Mindfulness of the Body Part 2

Last week I started talking about ways in the Satipatthana Sutta that it discusses as methods of mind— applying mindfulness to the body. And I wanted to continue on that theme tonight as there are quite a few ways of working with the body. We didn’t cover all of them.

So last week I discussed mindfulness of the breath, mindfulness of postures. On the movement of the body and on the parts of the body. So today I wanna continue on with postures a little bit, as well as talking about mindfulness of the elements and some practices related to death and the decomposition of the body.

So last week’s practices were pretty direct. You’re really just getting into what the body’s doing. And in some sense, these are as well.

But these require a little more cognitive input, let’s say. They’re a little bit more active in using the mind along with the body. But first, I wanted to loop back to postures, which we talked some about last time.

But while the postures are listed separately, when we do any type of meditative practice, whether it’s mindfulness of the body or not, your body is in some sort of posture. It has to be. You’re either sitting, you’re standing, you’re walking, you’re lying down.

And it’s important to think about that a little bit when you, when you’re, you know, thinking about, say, I want to maybe do some meditation practice, or also checking in on what posture you may be in at the moment where you feel like you need some practice and you may not be able to change your posture readily. How do we use these effectively? And for me, a lot of that relates to energy. And I, I talked about this one-on-one with different people that last week, but energy comes up for me a lot in terms of which posture I want to use.

And this is— some of this is physical energy, mental energy, and how fast the mind’s moving. So most people see I usually bring my cushion. I don’t sit in the chair.

I forgot my cushion tonight. But a lot of the reason I like to sit on a cushion versus the chair is it keeps me more awake. There, there’s a certain amount of, of sloth that will come into my mind personally.

And this is something you have to check in yourself. You may be perfectly comfortable in a chair. It may not be an issue.

But for me, I sit in these chairs. And it’s like, and it’s not just these chairs, it’s chairs generally. And it’s usually like sloth starts to take over quite quickly.

Where sitting on the ground, that doesn’t happen. And since I didn’t have my cushion today, then I start to think about other postures that I can utilize. So standing is another one that I’ll often use if there’s particularly low energy in the mind.

Mind feels sluggish, and I don’t necessarily— I’ve chosen to not spend the rest of my practice watching the slothful nature of the mind, then I may go ahead, you know, I’m going to stand up. And when I’m standing up, I mean, the, the Wu Qi posture that Rafi went through today is part of our Qigong practice, you know, that is a way of standing, that is a way you can use to stand. How do you dispose your body standing? Something I have just worked into my practices.

Sometimes I’ll kind of sway a little bit back, making sure I’m placing all the weight on one leg for, say, 5 breaths, weight on equal on both legs for 5 breaths, weight on the other leg for 5 breaths, and kind of shifting back and forth in, in this kind of flow so that the body doesn’t get overtired. Standing in one spot’s a little odd for a long period of time. We’re not totally used to doing that without just kind of pacing slightly.

Um, walking, again, as I mentioned last week, you know, Joseph Goldstein thinks that walking is probably one of the easiest ways to bring meditative practice into our everyday experience. And it can be as simple as just doing walking enough that when you get up and move to another place, You’re paying attention to the foot movement on the ground. You’re getting into that, even if it’s just, I’m going to go walk and get myself a cup of water.

I’m going to walk and go make a coffee and stand making the coffee and walk back to where I need to be. Um, I read about a practice that I used for a little while where you tried to be aware every time you walked through a door portal. And just that was your remembrance check-in was I’ve walked through a door.

Oh, was I aware that I just walked through a door just now? Was I aware I walked through the next door? And having that be a way of checking in when you’re just walking at your office from getting up from your desk and going to the bathroom and coming back or something similar. And then lying down. And there’s a certain amount of practice where you may be in bed and unable to fall asleep.

You may have woken up. You’re trying to get back to sleep. Some cases the mo— the body can just be so full of restless energy, um, that it can feel very nice to just lie on the ground.

And when there’s that much energy, I find it very unlikely that I’m gonna go to sleep. Um, so there’s times where, you know, you’re kind of sitting there on your cushion or something and body’s just kind of buzzing. It’s an interesting time to just say, okay, I’m gonna try lying on the ground right now.

Just kind of letting the body lay there. Now obviously if you’re in the kind of state I described sitting in the chair, very slothful, and then you lie on the ground, not the best combination of energy and posture. So something to consider.

So the elements, getting back into some of these other topics in Satipatthana, the elements practice is what I did some guidance on tonight. I don’t know how many people tried to follow along with that, but that’s effectively what it is. And it, you know, it, it sounds a little odd.

It’s like, okay, we’re going to do like earth, air, fire, and water with the body, and how do you do that? It sounds very, very, very foreign to our Western mind, um, but I’ve enjoyed it quite a bit, this practice. I don’t always use it as a sitting practice, but it, it’s still a way of connecting with the direct experience of the body, but basically recategorizing those experiences, recategorizing what we are feeling in the body into this other set of categories. And to me, the benefit of that comes from mixing up our associations with what these things are without getting away from the body feeling anything different.

The difference in how we connect with that experience. And so again, you know, there’s earth, there’s this feeling of solidity, there’s the feeling of the body on the ground, how the body is connecting with the ground, the— this weight of the body. The flow of temperature.

You can feel different parts of your body are hot, different parts of your body are cold. Pain can kind of fit into that. Digestion can fit into that.

