This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Hand Exercise; Introduction to Mindfulness (7 of 25) Aware of the Body as Body. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Hand Exercise; Dharmette: Introduction to Mindfulness (7 of 25) Aware of the Body as Body - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on January 16, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Hand Exercise

Warm greetings and welcome to this meditation session. It's part of a series on an introduction to mindfulness practice. For the second week of the series, we're focusing on mindfulness of the body. I want to begin today with a guided meditation on the body, on body mindfulness.

It's a little bit of an exercise to begin with, but it's an exercise that is meant to give you an insider's experience of what mindfulness of the body can be like. The Buddha talked about being aware of the body in the body, to be mindful of the body in terms of the body. What that means is that we're not adding a lot of judgments, evaluations, commentary, or a heavy-handed use of "me, myself, and mine" or "I, the doer." With mindfulness, we're just being aware of the simplicity of how the body experiences itself, independent of the more complicated judgments and commentary we have about it.

It's meant to be phenomenally simple. Some people find it's a huge relief that we don't have to be judging, figuring things out, or thinking. We're allowed just to, in a sense, rest our awareness in the body, letting the body do the bodyfulness, letting the body do the awarenessfulness of what the experience is.

To begin, assume a meditation posture that gives you some stability. You might move your body around in whatever way you have positioned it—kind of wiggle it, rock it, or find a way to establish the stability of being here on this spot, nowhere else, just here.

Gently close your eyes. Before we do the exercise, take a few long, slow breaths in a way that's comfortable for you. Let go as you exhale, releasing near the end of the exhale so the exhale continues a bit.

Then, letting your breathing return to normal, see if you can sense or feel whatever degree of stability you have in your sitting bones, in the place where the weight of your body is received by some surface. Maybe feel a sense of stability in your whole torso.

Then, with your ordinary breathing, spend a minute or two relaxing more in the body. Scan your body as you inhale, scanning for tension and holding, releasing as you exhale.

Now, to begin the exercise, bring your attention to your non-dominant hand and take a few moments to feel the hand. If in feeling it, you feel you can move your hand a little bit so it's better positioned and more comfortable, move your hand. Then become aware of the sensations in the hand. It might be pulsing or tingling, warmth and coolness. There might be the pressure of the contact of your hand against some part of your body.

Being aware of the hand in the hand means becoming aware of how the hand experiences itself, less up in the control tower watching and thinking about the hand, and more allowing the hand to reveal itself. Reveal the kaleidoscope of sensations that appear in the hand, in the palm of the hand, the back of the hand, and in the fingers.

Your thinking mind—the control tower—might have thoughts, judgments, and reactions to what we're doing, but those are distinct from how the hand is experiencing itself. For these few minutes, put aside what goes on in the mind in terms of thoughts, judgments, and reactions. Let those be in the background. In the foreground, become aware more intimately, more fully, of what the experience of the hand is, as if you've never gotten to know your hand¹. Feel it for itself.

Chances are, with this kind of attention to the hand, you're experiencing a lot more sensations in the hand than you would if we had just stayed with the breathing, ignoring the hand. Placing awareness in the hand reveals more of the experience of the hand itself.

Then, ending the focus on the non-dominant hand, take a three-breath journey. Return to breathing for three breaths, relaxing, letting go.

Then calmly bring your attention to your dominant hand. With a calm awareness, let the hand feel the sensations that appear in the dominant hand. The hand feels the sensations, and you make room in the mind, make room in awareness for the sensations to appear and show themselves.

If you find yourself straining or contracting in the eyes or in the mind to do this exercise, see if you can relax the mind. Relax around the eyes to be receptive to the hand's experience of itself.

Now consider for a moment where in your body you normally experience your breathing. Is it more in the belly, more in the chest, more in the nostrils, or more in all three altogether? Wherever it might be, and without focusing on the breathing, become aware of that part of your body in the way that you're aware of your hand. Let that part of your body sense and feel the sensations that appear, not specifically aware of the breathing, but as it occurs. Those sensations are also part of what appears and disappears.

Maybe, with the rhythm of breathing, allow the sensations to be there on the exhale and let that part of the body receive the sensations on the inhale. Let the place where you experience breathing be the home for your awareness that you return to over and over.

