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Guided Meditation: Sensing the Body's Experience

Hello everyone. It's the beginning of the week for some of us, and in some places in the world, it's already tomorrow. So, I'm happy to be here, and I want to start right in with the teaching to get oriented around this practice of mindfulness of the elements or the physical properties. This is such an important part of vipassanā^[1] practice.

Let's take a moment to see if people are hearing... Okay, great, thank you.

I want to start right in with this important area of mindfulness: mindfulness of the physical properties or sensations that we have. They're so fundamental to our experience, and there's something very valuable about being attentive to the fundamental layer of our experience, before the conceptual begins^[2].

I could be sitting here and feel tension in my shoulders; that's an ordinary thing to experience. But then I start wondering, "Why am I tense in my shoulders? Oh, it's left over from yesterday. Yesterday, I was waiting for a car to pull out of a parking space, and when it pulled out, someone else zipped their car into that space. I felt indignant and angry. How could they?" I got all tense, and since then my shoulder has been tense. "Why is the world such an unjust place? There's been so much injustice, and now it's with the cars. Maybe what I should really do is buy a small car, or even a bicycle, so I don't have to deal with this problem. Where do I get a good bicycle?" And on and on it goes. In the meantime, I have departed very far from the tension in my shoulder and am, in a sense, no longer in touch with it.

An alternative way, rather than going into stories and interpretations about our sensations, is to just feel the sensation of tension and let it be just tension. No past, no future, just tension. There might have been a cause, but we're not concerned with that. No resolution of the tension, just tension. Just offer mindful attention to what is, as if what is is allowed to stay there forever. What this does is create a kind of mental space or room. Giving attention to something gives it room, and something like tension then has room to relax. There is almost an instinct in the muscles themselves to relax if we are not feeding them more and more stories and ideas.

The idea of holding the tension in awareness gives it space to not be reinforced by stories, making space for it to relax. Some pleasant things at this elemental level actually get stronger if we hold them in awareness. But if we bounce off of them into the world of stories and ideas, we might lose touch with what feels wholesome and good. This four-element meditation is about dropping down to the elemental or fundamental sensation layer of experience, giving it lots of room, and not getting pulled up into stories, interpretations, pasts, and futures. This allows for a very important process.

The art of this is that whatever happens during this meditation—whether it's physical sensations, emotions, or even a lot of thinking—locate the way it is being manifested in physical sensations. Keep it so simple that you just stay with those sensations. Let the physical sensation be composted by the body; let the body process it. Not your mind, not your heart, just the body. Just the sensations themselves.

To help keep focused on a predominant sensation, you can breathe with it or breathe through it. If there is no predominant sensation that grabs your attention, you can refer to the body to feel it, or just stay with your breathing. There is something profound that happens when we give this kind of breathing room to the sensations of breathing. Just the sensations: each in-breath has its own sensation, and each out-breath^[3] has a sensation. That is the focus of meditation. Whatever is happening, how is it felt and experienced in the body as sensations?

Sitting, assume your meditation posture. To settle in, take a few long, slow, deep breaths.

Let your breath return to normal, and continue on the exhale to relax your body. Settle in. Your body will be the meditation hall for this meditation.

Then check in with yourself. What is the predominant experience of the moment for you, within you? And how is that felt in the body?

What sensations in your body are most pronounced that feel like they would be good to just hold in awareness? Notice what sensations are there: tightness, looseness, pressure, weight, softness, warmth, coolness, movement, expansion, contraction, hardness, pulling, twisting, opening.

Keep coming back to this fundamental, elemental level of experience, before stories and interpretations. Just the sensations for now. Breathing with it, being with the sensations, making room for the sensations.

If you're in your thinking, you're probably not feeling the sensations. But if you're thinking a lot, are there any physical sensations associated with that? If so, let those sensations be the place of mindfulness.

Whatever is happening, refer it back to the body. See how simple you can be with it, simply feeling the associated sensations.

To be able to step away from the incessant thinking mind, to relax, and to be settled in the body—the body breathing, the body sensing—can be a place where we find some peace from the incessant thinking. From time to time, it might feel like a vacation, like a place of safety.

May all of us find our way to be at ease and in safety, resting in our own physical experience and our body, so the body becomes a home—a place of rest and ease. Even if pain in the body is difficult, it's possible to find a place within to be at ease and at peace. May all of us, each individual one of us, all the people we know, and extending out into the world—may everyone find peace with their body, resting in ease and comfort in their body.

May there be a freedom from incessant thinking, reactivity, and meaning-making. Just breathing simply, just being alive is enough. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

And on this Valentine's Day, may it be a mettā^[4] day for all of us. Maybe there's a way that everyone can be our Valentine, whom we look upon with kind regard. May we have mettā for all beings.

Dharmette: Satipaṭṭhāna (29) Resting in the Wisdom of the Body

This part of the discourse on the foundations for awareness^[5] is the simplest of them all. It's a simple instruction that says, "In this body, there is the property of earth, the property of water, the property of fire, and the property of air or wind." And that's it. It does give a simile, which I'll mention tomorrow, but that's all the instruction says.

There's a recognition of each of these properties as they appear within us. It is so simple that it might be overlooked or not understood how profound it is. It's actually one of the central ways that vipassanā practice is done: really delving deep into the level of the sensations of our experience.

It's easy to not be in our sensations. Certainly, it's possible to have sensations of some kind and then start interpreting them, having stories around them, and reacting to them. It's also possible to not be connected to our sensations at all, and be living in the abstract world of thoughts, ideas, and feelings that are disconnected from our body.

