Transcription
So this morning I would like to offer a few avenues of possibility for working with the body in our life, in our meditative life; how we can work with the body. (Should probably actually just say: do forgive me if I'm a little less energetic than usual. I've got a bit of some kind of illness I'm struggling to shake off, so forgive me.) There are actually many possible approaches to insight meditation, and they're all valid. One of the favourite ways the Buddha had of speaking about it was to develop some degree of calmness, and then, he said, "Then take up one's theme." So take up one's theme. Typically a meditator works with the breath, or the mettā practice, some practice to still the mind, to develop a kind of anchor for consciousness, develop some degree of calmness, and then uses that to venture out in a deliberate way, to explore certain themes, certain areas of experience.
So many of you will be doing just this, using the breath as an anchor and venturing out. Sometimes that venturing out is because something is calling to the attention. It's very insistent on consciousness. And so one leaves the breath or leaves the mettā practice or whatever it is one is using as an anchor and goes out to explore something else, because it's calling, because it's pulling on the consciousness. There's also another way which is more deliberate: develop the calmness and then deliberately explore certain areas, certain themes. When the Buddha talks about that, he talks about many themes to explore. Four of them are the four foundations of mindfulness. We'll be going over this. So the first one is what I want to talk about today: the body, mindfulness of the body, working with the body.
Why these four foundations of mindfulness (the body, the feelings, the mind and the heart, and the teachings, the qualities of mind)? Why? Why is the Buddha saying pay particular attention to that? Part of it is because these are areas, these are the very areas, where we tend to struggle, where we tend to suffer. We get into a wrong relationship with these particular areas, and suffering is born of that. So we can see in relation to our body, we can ask ourself -- it's a very important, real question to ask ourselves -- how much am I fighting my body? So generally speaking, over one's life, but also at any moment, how much am I fighting my body? The way it looks, the way it appears -- am I okay with that? Deeply, genuinely? The way it feels? Am I fighting the way my body feels? When there's discomfort, when there's pain, am I fighting with it? And the process of ageing and all that that brings in the way we appear and the way we feel, am I fighting it? And death. This body dies.
On one level, of course, our body is, we could say, our home for this life. Everything we experience is kind of centred around this body. It's our home. Are we taking care of our relationship with that? In a way, it has to be right, because we carry it around with us all the time. So what is the relationship with the body, generally speaking or at any time? Is it a relationship of connection? Am I connecting with the body or am I disconnected? Sometimes these are not easy questions. Am I connected or am I disconnected? Is there aversion or is there respect? Is there a sense of wonder, of awe even, at this miracle of a body? Is there care? Are we really, genuinely, deeply caring for our body? Is there love running through that relationship, kindness, or are we putting pressure on our body (in all the kinds of ways that that's possible -- myriad ways it's possible for a human being to put a very unkind pressure on the body)? Are we relating to the actuality of the body, or are we relating to the image of how we think it should be or how we want it to be in the eyes of others?
There's a beautiful quote from Tsongkhapa. Some of you will know he's a fourteenth century -- one of the great Tibetan yogis and teachers. He says:
The human body, at peace with itself,
Is more precious than the rarest gem.
Cherish your body -- it is yours this one time only.
The human form is won with difficulty,
It is easy to lose.
All worldly things are brief,
Like lightning in the sky;
This life you must know
As a tiny splash of a raindrop;
A thing of beauty that disappears
Even as it comes into being.
Therefore set your goal;
And make use of every day and night
To attain it.
How can we come into a healthy, a kind, a liberated relationship with the body? The Buddha talks a lot about this. The first piece of it is, he says, "See the body in the body." It's a curious phrase. You can also translate it as "See the body as the body." So typically, we don't see the body in the body. We see self-view in the body, or self-worth in the body, or in the body of another: "A bit fat ..." or whatever it is. We judge another and we judge ourselves. We see the self-view and the self-worth, and we start comparing. We see self in the body, and not body in the body. We don't see body as body.
So right off the bat, the Buddha is saying, can we move into a mode of awareness, mindfulness, that sees body as body? That's the foundation of our mindfulness practice. And the more we can begin to do that, the more there is a sense of relief. How much suffering in this life comes from not seeing body as body, but from seeing self-worth in the body, caught up in this comparing and judging? Our very view of ourselves is wrapped up in the image we have of our body in relation to some other images. And the huge relief of just putting that down and practising a mode of seeing that's different -- seeing the body in the body.
