.

So we're dropping down to a deeper level, and this can be quite healing, quite healthy to do. Some of the ideas and attachments to the ideas that we have involve contractions and tightness, and they involve a disconnect with our lived, flowing, bodily experience. To be able to drop down into the lived bodily experience and let the sensations flow and move, and not be bottled up, not be restricted, not be contracted, is spiritually and physically a healthy thing. Mentally, to be in this kind of flow of sensations where the mind is not fixated on its painful ideas, or whatever ideas it has, is very healthy.

This idea of dropping down into the parts, to the direct experience of what's actually happening more than the ideas and thoughts about things, is part of what this exercise is about. What it helps us to do is to bring the mind and body together in harmony. If the mind is thinking about tomorrow, or yesterday, thinking about fantasies, delusions of grandeur, or delusions of "poor me" ^[3], we tend to be disconnected from our bodies. The body is always in the present moment, and so the task of meditation, when we want to harmonize the body and mind, is to let the mind join where the body is. Since the body has a lot to do with sensations, that's where we can find the harmony. That's where you can find the meeting, the joining, better than if we just stay conceptually thinking about how wonderful the body is and celebrating the body with ideas. We're in the sensation level of experience, and that's where this harmony happens, this coming together.

We'll see as we move on, this becomes really helpful to connect to deeper dimensions of our heart, deeper dimensions of our inner life. So we'll get there. Tomorrow we'll start doing a few sessions on the sixth exercise of Satipaṭṭhāna. I want to warn you that this involves contemplation, maybe even visualization, of a corpse. There are actually nine different contemplations on the progressive decay of a corpse. I don't think it's meant to be gruesome, but it's meant to somehow help us value the present moment and really show up here in the present moment. So that there's a qualitatively improved aliveness to our attention and dedication to this present moment experience.

Hopefully, this will be supportive for you to spend a couple of days on this corpse contemplation. It's a long tradition in Buddhism to contemplate death, and so we'll do that for a few days as part of this Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta.

Thank you.