This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Introduction to Mindfulness Meditation with Gil Fronsdal (2 of 4). It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Introduction to Mindfulness Meditation - Body - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on February 08, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction to Mindfulness Meditation - Body

Introduction

Good evening, can you hear me okay? Great. Sorry to be late. By the end of this five-week series, you'll know that there's no need to wait for anything because you can just practice. That's what you were doing very nicely. Once, many years ago when I was learning this practice, I was with a teacher who said if you're waiting for something to happen, you miss the boat, because his idea was you can always just show up for now, whatever that is. I am out of the habit of teaching in the evening. I used to do this all the time before the pandemic, and this is the first time since the pandemic that I've taught an evening class. I was busy at home with things.

Here we are, the second week of this introductory meditation class, and tonight we talk about mindfulness of the body. Some people are challenged with their body right away when they practice meditation. Sooner or later, most people are challenged in some way with discomfort in the body. But even without having to practice with discomfort, the body is a wonderful arena for practice. In fact, it's maybe the central arena. So much so that some people will say that the real Buddhist temple or the real monastery is your own body—that learning to live in your body, through your body, is essential.

It was certainly a surprise for me when I started practicing Buddhism how much being in the body, being embodied, was emphasized. Over and over again, we would in various ways bring attention to our bodies, evoking a very strong sense of embodiment. There are even Buddhist texts that say people get enlightened through the body. The Buddha himself talked about how there is no enlightenment without mindfulness of the body. It's that important.

It's not just that we have to contend with it and be mindful of it because it's challenging sometimes; the body is actually quite a wonderful place to live. What we'll see as meditation practice develops is that not only does our relationship to the body change, but our inner sense of what the body is changes. It turns out that if you close your eyes and feel your body, whatever experience you have of your body is not just the physical body. The experience you have is always mediated by the thoughts you have, the mind states you have, your level of concentration, your level of distraction, your level of neurosis.

The body is very amenable to the mind states and what's going on in the mind. It's dramatic how thoroughly our experience of the body can change when the ordinary thinking mind quiets down. There was a time in my early years where I had something I called my karmic body, which was the body of tension that I carried around all the time. A lot of my sense of my body was that the body was tense and held. When I got into meditation, at some point it was like I left the karmic body behind, and my sense of body became much more harmonious, radiant, soft, and expansive. Sometimes there was no sense of any boundaries, in a way that felt really delicious.

I say all this to you with the idea that whatever you think your body is, and your experience of your body is, it probably isn't what you think. Or to say it differently: it is exactly what you think. Let's think differently, and your experience of your body will become different as well.

Exercise: Feeling the Hand

We are learning to bring mindfulness to the body. This is a form of attention where we can be present for our body in a respectful, caring way without being reactive to it, shutting down, or resisting what's happening. We are learning how to bring a kind of balanced, open awareness to the experiences in the body so that rather than contracting or reacting, we actually soften and relax with whatever is happening.

I think it may be nice to start with an exercise that will give you some feeling for what mindfulness of the body can be about before we apply it in a different way to how we do it in meditation. First, just as you are—you don't have to change your posture if you don't want to—just close your eyes and be comfortable.

With your eyes closed, become aware of your dominant hand and feel the sensations you have in that hand. On the surface of the hand, the back of the hand, the palm of the hand, and the fingers. It isn't so much that you're up in the control tower looking down at the hand. It's more like: what is the hand's experience of itself? Feeling the hand and the sensations of your hand. Do they radiate or pulse? Are they warm or cold, tingling? Are there any feelings of pleasant or unpleasant sensations in the hand?

If your attention is on the hand but relaxed, does your awareness kind of roam around, kind of float between the different sensations of your hand? This is the hand's experience of itself. Very simple, very relaxed, allowing the hand to be itself, allowing the sensations to be there in a simple way.

Now, with your eyes closed, what did you think about your hand? You've probably looked at your hand many times in your lifetime, and maybe you've thought about the things that are wrong with your hand. Maybe your fingers are too long, too stubby, too large, or too small. Maybe your hand has too many wrinkles or too many lines, or maybe the color is not quite right. Certainly, you can start figuring out how something's not right with your hand. Or maybe it's not right now that I'm talking about it! [Laughter] Wow, the hand.