There are other reasons, of course, why mindfulness of the body is the first foundation of mindfulness. It's very important. The body is also a kind of mirror. It's a mirror for the mind and the heart. And so we can see in practice how our emotions, our thoughts, our intentions, are all actually reflected in the body -- some of them very clearly, some of them very subtly. We can begin to be sensitive to that. Actually, I think meditation is very physical in this sense. Something about it's very grounded in the body. It's very connected with the body. Everything is reflected there.
Our emotions are reflected in the body, and we can see this certainly with anger or fear, how we feel that -- all emotions. And there's a lot of talk these days about how emotions affect the body. There's definitely some truth in that. But, just a slight aside, how this can be taken up in certain New Age philosophies, etc., as a kind of unquestioned assumption -- particularly if people have illnesses which Western medicine hasn't yet found a cure for or solved. In come all the theories: "Oh, you're repressing your da-da-da-da-da emotion." And maybe there's some truth to that, but how much it can go over the top. And certainly people who suffer from chronic illnesses know how much blame there can be. They end up blaming themselves: "What am I not opening to? Why am I so repressed?", etc. So please, I think we should all be very careful in this area.
[10:07] Certainly the emotions affect the body. But likewise, and this is very common in Dharma, it works the other way. The body affects the emotions. You can see this if you just play with the breath a little bit, get the breath to really be long or very subtle and smooth, how the emotions are affected by it. It's a two-way causal pathway. Sometimes when we're very low energy in the body, that's a soil for certain negative emotions, for certain difficult emotions. When we have low physical energy, how much we are prey then to feelings of depression or grief or irritability or whatever it is. This can cycle. So something like grief -- and it may be a genuine grief that's there -- it's actually quite tiring. Grief is a very tiring feeling. The energy, the physical energy, gets low, and then we're prey to more grief, and it just spins its wheels like that. So causality often works two ways, and not to get too fixed on a very, in a way, naïve notion of cause and effect. Anyway.
The Buddha outlines many, many possibilities, possible meditations for working with the body. The most common one in insight meditation is this bare attention. So that's b-a-r-e, not b-e-a-r. [laughter] Bare attention to the experiences, the sensations of the body. I'm sure many of you are familiar. What it means is coming into as direct, naked as possible contact with the actual experience of bodily life. What does it actually feel like? Not my images, not the veil of concepts and conceptions and preconceived ideas. What does it actually feel, to touch the life of the body directly? There's huge emphasis on that as the basis. And this does give a real grounding to the life and to our sense of practice, and also very much a foundation for exploring, of course, the body, but also the mind and the heart.
So what do we begin to see when we turn this bare attention to explore the body? What begins to reveal itself? A whole world begins to open up. We feel heat, warmth, cold. Very direct, very simple, very naked. Tingling, vibrating, pressure in certain areas, lightness, movements of energy, sense of contraction, expansion, a sense of fluidity, a sense of space. All this in the bare attention to the life of the body. The more we pay attention on this level to the life of the body, the more the life of the body, in a way, comes alive for us. It comes alive. And of course, when we pay attention to the body, there are areas that are lacking in sensation, we can't feel anything, they're a bit numb. Of course. We don't have to pathologize that, and just because there's no sensation in a certain area it means we're repressed or something-something; we don't have to go there. The more we pay attention, the more that the body becomes alive. And if a certain area feels like there's no sensation or it's numb or whatever, just how does it feel there? How does that feel? Just a gentle attention brings life to the sense of the body.
And we can become extremely sensitive with all this, and the body a very sensitive tool of response, really. So picking out -- any sound, actually, can be felt reverberating through the body. Certainly when the rooks are going, you can sometimes feel it's just ricocheting in the body, in the stillness. But actually any sound. We can develop this sensitivity.
Often, of course, when we come to meditation practice, retreat, what we encounter in the sitting and the walking, sitting and walking, standing, sitting, walking, etc., is difficult body sensations, pain, discomfort. So I want to say a little bit about working with difficult body sensations. First thing to say is it's not an endurance test. There are no medals given out for meditative machismo or whatever. It's just not about that. Can we explore, with kindness, the difficult aspects of having a body? Because to have a body, to be human, means that at times we will have discomfort, we will have pain. No question about it. It's part of life. It's part of having a body. Are we willing to explore that and not just react to pain as something we need to flee from? Can we explore our edges in practice? And being willing to do that, with kindness, with curiosity, and when it's too much, to change the posture. Just to change, slowly, mindfully. That's part of the meditation, just to realize: how does it feel when it was uncomfortable, painful, and one changes slowly, and there's the relief, and there's the change of sensations? All that in mindfulness.
