This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Sensing Breathing; Introduction to Mindfulness (9 of 25) The Wisdom of Sensing. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Sensing Breathing; Dharmette: Introduction to Mindfulness (9 of 25) The Wisdom of Sensing - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on January 18, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Sensing Breathing

Good morning. Good day. In some ways, some of us are here today to befriend our bodies, to become intimate with our bodies. To not treat our bodies as something foreign to us, something that we take for granted and use to do the things that the mind wants to do, the self wants to do, like an object of transport. We are here to reconcile or heal our relationship to the body, so it's not something to be aversive to, angry at, ashamed of, or any of the difficulties that people have with their bodies. But to have a healed relationship with the body, so there's no wound between you and your body. There's no fear of the body, no shame of the body, no anger, no ignoring of it.

One of the ways to do this is to listen to the body deeply, as if the body has a voice, as if the body has an expression that wants to be known. To treat the body with tremendous respect, with care, with love. It too wants to be known. Maybe that's a little bit my own language for that, but something profound happens when we make room in awareness for the body to be itself, and to know the body from the inside out.

From the outside in, we could treat the body as an object, and then we can have all these relationships with that object, that thing, the body. But to treat the body or care for the body as a subject from the inside out—not from the ideas, the memories, the histories, the standards we judge it by, but from the inside out—is to allow the body to have its own experience. Not mediated by how we compare our bodies to other bodies. We don't compare ourselves to how our body was at an earlier age in our life. We don't relate to our body through our fears of what will happen to it. Without judgments, just allow it to be. Allow it to be itself.

If you can allow it to be whatever it is, for it to know itself, then the wisdom of the body can operate. The way in which the body is a river, a stream, a movement of processing. The body is not a thing; it's a process. The body is not a singular event; it's an ongoing unfolding. To allow that unfolding to occur without interfering with our judgments, interfering with our fixed ideas, or interfering by ignoring it, is a phenomenal process. A tremendous amount of benefits can come from that.

So we begin by learning—maybe not an easy task—how to have the awareness of the body be simple, without strain, without resistance, without judgment. One mode for doing that is to have a receptive attitude towards the body, an allowing attitude towards the body as it is in this moment while meditating. To bring that simple awareness, and then to ask the question as we're aware of particular parts of the body: what is the body expressing? What is this? What are these sensations? What's happening here? But not to get an answer that you can talk about, but rather to ask the question as a way of stepping closer with open arms, stepping closer with an open heart and open mind.

What is this? Let it register more deeply. Letting it register more deeply—what is going on here?—so that we begin to move beyond the concepts, the ideas, the stories, the judgments we have of the body. We get to feel not the abstractions of sensations happening, but the details of sensations, meaning the particularity of hot and cold, stretching and pulling, moving and flowing, hardness and softness. All the particularity, not because we're straining to understand it, but we're letting that particularity register.

So becoming friends with our body, assuming a posture that is not the posture you think you should have, but the posture you feel the body would like, so that it can be fully present here for you, for itself. A sense of alert calmness in the body. Gently close your eyes and take a moment in your own way to greet your body, as if you're just meeting after being apart for a while. Checking in: "How are you? What's going on?" In a way that feels nice for your body, breathe more deeply and relax on the exhale.

Letting your breathing return to normal. On the inhale, receive some part of your body where there's some tension or holding. On the exhale, kindly relax the body there.

Then, center yourself on the body's experience of breathing. Do a little exercise exploring the sensations of breathing. What sensations herald the beginning of the inhale? What is the first sensation that indicates your body is breathing in? It might be a little relaxing and expanding, maybe in the belly or the diaphragm. It might be a little movement of pressure as the diaphragm pushes down, a little movement of expansion as the chest expands, or the first tingling in the nostrils as the air gets pulled in.

As you continue to feel the first sensations of breathing in, you might become aware of different ones. Maybe different ones seem to occur simultaneously, and you're naturally aware of different ones on different breaths.

And then, what particular sensations mark the end of the inhale? A sensation of stopping, holding, a feeling of pressure or tautness. A momentary stillness where there's no more movement.

Between the beginning and the end, can you notice some unique sensation there? It might be the movements in your body, tingling and warmth, expansion. How is the breathing experienced between the beginning and the end?

Very lightly now, receive the whole journey of the in-breath from the beginning, middle, and end. As if the window is open and the rhythm of breathing blows gently through the window. Relaxing any way in which you're straining or tense so that awareness can be receptive, allowing the whole journey of sensations of in-breathing to reveal itself.