But if there are any sensations in the body elsewhere that are more compelling or more predominant, experiment with gently, calmly opening awareness in that location in your body and feeling the sensations there as you felt the hand. For a few moments now, let go of breathing and just feel those predominant sensations, letting commentary, judgment, and concerns recede to the background so there's space for the sensations to show themselves, whatever way they come, go, move, and shift.

After being aware of some other sensation for a while, then return again to the home base. Begin again with your breathing, or more accurately, begin again in that location where breathing is most clearly known. Be aware of whatever reveals itself there, whatever sensations, whether of the breathing or not.

If there's something strong that arises again in the body, let there be a gentle rhythm of shifting awareness to that location for a while. If it feels like you've acknowledged it enough, gently, calmly begin again with the home base, awareness of the body's sensations of breathing.

In the last little period of actual meditation, you could experiment with not having a home base for your awareness, but rather allow your awareness to gently float through your body to whatever sensations in your body call your awareness. Whatever sensations are predominant or compelling, without thinking about it or analyzing it, without concerns of being right or wrong, just let your awareness be relaxed and calm, not fixated on anything.

Every time the awareness lands in a new place, take some moments to feel it, like you felt the hand, and then open yourself up to let the awareness move on to another part of your body. So breathing is not at the center. Breathing is just one of the places, one of the sensations that a free-flowing awareness takes in as the awareness is centered in the body.

Then, as we come to the end of the sitting, feel the stability, openness, or calm that might be in the body. If those things are not there, maybe a tightened awareness of your body. As you exhale, relax the body more—the healing power of awareness and relaxation together.

Turn your awareness outwards to the world around you, a world with many challenges, and a world filled with people who are trying to help. For all the images of great disasters, natural or human-made, there are so many pictures and videos of people helping others. May it be that we live in a world where we help each other, we support each other, we care for each other. And may the mindfulness, stability, and calm that we have through this practice support us in doing that.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings everywhere be free.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Introduction to Mindfulness (7 of 25) Aware of the Body as Body

Hello and welcome to this seventh talk on introduction to mindfulness meditation. This week, the focus is on mindfulness of the body. As I said yesterday, this is one of the central teachings of the Buddha. The foundation of his meditation practice is a deep, stable connection to the body.

Part of the reason for this is that we're trying to become free of the hegemony of our thinking, our judgments, our biases, our stereotyping, and our preconceived ideas. We want to be free of our fixed agendas, opinions, and stories of what is and isn't. Not because these are necessarily wrong to have, but because they interfere with our ability for a deep connection in the present moment.

It's kind of like a friend who cares for you a lot. Maybe the person is challenged in some way but overcame the challenge to make you a really nice meal. They took a lot of care in the preparation of the food, the flavors, and the layout of the table. You sit down at the table and you don't really notice what the person has done, and you hardly taste the food because you're caught up in judgments about worldly affairs and who's right and who's wrong. You're spinning out opinions, ready to argue your case, and so preoccupied that you don't even notice what your friend has done for you.

In the same way, we don't even notice what our body, our inner life, and the world are doing for us in the moment here. There is something really special, whether we're suffering or whether we're happy, whether the body is in pain or whether it's comfortable. There's something very profound that's possible when we respect this body and respect it with our careful attention.

The body is not just a hunk of flesh. There is a lot of wisdom that arises in the body, a lot of information that arises out of the body, and a lot of guidance on how to live our life that comes from being connected to our body. For people who do meditation, focusing on the body is one of the ways that we begin getting out of our head, out of our preoccupations, and start finding a very different way of being here in this body. The body is kind of like a door that you open, and there are many dimensions and other depths of connection to ourselves and to the world that can happen through the doorway of the body.

Here at IMC², a foundational teaching of mindfulness is to use breathing as the home base. We rest there, and we ride the breath. Breathing is a wonderful antidote to wandering off in thought. For one thing, it shows us when we're wandering off, and then we can be wise about that, see that clearly, and relax. It also is a nice place to rest the mind for some people so that there's some continuity over time. As we have continuity with the breathing—whether it's three breaths or five breaths—there's something during that period of time that helps the mind begin slowly to relax. It relaxes because the energy of attention is going into breathing, which is a relaxing or opening kind of experience, instead of going into thinking and preoccupation, thereby fueling it, stirring it up, and continuing it more and more.

