REPLAY: Mindfulness of the Body

First published on January 23, 2023, this is the second talk in a replay of a series of four mindfulness talks by Don Thompson.  There will be two more talks in this series over the next two weeks: Mindfulness of Emotions and Mindfulness of Thoughts.

This mindfulness session is a transformative odyssey into the essence of our physical being, as we uncover the silent wisdom of our bodies with the profound insights of Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön. Within the folds of modern life, we often lose touch with the vibrant sensations that make us feel truly alive. This episode unfurls the practices that can reignite those sensations, guiding you through mindful techniques like body scans and using breath as an anchor. Experience a revival of intuition and sensory awareness as we embrace an integrated existence, free from the societal-induced mind-body split. Dive into the healing waters of acceptance, leaving the shores of control, and emerge with a renewed sense of aliveness and presence.

Feel the weight of daily life dissolve in our guided meditation chapter, a sanctuary of centeredness and balance. As I lead you through a body scan, each breath will anchor you deeper into a state of mindful presence, helping you to label and explore bodily sensations with a gentle curiosity. This meditative journey promises to leave you more attuned to the subtle whispers of your body, carrying you towards a life enriched with sensitivity and presence. With each moment spent in this practice, you reconnect with the often-forgotten language of your physical self, opening doors to a world where every sensation is a beacon guiding you back to your center.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:06

This is our second talk in our Introduction to Mindfulness Meditation class, and this particular talk will discuss mindfulness of the body and what that means, and subsequent to the talk, we're going to have a guided meditation involving what's called a body scan. And the body scan is basically going through the body, being aware of sensations in the body, in order to acclimate ourself to feelings in the body and to, in a sense, reintroduce ourselves to sensations in the body. Unless you've already been doing some kind of a mindfulness body scan practice, in that case, this will be, you know, something that you've already done, and perhaps what I talk about here can complement or enhance what you're already doing. If you're new to this, then this will be new information and, I think, quite beneficial and quite interesting, a great technique and it has some really good outcomes. So I'd like to describe, do you know, just a little bit of an outline of what we're going to talk about here, and the first thing I'd like to discuss is what I'll call the Western approach to the body.

Speaker 1: 1:30

Now, the Western approach I'm using the West is sort of a metaphor. Western culture, meaning the United States, europe, canada is sort of a metaphor for certain mentality, because the Western culture, you might say, permeates the entire world nowadays, in modern societies, throughout the traditional, older cultures of the East, including India and China and Japan and so on, but the Western again, I'm talking about Western cultures. It's sort of a metaphor, but it really has to do with modern cultures in the last few hundred years and I'll get into what I mean by that in a second. But basically, what this Western attitude has created is problems related to dissociation from the body, and I'll describe what dissociation from the body means and what kind of impacts or what are the symptoms of dissociation from the body, and I'll describe that. And then after that, we'll get into tools, mindful tools, that you can use to become more embodied, to have a sense of embodied presence, and a sense of embodied presence allows you to feel more alive and to intuit more, to open up to the wisdom of the body, and we'll get into more of that in a little bit. And again, there's many benefits to this, as I just mentioned. Those were some of the benefits and frankly, it just allows you a sense of full body awareness, you might say, as you get into these techniques related to mindfulness of the body and you go through them and you use them, I think you'll find them quite beneficial, and they really do create a sense of being more alive in the body, which is a really great thing.

Speaker 1: 3:34

I'm going to go ahead and quote from Pema Children, who is a Buddhist nun, a wonderful Buddhist nun, and the quote is as follows it is also helpful to realize that this very body that we have, that is sitting here right now, with its aches and its pleasures, is exactly what we need to be fully human, fully awake, fully alive. That's what Pema Children says, and what she means by that, I feel, is that she's really speaking to the body being a seat of awareness for us. Without the body, we don't have awareness in the world. That may sound like stating the obvious, but in reality we need to, I believe, come to a sense of respect for the body. A lot of times in meditation, the idea seems to be to transcend the body, to go into a state of transcendence that's almost like an altered state, you might say. So you're trying to move out of the body into some altered state. What the proposition is here is that you can't really do that. If that was your goal and maybe it's a good goal but if that was your goal in meditation. The idea is that you really need to feel good about what you're transcending first. If you don't feel good about what you're transcending, it's a little bit of a tough thing to do to transcend what you don't like. So what? The idea here is that we learn to respect the body, we learn to like the body and accept the body as it is in the present moment, and that's really alluded to, or show that, in the body scan and how that can occur.

