Descend into Your Body and Wake Up

Cross-posted today at the ID Project.


Lately I've been seeing more and more meditators and teachers talking about Mindfulness of Body -- which makes me very happy. Last month, Kate Johnson published a thoughtful piece at the ID Project blog called "Mindfulness of Bodies." Will Johnson had a fantastic article, "Full Body, Empty Mind," at Tricycle. A little further back, in November, I published (also at the ID Project blog) "You Are Not a Brain on a Stick (Or Are You?)".

In that piece, I wrote:

"...We modern people have become tragically disembodied, alienated from the most basic level of our own experience as human beings.... Most of us have lost the felt sense of what it is to be embodied, to experience the world in and through the medium of this material and energetic body into which we have been born.

"We think about the body a great deal, sometimes obsessively, but this is not the same as being in and with the body on its own terms. Our allegiance to thinking about everything -- mediating and managing our experience and our lives through the conceptual thought function -- is the very root of our disembodiment in the first place. For the most part, we think of our bodies as mere tools (and sometimes obstacles) to serve our ambitions and our ego's goals of attaining happiness and comfort; we rarely descend into the darkness of the body itself and witness, without an agenda, the naked experience that arises there."

As Reggie Ray says in his book Touching Enlightenment, it's not simply that we can find realization and awakening in the body -- there is actually no other place to find it.

But it would be just like us (wouldn't it?) to sit here in cyberspace and chit-chat and theorize about Mindfulness of Body, without actually doing it. So -- enough talk. Embedded below is a simple, 20-minute guided meditation on Mindfulness of Body that I led about a year ago at Nalandabodhi New York. You can download the MP3, or listen in streaming audio online. Close your Facebook and Twitter windows, silence your mobile phone, sit down in a comfortable meditation posture, click "Play," and explore the mystery of being alive in a human body. There is a world of somatic experience unfolding in your being at this very moment -- just waiting for you to notice it.






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Seeing What Wants to Be Seen

Human beings these days are disembodied and ethereal. Our ancestors lived close to the land; they knew where their food came from because they planted and harvested it with their own hands, and they knew where the heat in the fireplace came from because they chopped the wood themselves. Today most of us live in cities or in suburbs, far-removed from the sources of our food and energy. We buy it in units or packages, and couldn't care less where it comes from or how it's made. Many of us sit all day in an office cubicle, staring at a computer screen, while others sit all day on a sofa, staring at a TV screen or playing video games. When we leave the house or the office, we carry a portable device with us so that we are never cut off from the stream of information for more than a few minutes, as if we are uncertain what might happen to us if we don’t have constant input and output.

We live most of our lives from the neck up — constantly spinning in a mental hurricane of thoughts, ideas, commentary, story-lines, images, songs, memories, fantasies, emotions, daydreams, hopes, fears, judgments, strategies, and plans. The hurricane never seems to slow down for very long, because the wind of new information and fresh stimuli always keeps it turning. And with today’s mobile and social networking technologies, we’ve adopted the philosophy that almost every thought or idea that passes through our minds is important enough to share with the entire world, and should be injected into the minds of everyone else we know or have virtual contact with. A song plays on our iPod, and we quickly log on to Facebook to tell all our friends what we're listening to at this moment, as if they should care. And this unceasing ebb and flow of information into and out of our minds must not be interrupted at any hour of the day, no matter where we go or what we are doing. I heard about a man who took his mobile phone into the meditation hall at a weekend retreat, and was posting updates to his Twitter account during walking meditation: The person in front of me is walking WAY too slow.

Our attention is hypnotized and dazzled by this unceasing bombardment of information, and we spend all our time awash in it. As a consequence, it happens only rarely that our attention descends down out of the maelstrom of thoughts whirling in our brains and into the world of experience that is happening down below, in the rest of our bodies. We have, by and large, lost touch with what it means and what it feels like to be embodied — to experience the world and our own existence in and through the medium of this physical body made of matter and energy, alive with sensations, intimately connected to the world around it, and pulsing with information that has nothing to do with the realm of ideas and thoughts and stories. The average person today has become “a brain on a stick.”

Our habit of living all the time in our heads is toxic to our well-being, and a major stumbling block on the spiritual path. But it is an enormously seductive habit, reinforced by appearances. Of our six consciousnesses — sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and the mental consciousness that perceives thoughts — at least four of them, and possibly five, seem to be concentrated in the head, where our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and brain are all housed. This results in a strong, felt sense that our “self” exists in the head. It’s little wonder, then, that we spend most of our time living from the neck up.