This is bringing thoughts, ideas, and judgments about the hand into the present moment. Perhaps some of it was a bit painful, and I'm sorry to provoke that for you. But now, put aside all those thoughts and go back to feeling the hand by itself, the hand's experience of itself. The hand itself has no idea of how a hand should be. It doesn't compare itself with other hands. It's just there. Sensations of the hand.

For about a minute or two, accompany your hand by breathing through it, breathing with it. Allow it to be itself. Allow it to be felt as you breathe along with it. Then, you can take a few long, slow, deep breaths, and when you're ready, you can open your eyes.

Reflections on the Exercise

Those were two different ways of experiencing your hand. One was the hand's experience of itself, and one was through the filter of stories, comparative thinking, and judgments of what makes a good hand. What did you notice about the difference between those two?

Student 1: When you asked us to feel the hand's experience of itself, I was mostly thinking about how it feels. And then when you were talking about our judgment or comparison, I'm thinking of how it looks.

Gil Fronsdal: And what was it like for you, the two different ways? Did you prefer one over the other?

Student 1: Well, how it looks was more of a negative for me. I was thinking about the dry spots and whatnot, so it wasn't positive. But the other was more neutral.

Student 2: For me, one was a less busy experience than the other. The latter was more mentally involved. The first is how I want to be and feel always: just feeling the hand, receptive, and coexisting with the hand, as opposed to being busy and thinking about it, selecting. I wouldn't say it's positive or negative, they're different, but I prefer less busy. From what I'm beginning to learn about Buddhism, it's a way of feeling freer.

Student 3: I noticed it was hard to stay on the hand. I kept toggling back to my thoughts and then to the hand. Then when I was starting to judge my hand and think about what it looks like exactly, rather than how it feels, it was even harder. I prefer the way that's not judging my hand because it seems much less busy and critical and thought-oriented. It's just being.

Gil Fronsdal: Given how much human beings judge, isn't that normal? Shouldn't we spend more time doing that judging? [Laughter]

Student 3: Given how much people do it already... I know. It just means it's hard. I see why it's hard to do the practice because of that mind.

Student 4: With the feeling of the hand, I felt life in me. I felt alive because it was full of sensations and energy. With the other one, I forget that I'm alive because I'm so busy thinking about the spots and so forth.

Gil Fronsdal: Great, very nice. Forgetting you're alive. Sometimes in spiritual circles, they say some people are dead before they die because they're so disconnected from themselves, they don't feel their aliveness. They're lost in their thoughts.

Applying Mindfulness to the Body

That exercise was meant to offer you a contrast that you can find useful as you do this mindfulness practice. As we're doing mindfulness of the body, we're being mindful of what's happening in the body the way we just felt the hand—the hand's feeling of itself, very simple. It is not a time to judge, make comparisons, or react. We do that plenty, but that often is not connected to reality, it's not useful, and it's often painful.

When it gets accumulated or applied to more important things than a hand, it can be really painful. We don't only do it to ourselves, unfortunately, we do it towards others as well. Because we do that as a society, it reinforces us doing it to ourselves, feeling bad about ourselves, identifying ourselves with our judgments. If we get busy in the mind, it can be very debilitating to spend a lot of time spinning in those thoughts.

Mindfulness of the body is dropping out of that mind and allowing ourselves to feel the body on its own terms, from the inside out, free of the concepts and judgments that we normally have in everyday life. In a few weeks, we'll talk about mindfulness of thinking, which will show a different way to be mindful of those thoughts without being caught by them. But for now, mindfulness of the body.

The hand, for most of you, was probably a relatively neutral place to feel. But sometimes in meditation, what we're feeling doesn't feel pleasant or neutral; it might actually be unpleasant or painful. When we do mindfulness meditation, you're always welcome to change your posture if you're uncomfortable. But if all you do is change every time you're uncomfortable, you're shortchanging the power of learning what the meditation is about. When your morale is good and it feels appropriate, the idea is to—within reason—practice with the discomfort of the body. The way to feel the discomfort is the same way that you felt the hand.

