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Interplay Between the Body & Mind

Now, there are hearing assistance devices over on the counter just outside the other hall.

Perhaps because I just came back from being on retreat for the last couple of weeks, what's on my mind is my body. Or, what's in my body is my mind. One of the surprises for me in my years of Buddhist practice is the degree to which my body has become a home, has become a rich area to rest the awareness in, to be present in, and how much the body, or the experience of the body, is affected by the mind. And then, as the mind changes, the body changes.

When I was first discovering this in practice, I talked about how sometimes I experienced my karmic body^[1], and sometimes I experienced a dharmic body. Sometimes, when I got to meditation, I would leave my karmic body behind for a little while, and then after the meditation was over, I'd go back into it. It was fascinating to do this process and to learn how much what goes on in the mind influences how we experience our body. I think when I was quite young, I never would have assumed that. I thought that whatever experiences I had in the body, the pains and pleasures of my body, were just how it is. But to discover that pleasure and pain are very much influenced by what the mind is doing—the concepts the mind has about it, the associations, the memories, the values, the perceptions the mind has—affects the experience of pleasure and pain. And so does the state of the mind.

That's where meditation comes in, partly. It is to watch the state of the mind change as we meditate, and as that happens, the experience of the body changes as well. That's quite an educational experience to have. For one thing, it puts a question mark next to our experiences of our body, what our body is. Not a few people are quite oppressed by their body, they struggle with their body, and I don't want to minimize how difficult that is. But to understand that their inner experiences are variable, and so not to reify the particular experience we have as a final conclusion. But to be able to look at the mind and understand the mind's influences, and how it's possible to change the mind and the mind's attitudes and views and the mind state, and how that then shifts and changes how we experience the body.

If you go back to the ancient teachings of the Buddha, he had a wonderful, interesting word for body. It was kāya^[2]. It's particularly interesting to compare it with the other words for body used at the time of the Buddha. The second most common word used for body was sarīra^[3]. I first learned about the word because people use it to mean a relic. Some great teacher dies and they cremate the body and there are relics found, and they save the relics. It's the sarīra. But it refers to the physical body just as a physical entity, like a corpse. A corpse is a body that's not animated with anything; the mind is not active in the dead body. So all you have is a dead body, and this word sarīra is applied to just the physical body without any mind, just as a hunk of matter.

However, that's not the word that the Buddha uses when he's talking about meditation practice. In meditation practice, he uses the word kāya. The meanings of that word in meditation can shift and change, but it has to do with the experienced body. "Experienced" means it's felt; we feel it. The feelings we have in the body are not just purely physical events. The qualities of them, the intensity of them, their associations—many things associated with them have to do with what was on our mind.

To give you a few examples, in the Buddhist meditation teachings, he put a tremendous emphasis on mindfulness of the body (and also mindfulness itself). Many people now in the modern world associate Buddhist meditation with mindfulness. He had three discourses where he gave instructions in mindfulness. Each of them begins with the same instruction: "When you're breathing, know whether the breaths are long or whether they're short." That's the first instruction. The second instruction that they all share is: "While you're breathing, as you're paying attention to your breathing and meditation, experience your whole body, the entire kāya." So that's to tune into your body. Then the next instruction that's shared by all these is: "As you're breathing in and breathing out, relax your bodily formations^[4]."

The idea of being aware of your long and short breaths has a lot to do with the fact that the state of your mind can affect how you breathe. Many people find this. They calm down in meditation, the breathing gets slower, the breathing tends to become shorter, more subtle, more quiet. When the mind gets excited, the breathing picks up and you breathe quite hard. How we breathe can be seen as being affected by what goes on in the mind. But many people have discovered that if you focus on your breathing, that calms the mind. So there's this reciprocal relationship between breathing and the mind. Focus on the breathing, the mind calms down; the mind calms down, the breathing calms down. Right in the beginning instructions of mindfulness, you see this at play: this reciprocal relationship between the body and the mind.

The next instructions are about feeling the whole body and then calming or relaxing the bodily formations—the bodily activities, the muscles that are held in tensions we have that can be calmed. What can be calmed in our body are those tensions. The tensions we carry in our body, for the most part, originate in the mind. Maybe we can say a little bit simplistically that the tensions in the mind are often transferred into the body, and the chronic tension becomes quite hard muscles that stay frozen.