So how can we explore the difficult there? First thing, we often notice, when there are difficult sensations in the body, say in the hips or the knees or the back, wherever it is, what we notice very often is the rest of the body tensing and recoiling. We can actually pick up in the body awareness this resistance and tension to the pain. So the first port of call is to see if we can just relax the rest of the body, just as much as we can. Just can it be relaxed a little? Is it then possible to give mindfulness to the discomfort and go underneath the label? This bare attention, underneath the label of pain. So pain is a word that we slap onto things and then we run away, often. Can we go underneath that label and see what's there? Itching is quite a good one, an interesting one. Usually we're not going to die of an itch. It's quite a curious thing, an itch. What is an itch? Do we hang out long enough and actually put the awareness -- "what is that?" It's a very odd thing. Can we explore that? The tendency is just to want to scratch it and get rid of it. What if we don't, and just explore what the actual experience of an itch is?
Working with discomfort and pain, can we notice its edges? Are they very abrupt edges, or does the pain kind of taper off gradually over an area in the body? To remind ourselves that pain, it can, when it's very strong, feel like it takes up the whole of our experience. But check -- there are probably some areas of the body that are not in pain. If your knee hurts and it seems to be taking up everything, check out your nose or the ears. Are they okay? Your hands are often quite a safe area. Just to remind oneself it's not everything. When we're working with pain, we can work with the awareness in a very microscopic way, so literally putting the painful sensations under a microscope, really diving the attention in there to see the fabric, the very fabric of the experience. Get as close as we can, as detailed as we can. That's one mode of using the awareness, very, very helpful, can be.
[18:42] Another mode, equally helpful, is, in a sense, the opposite. It's as if we're looking at experience under a wide-angle lens, really opening up to a very spacious sense of awareness. Within that space, the pain in the body is just one part of the space. It's not taking up everything. In a way, it relativizes it a little bit. Spacious awareness can be very helpful also because within that space, within that wider space, we can begin to become sensitive to the deeper aspects of our relationship with the pain. Generally when there's pain, there's aversion -- want to get rid of it, want it to go away, want to flee it, want to push it away. Aversion. Something about that spaciousness begins to reveal the aversion in all its varying levels of subtlety. We can begin to work with it, and just relax the aversion, just relax the aversion, relax the aversion, relax that pushing away. Very, very profound avenue of practice.
Okay. So there's working with difficulty and pain, and that's very much a part of what it is to be a human being and, as many of you know, it's very much a part of what it is to be a meditator. But actually, there is also pleasant sensation in the body. There is comfort in the body. This is actually very important to stress this. I'm going to talk about it a little bit. When it's there, if it's there, to enjoy it. Okay? To enjoy it. To open to it. To explore it. Usually we hear, "Oh, don't go near that, because you might get attached" or whatever. I say enjoy it, open to it, explore it.
We can actually learn to feel, we can learn to feel, more often, comfort, well-being, peace, pleasure in the body. We can learn to feel that. Certainly I feel there's a real place for qigong and yoga and whatever other kind of -- whatever helps for us to learn to feel that comfort and well-being and pleasure in the body. So I'm on another avenue now, and not all of you will want to pick this up this retreat, but maybe just hear it and file it away, and for others it will be more relevant for this retreat. But this is important. We can learn to feel pleasure in the body, deep comfort, deep sense of well-being. It's a skill and we can learn it.
Sometimes we wonder, why are we so alienated so much of the time from our body? Part of it is because we haven't learnt to develop this sense of deep comfort in the body, so it's not a place we actually want to go much. We go out for the sense of comfort. Or to more superficial sources of comfort. Again, the opposite is also true, this mutual causality: oftentimes it's the very disconnection and alienation from the body that prevents us developing a sense of well-being in the body. So some of you will be doing the mettā practice, or the brahmavihāra practice on this retreat, loving-kindness. If you are, please remember that the body sense is at the centre of that practice. The Buddha says, "sensitive to the whole body." Of course we use the phrases and all that, and maybe visualizing another person, but stay sensitive to the body sense. It's very important. And sometimes within that there is a feeling of warmth, of love, of kindness. We want to feel that when it's there. And even when it's not, to stay sensitive to the body sense.