Speaker 1: 5:35

As I mentioned before, there's Western attitudes towards the body, modern attitudes which are, I think and psychologists think, are rather unhealthy, and a lot of this has to do with a sort of mind-body split. I mean, really the mind, the head, is thought of as the control tower for the rest of the body. And this control tower, this top-down approach you might say to the body, creates issues related to suppression and repression for one, but also just a sense of being out of touch or dissociated, again with bodily sensations. This is really exacerbated by patriarchal attitudes in modern society. But anyway, back to industrialization for a second. Modernization has really seen the earth as a vehicle for our own gain and has attempted to manipulate the earth towards certain ends and really paved over the natural world, with an urban landscape to a large extent, where a lot of people live that is really separate from nature. There really isn't a sense of nature anymore in these urban arenas or virtual arenas meaning, you know, computer screens, cell phones and so forth. So these virtual lives and these virtual realities and this industrialized urban reality really exacerbate the association from the body and all of this.

Speaker 1: 7:21

Really, in a sense it comes out of a sort of a patriarchal attitude, meaning this what I mean, I don't mean so much male-female, as much as top-down, as looking at things as needing to be controlled and needing to be manipulated and wielded into something that you want, that's something that's beneficial in your mind. I'm not saying that the outcomes of all this are bad, because really the intention of industrialization, you might say, was to create abundance, alleviate poverty. A lot of good things, you might say, came out of industrialization, but there were unintended consequences, certainly, and one of those is dissociation from the body or this sort of top-down approach which again leads to issues of suppression and repression, psychological issues related to suppression, pushing away or pushing out negative emotions, negative thoughts, suppressing them, or repression, really unconsciously, really without thinking about it, you're repressing negativity in the body and really holding negativity in your body in a way that really can be quite unhealthy, and so what we're trying to do with embodied awareness is to bring a sense of awareness back to the body. So it's a much healthier attitude towards the body, and it happens by being more mindful of the body, being more mindful of the bodily sensations and, in the present moment, in the here and now, looking at the body as it exists and accepting the feelings of the body as they are. I wanted to talk a little bit about symbolism related to this sort of patriarchal attitude, this top-down attitude, and how that has been dealt with in ancient cultures and older cultures in terms of attempting to strike a balance.

Speaker 1: 9:27

Now, I'm not saying that these ancient cultures were perfect by any means, and many of them had a horrible attitude towards women, but in some of their symbols, I think that there was some of an indication of an attempt or a desire to have balance between this you might say top-down approach, or this sort of control tower approach with a different approach, and here we see the star of David, and the star of David as one example of a symbol. This symbol, by the way, the star of David also exists in India. This exists in something called the Sri Yantra, which the Sri Yantra, by the way, is a symbol used, or it's used, in meditation. You use it as a point of focus. We're not going to be using any Yantras as a point of focus in our class, but I do want to make you aware of it because, really, what the star of David and the Yantra are alluding to is a balance between the masculine A the apex, you might say and the feminine V, you might say the valley, the valley, the feminine, the unconscious, the chaotic, whatever diversity. All of these things are alluded to by the V. The A is the mountain, it's the apex, it's the singularity of consciousness as opposed to the diversity of consciousness, and the dot in the middle means that that's the point of balance, that's the heart, that's the compassion. Really that's what that symbolizes. So, by meditating on these geometries of balance, you can rebalance your energies in your body. That's the idea, and the same thing we do with having the breath as an anchor or having any bodily anchor or being aware of the bodily sensations, is we're rebalancing the energies in the body from this top-down approach to a more full body awareness and presence, which is a really great thing and has a lot of good outcomes.