As we start feeling the whole body in meditation, one of the things we become aware of is the holding patterns in the body, how we hold ourselves tense. Maybe the shoulders are up high, the belly is held in tight, or there might be tensions in the face around the eyes and the jaw. The Buddha's instruction is when you start discovering that held tension in your body, to relax it. As that relaxes, that tends to relax the mind, calm the mind. The bodily formations that we're relaxing are the body that's been influenced by what goes on in the mind. The mind is tense, the body gets tense. The mind relaxes, some of this bodily stuff relaxes as well.

What I'm trying to point out here is that there's this interplay between the mind and the body. The word the Buddha most commonly used for body is not the physical body, but it's this experienced body that's an interplay of the workings of the mind and the body. This gives a lot of hope to people's experience in their body because it doesn't mean that their body is a fixed thing and the pain or pleasure is fixed and you're stuck with what you have. We have some ability to change, to adjust what our own experience of the body is.

I have known people who have experienced a lot of pain and have used meditation to ameliorate the pain. There's a variety of different ways in which mindfulness shifts our relationship to pain, but one of the ways is that if you can get into a meditation state, if you can really get into the meditation, that tends to change the quality of the mind. As the state of the mind changes, the experience of how the body feels changes as well.

To give you some examples, again from the teachings of the Buddha, when he taught concentration meditation, he instructed people to enter into four different states of meditative absorption^[5]. When you really get absorbed and you're no longer thinking about what's for dinner, or why you left the dirty dishes in the sink—whatever your mind is involved in—and these four absorptions, you really get involved deeply into it. When you get into these absorptions, these focused, concentrated, unified states, this begins to change the experiences of the body. One of the things that begins happening is there's a lot of pleasure in the body. The first thing that's often described is experiences of joy and happiness that begin coursing through the body.

The Buddha's instructions were this: he said, "When this joy and happiness in the body arises, spread it, disperse it, spread it, saturate it, pervade it, soak it into the whole body." What a trip, can you believe it? If you're feeling a little bit of joy and delight and pleasure in your body, go all out and spread it throughout your body. That's a little bit of a surprising instruction, but that's what people can do when they quiet and get settled and concentrated enough.

Some people think it has to do with something like dopamine, that somehow when the mind gets focused, is no longer distracted, no longer scattered, and really absorbed in one thing, it brings a sense of well-being that can feel physical. There's a common phenomenon—you don't have to meditate to do that—people who do a craft will feel that, or play an instrument, or read a nice book. There are nice feelings that can come sometimes. These things start arising, and then the instruction is to spread it throughout the body. This joy and pleasure originates in the state of the mind. As you go through these four different states of absorption, the same instructions: suffuse it, spread it throughout the body.

Except the fourth one, which is the deepest state of this kind of absorption. There, it's a little bit simpler what it says. It no longer talks about joy and pleasure, but it talks about the clarity or brightness of a pure mind. A pure mind is a mind which is not agitated by anything, and so it's freed of agitation, freed of disturbances, of anxieties and worries, all kinds of things. That produces a sense of clarity or brightness in the mind. The instructions are to suffuse that clarity throughout the body, so no part of the body doesn't feel that clarity. A curious kind of instruction, to spread that clarity throughout the body.

Some people who do this in deep meditation will say that they don't really experience their body anymore. Sometimes they have no experience of a body at all, but sometimes they report that their physical body and the boundaries of their body fall away, but there's this kind of glow of light or clarity. There's a really nice feeling that's there that's beautiful. So here again we see this idea that the mind and body are intimately related. Experience of the body and the mind are intimately related. As the mind gets concentrated and feelings like joy and pleasure arise, that's spread throughout the body. That mental clarity or mental brightness, as that gets developed, can also be spread and suffused into the whole body. When this happens, people feel like they have a very different experience of their body than what they have in ordinary life, when what I call the karmic body is operating.

It gives people a feeling of confidence, a feeling of peace, a feeling of being at home, a feeling of safety, a feeling like everything is good right here, right here in the body. The body provides the message that everything is good right now. It might not be good outside the walls of where you're meditating—there are all kinds of challenges in the world—but to really feel that things are good right here, no matter what difficulties there have been. To feel that is an education process of the body. For the body to begin registering a capacity of feeling at home in itself, and comfortable in itself, and safe and warm and cozy, can not only educate the body but re-educate the mind. It re-educates us from the conditioning that many of us received from very difficult things that happened in life. Tragedies happen, violence happens to people, great suffering happens, accidents happen to the body. Some of the accidents I've had were decades ago; sometimes when I remember it, I still feel a little twang or twinge in my body, like a little something. So we get a certain conditioning.