That's hard to do, because when it's uncomfortable, the thinking mind kicks up. "Oh no, I need to go to the doctor, and I probably need to have my toes amputated. And then how am I going to play soccer? I'm getting stressed now and I should probably meditate—I've heard meditation can help me calm down." And then you realize you're meditating! [Laughter] The mind spins out so easily. The idea is to learn how not to give in to that thinking mind, and be able to feel the body on its own terms.

I believe that's a very respectful thing to do for your body. The body is not just a hunk of flesh; it's an integral part of who you are. It's part of your intelligence, your creativity. The body is an antenna that picks up the environment and what's going on inside of you. To leave the body behind by going up into judgments, fantasy, and comparative thinking is a disconnect. It's actually disrespectful to the integral aspect of this body. So drop down and feel the body, even if it's uncomfortable.

The art of it is to discover: "Okay, my knee aches now. How can I let attention just be there as if it's not a problem, as just something to be felt?" If you feel it's a problem and you're getting antsy or afraid, by all means, move your posture. But sooner or later, people who meditate realize they're better off not moving so much. They realize some of the reason they move is because of impatience, restlessness, or feeling like they have to call 911 because their foot is falling asleep. When you just begin to relax, trust the body, and let the body feel itself, all kinds of things open up that are really useful.

The Breathing at the Center

Here at IMC¹, the way I teach is that the center of the meditation practice is the breathing. Breathing doesn't work for everyone, so it doesn't have to be the center. Some people let their whole body be the center, and that's how they center themselves mindfully. But we might emphasize the breathing if it works.

Breathing is a wonderful object. The rhythm of breathing is soothing. If you settle into breathing and your breathing starts getting a little bit longer, the longer the exhale seems to relax much of our nervous system. There's something about the rhythm of breathing that makes it easier to stay present. Something which doesn't move a lot in a rhythm is harder for the mind to stay focused on. Riding the waves of the breath coming and going is almost like your attention is a ball floating on the waves in the ocean, just resting with it and following it. As we practice more and more, we get more settled on the breathing and the mind wanders off less. That has a lot of benefits because the mind is not spinning out in crazy thoughts.

However, in some meditation traditions, like the Zen² practice I did first, all we were told to do was to be with the breath. Every time the mind wandered off, we came back to the breath. When I learned mindfulness, I learned a different way: when there's something that's compelling, something stronger than the breathing, we learn to make that the object of attention.

Compelling means that it's tugging at your attention: "Pay attention to me." Sometimes it's a lot of energy, sometimes it's pleasant, sometimes it's unpleasant. When that happens, we stop focusing on the breathing and let attention go to this place in the body. You feel it the way you would feel that hand. Get to know it, explore it. Let awareness be a relaxed thing that floats around in that area.

As you do that, you might notice you're reacting to it, judging it, or having ideas about it: "This shouldn't be there," or "This is great." Those ideas are extra. Of course, the mind will do that. You can't just turn the thinking switch off. But we're trying not to live in those thoughts. Let them recede to the background and live in the lived experience of the body. Feel it for a while. If it's hard to stay—say your knee aches—some people find it helpful to imagine they're breathing with or breathing through that place in the body.

After it's been acknowledged well enough or is no longer compelling, the practice is to come back to your breathing. Relax on the exhale, let go of your thinking mind, and wait until something else arises. The breathing is at the center. Something happens, you go out and visit it, and then you come back to the center. You do this without protests or complaining. It has just as much value to feel a warm tingling in your chest as it does to feel the breathing. It's just the next thing to be aware of.

Learning how to be present in a non-reactive, non-judgmental way for your body is a foundation for how we're going to be mindful of emotions, and mindful of thinking. We bring a wise attention to the present moment experience, where attention is not being filtered through our stories, ideas, memories, or judgments.

Guided Meditation

This way of including the body as part of the meditation—when the body speaks up, you turn to it and take that in over time. Over months and years, your whole body gets filled with awareness and attention, and slowly the body wakes up more and more. I was very disconnected from my body when I started meditating, and slowly this practice brought my body more alive, more sensitive. It became a marvelous field of attention, information, and refuge for me.

