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Guided Meditation: Sensing the Elements

Greetings to all of you, and I am happy to be here.

One of the things that I love about sitting down to meditate is returning to a simplicity of being. A kind of returning to the elemental qualities of just being alive, the immediacy of it, the directness of it.

Maybe it's the difference between spending a whole life eating processed food versus going out into the garden, picking vegetables and produce, and coming in. Maybe if it's a salad, just all raw ingredients that are gathered together and made into a nice salad, or zucchinis and onions that are chopped up and cooked directly. In the same way, we can live our lives lost in thought, preoccupied in abstractions, involved in the complexity of political philosophy, family dramas, sensual fantasies, and the world of regrets and resentments. All this kind of abstract world that we keep processing and processing and processing. It's not just simple processed food; it's over-processed, reprocessed, de-processed, and all kinds of things.

But then we come to sit and meditate, and we return to the garden. We return to where the elemental aspects of just being alive, breathing, sensing, and feeling exist. It can be such a delight. It can be a challenge, too, because the momentum of the processing machine can be strong; there's not a simple switch to turn off the processor. But we can appreciate that underneath all the thoughts, ideas, and experiences we're processing, there is something very fundamental, elemental, and basic about just breathing and the blood coursing through our veins, and the nerve endings in our skin and throughout our bodies picking up whatever sensations are being triggered.

The elemental qualities of our temperature, warmth, and coolness; hardness and softness; movements of the body. So we'll sit here, feeling the solidity of your body, maybe against whatever object is supporting the weight of your body. The bottom of your chair, your cushion, the floor, the bed—whatever is supporting the weight of your body. Feel the elemental solidity of that, the hardness or firmness of that, the support of it.

Much of our life, maybe all of our lives unless we're flying, fundamental is the foundational support that holds our weight so we don't fall through space. And then there is the solidity of our bones that maintains the muscles and the flesh from just completely collapsing like an empty pillowcase. Feel and sense the uprightness, if you're sitting upright, of the bones, the spine, and the solidity perhaps all the way up the spine to the neck and the skull.

Accompanying us through this life are the basic movements of breathing that can operate without any concern or thought from ourselves, or we can be actively involved in breathing. Appreciate this play by taking a few long, slow, deep breaths. This fundamental rhythm of breathing that's like the rhythm of the tides, the rhythm of the days and nights—the natural rhythm that we have inherited from the whole process of evolution.

Relaxing, softening, releasing the ways that muscles are sticky, closed, contracted. Releasing, softening. Moving in the direction of the muscles of the shoulders, the belly, arms, and legs maybe becoming a little bit water-like. Flowing and soft, not resisting anything, not holding back.

Letting your breathing be normal, settling down into the body's experience of itself. The sensations there are in the body, you might think of them as the raw ingredients that take in the data, the information that gathers together experiences, which the mind can process and abstract on, getting involved in its thoughts and concerns. For these minutes here, you do not need to think about anything or process anything. Maybe you can give yourself a break, a pause.

Trust that there is something else to do here besides think and consider and remember and plan. Be in the garden of the body, the elemental qualities of sensations, where the mind's involvement is to receive. Receive the elemental, basic physical experience of the body: a shifting, buzzing kaleidoscope of changing sensations in the body.

When you need to, let the thinking mind become quieter. No need to keep thinking. Quiet the mind so the mind can spend more time sensing, feeling, receiving, savoring the experience of the body. Notice how those sensations of the body are shifting, changing, moving, and pulsing in a flow. Just body for these minutes.

You might relate to the sensations of your body as you would to the weather, both impersonal and intimate. If you have uncomfortable sensations in your body, it's a particular kind of weather. Allow yourself to rest, settle, and trust the elemental experience of the sensations of the body.

One of the values of attention to the elemental qualities of sensations is noticing how much we drift away from that in our mental processing into a world that can be much more complex, convoluted, and stressful than the raw simplicity of the body just breathing and the heart beating.

Perhaps you have a small taste today, or other times, of the thinking, processing mind coming more and more to rest, just sitting, breathing peacefully and quietly, just being.

Maybe it helps us to realize and appreciate how many people's minds are spinning in this convoluted processing of thoughts, ideas, memories, plans, and fantasies. Spinning webs that they get caught in, spinning webs of thoughts and ideas with which they suffer. May we have compassion, care, and good will to all the people suffering because of their thoughts and way of thinking.

