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Guided Meditation: Listening to Body Time

Greetings, friends. Good morning, afternoon, evening, whatever time it might be where you're joining from. Lovely to be with you in this moment in time.

This week we are exploring teachings on time. During the first two days, we explored psychological time with memory, anticipation, past, future. Yesterday we explored becoming an identity, bhava^[1], becoming and time in time. Today we're going to explore another dimension of time that deeply shapes our modern life: the tension between mechanical time and body time, lived time.

Though the Buddha did not live in a world of smartphones, calendar alerts, productivity systems, and relentless optimization, there has always been the human tendency towards restlessness, striving, pressure, and disconnection from the body. Today we will investigate what happens when life becomes governed entirely by clocks and productivity, what wisdom appears when we reconnect with the body and a sense of embodied presence, and how we can wisely live with both external structure and internal attunement. With that as the framing, let's begin meditating together.

Listening to body time. Let's begin. Let's arrive in our bodies in this moment in time.

Sitting with dignity. A sense of uprightness in the spine, allowing there at the same time to be ease in the body. Both ease and uprightness. Can they both be present?

Can we allow our shoulders to relax? Perhaps rolled back a little bit. Let the chest be open. Back upright.

A sense of settledness in our sit bones. Feeling the sit bones planted on the chair and the cushion, and allowing the muscles to relax—the soft tissue of the face, forehead, cheeks, jaw, neck, shoulders, arms, hands, chest, and belly or trunk. The sit bones themselves softened, as well as the legs and feet.

Allowing awareness to be turned inward. Letting go of what is not needed right now and tuning into the breath. The sensations of the breath.

Notice if the mind is contentedly present or if there's some speeding ahead. It's rushing. It's leaning forward. It's measuring, comparing, evaluating, trying to get somewhere.

If so, can we return to embodied time? A slower sensing. Sensing the length of an inhale. The length of an exhale. Sensed, known body time. Sounds naturally arising and passing. Pressure, heat, sensations.

What happens when there's nothing to accomplish in these few moments?

Notice if it's possible to enter into body time, this natural rhythm of the body. Sitting, breathing, being, simply being. Inhabiting and sensing the timelessness of body time in this moment. Still within the mechanical time of this period of meditation.

And not to fight with any sense of past or future. If time travel arises, simply notice and invite yourself gently, kindly, to tune into body time. The length of the breath, the rhythm of the body, sitting. Nowhere to go, nothing to accomplish right now.

If the mind is rushing away, what's driving? What's underneath this feeling of rushing away? Am I afraid? What am I afraid will happen if I slow down and stay? What happens if I rest more? Trust a deeper sense of presence in this moment.

As we turn to bring this period of sitting to a close, tune into your relationship with mechanical time as this period of sitting is ending. And how is that relationship held with respect to body time? The sense of presence of the body, the breath—it simply breathes, senses, and lifts without a metronome. Simply bringing awareness.

May our practice be a cause and condition for ease, freedom, and awakening of all beings everywhere, including ourselves.

Dharmette: Time (3 of 5); Embodied Time and Mechanical Time

Hello and greetings, friends. Today we continue exploring time and our wise relationship with time in the Dharma.

Many of us perhaps live with the feeling that time is chasing us, or that we're chasing time. There's always another email, another task, another responsibility, text message, something else to optimize. And yet underneath all of this is another rhythm. There's the rhythm of the breath breathing. There's the rhythm of fatigue and renewal, the rhythm of the seasons, the rhythm of the living body. Today we'll explore some of the tensions between mechanical time and embodied time, which is particularly felt perhaps in Silicon Valley where IMC (Insight Meditation Center) is in Redwood City, and maybe actually I would say the Western world, or even more so the whole world. There's always been, as I mentioned earlier, even in the times of the Buddha, this feeling of restlessness and accomplishment. So even though it's more acute in this zeitgeist, it's not unique to our zeitgeist, the time we live in.

I want to draw again from the book I mentioned yesterday, Einstein's Dreams^[2], which was an international bestseller I learned yesterday. I love my copy by Alan Lightman, who is both a physicist and a philosopher. I'll draw a couple of stories from his book to elucidate a point.

In one of the stories, he talks about two worlds. In one world, there's mechanical time, and then there is body time. Mechanical time is rigid and metallic. It's like a great iron pendulum swinging back and forth, back and forth. The same, the same, predetermined. Body time is the other thing entirely. It squirms and wriggles, Lightman says, like a bluefish in a bay. It makes up its mind as it goes along.

The people in this world split into two kinds. Some are convinced that mechanical time barely exists. They pass by the giant clock in the square and they don't even see it. They wear watches only as ornaments, as courtesies to whoever gave them the gift of the watch. They eat when they're hungry. They go to work when they wake. They laugh at the idea of mechanical time because they know and they can feel that time moves in fits and starts—that an hour rushing a child to the hospital is not the same length as an hour in the sun.