Assuming a meditation posture and gently closing your eyes.

It's good to take a few minutes at the beginning to prepare yourself for meditation. One way to do that is to take a few long, slow, deep breaths, and as you exhale, make a long exhale where you relax in your body.

Then, letting your breathing return to normal, continue preparing for the meditation with a normal breath. With each exhale for a while, relax the holding in your body, the tension in your body.

Some people like to do it systematically, starting at the forehead and the eyes. Feeling what's there on the inhale, and softening the forehead and eyes as you exhale. On the exhale, letting the muscles of the face fall away from the bone.

On the inhale, feeling your shoulders. On the exhale, relaxing the shoulders. Softening.

On the inhale, feeling your belly. On the exhale, softening the belly.

On the inhale, feeling some global sense of your whole body. And on the exhale, releasing the body, relaxing any way in which you brace yourself against life.

And now, become aware of the part of your body where you usually experience your breathing. Some people feel it more in the belly moving. Some people in the chest. Some people the air going in and out through the nostrils. Some people will feel all of them together in some global way. Wherever you feel the body's experience of breathing, let it be like the exercise with the hand, to allow the body to have its own experience of breathing, without any shoulds or the way it's supposed to be.

It doesn't matter if it's comfortable or uncomfortable. When we make room for the body to experience itself breathing, it's a gift we give the body. The gift of it getting to know itself. Make room for the body to feel itself breathing, and you floating on that experience.

Then, I'm going to ask you to shift your attention someplace else, and see if you can do it in a calm, gentle, slow way. Move your attention to some place in your body that's not your breathing, that's a little bit compelling. Like we did with the hand, let that part of the body know itself. Take time to know it, to feel it.

And then, letting go of that place and returning to breathing. Feeling the physical sensations of your body as your body breathes.

If there's a lot of thinking, on the exhale, relax the thinking mind. Any tension or tightness associated with thinking, let it soften, and then turn to breathing.

And now, move your attention to what might be the strongest sensation in your body. For a few moments, even if it's painful, let it be. Let it be itself, and let the body experience it from the inside. If it helps, you can breathe with it or breathe through it.

Give the body the gift of feeling itself without the filter of your reactions, thoughts, and judgments. It's an exercise of seeing how simple you can be, to simply feel the body on its own terms.

And then, returning to your breathing. Letting that sensation recede to the background as you enter into the body's experience of breathing. Knowing the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out.

If the mind is thinking a lot, with every exhale, let go of your thoughts. Let the thinking mind be quieter. Maybe the place in your body is slightly different where you feel the inhale and where you feel the exhale.

If you find yourself easily distracted from doing this, there's nothing wrong with that. We're doing mindfulness practice; it's all about just knowing what's happening. So knowing, "Oh, a lot of thinking," and then when you're ready, begin again with your breathing.

And then to end this meditation, you can take a few long, slow, deep breaths again and feel your body more fully, more widely. Feel the contact of your body against your cushion and chair and floor. And when you're ready, you can open your eyes.

Reflections and Q&A

There's a very strong, almost addictive force that exists in many people's minds to be thinking about all kinds of things. Sometimes our thinking has us by the nose, leads us around, directs what we do, and makes us restless or want things to be different. It can take a while for the thinking mind to discover that it's okay and safe to be present, to be relaxed. It doesn't always have to be busy, planning, defending, or figuring out what went wrong. It's okay to just be here, present in a very simple way.

One of the aids to this simplicity of being is mindfulness of the body. Right now we're keeping it simple: just breathing and the body. Next week we'll talk about including emotions, then thinking, and then the whole world. There's a different quality of attention that goes into meeting this world than is possible if we're always living in our thoughts, our judgments, and our reactivity. We're tapping into a different capacity of intelligence, creativity, and freedom by not being so glued to the reactive, spinning mind.

Student 5: I started feeling sad because my stomach hurts a lot, and I'm even crying a little bit right now. I am not comfortable sitting with it because there's nothing I can do about it. I've tried different things and it still hurts, so being here and sitting with it made me angry a little bit. I wanted to just get up and start walking around or lay down or do something.