Of course, we think about the body a great deal — in fact, many of us think about our bodies obsessively — but this is very different from being in and with the body on its own terms. It is our very allegiance to thinking and strategizing about everything — mediating and managing our experience and our lives through conceptual thought — that is the root of our disembodiment in the first place. For the most part, we think of our bodies as mere tools (or sometimes obstacles) that serve our ambitions and our ego’s goals of attaining happiness and comfort. We rarely descend into the darkness of the body itself and witness, on its own terms, without an agenda, the naked experience that arises there.

In his book Touching Enlightenment: Finding Realization in the Body, the American Buddhist teacher Reggie Ray shares a story that comes from the African spiritual guide, Malidoma Somé. Somé once moved to a West African village where there was no electricity. When he wanted to light some lamps at night to see better, he encountered strong resistance among the village elders, who told him, “If we light the lamps, we won’t be able to see.” The elders explained to him: “You can’t see anything real in the daylight. The only thing you see in the daylight is what you want to see. When you turn the lights off in the night, you see what wants to be seen, which is a whole different story.”

Descending out of our heads and the thinking mind and down into our bodies, says Ray, is like turning off the lights in order to see better. In the “darkness” of the body’s own perpetual unfolding of experience, we see not what we want to see, but what wants to be seen.

Psychology speaks of the mind’s conscious and unconscious aspects, with the conscious being likened to the small part of an iceberg that sits above the surface of the water and the unconscious being likened to that far more vast part of the iceberg that is hidden and submerged beneath the surface. This is also how we relate to our bodies, concentrating so much of our attention on that small and limited part of our experience that unfolds above the neck. Only rarely does our awareness descend into the vast regions of bodily experience that lurk, unexplored, beneath the surface. But it is impossible to be really present and aware of our human life if we are ignoring 95% of our embodied experience in every moment. All of that experience, whether it is pleasant, unpleasant or neutral, exciting or boring, painful or pleasurable, is a vital part of the total mystery that is human existence.

The human mind is, to use a strong word, a liar. The mind is always time-traveling into the past and into the future; it is forever fantasizing about things that don’t exist, trying to relive moments and experiences that are over and gone, and plotting to control situations that have not yet arisen and may never do so. The mind is very rarely satisfied with simply being here and now, in a naked and unfabricated way: it is always projecting onto its own internal screen what it wants to see.

But the body is incapable of deceit. It is always right here, right now; it cannot be elsewhere, or elsewhen. The body puts on no airs, and makes no pretense of being anything other than what it is or feeling anything other than what it feels. Upon the internal screen of the body, there is always and only projected that which wants to be seen. If what is projected there happens to also be what we want to see, that’s nice — but the body doesn’t particularly give a damn. So, when we are grounded and mindful of the body, we cannot help but be present and awake to our actual experience, here and now. As Reggie Ray says, “We are not only able to touch enlightenment with our bodies...there is actually no other way to do so.”


Making a Bad Situation Worse

Our disembodiment and our addiction to thinking can create huge obstacles for us on the spiritual path. If we practice meditation, for example, we might do so under the mistaken belief that meditation is all about working with the thinking mind and that it has nothing to do with the body. This can be worse for us than not practicing meditation at all, since in reality meditation has a tremendous amount to do with the body. From the time we first sit down to meditate, we are working with our posture and with the restless and uncomfortable sensations that arise in our bodies. And as we continue to practice meditation, we begin to discover more and more profound depths of insight and realization within the body’s own unfolding of experience, moment to moment. This is why Saraha, the 8th-century Indian Buddhist saint and meditation master, said: “There is no place of pilgrimage as fabulous and open as this body of mine, no place more worth exploring.”

Because of our sworn allegiance to thinking, we may see our bodies, at best, as tools to be utilized to achieve the spiritual aims and ambitions of our minds — and, at worst, as pain-producing obstacles that prevent us from getting where we want to go on the spiritual path. We may, for instance, imagine that samadhi, or very deep meditation, is some kind of alternate, disembodied state, an ethereal nirvana-realm that exists somewhere other than where our asses happen to be sitting right now. Surely, we think, samadhi is something holy and pure, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the body’s aches and pains and farts. But time and again, the great masters of meditation have told us that meditation actually begins with the body and unfolds in the body, with open and mindful and unbiased awareness of our precise situation in the present moment. The Buddha’s teachings on meditation in the early scriptures began with developing a profound mindfulness of the body, and this is one of the meditations that the Buddha continued practicing even after he attained enlightenment. So why, then, do we often regard our own bodies as little more than irritating hindrances to meditation? Where do we suppose realization is going to take place, if not in and through the body?