Speaker 1: 11:32

So some of the negative outcomes of dissociation can include things like fatigue, anxiety. Living in a virtual life, as I mentioned, having escape mechanisms and addictions. So it takes a lot of energy really to have a top-down approach To sort of will these things out of your consciousness is very it takes a lot of energy to do that and it causes fatigue. Anxiety arises out of a sense of well, this imbalance is really unhealthy. You know there's something wrong, there's something not quite right and we feel this and we have anxiety related to it.

Speaker 1: 12:18

Virtual lives, really we all know what that means. Of course it just means living in a computer world, living in a screen, not really engaging with life directly, but rather living it virtually. There could be said to be some benefits to living virtually. I mean it's a lot easier on the environment, you might say. Because we live virtually, we have less of an impact on the environment and that can be a good thing. But on the other hand, psychologically or in terms of consciousness, if we're using those virtual realities as a way to escape, as an addiction, well, that can be a bad thing.

Speaker 1: 12:58

So what we need to do is just realize and understand sometimes that that can be the case and what we need to do is try to be aware of it and work with the sensations in our body through techniques of embodiment or tools of embodiment, which I'll get to in a second. And those tools of embodiment help us to reacclimate two sensations in the body in a healthy way, so that we become more alive, so that we become more sensitive and we have less of a need for addictions, whether that's alcohol or some kind of drugs or you know. Even a horrible example, of course, is the opioid crisis. That's a horrible example of an escape mechanism. So we want to move away from that. We want to become more embodied so that we don't have to do that, we don't need those addictions so much. Some of the tools for embodiment this would include techniques that we've already discussed, like using the breath as an anchor. That's a great tool for embodiment, which we went over in the initial meditation for the rain practice. Another one is the body scan, which we're going to be going over in a few minutes here. What the body scan is and how you do it, what the technique is, what we'll show you in the guided meditation.

Speaker 1: 14:28

Some level of inquiry is also useful, but just keep in mind that inquiry in this case doesn't mean that you've got some big intellectual analysis. It's not what it means. It just means being aware of the sensations in the body and asking the fundamental question well, what is happening in my body and can I be with it? That's really what Tara Brock and Jack Cornfield allude to in their practice is questioning these sensations and asking yourself again what is happening in my body and can I be with it, and simply going through that exercise is a form of inquiry and can be very beneficial in terms of just bringing bodily sensations back to what Tara Brock would call above the line, and we'll get into that in more in the mindfulness of emotions.

Speaker 1: 15:22

But basically what we're doing is we're bringing the unconscious, what we haven't been conscious of, what we've been suppressing perhaps, or even repressed issues. We bring them to the conscious. We bring them to the conscious in order to become aware of them, and simply by scanning through the body and being aware of sensations we can become aware of things that we really were probably unconscious of or weren't really dealing with, and by simply becoming aware of them. It helps to reactivate ourselves to the body and has some very, very beneficial outcomes. Some of those would include this is straight from Tara Brock and Jack Cornfield as well and psychologists and Buddhist psychologists.

Speaker 1: 16:17

What they feel the benefits are would be that we come to the wisdom of the body, come back to the wisdom of the body, meaning that we understand the intuition that comes from the body. Meaning that we become more sensitive to the body and can actually feel through the heart or through the gut, the heart being a sense of compassion and love, the gut being our sense of volition and power. We get a gut sense again. We trust our gut in terms of what our decisions are going to be. We get more and more intuitive and we use the body's wisdom in this way to become more in touch with our body and to be able to return to that wisdom.