If we live in fear all the time, that gets translated to the body, right? The experienced body is partly shaped by the mind. Fear is mostly seen as a mental phenomenon, but it really courses through our body as well; it's experienced in the body as well. So there's this thing about not being able to separate the body and the mind; the reciprocal way they work together is built into this Buddhist word kāya. To re-educate the body, to change it and soften it and learn a whole different way of being, and feel at home in there rather than looking out in the world for sensual pleasures. Looking out in the world, hoping the world out there is going to do something nice for me. To be able to experience inner pleasure, delight, and joy without having had a good meal, without having a good drink, without having... and if I dare say sex, because then you won't listen to me anymore... without having a massage, or having any nice things, which there's nothing wrong with those things inherently. But to think that that's where happiness is going to come from, we know is a dead end. Pleasure is not happiness.

But you start feeling this goodness and warmth, and certainly pleasure, happiness, and joy inside, that's not dependent on winning the lottery, or getting a nice car, or nice food, or a nice date, or whatever sensual pleasure that's out there in the world can provide. It changes our priorities. Hopefully it doesn't make us a hermit, that we're self-contained, but if we're no longer looking into the world for our needs to be met, for our pleasures to be attained so much, we can feel more complete and full right here.

Then it gets a little bit more interesting, because this word kāya being the experienced body that's influenced partly by the mind, there are times when the physical body seemingly falls away and there's still a sense of a body, but it's more like a mind-made body. It's a body which seems to not really be recognizable as your physical body. Some people report it's just a glow, a glowing, a vibration, a warmth. There's a suffusing warmth that goes everywhere, then it reaches out without any boundaries. So it feels like it has no boundaries, just beyond the boundaries of our skin. Some people see this light and they feel like they have a light body or something. It's kind of fascinating that our experience of the body is so malleable, can be changed so much.

One of the reasons I'm going on like this is not so much that you're supposed to go into these altered states and have a light body or whatever. They're all products of mental states. It's not like we have this ethereal body exactly that's separate from who we are, but just as the mind state changes, so does the way we experience the body. I'm going on like this to encourage you not to stay stuck in your karmic body—the body that you carry around with you that's full of tension and holding things, and maybe fear in your body. You don't have to go around like that all the time. You're going around like that certainly because things happen to you, and maybe terrible things happened to you, but it's also happening because of how you then continue to engage your mind. If we focus too much with certain attitudes, those attitudes get translated into how we experience the body. We prioritize certain perceptions, and we single out from our field of awareness certain things that we think are important to pay attention to. We have certain reactions to life and to our physical body, and sometimes people are at odds with themselves, in conflict with their body. We have expectations and values of what's important, and so it shouldn't be what I'm having, it should be different. I should have a different experience than what I'm having, and it's not right having what it is. All these ways that we get fixed on these ideas and judgments about our body can keep a frozen attitude or frozen mind state that keeps the experience of the body stuck.

Meditation is meant to free us from being stuck. One of the ways that helps and supports this process is the loosening up of the experience of the body. Soften the holding pattern, which means that we're playing with the reciprocal relationship between the mind and the body. We're softening, relaxing the body. As we begin relaxing the body, the mind relaxes.

Here's an interesting example that I was reminded of recently. I think it's to the point about the difference between being caught up and not caught up in the mind, and what the body does. Many years ago, when I was a Zen student, we would sit in the meditation hall facing the wall. Your back was near the edge of a platform, and so someone could walk right behind your back during the meditation period. The teacher would sometimes walk around the hall, and if your posture wasn't really straight, or you were a little bit slumped, the teachers would come in and adjust your posture to help you out. I remember they would do it quite kindly, because they would first gently put their hand on my shoulder so I knew they were there. Then they would gently put their hand on my lower back or my shoulder and kind of move things a little bit. I appreciated it.

But what was interesting was, sometimes I would feel the hand on my shoulder and I had a startled response. And sometimes the hand would go on my shoulder and I was like putty. I was like, "Oh okay," I would just go with it or just kind of melt with the hand and offer no resistance. What was the difference between being startled and being really soft? Both times I had no idea what was coming, it came out of the blue. The difference was that when I was startled, I was always thinking, and when I wasn't startled, I wasn't really thinking. I wasn't caught up in my thoughts. That was the difference.

The body reacts and behaves in different ways depending on what goes on in the mind. If we keep thinking the same thoughts over and over again, especially negative thoughts, it can have a negative impact on the body. If you can have positive thoughts, that sometimes can have a positive influence in the body. But if you cannot think at all, with a soft, nice body, that has a very, very different effect on the body that's very wonderful and sweet.

