This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Sensing the Body; Introduction to Mindfulness (6 of 25) Listening to the Body. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Sensing the Body; Dharmette: Introduction to Mindfulness (6 of 25) Listening to the Body - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on January 15, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Sensing the Body

A warm and celebratory hello on this Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. I believe it's my favorite national holiday here in the United States because of the phenomenal values that animated and guided Dr. Martin Luther King. Because of his clear highlighting of the challenges of our society—the poverty, the war, the racism—and for the actions he took to rectify these problems with the values of nonviolence, it is phenomenal. So, I celebrate it. Thank you.

One of the gifts that Buddhist practice has provided me is a clear, deep connection to my own body. I didn't pay much attention to my body before I started doing this Buddhist practice. In my early years of practice, there was an awakening to my body, and this was phenomenally important for me, as it remains today.

Our body is not a hunk of flesh. It's not just a bunch of physical material that's combined itself to move us around like a car. Our body is a dynamic organ of perception. Maybe not every single part of it, but I suspect in one way or another, every part of the body, in its own way, is perceiving its environment. It's perceiving what it needs, what comes up against the cell walls, and all kinds of things. Every living cell is nourished by the blood that flows by. All over the body, there is sensation, and some of those capacities to sense and be aware of the environment come up to our mind and inform us how we feel, what's happening in the world, and how we take care of ourselves.

So much of the experience we have with the body is not the experience of just materiality; it's the experience of how this material body senses, feels, and interacts with the mind and the heart. It's dynamic, and there is much more information available through the senses and muscles of the body than most people avail themselves of. To begin to allow, receive, listen, and be attuned to this dynamic body is an invaluable part of what practice is.

For that, it helps to not be preoccupied in thoughts. Part of the motivation to avoid preoccupation and to center ourselves in the body is that whatever we're searching for through our thoughts, something even deeper and more wonderful is available through our body. Even when the body is quite difficult for us, it is a pathway to freedom and liberation.

To assume a meditation posture is to engage the body and bring awareness into it. We adjust the body and its posture to be most suitable for us to be aware, to be attentive, and to have a kind of peaceful alertness to the immediacy of our experience.

Lowering your gaze, perhaps closing your eyes.

One of the ways to begin heightening attention to the body is to take some long, slow, deep breaths. Comfortably deep or full. As the chest expands, the belly expands. Allow the belly to expand by keeping it relaxed. With that expansion, feel the edges of the expansion and how it connects you to your body.

As you inhale, feel it. And as you exhale, relax the whole body as you transition to feeling the whole body.

Inhaling... relaxing. Letting go on the exhale is a way of clearing the field of preoccupation and tension to be more available to feel the body.

Inhale.

Let your breathing return to normal, but continue gently. As you inhale, receive the influence of the inhale on your body. Relax and let go on the exhale, so you can be prepared to start fresh and new with receiving the sensations of the body in a global kind of way.

Inhale.

For a while now, if you'd like, you can let go of primary attention to your breathing. Instead, be receptive to whatever sensations in your body appear, without lingering or getting focused on any particular sensation. A light touch of awareness that can float from one appearance to another of different sensations. A gentle moving of awareness around the body. Do whatever sensation calls next, coming and going.

Less focusing and more receiving in a relaxed way for a few moments. Allowing different parts of the body to reveal themselves as they do. You receive and feel.

If there's a lot of thinking, feel the physical sensations connected to thinking in the same way.

If you keep getting pulled into thoughts, on the exhales, let go of thinking. Relax the thinking mind, maybe relaxing how you're troubled by the thinking mind. Otherwise, allow your attention to drift around the body in whatever way it wants, whatever way it's called, so that you begin awakening a richer grounding in the body.

Feeling the weight of the body. The three-dimensionality of the body. Maybe the solidity of the body. Bring awareness so that you come to rest in the body, in the torso. Instead of being swept away by thoughts, you're nested in the body.