Gil Fronsdal: You're certainly welcome to get up and walk around if you feel that's better for you. But there might be an interesting discovery in a different way to be with discomfort when you can't do anything about it. Even though you can't do anything about it, you are doing something in relationship to it. You were not liking it.

Student 5: I was not liking it, yeah.

Gil Fronsdal: And probably a series of other things: hating it, afraid of it. Some of those things are the reactivity of the mind, which is extra. It's a marvelous thing that can happen when we can be with pain without any reactivity. Actually, when the mind's defense gets really strong around something we call pain, it stops being pain. Pain is a composite that's made up of many factors. Those can shift very quickly as some of the factors get diminished. Just spending time with non-reactive attention to pain in the belly is a gift to the belly because it stops being what you thought it was. But it's a challenging thing to learn because of how strong the habit is of reacting.

In meditation, you always have a choice to get up and leave. But a day will come where you don't have that choice. Meditation is the laboratory where you're discovering how to be with challenging life situations in a new way. When you feel ready, learn to ride the edge of where you're comfortable to be with things like this, and see if you can find a different way.

Not a few times people discover, like with pain, it's not just the pain there, but because we're reacting, there's tension we build up around it. That tension begins to dissipate, and lo and behold, the pain hasn't changed but it's more manageable. I get migraines sometimes. I'm kind of miserable until I go to bed, put the sheets over my head, and lay on my side. Then I'm happy because I've learned to bring my attention right into the middle of the most intense pain. If I put my attention right into intense pain, it stops being pain. My breathing relaxes, and I'm just there with it, and I'm comfortable. But I have to keep doing it, because if I get distracted and start thinking again and leave that spot, it starts hurting again. For me, I feel so lucky to have this capacity to just go there and be with it and hold it in this kind of way. It's not easy to do, but that's the direction we're pointing to.

Student 6: I'm curious about a different situation which is more than the actual posture of sitting, because it's not chronic and it will go away if I move. I noticed that if I'm thinking about it as pain and I just want to move, it gets worse. But if I can pay attention to the details of what it feels like—there's some stretching or some pressure—it has more physical characteristics rather than the interpretation of pain. When it's about sitting, do I just continue to sit and practice tolerance of the discomfort?

Gil Fronsdal: Two things. First, it's good to have a good meditation posture. Get good instructions from a yoga teacher so you're aligned and not uncomfortable because of the posture itself. Slowly people tend to learn and develop it over the course of a year.

Second, the idea is that it is useful, within reason, to practice with discomfort. But you only should do it when you feel like you want to do it. You might notice, "I've been meditating now for a few months, and every time I have a little ache I move. Gil says maybe I should learn a different way to be with discomfort. Today the discomfort is not so bad. I slept well, I had a good meal, I'm a little enthusiastic. Let's explore this." It's up to you when you feel you're ready for the training with the discomfort. In Zen, you weren't allowed to move. We had to sit for hours. It was a little bit masochistic. That's not our school.

This may be a surprise, because meditation is associated with just relaxing, getting some calm, and floating on a cloud. That's great, but we're doing something much more important in addition: we're learning how to meet whatever challenges life brings us and find a wise way to stay with it. Hold it with compassion, hold it with equanimity³, hold it calmly. That's a phenomenal life skill to learn. You might have a situation where the doctors have no pain medication for you. "It's okay, I know what I've done before, and I'll practice now with this." Buddhism is a lot about learning to be free, but if you're only free when you're comfortable, you're not really free.

Student 7: I noticed an itch arise. It wasn't there a second ago. I've noticed if I attend to that and I scratch it, then another one will pop up somewhere else. So I just did that practice, stayed with it, and it began to transform. It actually became this really marvelous thing, almost like a constellation of stars. The sensation was arising, and I was able to hold it in a very different relationship.

Gil Fronsdal: That's a wonderful way that this can unfold in meditation—stars and constellations and sparkles and lots of space and openness. It's like you've entered into a new universe around the body. The body shifts and changes depending on the state of the mind. Your raw physical body didn't change much, except maybe stress hormones disappeared, but the way we experience the body changes dramatically.