There is a curious feedback loop between mind and body that we can begin to discover in meditation. We might notice, for example, that at times when we are lost in discursiveness and mental chatter, we also tend to be very absorbed in that level of experience that happens from the neck up. The further we go into discursiveness and mental chatter, the more we begin to physically slouch and lose touch with what’s going on in the rest of our bodies, below the surface of the iceberg. By contrast, at times when we are particularly mindful and undistracted, we tend to be more grounded in the dimensions of experience that happen below the neck, in the dark regions of the body where energy ebbs and flows according to its own patterns, beyond the control of our conscious minds. By staying with that experience, we are able to abide in a more present and relaxed way. And that, I'm increasingly convinced, is the key to unlocking every door to realization that we might encounter on the spiritual path.

The Source of Your Joy

During the past month here at the Abbey, we've been immersed in studying and practicing the Four Foundations of Mindfulness -- a traditional form of meditation practiced since the time of the Buddha, 2500 years ago -- with Pema Chodron. It has been an unexpectedly wild ride, full of emotional drama and personal discoveries. I think each participant in the retreat feels that they've gotten to know themselves better this month.

We spent a good couple of weeks working with the first foundation, Mindfulness of Body -- repeatedly doing very slow body scans and bringing our attention as fully as possible into experiencing each part of our bodies. This was the first step in getting to know ourselves; that's because ordinarily we're not really in our bodies, or not in any genuine, meaningful way. You might have a concept of your left foot and where it is located in relation to the rest of your body; but how often do you actually descend into your left foot and remain there, experiencing the sensations that arise and pass at each moment? By being willing to remain with the unfabricated experience that is unfolding within our bodies, moment by moment, we begin to more fully inhabit our own human existence -- we come home to ourselves.

In practicing the second foundation, Mindfulness of Feeling, we began to explore the realm of feeling tones and emotional reactions. Every sensation or experience that arises is either pleasant, unpleasant or neutral -- or at least we perceive it that way -- and then we're off to the races, reacting automatically, unthinkingly, with attachment or aversion or zoning out. What's more, we frequently escalate our elemental reactions of attachment and aversion into heightened states of emotional drama. The essence of Mindfulness of Feeling is allowing the mind to simply notice and rest with these intangible feeling tones and emotional energies, without adopting or rejecting them.

When we spend enough time with these foundations of mindfulness, we might notice that they blur into one another. Ordinarily, we think that our physical sensations are cut from a very different cloth than our emotional feelings, that these two elements of experience take place in different locations or that they enter through different doors of perception. But as we descend more deeply into our sensations and perceptions, we start to glimpse that it's all one big mash-up of experience unfolding in different ways. When we look beyond our assumption that experience can be neatly compartmentalized into different categories -- thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, and perceptions -- we discover that it's difficult to draw hard and fast lines anywhere. Gaylon Ferguson compares this to the rooms of a house, which we think of as being very separate; but the smell of breakfast cooking travels through the whole house and finds you wherever you are.

Emotions, for example, can be embedded and expressed right within our bodies; they can, in fact, be carried there (and perhaps without our awareness) for years. During the first week of the retreat I noticed that each time we did the body scans, there was a particular moment when I would start to freak out. In the area of my solar plexus and stomach, I could feel a kind of gripping tension, a hot and tight and uncomfortable feeling. I knew I had stumbled across something that needed closer inspection.

As I stayed with this uncomfortable sensation in my abdomen, and the feelings of aversion and fear that arose in response to it, I gradually realized that the physical sensation itself was intertwined with a particular emotional feeling of grief that I had been carrying, in a rather unfelt way, for quite some time. Grief, and my resistance towards feeling it, were being expressed in my body, held in my gut like a stone. As I continued working with this tangle of emotional and physical feelings, I was able to begin letting go of the resistance, and moving into the grief itself.

I spent one afternoon weeping (weeping mindfully, if I may say so), and saw that indeed the feeling of grief arose and expressed itself right there in my solar plexus where I had felt the initial push and pull of something unfelt and unwanted. I had the image of a wet towel in my abdomen being squeezed tightly; the water that came out of the towel seemed to emerge as tears, and the whole physical display of grief. Afterwards, I felt somewhat as if a storm -- one that had perhaps been brewing and building for a long time -- had blown through and cleared the air. And the physical sensation of tightness and clutching in my solar plexus was noticeably diminished.