Speaker 1: 17:07

That's one benefit of becoming more acclimated to our body through techniques like the breath and the body scan and those mindfulness techniques, and it allows us really to live more fully. We live more fully and we have a better respect for nature. By living more fully, we are able to look at reality without false concepts. We're able to look at reality, you might say directly, without being obscured by the stories that we're telling ourselves. We're able to see reality more directly so by using techniques of mindfulness, it opens us back up to the wisdom of the body, to our intuition, to this sense of being in a full body, awareness which makes us feel more alive and present when we're in nature. We are able to enjoy nature more fully and, in general, we're able to enjoy our lives more fully. Life becomes literally more vibrant for us. It becomes more vibrant in the sense that you're able to notice things like the wind through the trees or light on the leaves or the changes of color in the sunset. I'm not saying we don't see those things now, but it just brings us into a heightened, a higher sense of these things and makes us more sensitive to them.

Speaker 1: 18:44

In a way I'll get into this a little bit in the last talk as well it brings us back to the consciousness of the poet, of the poet stance. The way that Vivian Gornick says it is that she says you become the instrument of your own illumination, the body being the instrument, the body being the instrument of your illumination, you become the instrument of your own illumination. You don't need the addiction to get the illumination. You don't need the transcendent reality that you're trying to get to outside of the body for that realization. What you need, rather, or what you attain, is the embodied sense of presence, which allows you to become the instrument, through your body, of your own illumination. That's a really wonderful outcome from these mindfulness practices.

Speaker 1: 19:44

Let's go ahead and jump into the guided meditation, which includes the body skin. Get right into it. Just keep in mind that there will be some gaps. Just wait until the bell rings at the end, and that's when the meditation ends. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure talking to you about mindfulness of the body, and now we'll move into our guided meditation. Thanks so much.

Speaker 1: 20:22

So this meditation will be related to the body and a body scan. Just a quick note as I mentioned before, there will be some long pauses in this meditation, so even up to a minute. So don't stop unless you hear the bell ring. The bell ringing at the end is the indication that we finished our session. That's when we want to stop. So, anyway, feel free to find a comfortable seated position, one that allows you to be relaxed yet alert. You can go ahead and close your eyes, if you'd like.

Speaker 1: 21:08

We want to start by just feeling a simple sense of presence. So I invite you to go ahead and scan through your body, just noticing any obvious areas of tension in your body and just relaxing those areas, just feeling all of the tension be released from the body, from those areas of tension. You might take a few deep breaths, slow inhales, slow exhales, allowing the breath, however, to be natural. So let's do that, let's do three breaths. So now let's go ahead and bring our attention to where we most easily feel the breath. Where is it that you sense it the most? Where is it the most pleasurable? And you just want to be able to use the breath as an anchor, as a home base, something to return to when your mind starts to wander. If you find yourself distracted, you can always bring yourself back to your anchor. Now, if the breath is not a good anchor for you, if it's not comfortable for you, you might try something else, like, for example, you can just rest your hands on your thighs and you can bring your attention back to your hands on your thighs and the feeling of your hands resting there, and that can be your anchor as well if the breath is not comfortable for you. So if the breath is comfortable for you, feel free to use that.

Speaker 1: 23:18

But now, with a relaxed interest and attention, what we want to do is discover the sensations of the breath and what your chosen anchor feels like. What does it feel like and are you noticing anything in particular that's strong, that's calling your attention in a strong fashion. So what you want to do is go ahead and allow yourself to breathe naturally and let the breath now receive to the background and instead let's bring an interested and kind attention to sensations in the body. What do those sensations feel like? So you might be aware of aches and pains, you might be aware of aching or twisting or something pleasant or unpleasant. Just scan the body and notice where those sensations are. Try to fully attend to them, try to give your full attention to them and you might notice you know, as you bring your attention to them, what happens. I mean, do they dissipate? Sometimes they will. Sometimes, once you bring your attention to something, it goes away or it might persist, and you want to notice that as well.

Speaker 1: 25:00

You also want to, you know, be aware of what is the word that arises as you do your scanning and you feel these sensations in your body, what is it named for you? And you can go ahead and, you know, be proactive about it. Go ahead and label, as we did in our rain practice. Go ahead and label what it is that you're feeling. Go ahead and name it and you can use just a small bit of your attention on the labeling process. You don't want to become obsessed with labeling and spend too much time doing that, but really you want to stay primarily focused and aware of what the sensation is and what it feels like and just use a little bit of your mental processes to label the sensation. You want to offer a calm and steady attention to this process.

