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# Guided Meditation: Aware of Body, Respecting Awareness; Dharmette: Body (3 of 5) Respecting the Body - [Gil Fronsdal](https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/1)

*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: Aware of Body, Respecting Awareness](https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/14405)

Good day, everyone. It's nice to see all these names on the chat, and some of you I haven't met, but I've met your name and your greetings many times. Thank you for it.

And also, thank you to all those of you who are going to be listening to this later. I think that our meditation community extends way beyond the people who actually show up here live, and I appreciate so much that there are these wide circles of community that gather around this practice together.

The topic for today is respect in relationship to the basic mindfulness practice we do. Also, this week the focus is on the body, and so certainly it's valuable to respect the body. I'll talk more about that during the little talk after this, but for now, I want to emphasize that as we attend to the body, as we bring mindfulness to the body, it's also important to respect the awareness that we're using—the attention, the mindfulness with which we perceive this body, that we're aware of this body, that we recognize the different aspects of the body that we focus on.

So I want to guide you through a little exercise that I've done many times before. Some of you have done it, and even though it's more or less the same exercise, it's not any different. I don't think of it as any different than just sitting down to meditate to focus on the breathing. We've done it before, but we do it again and again, for some of us, for decades.

This is an exercise in respecting awareness, or to say it differently, in seeing if we can find an awareness where the attention, a way of being attentive, is calm and free of hurry, but also free of extra baggage. The awareness is very simple, not avoidant or held back, and not coming along with forcefulness or expectations. It is without aversion, without resistance, just very, very simple.

The exercise is to guide you through this kind of simplicity that we might be able to find, and then that can be used for attending to the body as different body sensations come along in the meditation practice.

Assuming a meditation posture and gently closing the eyes.

Gently take a few long, slow, deep breaths in. Then, with maybe a little longer exhale than usual, let there be a wave of relaxation through your body. That wave, maybe from the top of the head as you exhale progressively, moves down through the body, just relaxing, softening all the way down to your seat, down your legs even. Then do it again.

Letting your breathing return to normal.

Maybe for the next three or four breaths on the exhale, continue with a wave-like relaxation moving through your body from the head all the way down to the feet.

And then to begin this exercise.

Bring your attention to one of your hands, maybe the right hand. If your hand is complicated—maybe it's hurt, or in pain, or has arthritis or something—maybe you can find something else that's more neutral. Maybe one of your feet or an elbow, something that doesn't have any particular complications, pain, or discomfort with it.

Feel the sensations of this place. Feel the sensations of your hand. Feeling the palm of the hand. The back of the hand. The fingers.

And feel the simplicity of the sensations there. Simplicity meaning without needing to think about it, or remember what it's been in the past, or associations and meanings you attribute to it. Just in the moment now.

Maybe there are sensations of touch if your hand is touching something. Maybe there's warmth or coolness. Maybe there is tingling and vibration. Sensations of pressure. Of weight, heavy and light. Some sensations might be hard and soft.

And letting the awareness recognize or know how the hand experiences itself. In a sense, the hand doesn't have a name for itself as a hand; it's just the sensations that it feels.

Notice how you are being aware. Are you perplexed? Are you eager? Are you trying to do this like a school assignment, trying to do it right? Or are you disinterested, or even resisting?

All these ways of being have an influence on how we are aware, how we are mindful.

Is your awareness pulled back and you're kind of watching or thinking about the hand from the control tower in the head? Are you intimate and close in touch, almost like you're in your hand?

Can you adjust your awareness so that it's very simple but clearly connected to the sensations of the hand? Maybe letting go of thoughts and ideas, like you would if you quieted your mind, maybe closed your eyes to listen to a faint sound far away.

And then calmly, deliberately, slowly, maybe move your awareness to the other hand. Adjust your awareness, your attention, your mindfulness, so it has as little extra baggage, extra attitudes, expectations or aversions, desires. So it's just feeling the hand. Feeling how the hand experiences itself.

Respecting your awareness, so your awareness can just be as simple and clear as it is when it's alone, when it's not influenced by attitudes, desires, aversions. When awareness is also not under the influence of ideas of self. Ideas that I have to do it right, or I'm doing it wrong, I don't understand, or I'm doing it great. Just simple awareness of the hand.

Respecting awareness is allowing awareness to do its work without a lot of extra.

And then calmly and deliberately bring your attention to some sensation in your body that's uncomfortable or unpleasant. Maybe not dramatically so, but calmly bring attention to it and see if you can be aware of that area of your body in the same way you're aware of your hand.

In trying to respect the simplicity of awareness, without it coming under the influence of your ideas about the discomfort, your aversion, or your desires. Instead, letting your mindfulness feel, know how that part of your body experiences itself, as if it's allowed to be just the way it is. Even discomfort is allowed permission to be there in this simple awareness.