And then become aware of the first sensation that heralds the beginning of the exhale. Maybe a release, a softening, a movement, a warm tingling, or a sensation in the nostrils, a pulling.

Becoming aware of the last sensation of exhaling. Maybe the final sensations of exhaling fade away. Maybe there's a sensation of settling, of weight, pressure, or the release of pressure.

And between the beginning and end of the exhale, can you recognize a sensation somewhere in the middle? Maybe a small sensation of movement, or strengthening, a sensation of warmth, or tingling in the nostrils.

Without being too concerned for the inhale, for the next few exhales allow yourself to feel the beginning, middle, and end of the exhale.

And now allow yourself to feel, to receive the sensations of breathing in and the sensations of breathing out. Remembering that sensing and sensations occur in the same place. It's not something we do from the control tower, but rather allowing ourselves to feel what's happening in the body. Like the waves that wash up and down the sandy shore, follow, watch, be with the waves of inhale and exhale as sensation in the body.

Rather than treating the body with judgment, or as a foreign body, or as an object that you judge or have stories about, relax and allow yourself to experience the body's sensations. Notice how the body speaks. Listen non-judgmentally, allowing those sensations to exist peacefully without any conflict, without being ignored. Maybe by feeling the sensations of your body breathing.

And then, as we come to the end of the sitting, to whatever degree that you could experience your body non-judgmentally, without a story, allowing it to be as it is—open that kind of awareness to this world of ours. Give yourself permission for a few moments here to allow the world, the world of people, to be as it is, without your judgments, without your stories and projections of the future, memories of what happened.

Just allow all things to be as they are at this moment, with you relaxed and open, breathing, so that your deeper heartfelt compassion, care, love, and kindness is unfiltered, unobstructed by the stories, memories, judgments, fears, and desires. In the special circumstance of meditation, where we don't need to say anything to anyone or do anything for anyone here, have unfiltered care, unfiltered compassion, love, and kindness here now. With goodwill radiating from us in all directions—in front, behind, to the sides. Radiating goodwill.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may the peaceful goodwill that we end this meditation with be the beginning of bringing goodwill into this world. May all beings be free.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Introduction to Mindfulness (9 of 25) The Wisdom of Sensing

This will be the fourth talk on mindfulness of the body. An analogy I like to use that is directly connected to the body is the body's capacity to heal itself from a cut. You might be in the kitchen chopping vegetables and get a little cut on your finger. Your job is to keep the cut clean, maybe protect it with a Band-Aid to keep dirt out of it, and then the body has the best circumstances in which to heal itself. Our job is to kind of get out of the way but keep it protected. We can't engineer the healing. Probably no one knows all the different physiology of healing a cut that goes on, but the body knows how to do it.

There's all this capacity the body has of healing itself, of coming back into homeostasis, coming back into peace and calm. If we can get out of the way and allow for the body's wisdom and innate capacities to operate, a lot of beneficial things can happen. I've been with people who have died, and sometimes it's remarkable to see people's faces right after they've died because the muscles relax. Occasionally, there's a deep sense of peace in the face because tension they've been carrying in the facial musculature has finally released.

We get a little bit of the same kind of thing at the end of a seven-day retreat. When we see people's faces after seven days of meditation, so much has softened in the face. They haven't been focusing on relaxing the face; it's just the circumstances of the retreat, of leaving themselves alone very deeply, that allows something to relax and maybe a little bit heal in the face, in the muscles of the body everywhere.

The body has a capacity to relax, to heal. Sometimes the body is the first to give a feeling of discomfort when something feels wrong. Something doesn't feel quite right, and there's a kind of feeling of tension or anxiety in the belly, or a little pressure, a feeling of "Oh, this is not right." The body might know that before the mind has understood it. Some people have learned to really pay attention carefully when the body gives this feeling that something's not right here, and then by paying attention we discover what it is.

The ability to allow the body its own process gives us access to much more capacity for health, for healing, for wisdom, for spirituality than if all those things are negotiated only with the mind. Part of the reason for that is that the mind all too easily is hijacked by stories, judgments, memories, fears, desires, aversions, hatred—all kinds of things the mind gets caught up in and concerned with.

