Mindfulness of the Body Part 1

So this week and next week I’ll be talking about mindfulness of the body. And in our Vipassana or insight tradition, there’s not just one topic or practice of meditation, um, but many. And each one can appeal to different people’s personalities.

Some people really like this type of practice versus that type of practice. And generally these are all grouped into what are called the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. And under each of these foundations are a number of subtopics.

The first of these foundations is the body. And that’s what we’ll be talking about this week and next week. All— and there are, I think, 6, 5 or 6 different practices that allow us to practice being mindful, using our body as the anchor of our practice.

The second foundation of mindfulness is feelings and feeling tones and checking in on the pleasant, unpleasant, neutral nature of all of our sense experiences. Third foundation is the mind. People here last week, I did a guided or a little meditation on mindfulness of the mind and what that’s like, noticing the the kind of climates and flows of how the mind is at any given point, different moods and affects and, you know, feeling, feelings in an emotional sense that are flowing through the mind.

And the last foundation of mindfulness is dhammas. This is seeing some of these, um, statements and concepts, things like impermanence, and bringing that into a meditation practice. Watching impermanence would be a mindfulness of dhammas, as an example.

So again, this time we’ll be talking about the body, and I’ll be covering some of the practices this week, some of the practices next week, and As to why the body, there’s a brief sutta from the Buddha that goes— and Howie Cohen shared this at his retreat last year for people who were at that— there’s one thing that when developed and cultivated leads exclusively to disenchantment, to dispassion, to cessation. Peace, to direct knowledge, to enlightenment, to nibbana. What is that one thing? Mindfulness directed to the body.

And so one of the first practices, this is the first practice that’s always listed in mindfulness of the body, is what we went into today, mindfulness of the breath. And you’ve done like an introductory meditation course, it usually has some form of mindfulness of breath included. If not the first thing, it’ll come pretty quickly thereafter.

And it’s said that the Buddha practiced mindfulness of breath pretty extensively. For most of the samadhi practices, mindfulness of the breath. Um, there’s a whole sutta, the Anapanasati Sutta, that’s quite interesting.

About mindfulness of the breath and noticing how the breath flows into all of these other ways that we’re able to be mindful. And in some ways, the breath is an even more accentuated way of looking at the body, because one of the benefits of having mindfulness of the body is the body is always here. You may not remember this concept or this concept or some Dharma word or some phrase or some, but your body’s here.

And especially with your body, your breath is always here. Or you’re having real problems, you’re probably in the hospital, things are not going well, but otherwise your breath is always here. And so it just, it takes that aspect of the body and cranks it up a notch because no matter what’s going on, Body’s always breathing.

It’s always checking in on how’s the breath right now. Things get tough. If things smooth, things are very peaceful, you could check in on the breath.

Things are stressful, check in on the breath. And similarly to the instructions, it’s just noticing how the body is breathing. There’s no control to it.

There’s no Working with it, it’s noticing that the body does a lot of interesting things, and there’s the impermanence, there’s the arising and passing away of the breath, there’s the fact that, like, things being unsatisfactory— we have to breathe, well, we have to breathe again, and then we have to breathe again, and then we have to breathe again, then we have to breathe again, we have to breathe again. We can’t take one nice breath for today, you know, or do something like a sea turtle where we can take one big breath and then dive down and come back up a couple hours later, maybe a day later, and breathe again. You know, we have to keep doing this.

We have to keep doing this or we don’t stay alive. And that ultimately we really don’t have a whole lot of control over it. Body’s just kind of doing it.

We go to sleep, the body keeps doing it. We ignore it for days, weeks, years, body just keeps doing it. There’s this out of control nature of something that is vital to our life.

So you can see these little things. We give these instructions. There’s the initial practice of just training our mindfulness on each of these topics, training ourselves to begin to be aware.

And then after that, noticing how all these other things that we talk about flow into these different practices. And all of the foundations of mindfulness, each of these practices are like that. You can start to see these things reflected down.

Some people, mindfulness of the breath is not for them, and that’s fine. That’s why I like to share some of these things. Um, and it’s an invitation really at any of our sats, regardless of the instruction, if there’s a topic that you try out, it’s like, that’s, that’s it, that’s, that’s the one, do it regardless.

You can try on the instruction if you want to, but It works, it works, use it. The second item that comes up in the foundations of mindfulness of the body is postures. I kind of alluded to this at the beginning, and Julie took advantage of it during this practice period.

But the Buddha talks about practicing sitting, practicing standing, practicing walking, practicing lying down. And there’s, um, an interesting lecture that I was— or it’s not a lecture, it’s an interview with Joseph Goldstein I was listening to recently. And he, in the interview, he’s talking about these different postures and, and that, you know, for him, most meditators he’s encountered, you know, Sitting’s up here, way up here.

Come way down a good ways, here’s walking. And then like standing and lying down are somewhere in the basement, just, you know, those don’t exist. And that’s generally how people approach their practice.

And he really encouraged, you know, trying to flip that because in many cases we may not feel like we can practice if we can’t sit. We don’t have a place to sit. We don’t have the right stuff to sit.

And Joseph talked about, you know, have walking perhaps at the top. Walking, maybe lying down. We do a lot of that.

And, you know, if you can get to a place and sit, excellent. But otherwise, really start to key in on the body walking, on the body moving. You get up from your desk at work and go walk to get a cup of water.

Notice the body walking. You’re standing waiting for something. Notice the body standing.

It’s the same way. We’re just noticing how the body is. You could notice the sensations of the feet on the ground.

Notice sensation in the legs. The movement of the arms. If the body’s lying down, again, just noticing how is the posture of the body when it’s lying down.