If there is impatience or worry or aversion, maybe on the next exhale you can relax that, even for just a few moments. Relaxing reactivity, and for a few moments just feeling the area where the discomfort is. To feel the particularity of the sensations there: the pulsing, vibration, pulling, pressure, tightness.

And then I'll ask you to move your attention one more time. This time connect to your awareness, your attention, to see if again you can move it calmly, deliberately, simply. So this simple awareness now moves to experience that part of your body where you accompany your breathing.

Feeling the area of your body where you feel your body breathing. Allow yourself to be aware simply of the sensations that come into play as you breathe.

Maybe every breath is like a windshield wiper that moves aside any extra attitude that complicates awareness, any wanting or not wanting, judgments. Like the windshield becomes for a moment clear, so the awareness becomes clearly aware of just the breathing.

And as we come to the end, to evoke the metaphor of a windshield wiper on a rainy day. We're driving a car and it's raining. We don't talk this way or think this way, but there's some truth to it: that as we use the windshield wiper, we're trusting the value of a clear windshield. We're trusting how we see when the windshield is cleared over the rain.

You can feel the lack of trust or ease if the windshield wiper doesn't work and it's raining hard and we have to really strain to try to be careful driving. We probably shouldn't be driving. And when we use the windshield wipers to keep the window clear, we are safer driving, but also we become safer for the other drivers and the pedestrians. We offer mutual safety.

And so if we are able to clear the window of awareness from our preoccupations, our attitudes, our fears, our aversions, and to respect and trust a clear awareness in the moment, we become safer for ourselves and safer for others. In a sense, we can give the gift of safety to others.

And on this day coming out of this meditation, perhaps we can reflect and consider how we can live so we bring greater safety to others. How can we keep our awareness present, attentive, clear, and simple? Trusting awareness, respecting our capacity to be aware, and in doing so bringing safety in all directions.

It may be more than safety; a dedication to live 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 everywhere be free.

## [Dharmette: Body (3 of 5) Respecting the Body](https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/14406)

So continuing today with discussing mindfulness of the body as part of the overall practice of mindfulness, and today it's respect. So, respecting the body.

Many years ago, I saw an article in, I think it was *Mother Jones* magazine, and the title struck me. The title was: "The Body: Friend, Foe, or Total Stranger?" We have complicated relationships to our bodies, and some of it has been acculturated into us by the way that our culture relates to the body. Some of it has to do with life experiences and maybe what individuals have told us about our body and our features.

A tremendous amount of suffering goes on in our society that's related to our bodies. To name just one—there are many—there are attitudes our culture, many cultures, have towards skin color, body size, height. All kinds of things go on, and so many of us can live under the weight of thoughts and preoccupations about our bodies. "My nose is too big," or "too little."

When I was young, I was very concerned about having too high a forehead and worried I was going to lose my hair in seventh and eighth grade. I would spend an inordinate amount of time in class measuring the distance from my nose to my scalp. I would take my finger and kind of feel the distance to make sure that I wasn't losing hair. I could probably also write a somewhat interesting autobiography all from the perspective of my hair, my hair length, what I've done with my hair over these decades of my life. From crew cuts when I was a little kid to long hair halfway down to my belly button later in my life, and then a shaved head when I was a monk, and on and on.

So what was going on? What were the associations, the beliefs, the attitudes going on? There is often an overlay on top of the body of our judgments and ideas or preoccupations. One of the things that's possible to discover—like the exercise of the hand that I gave in this last guided meditation—is to experience a difference between the hand's experience of itself and our ideas of the hand. The idea is, "My fingers are too long," or "too short," "My fingernails are this or that," or "My hand is chubby." It can be debilitating and depressing even, some of these ideas and thoughts.

But the hand itself doesn't have those thoughts and ideas. The hand itself just feels itself. It has no judgments about what it is. It's tremendously respectful for the hand to leave it alone, to free it from our judgments, ideas, associations, and to experience the hand, or whatever part of the body, whatever's going on in our body, independent of the acculturation, independent of the life experiences even, and the judgments, the ideas, and how we've been treated.

Part of mindfulness practice is to give ourselves the gift, give our body the gift, of allowing it to experience itself independent of all these other comparisons we make. Comparisons with other kinds of hands, what it should be and not be.

If I hang out with a certain group of people, I might feel bad about myself for being too short. I might think, "Oh, I'm too short, and this is unfortunate, and there are people looking down at me all the time, and I have to look up high." If it just happens to be that I'm hanging out with National Basketball Association players, then in comparison I'm short. But in comparison to many people in our culture, our society, I'm a little bit tall. But I can make a story and get caught up in these differences and comparisons that cause a lot of suffering. I don't want to dismiss the suffering and the challenges that all this makes; we need to address it wisely. But in meditation, we can give ourselves the gift of experiencing the body in and of itself, free of all that.