As your awareness drifts or opens to the body, if you become aware of your breathing, that can be part of the whole. No need to linger or focus on the breathing. Let the sensations of breathing come as they do, being equally available for whatever else wants to show itself in your body.

Almost as if your body is speaking to you and you're listening. Listening equally to what is painful in your body, what is pleasant, and what is neutral. Not lingering with anything.

Letting go of thoughts as you exhale. Let go of any fixations of attention as you exhale, and open broadly to the body as you inhale.

And then, as we come to the end of the sitting, take a few moments to feel what it's like to be in your body right now. How are you from the point of view of your body? How are you from the point of view of your mind? How are you from the point of view of your heart?

One of the values of mindfulness of the body is that we're more closely connected to the physical sensations of care, kindness, and love. Physical sensations of tenderness, gentleness, or warmth.

As we come to the end of the sitting, gaze upon the world with kind eyes. Orient to the world with a warm, open heart, aspiring that whatever benefits come from meditating be for the benefit of yourself, the benefit of others, for the benefit of the relationship between self and others, and for the benefit of the whole world.

May it be that this body of ours supports us in the kind of presence, openness, and warmth that aspires for the welfare of all beings.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings be free.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Introduction to Mindfulness (6 of 25) Listening to the Body

Good morning, or good day, on this Martin Luther King holiday. That's my favorite holiday. I love that Martin Luther King's expression "Soul Power" was his translation of Satyagraha¹, which is Mahatma Gandhi's term that literally means "holding to the truth," but is sometimes translated as "power of truth."

Today we'll continue this five-week introduction to mindfulness meditation. Last week was the foundation, the way I usually teach, which is with the breathing. This week, it's mindfulness of the body. For some people, mindfulness of the body—in the way that this last guided meditation was done—works better than mindfulness of breathing. There's something about narrowing or focusing on the breathing that, for some people, evokes challenging feelings or emotions. So it's not necessarily useful to center on the breathing. Instead, being broader and just feeling the body without focusing on any particular part—letting it be a gentle drifting, opening, and receiving of the different sensations of the body as they appear—frees up the mind that usually fixates and becomes reactive to what's happening.

This ability to be grounded in the body, to become more embodied, is a central feature of the Buddha's teachings on mindfulness. His classic instructions in meditation always begin with mindfulness of the body. "Feeling the whole body" and "relaxing the body" are his two explicit instructions around the body—to feel the whole body and to calm it. That prepares the ground for further practice and the unfolding of meditation. He also made very strong statements that there is no Awakening without mindfulness of the body. There's one passage where he says, in many different ways, that there is no experience of the deathless, there is no freedom, without mindfulness of the body.

It's a fascinating topic to become more sensitive to your body. I think for many of us, there are a lot of forces in modern society that disconnect us from our bodies. Excessive screen time takes us away from really being present here in our body. In our sedentary lives, we don't benefit from all the different ways the body can move and awaken itself, and how those parts interact, play, and come alive to inform our minds.

It's known that for many of us, certain of our sense doors are underdeveloped. If we go to societies that put much more emphasis on certain sense doors, people there are much more attuned to the environment, and those sense doors are much more acute. Just like how many of us in the modern world use only a small part of our capacity to memorize. Back in the ancient world, there were no books or internet to look things up, so the only way to store information, knowledge, stories, and songs was to memorize them. People had a much better capacity for memorization than we do today. People sometimes had a much better capacity for sensing the environment around them as well.

Meditation practice is partly about cultivating a greater capacity for attention through all our senses—not just through the mind's eye or cognitive knowing. It heightens the capacity to feel the whole body and awaken it. People who have had very difficult experiences or emotional trauma sometimes find it too difficult to feel the intensity of their emotions, so they shut down their body and shut down sensing parts of the body. Some people, because of their professions or the way they were raised in a society that prioritizes the intellect, mostly live from the neck up—in their thoughts, ideas, and eyes.