In the Buddha's words, "sensitive to the whole body." When there is a feeling of mettā, if you're doing the mettā practice, when there is that feeling (and it can't be there all the time), to really make sure you feel that and bathe your body in it, or feel it radiating out from the body and bathing your own body on the way out. Really part of what deepens the mettā practice. And similarly with the breath, learning to do this. The Buddha says, "sensitive to the whole body," and the next thing he says is, "learning to breathe in and breathe out sensitive to rapture." When he's talking about mindfulness of the body, he's actually saying this. And rapture is kind of a loaded word, and it can mean something very extreme, but it can also mean just this quiet sense of comfort, nothing too remarkable, a sense of well-being. Can we learn, at some point in our practice, to breathe, to do the mettā, or just to develop this sensitivity, to well-being, to comfort, to ease in the body? It's a skill and it's there. And actually, is it that far away? Is it that far away for us? Is it that far-fetched? It can seem it. And I know this is the second day of a retreat. It can seem it. But I wonder, actually, if it is that far away.
The sense of the body, the experience of the body, can never be for us separate from our perception of it. It can never be then separate from our mind and heart, from the way we are looking at it. In a way this is obvious, but actually this is extremely significant. The experience, the sense of the body, is never separate from our perception of it. As I'm saying, we can learn -- I'm just talking about one avenue that we can explore, a possibility -- we can learn to perceive peace and well-being more often in the body. This is something -- we can play with perception. Sometimes we're in meditation, sitting, walking, standing, whatever it is, and there is tension or discomfort in the body, or pain. What if we play with the perception? Can imagine just kind of chopping it up, dicing it up like you dice, I don't know, a potato in the kitchen or something, or carrots. [laughs] Just dice it up in the mind. What happens then? What happens?
In a way, the perception that we have of the body, if we're just with the sensation, the life of the body, this energy field of perception, if we really pay attention, there are actually frequencies of -- I don't know what to call it -- frequencies of energy, sort of there. They're coexisting. Oftentimes we get drawn into the frequency of pain, but actually there are other frequencies existing at the same time. Please, at some point in your life, do explore this, because it's extremely fruitful. It doesn't have to be on this retreat. There are frequencies in the body energy perception, and we can learn to tune into the pleasant ones. We can learn to go deeper and deeper into that pleasure, that well-being. So all I want to say for now, for those who are not going to pick this up (and that's completely valid, not to pick it up on this retreat), just to know that that's a possibility at some point. Just that much. Just to know it's a possibility.
This idea of bare attention that is, in a way, so common in insight meditation, "bare attention" is actually not a phrase, not a concept, that the Buddha ever used. There's no place in his shelf-full of discourses where you can find the phrase "bare attention." Now, that doesn't mean that it's not extremely useful. It's extremely useful as an avenue into insight meditation. But the actual deeper truth of it is that perception is malleable. Perception is malleable. It's shapeable. We can learn to play with perception and shape it. So there is this notion, particularly in this tradition (insight meditation), of mindfulness, bare attention, just being with the actuality of things. Beautiful, extremely fruitful, profound, wonderfully liberating -- to a certain extent. The actual truth is that perception is malleable. There is no actuality of things independent of this process of perception.
I'm aware some of you may be listening to this and it's like, "Okay, I can see that." I don't know how to put it, but it's, in a way, a bigger deal than it might at first seem. It's something we need to see over and over. There's a tremendous amount there. The Buddha said if you understand perception completely, that's complete liberation, that's an arahant. There's something very, very deep here, very, very profound.
So, anyway. Most of the time, perhaps, or rather often, we are sitting, walking, standing in meditation, and actually there's nothing very particularly dramatic or strong going on in the experience. Does that mean that the bodily life is not interesting? Is that what happens then? This mindfulness of the body is an extremely deep resource for us, extremely deep. It's easy to overlook it. A short time after the Buddha died, and one of his chief disciples, Sāriputta, had died a little while before the Buddha, and then Ānanda, the Buddha's cousin and attendant who had been with the Buddha for years, decades, looking after him and being right at his side, said to himself, "What to do now? The master is gone. The friend is gone too [Sāriputta, the friend]. What to do?" And he says, "Ah," there's this word in Pali, "Kāyagatāsati. Ah, kāyagatāsati." It means 'mindfulness immersed in the body.' So immersed in this field of awareness, this field of energy, of perception. Mindfulness immersed in that. He knew what a deep resource it was. "Ah, kāyagatāsati," that's my resource.