Finally, I'd like to say that the tradition talks about suffusing the sense of well-being through the body, spreading it through the body. One of the things I've learned from that is to expand my experience, my feeling or sense or understanding or perception of my body, so that it becomes bigger. When I'm involved in certain thoughts, certain self-concepts, certain concerns, my sense of my body tends to shrink or feel smaller. In certain emotions, also, I've noticed when I have certain emotions, I tend to gather myself around that emotion inside. So, for example, if I'm feeling sad, I might prioritize this idea: "Oh, poor me," or something. Somehow, one way or another, I tend to find myself gathered in close to this little bundle of sadness that I might feel somewhere.

What I've learned to do is to bring my awareness right into the middle of all these feelings I have in my body and allow them. The word "allow" is a very important part of this. I don't make it, I allow it. I allow it to kind of spread outward. One idea I have sometimes is that I'm allowing these things that are inside to rest outwards into what's holding it, like if there's a bag, like skin. Let it go out just to rest in the bag, to spread and just kind of expand and be held, and not be contracted. Then things like sadness begin to spread and become larger, and it tends to be a lot easier to hold it kindly, in a non-reactive way, as it spreads outwards and gets bigger.

Oddly enough, being absorbed and focused on something like sadness, and having it spread, in the middle of it there are feelings of goodness that arise. Something feels really nice in the middle of it because it's kind of been set free, or something's been freed up or loosened up inside because I'm not holding onto it. As I keep focusing on the body and feeling it spreading, allowing it to expand, my mind begins to soften as well. My mind starts feeling some of that goodness. As my mind softens, that changes how I experience my body. How I experience my body changes how I experience my mind.

This reciprocal biofeedback system is one of the systems that supports meditators in getting absorbed, getting really concentrated, being right here in this body at this time because it's so good, it feels so right, it feels so healthy, it feels so true. When we don't have that biofeedback system and we have our thoughts and our concerns or judgments and preoccupations we go into, we are actually separating ourselves from the experienced body, from this mind-body cooperative system. And so it can't really function in a harmonious way or in a healthy way if we're removed from it. So, to have a biofeedback system that encourages us not to go off and wander in thought, but come back and be present in a kind of quiet way with a bodily experience, feeling it, sensing, opening to it, is quite helpful.

So that was a little bit of what I've learned in mindfulness of the body. Mindfulness lessons that were learned partly, to a great extent, through a lot of pain. I've learned to sit with a lot of pain in this body as well, and what I've learned from that is kind of opened up to this wider thing. So I kind of end with that. Maybe that's a downer to end like that, but I end with that just so you don't think that it's just an easy highway that I'm talking about. A lot of what we're doing in this practice is really being present for what's true for us and what's going on. If that's pain, then we learn to work with that and find a different relationship to the pain. Because the pain and the mind are so closely related, as we learn to have a different relationship to the pain, the pain changes, the mind changes, and we have this reciprocal thing happening again.

So we have about 10 minutes, and I'd like to hear any questions or concerns you might want to ask about this topic.

Q&A

Speaker 1: My question is about your last comment about learning from the pain. I'm really intrigued by that because when I watch those I love or friends of mine who have been in great pain, whether it's physical pain or emotional pain, either from an illness or a tragedy, I'm really intrigued about the lesson that comes from the pain. So maybe you can talk a little bit about that.

Gil Fronsdal: I think probably there are many lessons a person could have. The one that I'd like to highlight is lessons about our relationship to the pain. Not what it means for our life, but rather what is our relationship to that pain? Are we resisting it? Are we hating it? Are we running away from it? Are we blaming someone for it? Are we caught up in fantasy in order to distract us from it? There are all these strategies people have when they're uncomfortable in pain that are not so healthy. To be able to see those, learn about those unhelpful strategies, and then to learn some healthy ways to be present for pain is one of the great gifts I've had from this practice.

Some people learn from pain that, "Oh see, pain... I think of pain as a signal that something needs our attention." I think that pain should always be respected. But it isn't necessarily the pain itself that needs our attention, sometimes it's our relationship to it. Sometimes we learn from pain that, "I better shift my posture, or I should walk in a different way," or something physically needs to change as well. Those are also lessons that we can have from it if we really pay attention. I've had that sometimes where I've had difficulties with walking and I had to pay really careful attention to understand what I was doing. I was holding myself when I walked, and so I could find a way to walk that didn't have pain.

Speaker 1: I have a follow-up question. What if the pain comes from distress? How would you recommend changing your relationship with the distress?