We are redirecting the food of the mind from what is not so helpful to something that's more helpful, from preoccupations and distracted thought to being present here and now with our experience, in this case with the breathing.

However, in some meditation practices, like when I practiced Zen, breathing was a primary focus—just coming back to the breath over and over again. It's kind of a concentration practice. In the way we teach here at IMC, where we're teaching mindfulness more than concentration, we do use the breathing as a default when it works for people. But then, when something else becomes more compelling or more pronounced—some other sensation in the body—we happily, contentedly shift the focus of attention from the breathing to this other thing in the body. It could be discomfort, it could be pleasure, it could be sensations of warmth, coolness, any sensations at all. Whatever it might be is equally valid as a place to cultivate present-moment attention. We're just developing that present-moment attention with that other sensation.

It's possible that it's enough just to acknowledge it for a little while, feel it and sense it, and then we begin again with the breathing. Or sometimes it's nice just to stay there if something is very compelling or very strong. We just enter into the world of that part of the body, like we did in the exercise with the hand. You're not necessarily focusing on the discomfort, because that's a little bit of an abstraction—the idea of discomfort. But underneath the idea, the global sense of what's going on, are the details of the individual sensations that are at play in that area of discomfort, or that area that's very comfortable or pleasant.

The idea is to just stay with it and feel it. Let that be a place where you're training yourself to notice the distracted mind, the straining mind, the demanding mind, the expecting mind, the resisting mind, and relax. You begin finding a way of being present in a relaxed, non-reactive way.

That's the basic idea: we stay with the breathing, something else becomes compelling, we let go of the breathing and attend to that for a little while, and then come back to the breathing.

Some people, as I said last week, find that breathing doesn't work very well as a focus of attention. For some people, what works much better is to just be open more generally and globally in the body without much particular focus on the breathing. Then allow the awareness to float or drift or move around the body to whatever is compelling, whatever appears, whatever shows itself, whatever is asking for attention. But as we bring the attention to different parts of the body, we are careful not to fixate on them, not to get stuck there. We keep the attention soft and light so that when something else occurs that's more compelling or calls on you, the mind can gently float there.

It's the present moment experiences of the body that are the grounding in the present moment, an alternative to distracted thinking. Rather than the breathing being the primary home, the whole body is the home for attention. That way, there isn't this zeroing in, preoccupation, concern, or reactivity around breathing, which makes it difficult for some people to be with the breathing.

Both ways of practicing are quite wonderful. What's interesting is that whichever one we start with, at some point we move into the other. People who mostly focus on the breathing, as they get really stable and settled, find a way in which their attention opens up. What feels the best is an open awareness to whatever is happening in the body, letting it show itself, and letting the awareness just stay open to the different places.

People who start with a more open awareness to the body, at some point, will find that things get simpler and more relaxed. The biggest movements of the body then become their primary subject of attention. Usually, that biggest movement is the breathing. But they come to that breathing in a much more relaxed, easygoing way where there are fewer complications. It can be quite nice to just flow lightly with the breathing.

So it shifts and changes. But all things being equal, I recommend the foundational way here at IMC, which is to use the breathing as the home base and be content to stay there as much as you can. But if something else in the body becomes predominant, shift your attention to the predominant thing. That might be for three or four seconds just to feel it and acknowledge it—that's enough—and then it can recede into the background. Or you might discover that you need to make it the primary focus of attention. It might be for five minutes you're just exploring and feeling and breathing with that sensation.

Maybe that's enough for today: breathing and body. As you go about your day today, I would very much encourage you to continue with mindfulness of your body. For those of you who set a timer yesterday that went off periodically through the day, or if you have other ways of periodically checking in with yourself: check in with yourself first to feel how you are in your body, and then take the three-breath journey. After you've done the three-breath journey, feel what's happened, what's shifted in your body. If you do that even just once every hour through a day, I think it could have a very helpful impact on you. If nothing else, it's very educational to discover more deeply what's going on.

Stop and just notice what's happening in your body. Take time to feel it, breathe with it, then do the three-breath journey. Just center yourself on three breaths as if that's the only thing that you need to do in the world, and then open to the body and see what shifted. That whole process doesn't have to take more than a minute. If it's enjoyable, you can do it more.

Thank you very much, and I look forward to continuing this series tomorrow.