Speaker 1: 26:06

So if, during this time, if strong sensations call your attention, then what's going to happen is your primary anchor breathing, for example is going to recede and what you want to do to replace that anchor then is to bring this kind and gentle attention to whatever feeling is arising in the body, naming what you notice and just offering your presence to it. Well, what I mean by offering your presence is we are in the present moment, we are here and now. There's no future yet. There's nothing in the past, it's gone. We're in the present moment, offer this sensation or sensations in your body, this feeling of presence, of being here right now with these feelings. If nothing strong is calling your attention, then you know it's okay just to go ahead and just continue resting with your anchor, rest with the breath, rest with your hands on your thighs, whatever it is you've chosen to be your particular anchor. So let's go ahead and do that. Just rest in the present moment in the sense of presence with these body sensations or with your anchor.

Speaker 1: 28:46

So now, unless you're already resting with your anchor, your chosen anchor breath or hands on thighs or whatever let's go ahead and bring your anchor back to the foreground in terms of your attention. So go ahead and bring your breath If you're using that as an anchor to the foreground, or whatever your anchor is. Now, the idea here is that we're learning to be centered and balanced and present for the breath and for sensations in the body. We just want to be aware of them, we want to allow them, we want to be present with them. We're getting back in touch with our body, we're getting back in touch with sensations in the body and this is going to change all the time. You know it's going to change. But this process as you practice it, you become more and more aware of sensations in the body.

Speaker 1: 29:50

Now let's go ahead and do a little bit of additional scanning. Go ahead and bring your attention to the top of your head and just notice sensations in the scalp. And then go ahead and bring your attention down the back of your neck. Go ahead and bring it to your face, to your jaw, and just notice your neck and your throat and let them soften, relax, let those areas soften. So notice your shoulders and arms and just feel any sensations in your shoulders and arms and neck and just let it all soften and relax. You want to notice any tightness and changes in temperature. You really should, you know, be sensitive to those things. You want to notice the fabric on your clothing. How does that feel? How does that feel against your skin? So, after bringing that kind of attention to your body, to those sensations, let's go ahead and move to the upper back and the lower back. Let's feel the sensations there. So wherever you're holding tension, just let it go.

Speaker 1: 31:46

Let's continue the scan down through the abdomen, down through the legs, your thighs, your knees, your shin, your calves. Just continue the scan downward through the body, noticing any sensations, any sense of tension, any sense of weight. What does all this feel like? Just to be aware of it In the present moment. What does it feel like? And as we're doing this, we just want to continue to breathe, to use our anchor, to be aware of our anchor, the breath, or hands on the thighs or whatever is your chosen anchor Just to be aware and to stay with it in the present moment, to breathe with it, to breathe with these sensations in the body. You want to feel it all the way down to your toes. Let's just stay with that for a while, breathing with it, breathing with it, breathing with it, Breathing with it, breathing with it.

Speaker 1: 34:46

So, as we close out the meditation, let's just continue to breathe with this whole body, feeling the sensation of whole body awareness, and you might feel some gratitude to your body. You know your body might cause you some problems, but it's still there. The heart's still beating, you're still alive. It can't be so bad if that's all true. So to offer a little bit of gratitude to your body can be a good thing. It gets back to respecting the body, feeling good about the body. The body is the seat of your awareness. The body is a good thing. We want to treat it well and by reconnecting with the sensations of the body, with the feelings in the body, we're admitting and allowing the body's wisdom to guide us, to show us, to teach us, because the body is our natural wisdom and our natural wisdom can be very helpful in many ways, in many circumstances. So thank you for listening and we'll go ahead and close out this guided meditation and we'll move on to the next session, next week. Thanks so much, bell BELL.