Gil Fronsdal: Well, I think that the core mindfulness thing is to turn your attention to the experience of distress. Not the thoughts about the distress, the stories, but rather the felt sense experience of it. And then, I love the metaphor: imagine your awareness is two hands that can be cupped together, and they come underneath and hold the distress as if it has permission to be there. And then just be with it, sense it and feel it as if it's never had an opportunity to be seen and known before, and then see what happens. Give it time to show itself to you. It's a powerful process, because something like distress is not a unitary thing. It's probably a composite of different attitudes, beliefs, other emotions, ideas of self and other—all kinds of things come into play: values, memories, predictions of the future. So if you can just hold it without trying to fix it or react to it and just take a really good look at it, it might begin to open up and show you its component parts until you can maybe find the pivotal point that is holding it all together.

Speaker 2: I have a question about pain when somebody has a chronic illness that's ongoing, or when somebody's in the dying process. I had read in the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying that pain can be a deep purification process. Do you know anything about that or have any thoughts on that?

Gil Fronsdal: So, pain is a purification process. It's a fairly common Buddhist idea that we have purification processes. We have all these things that we hold inside of us: we have tension, we have attachments, we have memories that are held tight and haven't been released or resolved. We have difficult memories of things we've done that are sometimes buried deep inside. As we meditate, we start going through layers of the mind and we start encountering these places where these difficult things are held. So the process of freeing ourselves from that sometimes is painful, or distressing, or challenging in different ways. And if the pain is because of that purifying process, the emptying process, freeing process, then it's considered a purification process you should allow for.

So that's one way that pain itself represents the holding. But when it comes to some chronic illnesses and injuries and dying, some of the pain is just pure physiological intensity that I wouldn't associate with our karma or our background. I think that does a disservice to people; then it's more complicated than it needs to be.

Whether it's a purifying process to be with that pain depends a lot on how we practice with the pain. If it's like what I talked about earlier, if we're learning from that how not to be so reactive, learning to be discovering how to be peaceful with a pain, that might be a really useful lesson. The pain doesn't go away, but we might have learned to be peaceful with it. I've known lots of people whose pain hasn't gone away—the edges sometimes go away, but the pain doesn't go away—but they learn how to hold it spaciously. They've learned how to be peaceful with it. I've had very intense pain and intense joy at the same time. Pain doesn't have to be the only thing that's present. So maybe that's a kind of purification process; maybe the reactivity we have around pain is too big and it needs to be resolved before we die. But I'm reluctant to make a general statement about how it should be. I think that every dying is unique.

Speaker 3: I've been working with the pain in my body through qigong, and I just want to make sure that I'm not applying the wrong principles to meditation, because I'm really new to meditation. Is there an order of things? Like, should one work on concentration and calming the mind before you go into the pain? What I'm noticing, because during this meditation I was working with the pain in the way I know how, which is holding it in loving acceptance and not asking it to go away and just giving it all my attention. But there is totally a part of my mind that wants it to go away. So the whole time it just felt like a struggle, and then after a while I was like, "I'm just gonna try that feeling the breath on my nose thing," you know? Is there an appropriate order to this?

Gil Fronsdal: I think it's also very personal what works for different people, what's the right order for an individual. But because we're kind of a mindfulness specialty here, the general principle in mindfulness is to not try to get rid of anything, but rather to learn how to hold it in non-reactive awareness. Some people are trying to get rid of pain, and I practiced a long time practicing in order to get rid of my pain, and I found in the end it was actually much more transformative not to get rid of it, but learn how to hold it in a non-reactive way. And then all kinds of other lessons would come out of it.

So with that principle, if you have intense back pain, maybe when you're sitting here that becomes the meditation.

Speaker 3: Secondary question is, my mind is saying, "Oh, you don't have concentration," because the pain moves sometimes. If you do hold it acceptingly, it shifts, and now you got a new spot. My mind is like, "Well, you're not developing concentration because you're moving all over the place." Is that true, or is my mind full of it per usual? [Laughter]

Gil Fronsdal: I like that you're asking the question. That's the kind of questioning that a meditator should do. I think that the person who should answer that is you. It's a little bit hard for me to know exactly what's going on in your mind, but I think that you're asking the right question, and I suspect that you'll find the answer. One of the important things about this kind of meditation practice is to learn how to become your own teacher around these things. So you're asking a good question. I prefer just to turn the mirror back on you and see if you can find your way with it. One of the ways to find your way is trial and error. You try something and see if that works. Just try different things. I'll stay close to that question.

Great, so I hope all of you will give your body a second chance, or a third chance, or a new chance to come to love it, and it'll love you back if you learn to settle in and really be present for it in a nice way. Thank you.