Yet, so much of our emotional life lives in our full body, especially in our torso, our chest, and our belly. By not cultivating and developing a heightened sensitivity of our torso, we receive so much less information about what's happening to us, the impact the world has on us, and the kinds of responses we have. A Zen teacher many years ago, Katagiri Roshi², said that our body is an antenna. I love that idea. The body is primed to take in information and sensations from the environment and process it. It's also primed to express what's going on with us emotionally, reactively, and in the mind.

There's an intimate relationship between the state of the mind and the state of our body. As the state of the mind changes in meditation, the experience of the body changes as well. Sometimes, when the mind is really peaceful, calm, and spacious, the body feels the same way. If the mind suddenly remembers some slight or offense that someone did a long time ago, you can feel how the body contracts too. We have a thought or memory, and the body just tightens up in response to that, getting hot or tense. As the body relaxes and softens, so does the mind.

The advantage of mindfulness of the body is that it provides so many subtle cues of what's happening in the mind. As we open to receive and allow them, things tend to relax and soften, giving breathing room to our experience. It's kind of like if we were really tense in the shoulders, and a trusted friend gently put their hand on our shoulders. Only then do we realize how tense we are, and then something relaxes. You almost don't have to think about relaxing; something just relaxes.

There's something about bringing this kind, available, receptive awareness to what's happening inside of us that moves attention to relaxing. It allows emergent emotions that don't come with tension—like a feeling of suffusion, flow, or radiance—to grow and spread out.

When gases get warm, they expand. When ice warms, it melts. That which is frozen, as the warmth of attention opens up to it, begins to thaw. The places which are already soft and open expand outwards. Anger, greed, and hatred are all parts of being frozen, tight, or constricted. As we bring attention to them, they tend to relax. Anything that involves clinging can relax. Anything that involves a gentle, warm radiance—like love, kindness, or generosity—grows in that space of awareness. The more we can be in our body in this receptive, open way, the easier it is.

Some people find that it's easier to be with the sensations of the body if the rhythm or beat of breathing keeps us centered. Breathing in, breathing out, breathing through whatever is happening. Breathing with whatever is happening in the body keeps us grounded. Other people find that it's not useful to be with the breathing, but it's easier for them to just be relaxed and not include it. The breathing may be in the background, but for the time being, it's not useful to feel. For them, feeling the rest of the body more globally is helpful.

Eventually, people who find it best to avoid the breathing because it triggers fear or anxiety experience a shift. At some point, they're ready to take in the breathing. I've been that way sometimes, where I would ignore the breathing, but then at some point, it came in through the back door and was nice to be with. The breathing itself is a very rich ecosystem. In itself, it's an aggregate of all the different reactions, feelings, and sensations happening in the rest of the body. It's almost like a meeting point for everything. So the breathing itself is an invaluable part of this exploration of the body.

This talk was meant to provide the reasons why it's so valuable to be connected to the body. Of course, it's not always easy to do this. The body can be a difficult place for many reasons. But to begin opening up to the body, being interested in it, and listening to it in a deeper way—like you'd listen to a friend—is an invaluable and very important part of this mindfulness practice. So much so that I feel it's unfortunate we translated sati³ as "mindfulness." Sometimes I wish we had translated it as "bodyfulness."

If this meditation was interesting today, you might practice it one more time today before tomorrow. As you go through your day, you might do a very simple thing: periodically, maybe with a reminder, check in with your body and ask, "What's happening here?"

If you have a device, you can set a timer—once an hour, once every 30 minutes, or once every 10 minutes—so that you get a little ping and check in. It doesn't have to be more than a five-second check-in. "What's happening here in the body? Oh, that's what's happening." That regular check-in will slowly, over time, provide you with a greater literacy of your body. It will build your ability to listen and recognize what's happening. I'm pretty confident that listening to your body will provide a lot of wisdom. A lot of wisdom in Buddhism comes from this grounding in the body.

Thank you very much. I appreciate this chance a lot, and I look forward to tomorrow.