Part of mindfulness practice is to awaken the body. There is one Mahāyāna^[6] sutra that says awakening and enlightenment happen through the body. The Buddha himself said that there is no awakening without mindfulness of the body.

What we're doing by dropping into the sensations and just feeling them as they appear is beginning to expand our awareness throughout our body. More and more of our body starts becoming something we feel really connected to, and we start feeling embodied. Doing this does a lot of wonderful things for us.

One is that the body itself can process so much of our life, including our difficulties, emotions, thoughts, concerns, and tensions. Partly, this is because when we're not in the body, we're often in reactivity, thoughts, interpretations, and stressful ways of thinking that reinforce the tension in the body.

If we drop down into the body, there's breathing room for things to unfold. Some things will naturally unfold and resolve themselves, like tension, for example. Oftentimes, some things don't resolve themselves—maybe there's chronic physical tension in the body—but there's an art to just feeling the tension without adding any second arrows^[7] to it. We avoid adding extra tension to it, and instead delve even deeper into the pain, so we're no longer experiencing it at the conceptual level.

What I mean by that is, let's take pain as an example. The word "pain" is an abstraction; it's an umbrella term for sensations that are quite intense, and those sensations can vary. There can be intense burning or stabbing. There can be intense twisting. There can be intense stretching, pulling, and tightening. There can be intense exhaustion of the muscles where it's really aching.

These are the particular sensations we call pain. Two people can say they have pain, yet they have very different sensations. Sometimes when we call things pain, we react to all the ideas and notions we have about it. We react to the abstraction—what it means, where it's going, what's going to happen in the future—rather than just dropping into the pain itself and feeling the particularities of the sensation.

At the level of calling it pain, it might feel like it's constant. But when we drop into the level of sensations, we can discover, if we're really focused, that the sensations are not constant. They are inconstant; they come and they go, they appear and they disappear. When I was a new Zen student, I used to bring my attention to feel the pain in my knees, which I had a lot of. Sometimes it would be reduced to a little square centimeter. In that centimeter, there would be this dancing of intense sensations—sparking sensations of stabbing, tightening, and different things. It was fascinating to watch the dance flicking around, realizing there was no one sensation to hold on to or react to because they were constantly moving in this little square centimeter.

For some things, the ability to feel at the sensation level gives breathing room for them to resolve themselves, to unwind, and to dissolve. For other things that are pleasant and enjoyable, there's breathing room for them to grow and expand. Some of the great feelings of well-being that come with practice are much more accessible if we can feel them fully in the body.

The more we're awake in the body, the more it becomes a field of sensations. We can feel happiness, joy, and well-being in an embodied way. It is more stable, fuller, and courses through us more if we can really feel it through the body. This ability to drop down and feel the sensations increases our capacity for experiencing joy and happiness.

By dropping down, being embodied with our experience, referring everything back to the body, and letting the body hold it, the body wakes up. It becomes more expansive with sensations, so we are not just living from the neck up. It also turns out we have a lot more capacity for being with difficulties this way. The mind sometimes doesn't have much capacity; wrapped up in its stories, ideas, reactions, beliefs, memories, and projections into the future, it can get very claustrophobic.

But if we can be centered, grounded, and stable in our body—making room to feel the sensations, letting them come, and making room for them—we have a much bigger capacity to deal with challenges. We develop a much greater ability to be uncomfortable without being knocked over, pushed around, reactive, or tense. We don't feel like our boundaries are being pushed because we have the capacity to hold the experience and be aware of it.

The analogy I like is that if you put a pyramid on its head, on its point, it's not very stable. Maybe it can get perfectly balanced for a moment, but if someone taps it, it falls over. But if you turn the pyramid right side up, so it is sitting on its broad base, you can push it, and it's not going to tip over easily, if at all. So there's something about being stably centered in the physicality of our body and the sensations of the body. We don't easily get pushed over or thrown off balance by the events of the world.

These simple instructions—though perhaps the exercise is not always simple to do—open up a vast world of possibility. This is the world of being centered and grounded in our body, fully embodied, letting the body process our life, and letting it be the place where we compost things.

When I have difficult emotions, I find it incredibly valuable to sit, meditate, and just feel those emotions in my body. I trust the body to compost them. I bring the emotions back into my body, feeling them physically. It's so relieving to realize that the wisdom of the body knows how to take care of things, sometimes much better than the mind, which is trying to figure things out or trying to navigate, negotiate, mediate, and bargain with reality.

To begin increasing your vocabulary for sensations, you might want to draw up a list and maybe ask friends to add words to it, exploring all the ways that direct sensory experience is felt. The greater your vocabulary, the more access you have to enter into this world of sensations and feel them. By entering so fully, at some point you start feeling the dynamism of it—the dynamic nature in which experience changes, moves, flows, and comes alive more and more as we rest in the body and as awareness becomes embodied. I offer that as an exercise to support this sensation meditation:

Draw up a long list of all the words in your language that describe sensations: twisting, pulling, heat, hot, cold, heavy, light, itching, and whatever else it might be. Get your friends involved; they might have different words than you do. As your vocabulary increases, perhaps your sensitivity also increases, enabling you to identify differences between sensations that might otherwise have been missed.

So, thank you. I hope you'll come to a day, maybe today, where you come to love your body. Much mettā to your body; may your body be one of your Valentines. Thank you.