Later, as we went deeper into Mindfulness of Body and Feeling, I found that my attention and awareness were drawn very intensely, for several days, into my face. This felt like a natural emphasis, since the face is such an important part of how we humans embody and express our emotions; the face is perhaps the busiest intersection of mind and body. I began to notice subtle patterns of physical tension in my face: a gripping of the muscles below and above the eyes, a hardening of the eyebrows and a worried pinching of the area between the brows. The more I paid attention to these patterns, the less subtle they became.

But more significantly, I noticed how these habitual patterns of tension in my face seemed to go hand in hand with emotional drama or discursiveness in my mind. Each time my mind wandered off into some kind of story-line or discursive fantasy, my face would also assume a mask of tension reflecting the tension in my mind. I found it was impossible to determine which was the chicken and which was the egg: did the discursiveness in my mind trigger a reflexive tension in my face, or did the tension in my face invite and open the door for discursiveness to enter my mind? The two always seemed to be there at the same time, so it was impossible for me to say. But I noticed, too, that if I consciously relaxed the tension in my face, my mind also relaxed.

I was reminded of the psychologist Paul Ekman, whose pioneering work produced a tremendously nuanced and accurate system (the Facial Action Coding System, or FACS) for reading emotions on people’s faces. To develop this science, Ekman took himself as a test subject; in a process that was often grueling, he learned to control each and every muscle in his face individually, at will, sometimes even using electrical stimulation to get at certain muscles he could not control consciously. He also studied how people in various cultures express and interpret emotions on the face.

Along the way, Ekman made several startling discoveries. Facial expressions of emotion are not culturally determined, as most scientists had always assumed. They are universal, and are hard-wired into our biology. Moreover, Ekman revealed something called facial micro-expressions, which are fleeting, instantaneous glimpses of emotion that pass across the face so quickly that they go unnoticed by most people. Micro-expressions, too, are involuntary, and when one knows how to identify and interpret them, it becomes possible to read people’s true emotions even when they are trying to pretend they feel otherwise.

Another of Ekman’s discoveries, which he stumbled upon through his early experimentation on his own face, is that there is no clear separation between the emotion itself and its corresponding facial expression. We might assume that first there is an emotion and then there a reactive facial expression that signals the presence of that emotion. What Ekman found, however, was that simply by adopting a particular facial expression, he would actually experience the corresponding emotion. Which is the chicken and which the egg, indeed?

When I shared my recent experience with Pema Chodron, she pointed out that this is probably why many Buddhist teachers stress the importance of smiling. Some even teach smiling as an actual practice to their students. I have to admit that, until now, that kind of instruction always sounded incredibly cheesy to me, and I dismissed it rather cynically. But my own experiments in meditation this month, not to mention the decades of scientific work produced by Paul Ekman, suggest that there might be something to it. In the words of Thich Nhat Hanh, “Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.”

Four Circles of Mindfulness

As I'm entering my fourth week at Gampo Abbey, I can observe myself slowly beginning to settle into practice. It is as if pieces of myself that were trailing somewhere behind me, still in New York City perhaps, are now arriving one by one, and joining the rest of me here. Many days these past three weeks, meditation has been a struggle between me and my own mind, an encounter with what Buddhists refer to as 'monkey mind.' But over the past few days, I've noticed the monkey beginning to quiet down and settle into being in this new zoo.

One thing that has helped me a great deal with this, in terms of meditation practice, is working with what are traditionally called the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. I had always thought of the Four Foundations as a long practice that unfolds in sequential stages over the course of weeks or months or years, and in viewing it that way I'd always struggled to relate to it (no wonder!). In fact, in the Satipatthana Sutta, the Buddha even advises his monks to practice the Four Foundations of Mindfulness for seven years. But this week, I have stumbled upon a way of bringing the Four Foundations into my meditation sessions in a much more immediate, practical way. Others, no doubt, have been practicing this way for years, but it came as something of a revelation to me. I've begun to apply them as an actual meditation technique, on the spot, and it seems to have a powerful settling effect on the mind.

Here's how I've been working with them:

FIRST, close your eyes and bring a gentle awareness to what is going on in your body at this moment. Notice your posture, and the connection between your body and the ground beneath you. Feel your torso and your legs and ankles and feet, your shoulders and arms and hands, your neck and head and face. Scan over your body and note any places where you might be holding tension, and gently let it go wherever possible. Bring a soft attention to the sensations of your body breathing, and to whatever other bodily sensations you may notice. This is the first foundation, Mindfulness of Body.