May we wish for others that they can have a peaceful mind. An un-anxious mind. A settled mind that's able to be here, breathing and appreciating the simplicity of life in this beautiful garden of the body, the present moment.

May all beings have peace of mind. May all beings catch a break from the stresses of their thinking mind. May all beings hold their struggles with care and compassion. May all beings experience a freedom from struggles and stresses in their mind, and in doing so, may they feel the richness and the peacefulness of just being as they are. May all beings be happy and free.

Dharmette: Mindfulness of the Body (4 of 4) The Four Elements

So before I offer my words this morning, I want to announce that for tomorrow, Nikki Mirghafori^[1] will give the 7:00 a.m. sitting and lead the talk. I'm going to go and see my 90-year-old father, and we need to start driving down to Southern California. I'd like to start early before it's too hot or it's too late.

It's very fortuitous that Nikki will come, because the schedule was to talk about the final exercise in mindfulness of the body. It is an exercise that might sound gruesome, but I'm sure that Nikki will present it in other ways. It is an imaginary practice, a visualizing practice, or a reviewing practice of how this body of ours, sooner or later, will become a corpse. Rather than being a gruesome, frightening, and depressing exercise, I think it's really part and parcel of this movement towards freedom. Nikki has done a lot of contemplation of that, a lot of consideration of this. I think maybe last year she even talked about it a bit when she was leading this 7:00 a.m. sitting, so it was very fortuitous that the topic should be one that's so close to Nikki's heart. I think you'll be in much better hands with her than me on this topic, so I'm very happy for this.

But the topic for today I'll introduce this way. Many years ago I saw a poem, and I don't remember^[2] all the pieces of the poem, but it was a very simple poem that said something like: if you're running, walk; if you're walking, stand; if you're standing, sit down; if you're sitting, lay down. I think it went on, but there was a progressive movement to be getting quieter and quieter, stiller and stiller, to less activity, less energy involved in doing and doing and doing.

This could describe a little bit the movement of meditation. We're moving from a mind which is very much more active, busy, abstract, and thinking a lot, and letting the thinking mind, the abstraction mind, become quieter. But not just become quiet and calm, but become clearer and clearer. So there's a clarity of attention that goes completely together with no longer being so involved and caught up in the thinking world.

So much of the stress that human beings experience, you might attribute it to the world around you, which has some truth to it. But much of it is processed through the world of our thoughts, and our thoughts themselves get transformed into emotions, and emotions come back and feed the thoughts. There can be this complicated Möbius loop that we can never get out of—thoughts and feelings and spinning. But as we sit down to meditate, some of this stuff quiets down. Thinking about the future quiets down, and we're just thinking about the present. Thinking about the present in terms of "me, myself, and mine" and how I feel, all my resentments or dreams—that quiets down. We just get quieter and quieter in that mind as we realize we give our mind a vacation, a rest from the incessant ways in which we can think and think and think.

I can remember laying on the grass someplace, looking at the clouds drifting by and feeling so content, happy, and peaceful. Just watching the patterns of the moving clouds as they moved through the blue sky above me. After a while, so much of my daily life and concerns fell away. I was just there, kind of absorbed or involved in just watching the changing patterns of clouds and the movement of it. Until I would say that I wasn't even thinking, "There are clouds." There was just awareness of movement, color, and shapes that were shifting. It's much more elemental, basic. The relief, the peace, the simplicity, the quiet of the mind that can do that with the clarity of seeing—not numbed out, but with clarity—just gets so peaceful. It was a wonderful break. It was a wonderful pause. It was a little vacation from being so caught up in things.

If we have that experience, then we can have a new appreciation of how the mind gets caught, how the mind gets preoccupied, spins out, and gets busy. If all we ever know is a busy mind, it feels normal, and the stresses of it are just taken for granted or not even known. They're so normalized we don't even know they're there. But if we have this very strong, radical experience of things really getting quiet in the mind, then we can start taking more consideration and care of what the mind is doing. We begin getting a feeling for what freedom and peace is. That's not found in chasing more thoughts, not by thinking better, but by quieting the thoughts. Not to numb out or to be disconnected from the world, but to have a different kind of intelligence operating that is not so much centered in thinking.