Um, there’s the flow of air, flow of breath in the body, the flow of air across the body, and then the feeling of liquids, the body sweating, saliva in the body, the flow of blood. Pulsing of the heart. And so you can see how this kind of can connect with this parts of the body that we talked about last week.

It’s just taking those and categorizing them in a different way. And for me, I get the most benefit out of this when I’m walking outside. Um, if you’re walking outside and, and there’s— I had a particularly good practice one time.

We had retreat at the Villa de Mattel. The Villa de Mattel has a grass labyrinth. And you can take your shoes off and walk in the grass labyrinth.

And doing that in the morning, you know, you’re feeling your feet on the earth, you’re feeling the wetness of the dew of the grass on the feet, feeling the flow of the breeze blowing, the wind blowing against the body, the breath in the body, the heat of the sun in the morning, the coldness of the dew and your feet on the ground. Body sweating, the dew on the feet, you know, there, there’s, you’re getting all of these different elements going, but noticing them as sensations in the body. And kind of, it, it gives your mind quite a lot to occupy it as well.

There, there’s, there’s a lot of flow that can be going on with the body in this way. And What I’ve really gotten in touch with doing the practice with the elements is that it takes you out of your identification with this body as your body. These things start to feel a little more abstract while still paying attention to the actual sensation.

It’s not like I’m envisioning or imagining this idea of water. I’m feeling the liquid in my mouth. I’m feeling the liquid on my feet.

Feeling the sweat, but I’m— it’s this, it’s taking that and thinking of it and observing it as liquid. There’s liquid outside the body, there’s liquid in the body, there’s solidity of the ground, there’s solidity of the body, there’s temperature. You know, some ways we are a flow of thermodynamics with everything around us.

And, you know, the breeze, the air that’s blowing across us, it’s the same air that’s coming in and coming out. So the last practice that they mention in the Satipatthana Sutta is on mindfulness of the body, is this disintegration of the body and being mindful of the body’s decay. And this is a visualization process.

So we, we are now getting even further away from kind of a direct feeling of the body, but more an imagining of the body. And if there’s one of these practices I might encourage people, you know, if you don’t feel like you want to ever try this, that’s fine. Bhikkhu Analayo, one of the, he’s a great Buddhist scholar and practitioner monk.

He describes this practice as being like a very fast sports car that you can, you can really figure out some very interesting stuff in terms of impermanence, not-self, um, dissatisfaction with the body. But also like a very fast sports car, you can very easily wrap it around a pole. You have a question? Batting a fly.

And so it’s just something to be aware of. And the way, you know, the monastics would practice this, and it, and in the sutta, it really, again, like the parts of the body that we described last week, it really goes part by part through after the body dies, what happens to the body. In very, very direct language.

And the monks and monastics would— monks and nuns would sit in these charnel grounds. In ancient India, you would just kind of bring the body out, let the body sit there. Body would decay and decompose, and you could go and bury the bones or cremate what’s left.

And you would sit there with these bodies and In Asia, in some cases, it’s, it’s sort of like donating your body to science. Some ways here, like, you could donate your body to be an object of meditation after your death if you so choose. And that’s a, a way of giving back, giving your, your body as a way for practice.

Many monasteries will have like a skeleton in the corner of the sitting hall here. Is something as a kind of memento mori is where this kind of concept comes from. And I have to say, so in architecture school, one of my projects that we had one semester was to design a cemetery.

And as part of designing that cemetery, and it was cemetery for families who don’t have the money or people who— people who don’t have the money to be buried, people who may not have any family to be buried, people who they may not even know who they are. And there are cemeteries like this in every county and city across the United States. And they— we did a lot of research on this as part of our, our school curriculum was to do quite a bit of research as part of this.

We ended up going and looking at the pictures that the counties and cities post online of these bodies. To help families identify them. And again, you hide your discretion advisement on these things.

This is— these are not pretty images. These are, these are very, very intense images of the body and what happens to a body, because there’s a lot of identification with these bodies. And the fact, the way I found this the most, I think the right word, simple to practice, a brief, is abbreviating it down to thinking of the body as a skeleton.

Most of us had some class in school where there was like this little plastic skeleton that was hung up and teacher talked about the different bones of the body. And the way this practice works is taking that image, visualizing that, and repeating this kind of as a little mantra: this body will be like that body. It’s not exempt from that fate.

And being aware, you know, this body has bones in the hands. These bones of the hands will be like those bones. And then eventually the— and, and being aware of that in kind of a skeletal form is probably the most, most simple and palatable and direct way of working in it, if that’s something that you choose.

But again, the sports car, don’t wrap it around the pole. There’s a significant focus on impermanence with it, and again, we’re getting kind of outside of more of a direct touching of the sensations of the body. So again, you know, there’s many ways of practicing with body.

That’s probably, you know, there’s at least 7, I think, in the sutta itself. And they kind of, again, run that gambit from as simple as the breath to as complicated as a 10-part visualization of the body. Okay.

You know, quite the spectrum there, and each of them can relate at different points to where we are in our practice, what we want to achieve with the practice, if we want to look for something specific, and different ones appeal to each of our different personalities. Um, and so during your day-to-day life, I would encourage if you feel like you’re out of touch, out of sequence, just notice what the body’s doing right then. As simple as that.

Just notice if the body’s sitting, notice it’s sitting. There’s feet on the floor, notice the feet on the floor. Body’s breathing, notice it breathing.

You know, being in contact with this body that’s always here and now is a really good way to help refresh our practice over and over again. Thank you all for your attention, mind attention, listening to this about the different parts of the body.