As is said in Buddhism, sometimes the mind is like a puppeteer that has these strings from the fingers of the mind down into all the different muscles. Some ways of thinking actually create tension in the body, sometimes a severe, chronic tension in the body. The advantage of getting calm in meditation is to then notice when we start thinking about something, the impact it has on the body, the tension that comes in. We start to appreciate what a strong role the thinking mind has in interfering with the body's own capacities.

As we meditate, the idea is to no longer experience the body through the filter of all our thoughts, stories, memories, and history, but to begin to receive and allow for the body's experience of itself. As I've been doing here, sometimes I use the language of "allowing" and "receiving." That's sometimes very helpful, but there's a limit to how much allowing, receiving, and accepting you want to do, because sometimes that lends itself to being very general, and having a generalized sense of experience here and now.

The deepening of mindfulness meditation comes when, in this relaxed, open, allowing awareness, we allow things to touch the soft, tender part, the sensitive part of awareness, and we really get to know it well, feel it well, and recognize what it is. As I put my finger on the softest, most sensitive part of my palm, it's not just feeling a finger, which is a kind of abstraction. There are feelings of warmth, feelings of pressure, softness, radiating warmth, a little bit of texture, a little bit of elasticity, a little bit of pressure. There are all these very particular sensations.

The deepening of insight¹ practice comes when we combine this kind of relaxed, soft, receptive awareness that is not filtered, carried by, or influenced by a lot of thoughts, ideas, or concepts of what is, to really start feeling the simplicity of the moment, of the actual sensations themselves.

Even if I put my finger against my palm, and someone says, "What are you experiencing?" and I say, "I'm experiencing my finger touching my palm," that's not exactly what I'm experiencing. That's the concept of finger, the concept of palm. Yes, they're touching, that's what's happening. But the experience, the sensations, is not the finger. The sensation is not the palm. The sensation is the warmth, the pressure, the elasticity, the texture, the pleasure that I feel in that contact. Those are the sensations.

The same thing happens with pain. Pain is real, for sure, but the word "pain" is an abstraction. If we stay at the abstraction, it's kind of like saying the experience of the finger against the palm. It's not actually what's happening. What's literally happening is that there might be intense piercing, sharp², twisting, or stabbing sensations. There are many different kinds of pain, so which kind of pain is it now? Feel the sensations of it.

The advantage of doing that with anything, including pain, is that as long as we stay a little bit separate by the concepts, the idea of what it is and not in the sensations, we're not allowing ourselves that intimacy. We're not allowing that deep sense of the way in which awareness makes room for those sensations to unfold, to do what they want to do.

That is one of the great arts of insight meditation: to be so close to the experience in a gentle, soft, relaxed way that it's almost as if awareness is not riding tightly on top of our experience, concerned with it, struggling with it. Rather, awareness is a great open space that allows things to unfold, to unravel, to open up, to shift and change as they need to do.

It's like creating room. Mindfulness is like creating space. It's not just a moment of mindfulness we want, like, "Oh, warmth," and then allowing that warmth to be felt. Pressure, allowing the pressure to be felt. Pleasure, allowing the pleasure to be felt. Not for the sake of experiencing it for oneself, but rather to allow the sensations room so that they can move along and do what's next.

All sensations are processes. All sensations are in movement, active, and dynamic. To start living in that dynamic place, that's one of the functions of deeper insight practice.

What I'm teaching today is a stepping stone towards that capacity. It's not necessarily easy to rest there, but part of mindfulness of the body is to begin finding ourselves not with a generalized presence for the body, but with a relaxed receptivity to the particularity of the sensations in the body.

So today in the guided meditation, we did this exercise to do that with the breathing. Breathing is part of mindfulness of the body. Start allowing yourself to get absorbed by the particular sensations that come into play, like a kaleidoscope of these sensations that flow through as we breathe in and flow through as we breathe out. It's kind of like getting out of the way while feeling it intimately. Getting out of the way where we're really connected. We're allowing for the particular sensations to play their dance—not the general idea of breathing, but the actual particularity of sensations.

We'll continue with this tomorrow. If this didn't make so much sense to you, don't worry. Whatever you understood from what I taught today, even if you didn't know how to apply it, just store it away for now. With time, I think it will become clear how this works in a way that's not a strain, not a lot of effort and work.

We'll have one more day on mindfulness of the body, and we'll do a little bit more on this idea of sensations. That will set the foundation for a way of practicing mindfulness of emotions. I won't be here next week, so the week on emotions will be in two weeks. With the breathing last week and the body this week, all this sets the ground for a wise way of being with emotions.

Thank you very much.