It's in this context I'd like to talk about this next exercise of the mindfulness of the four elements. These are very simple, maybe appropriately simple instructions—some of the simplest ones for mindfulness practice. One contemplates the same body, however it is placed, however disposed—whatever way the body is sitting, standing, walking, whatever way we are—as consisting of elements. "Thus in this body, there are the earth element, the water element, the fire element, and the air element."

This is supposed to be an ancient Indian idea that all physical matter is made up of four different elements, or qualities, or characteristics, or processes: earth, water, fire, and air. Kind of like how the earth is the foundation for the oceans and the rivers. Fire is a little bit more like the kitchen fires or campfires of the ancient world. And then higher than that is air. So it kind of goes from the most solid to the most ethereal or light.

How it applies to our body is the awareness of the raw, basic sensations of the body, the physical sensations that make up our experience of the body. Not necessarily what the body is, but how, from the inside out, we experience the body. It simplifies all the possible experiences we have into four categories: those of solidity, those of liquidity, those of temperature^[3], and those of movement. Solidity is the earth element, liquidity is the water element, temperature is the fire element, and movement, associated with wind, is the air element.

So it isn't so much that you have to remember and fit everything into these four elements' ideas, but to really understand the sensations that those point to. Feel the solidity, the hardness, the softness of the body, the weight of the body, the lightness of the body perhaps. Feel the temperature of the body, the cold and the heat. Feel the movements of the body, the movements of the chest and the diaphragm as we breathe. Sometimes you can feel the blood coursing through us, or the movements of the heart, or whatever it might be. Then the water element is all the things that are kind of fluid and a little bit sticky. It says that it's what creates stickiness. I associate it with the muscles when they are tense^[4]. Other people might have different associations to the elements, but as they get kind of tight, sometimes they become sticky, and we can unstick them. Sometimes you have to massage your muscles a lot to get them to unstick. But saliva, when we swallow, is definitely fluid.

Here the idea is to drop into the raw, fundamental simplicity of the body, kind of like you're looking at the clouds and just letting everything else go. Trusting and sensing this very basic aspect of human life, the sensing of the body. Get concentrated, be quiet, begin letting go of the complicated world of thoughts and ideas, and really become more and more attuned, to get concentrated into the world of our sensations. As we do that, the mind gets quieter and quieter, stiller and stiller.

There are many benefits of this, but one is that the mind gets quieter and we have a whole different vantage point to be wise about the thinking mind and not be lost in it. The other advantage is that as we get deeper and deeper, absorbed in a concentrated way into this world of just the basic flow of sensations—the kaleidoscope, the river of sensations that move through us, all the different sensations that come and go—we less and less relate to them as abstractions. The idea that there's a hand is true enough, but it is a little bit of an abstraction compared to just the sensations of the hand. Close your eyes, and notice just the sensations as they're buzzing, glowing, pulsing, tingling in the hand. The kind of "handness," the idea of the hand, falls away because that's a concept we overlay on the hand. But with just the sensations of it, we find that it lends itself to more and more of the mind letting go, letting go, letting go. In a subtle way, even the idea of a hand is a little attachment, a little holding onto something that's not needed in deep meditation.

So this idea of dropping into the elemental sensations, the raw foundation from which we build so much of our lives, and getting concentrated there in just the simplicity of the elemental qualities of our physical body, is a very key aspect of Vipassana^[5] practice. It allows us to see the changing nature of phenomena, the impermanent, inconstant nature of things, and that itself leads to freedom.

May you spend time in the garden of your body with the basic, foundational ingredients from which we build so much of our complicated life. Maybe stop for a while from eating processed food, but rather start with the elemental ingredients. Just feel and sense the rawness of them, like eating raw vegetables, raw food that might be full of nutrients. May the raw, elemental sensations of your body nourish you with some of the best nutrients that we can have.

So thank you very much. I'll be with you indirectly with Nikki's teaching tomorrow, and I'll be back on Monday. Thank you.

Announcements

Oh, I can also say—maybe I said this already—that on Sunday at 10:30 a.m. California time, IMC^[6] will have a community meeting to talk about the opening of IMC, perhaps in August. Everyone's welcome to come to the meeting, and some of you are local, so you might be coming. If you want to talk a little bit about it, to hear some of the plans and ideas of that opening, it will be a Zoom meeting. The Zoom information is already on the 'What's New' page and the IMC calendar, and I'll probably post it in the chat for the Sunday morning talk. So thank you.