And then in this world, there are also others who behave as though their bodies barely exist. They rise at 7:00 precisely. They lunch at noon precisely. When their stomach growls, they check their watch to see whether it's time to be hungry. When they begin to lose themselves in a piece of music, they glance at the clock above the stage to see when it will be time to go home. For them, the body is a machine, levers and forces and chemicals—a thing to be ordered, not obeyed.

Here, Lightman has his thumb a little on the scale. You can feel him gently ridiculing the clock people. And I notice that pull in myself, too. Of course, there's something romantic about the bluefish, this rhythm of swimming and finding our own rhythm. The live one, the bluefish, who eats when they're hungry and sits when they're moved to. But I want to resist this easy version, because the easy version isn't wisdom either. It's just a preference dressed up as wisdom. The real wisdom here is that there are two times and both are true, and we need to know which one we tend towards.

This is the practice: to really become aware of which one we tend towards and skillfully work with both. I think the Dharma models this quite beautifully and very concretely in how we practice and how we teach the practice itself. I'll give you an example.

When I teach retreats, I'll speak personally, especially when beginners come on silent meditation retreats, say at IRC (Insight Retreat Center). I tell them something that perhaps sounds like a contradiction. I tell them first to give yourself to the schedule of the retreat. If you've ever been on a silent retreat, it starts early in the morning: sit, walk, sit, walk, sit, walk. You eat somewhere, then sit, walk, sit, walk, sit, walk. Forty-five minute segments, and it's very regimented. So I tell them, give yourself to the schedule. The schedule says sit, you go to the hall and sit. The schedule says walk, you walk. You don't have to decide; there's not this confusion of "Do I do this? Do I do that?"

And then, in the same breath, I invite folks: if you're genuinely tired, take a nap in the afternoon. Listen to your body and see what it needs. If you need to sit outside, if the heart needs some space, sit outside. Sometimes people say, "Wait, which is it? Do I give myself to the schedule, or do I listen to my body and take a nap if I'm exhausted?" Well, the answer is both. You do both completely. You give yourself to the schedule, and you listen to your body.

There's enormous wisdom in each. The skill isn't choosing one forever; the wisdom is knowing in each moment which one is the medicine. The medicine depends on the patient, and you're both the patient and the one holding the medicine cabinet open. The real wisdom is honest self-knowledge about your tendency. Sometimes discernment is tough—wondering what the right thing is. Just choose one. You'll know soon enough if you've veered too far in one direction. If you've given yourself too much to the schedule, you'll be exhausted, and you'll learn that resting would have been the more appropriate thing to do. Sometimes wisdom does not arise in the moment, but afterwards, when we look back and see that having chosen body time would have been wiser, or that giving myself to the schedule would have been wiser. It's okay for wisdom to learn from what already occurred and then move forward.

Another thing I want to bring in is to notice if you're a clock-time type when it comes to meditation. If you're highly disciplined and you are on the cushion at 5:00 a.m. every morning—well, this program is at 7:00, but anyway—no matter what, notice if you start to become too tight about practice. Does the practice start to lose its joy, its freshness? Do you do it out of grim duty, not practicing because you love it or enjoy it?

On the other hand, I want to balance it. If you notice that you're too much of a body-time type, and you only sit whenever you're moved, you practice whenever you're inspired. The failure mode becomes, "I'll sit whenever I feel like it." "Whenever I feel like it" quietly becomes almost never. If the inspiration doesn't come, a month can go by and the cushion gets dusty.

If we just let ourselves be "natural" and move purely by inspiration, we can simply drift. So, pushing the edge a little gently with structure—setting a time even when unmotivated—can help. Given that this is the 7:00 a.m. Sangha, you show up at 7:00 a.m. even if you're unmotivated. This is beautiful.

And yet, notice if there's too much discipline and you're sitting simply because you should. Aversion builds quietly under the discipline until you don't like your practice anymore, and you're just an employee of your practice. It's as if you have a timecard you're checking in and out of: Yep, sat for 30 minutes. Yep, showed up. And yet there is no love, there is no heart. I'll say something very heretical as a Dharma teacher: if that becomes your modus operandi with practice, then stop sitting for a while. I've actually given that instruction to some of my students who were just sitting out of grim duty, and there wasn't any heart. I invited them to stop sitting for a while.

This student of mine, for example, started to miss sitting. They started to develop this love again, feeling, "I miss sitting." At that point, I said, "Okay, now you can go back to sitting." This is great, instead of letting it fall into grim duty.

Having wisdom about body time and mechanical time can really support us—and not just in practice. The examples I gave with sitting are helpful examples in the Dharma, I hope, but this is also about life. What else is there in your life that you're doing mechanically, where body time and the heart have lost their touch?

With that, we have reached the end of our mechanical time for this Dharmette. I look forward to continuing this series on time tomorrow. There is still more to share and practice together. Thanks, everyone. Take good care.