The First and Second Arrow

I'll tell you a story. This is a famous Buddhist parable⁴. The Buddha was sitting with a group of people, and he asked them a question. He said, "If an archer comes along with a bow and arrow and shoots you with an arrow, will that hurt you?"

And they said, "Yeah."

And he said, "Well, if he comes along and shoots you with a second arrow, will that hurt even more?"

"Oh yeah, getting two arrows hurts more than having one."

And then the Buddha said, "Well, life brings you the first arrow. You shoot the second arrow."

For example, if I'm walking down the sidewalk here and I trip and fall and scrape my knee, that's just life. That happens. That's the first arrow. But it's right in front of IMC, and you all see me, and I'm a mindfulness teacher who's supposed to pay attention. "This is an embarrassment. I'm a mess. I'm angry that I got seen. I'm angry at you for seeing me!" I'm just shooting arrows left and right! Sometimes you just let it be the first arrow. "Oh, I tripped, I scraped my knee, it hurts." I don't have to add anything to it. We add a lot of second arrows.

When sitting in meditation, sometimes you can see it. Something happens that's uncomfortable, maybe pain in the body. And then you might see the second arrows. Maybe you're upset with yourself, upset with the teacher giving instructions, or you tighten up and shut down, or criticize yourself. Part of what we're doing here is learning to be present in a very simple way. The simpler we can have the presence, the more we start noticing what we do that's extra, the second arrows, the reactivity.

For now, it's very important that you never think you're meditating wrong. This is a meditation-free zone: you can't do it wrong. If you have a second arrow, smile. "I saw that. I'm learning the tricks of the mind. I'm learning what my mind does." If you notice it, you see what's happening, then you're doing the practice. If you get distracted a lot in thought, that's not wrong. What you do then is see that's the case. "Look, I'm thinking a lot. Oh no, I'm not supposed to think in meditation." Wait a minute, I think that's a second arrow.

One of the tricks of doing this kind of meditation practice: when in doubt, just start over. Start fresh. "I don't know what to do, I'm lost. Boy, I had a lot of second arrows there. Where do I find my way back? Okay, just take a deep breath and start over again." Let it be a fresh beginning. If you have thoughts that you're doing it wrong, you're still not wrong. It's just one more thing to see. Start seeing what goes on in the mind, the heart, and the body, and then learning to come back and be really simple with everything.

For this next week, if there are uncomfortable body sensations, and you feel curiosity about practicing with it, try bringing attention and feeling the discomfort really simply. See if you can hold the discomfort as if it has permission to be there forever. Just be with it. Breathe with it a little bit. See how simple you can be. See what shifts and changes. See what second arrows you don't add, what extra layers of tension or contraction you stop doing that maybe you didn't even know you were doing. It's a life skill which will serve you really well. Someday it might be because it's time to help someone else, and you have your own challenge with your own pain, but now you know how to hold it so it doesn't get in the way of being able to be of help in the world.

If you want to explore this topic more over the course of this week, certainly make your body the book. Some people ask me, "Do you have a book to recommend on Buddhism?" I say, "Yeah, the book of your body." Everything you need to know about Buddhism is found by attention to the body. It's that profound. I have a PhD in Buddhism, so I should know that this is where you find it, not in those books! [Laughter]

It might shift your relationship to your body. In this country, the amount of suffering people experience about their body is huge. A lot of it has to do with comparative thinking, reactive thinking, judgments, and acquired ideas that we take in from outside. People make a fortune on these crazy ideas we have about the body. The more they can get you upset about your body, the more they can sell you.

This shift from the thinking, comparing, judging mind to just feeling and allowing your body to be itself is profound. Your body is probably a lot happier usually than you are. Your body is probably a lot happier with itself than you are. Give your body the gift of letting it be itself without the burden of all these heavy judgments. It's a radical thing, and in some ways it's maybe a political thing to do in this country. It's good politics to just trust your body, feel it, and be with it in a simple way. Learn that, and you might save a lot of money and angst. Your body will love you. People who do this practice really come to treasure their body, love their body, treat it with respect, and it becomes a really good partnership.

Thank you for being here.