SECOND, open your eyes but keep your gaze directed downward, about three to six feet in front of you. While maintaining an awareness of what is going on in your body, gradually expand your awareness to notice how you experience sensations and phenomena as either pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. This is the second foundation, Mindfulness of Feeling. The word 'feeling' is a problematic translation here, because we usually think of 'feelings' as emotions -- but that's another layer of the onion (coming up next). Here we are quite simply looking at the very basic way in which we categorize everything that arises in our experience in one of three ways: pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Developing a mindfulness of this is so important because we are so strongly programmed to react to these three ways of perceiving our experience: we pursue and grasp at what is perceived as pleasant, we recoil from and struggle against what is perceived as unpleasant, and we tune out or ignore what is perceived as neutral. From a meditative point of view, that's where all our problems really begin. One of the interesting things we discover when we work with this level of mindfulness is that our labels of pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral are often, to a greater or lesser degree, projections onto experiences that are actually pure sensation arising, beyond categorization, beyond label or concept. Sometimes if we disengage from our habitual storyline about that pain in our back or our knee, rather than dwelling on it and feeding it by constantly slapping it with the "unpleasant" label, it begins to lose much of its force and we experience it in a different way.

THIRD, raise your gaze a little further, about six to twelve feet in front of you. While maintaining an awareness of the body and of sensations that are pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral, expand your awareness to include the thoughts and emotions that are passing through your mind. This is the third foundation, Mindfulness of Mind. Thoughts and emotions come and go all the time, passing through our minds like bicycles without riders. Normally what we do is to jump on each and every bicycle that passes by and start pedaling, pedaling, fueling the thought and building it up into a storyline or a fantasy that swamps our awareness. Some thoughts and storylines are so juicy that we clear a whole space for them and set them up like stationary bikes or hamster wheels, and we just keep coming back to pedal away on them. If we just watch the illusory bicycles come and go without jumping on them and pedaling, they peter out eventually and fall down, dissolving back into the nothingness from which they arose. As it says in the Sadhana of Mahamudra, "Good and bad, happy and sad, all thoughts vanish like the imprint of a bird in the sky." (This line has become something of a mantra for me, and I find it's worth memorizing and repeating frequently.)

FOURTH, raise your gaze completely so that you are looking out at the horizon (or, if you're feeling daring, even a little above the horizon, into open space). While maintaining an awareness of body, of feelings and sensations experienced as pleasant, unpleasant and neutral, and of thoughts and emotions passing through the mind, expand your awareness outwards to include all the "dharmas" of phenomenal experience: sights, sounds, smells, and so on. Simply be present in your environment with a relaxed, all-encompassing awareness that embraces whatever is happening in your surroundings. This is the fourth foundation, Mindfulness of Dharmas. Gradually the distinction between internal and external experience begins to blur and dissolve, and mindfulness-awareness becomes open, spacious and relaxed.

Instead of calling these the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, which sounds very linear and hierarchical, I prefer to think of them as Four Circles of Mindfulness, with each circle building out upon the previous one, extending mindfulness outward through concentric circles of increasingly expansive awareness. You can picture them like a radar screen, starting with the innermost circle of body, the second circle of feelings, the third circle of mind, and the fourth circle of dharmas. Mindfulness-awareness becomes like the sweeping arm of the radar, scanning each of these concentric circles and noticing when a new blip appears somewhere on the screen: an itch or a sensation experienced in the body as unpleasant, a new thought that emerges into awareness and passes through the territory of conscious mind.

Sometimes a blip will seem to appear in one area and cross over into another: someone sneezes in the shrine room and it startles you (unpleasant), and then you begin to actively think about sneezes and germs, then you begin to feel anxiety and fear about getting sick. At that point you've basically lost the thread -- no problem, simply come back and start again at the innermost circle, mindfulness of body, and work your way back out.

I think of this practice as being somewhat like the Shambhala practice of invoking Windhorse, for those who are familiar with that set of teachings. It's a way of dispelling the various layers of resistance and obstacles to being present, and invoking a sense of confident, self-existing awareness and presence that embraces all the various layers of our experience. Applying these circles of mindfulness doesn't need to take very long -- you can spend as much time as you want or feel that you need to in each circle, but running through the sequence doesn't need to take more than a few minutes, or even half a minute once you get the hang of it. Gradually it becomes a less sequential exercise as you develop a thread of awareness that runs across all four circles.