And in the sutta, this expands to all other bodily postures. It goes, when going forward and returning, making themselves fully alert when looking toward and looking away, when flexing and extending your limbs, when carrying your clothes or bag, when eating, drinking, chewing, savoring, when urinating and defecating, when walking, standing, sitting, falling asleep, waking up, talking, remaining silent, making oneself fully alert to how body is right now, being mindful of this body. So really, the sutta is asking us if it can be a core part of your practice to take mindfulness, take this mindful awareness practice off of the cushion.

Have it in every movement that you make throughout the day. You go on retreat, this is a lot of what retreat becomes is the transition periods. Okay, there’s formal sitting practice, you know, there’s formal sitting practice later, but all of the transition moments that are included in all of these things, eating, chewing, walking, standing, urinating, moving, extending your limbs, retracting your lips.

Bringing mindfulness to all the movements of the body. Last one I want to talk about is mindfulness of the parts of the body. And to my understanding, this is a bit of the origination of the body scan technique that’s in a lot of, um, Vipassana traditions and Vipassana practices is The instructions in the sutta go through looking at each part of the body.

You can do this in kind of the body scan format. Start at the bottom of the feet and work your way up through the body, you know, noticing how does it feel on the bottom of the feet, top of the feet, ankles, the legs, the knees, thighs, the pelvis, stomach, the back, chest, the shoulders, you know, down the arms, down to the hands, the fingers, the inside of the hand, the outside of the hand. The neck, the back of the neck, the back of the head, around the face, eyes now.

And in the sutta, then you go inwards. You check on the organs. You check on the flow of blood.

Can you sense the pulse? Can you, I mean, the limb, bile, urine, excrement, every, I mean, everything. It’s all in there. This is the body.

And they, and this is kind of important when you work on it in this way, he can be, there’s a simile in the sutta where they compare it to say a skilled cook, skilled merchant looking in a bag with a mix of beans and grains and being able to pick out that’s a red bean, that’s a black bean. That’s brown rice. That’s white rice.

That’s long grain rice. That’s this kind of bean. That’s that kind of bean.

In an impartial way. It can be really easy. We scan through the body.

We’re attached to these bodies. That’s another thing you notice being practicing and developing mindfulness of the bodies. We have attachments to these things.

We have opinions about these things. And in that, you know, just looking at it as if you had a variety, you know, you’re at the supermarket and you’re in the bean section. And there’s just, you know, there’s no real attachment to this being or that.

You’re just looking at them all. There they are. Maybe you’re in one of those places that has little knobs where you can turn and let them loose.

You just kind of— they all get loose down there on the ground, and you pick them out. This is this kind.

This is the knee. This is the foot. This is the ankle.

This is the blood flowing. This is the urine. This is the eyes.

This is the saliva of the mouth. Etc., etc.,

etc. And so there’s a refrain that goes on with each of these, that in this way one remains focused internally on the body in and of itself, externally on the body in and of itself, or both internally and externally. You know, you can be mindful of your body.

You can be mindful of other people as well. You can be mindful externally. All right, there’s, there’s this kind of— as I got into mindfulness of the breath, there’s this vivid memory I have of my grandfather and sitting with him in the car, being silent, and him just breathing, and the sound of this breathing.

At some level, it’s a little relaxing, but it’s just you’re aware of, of breath. Or they remain focused on the phenomena of the origination with regard to the body, the phenomenon of passing away with regard to the body, or the phenomenon of origination and passing away. These breaths arise, they pass away.

We have feelings in different parts of the body. We go through the body, you check in on the foot, and when you go back and you check on the foot, may not be the same as the first time you check. Things in the back and body, they shift and move, or their mindfulness that there is a body is maintained to the extent of knowledge and remembrance.

Just notice, you know, it can be that basic. There’s a body. You can think about the times we get disconnected.

We’re just kind of living in our head. We forget that we are attached to this thing, that it’s not a machine, that it’s part of us. and that can be the extent of our knowledge, extent of our awareness.

They remain independent, unsustained, not clinging to anything in the world. This is how they remain focused on the body in and of itself. Again, you know, the body, as I said, it’s always here.

It’s not in the past, it’s not in the future. Sensations in the body, looking at, you know, analyzing it. We’re not looking at a remembered body, a future body.

It’s this, it’s right here. This breath is happening now. It keeps us in the present moment.

The body is often responding to our moods and emotions faster than our minds often are processing them. You’ll kind of notice yourself tensing up, tensing up, or relaxing the body before you realize that you’re relaxed or that you’re tense. It tunes into those moods.

And we don’t have to have a whole lot of conceptual framework to just sit and know we’re sitting, walk and know we’re walking. That doesn’t require some great vast Dharma knowledge, a Dharma graduate degree to just watch the body breathe. And that you can really feel wisdom in the body.

There are times and experiences that are positive that are in the body that are known. Felt, and that can be an important thing to come back to. So concluding there, I wanted to give people an opportunity, um, a little dark, but nonetheless, I want to invite people to try on a practice of the body for maybe 9 or 10 minutes.

Til about 8:10. Depending on your space at home, you could try walking, try standing or lying down. People here in this space, you could try walking.

If you’re feeling contented sitting, maybe you try out a body scan. Breath isn’t your thing, maybe try the breath. Just give something a try.

So we’ll return at about Actually, we’re going to extend it. We’ll do till 8:15, and then we’ll come back and come back into the circle. To welcome back everybody on Zoom as well, return to our seats and places in circle.

And open up the floor to any questions, comments, thoughts on the mindfulness of the body.