If we really want to respect the body, we want to somehow be able to distinguish between the judgments, the stories, the commentary, the associations that we pile on top of the body, from the body's experience of itself, which is often very simple.

That can also be relevant when there's pain or discomfort in the body. We have predictions that, "Oh, if this knee pain continues, I'll have to amputate my leg, and it'll be the end somehow." Certainly, there are dangers with the body being uncomfortable and in pain, but sometimes there are not. One of the great things that can happen through the heightened sensitivity and respect of the body by really paying attention to it in meditation is that we can tell the difference between pain that is a danger signal and pain which is not.

If it's a danger signal, then change your posture. By all means, don't live with a danger. If you're in doubt of what it is, change your posture. Don't stay with pain that way. But if there's no danger signal, I like to think of the pain as a signal, a message. And part of that message is not that something needs to be changed, that we have to do something, but rather the message is that we can offer it the medicine of awareness, to hold it in awareness.

So part of this respecting awareness that we did in that last meditation is that the awareness with which we hold discomfort and pain needs to be simple. It needs to not be piled on with these judgments, associations, fears, and ideas of self that make it so much more complicated. Very simple awareness.

For example, if someone goes around with a clenched hand because they're afraid or angry or something, you could come with a crowbar and directly try to fight the clenchedness to open up the fingers. You get one open, and then when you start the other one, the first one closes up again. Another way to do it is to come along with a loving, soft, caring hand and hold the person's hand and support it. Just tell them, "Here, rest in my hand. Feel your weight, and let it rest and settle into my hand." Then slowly, people's hands will begin to open because they feel the support and the care.

We can do the same thing for ourselves. As we bring our awareness to the area of tension or pain, perhaps what we're doing is allowing something to thaw, something to relax and open. We're maybe making space for the body's ability to heal itself. Just like the tight, clenched fist is the illness, we're holding it so that it can release and relax itself. And perhaps it's not always relaxation. Maybe it's just simply that bringing a lot of attention to an area brings more blood to it, or the micro-tensions around it relax.

Or we begin seeing that the experience of discomfort in and of itself is a very different experience if we just feel it in and of itself, than if we see it through the filter of our ideas. Even the idea that it's "pain" is kind of an abstraction, oddly enough. When you really feel it directly, you realize that pain is an abstraction. What's really happening is there are sensations of heat or stabbing or pulling or tightness or pressure or strong contraction, and all these kinds of particular sensations that are intense. They are all kinds of different sensations. When we start feeling the particularity of it, then we're not overlaying an idea like pain, which comes along with a lot of baggage, a lot of other ideas about what pain means. Some people associate pain with failure: "I'm doing something wrong," and that's a little bit debilitating to have that idea. So just feel it and be with it.

Then as we feel more deeply into discomfort, for example, there might be a message there. That message might be that there's some embodied emotion in that place stored up from a long time ago that maybe needs to be released. Maybe it gets released with tears, maybe it gets released with heat or something else. But I think it's nice within this respecting of the body to think that there's a very huge difference between the corporal body that we have when we're a corpse and the animated body, the body that has sensations in it.

The sensate body, I like to think of it as a messenger system. It's always there to inform us about something. It can be as simple as, "It's hot outside," or "cold, take off your sweater, put on your sweater." But everything is a message, and how do we read that message? With mindfulness meditation, it isn't so much that we're actively reading it, but we're allowing this respectful, careful, simple awareness to hold the experience, to be with the experience so that we get to know it better. Something begins to happen: the self-healing functions of the body can operate. The message system of the body can reveal something to us more deeply.

Maybe what we're learning is not necessarily about the discomfort or the pleasure that we might feel, but rather we're learning that the message is you're not free in relationship to it. You're caught up in it. You're somehow attached to it or aversive to it, and your awareness is not free. Your awareness is not in that place of freedom and simplicity, and that's where the work is. That's what the message is that comes back to us.

So, to respect the body. In the instructions that we have here at IMC[^1], it is to stay with your breathing. That's the default, that's where we develop some concentration. But at a moment's notice, if some experience of the body is more predominant, more compelling—which means that there's a tension set up between trying to stay with the breathing and this other sensation, the body kind of calling attention to itself—you can just let go of the breathing. Then see if you can calmly, deliberately, bring a clear, simple awareness to hang out for a while, to hold for a while this compelling sensation, whether it's pleasant or unpleasant. And when it's no longer compelling, you can either continue to be aware of it if it feels like the right thing, or you can come back to your breathing.

So respecting your body, it's definitely worth it. "Friend, foe, or total stranger?" A wonderful thing that can happen as we do this practice is our body becomes our friend, and we become its friend. So may that friendship last for a long time. Thank you.

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[^1]: **IMC:** Insight Meditation Center, a meditation center in Redwood City, California, where Gil Fronsdal is the primary teacher.