[29:46] So whether it's pleasure, whether it's unpleasant, whether it's neither, it's mindfulness of the body. Of course, in our life, in spiritual life, in our life in general, we need to take care of the body. Absolutely we do, of course we do, when there's illness, when there's sickness. We need to take care of the body. But just as significantly, and in some cases more significantly, are we taking care of the relationship with the body? So yes, we take care of the body. Are we taking care of the relationship too?
This is particularly for those -- and I know there are some here -- who suffer from chronic illness, illness that just doesn't seem to go away. I know from experience what that's like for myself. I remember years ago, in a period of suffering intermittently from this chronic illness, years ago I remember being at home and in a period where there was quite active illness, and being unable to sleep -- the discomfort and the agitation in the body. And then just getting out of bed, in the middle of the night really, and sitting, just sitting, meditating. And bringing, immersing the mindfulness in the body, working with the letting go of the aversion, relaxing that pushing away, just over and over, opening, relaxing the pushing, relaxing the aversion. Something begins to change. The whole sense of the body, the whole sense of the illness, can begin to change. Very, very beautiful. The body just sitting there in the silence, in the stillness of the night, open, connected. Just the body there in silence, and this quality of mercy, a real tenderness washing through the whole experience.
And out of that -- whether we're ill or not, whatever -- out of that can come this real sense of bowing, reverence, even joy. There's this opening to the body, to the life of the body, that's not dependent on pleasure there. It's not dependent on feeling pleasure. Not dependent on getting rid of pain. Not dependent on fixing the body in any way. I sometimes say to people, you kind of know when you're hooked on meditation when the idea of a good evening's entertainment is sitting at home watching the pain in your knees. Whatever the sensations, can we find an opening to it, find a relationship to it that somehow there's beauty in that, even if it's difficult? There's a real sense of beauty in it, a sense of the mystery of it. The mystery of our life. This is our life. What else is my life? I have these ideas about what my life is. My life is the most basic thing on one level. The sense of that immediacy and mystery and that beauty.
[33:20] So there's working with the unpleasant and with the pleasant and the discomfort and loveliness in the body. Whatever is going on in the body, one of the avenues that's really important or possible for us to explore is this noticing of change, noticing of impermanence. Again, going back to the beginning, deliberately taking up one's theme. We can deliberately take up change and impermanence as a theme in our meditation, deliberately. And begin to notice, when we turn that mindfulness on the body, flickering, changing, dancing, throbbing, pulsating, constantly moving. Begin to tune into that, over and over, this change, this impermanence. Especially if there are difficult sensations, it can be very skilful to work with this impermanence.
There's another way of working with impermanence, which I find sometimes very powerful, and it's more to do with the contemplation of death and impermanence in that way. This is not morbid, or doesn't have to be morbid. A sense of sitting, walking, standing, being in the body, and this moment of the body sensation is in the context of our death. It's in the context of vast expanses of time, billions of years the universe is old, billions of years the universe will last. Our life? [snaps fingers] What, 50, 70, 90, 100 years? Tiny, tiny in the vastness of that time. Tiny in the vastness of that space. Can we actually bring this into our reflections, into our relationship with the body? So it's not just this micro, moment-to-moment impermanence that we're noticing. The actual experience, even now, this moment, this moment is in the context of our death. It's in the context of the vastness of time. And actually, nowhere in the universe can we find anything that lasts. Not bodies. Certainly not. Not galaxies or superclusters of galaxies or super-superclusters. Not the tiniest atomic particles. Cannot be found, something that is not subject to change. Can we begin to contemplate this deliberately?
So there's the contemplation of change, one of the three characteristics, anicca, change, impermanence. Second one of the three characteristics. The Buddha said contemplate this, look at it, see it, deliberately. Second one is dukkha, which is a hard one to translate. It's unsatisfactoriness. So basically speaking, this body will let you down. It's going to let us down. There's no question about it. It will let you down. And yes, there's a tremendous amount of pleasure to be had in the body, a tremendous sense of beauty at all levels -- superficial beauty and a very deep sense of beauty in the body. Joy in the body. All of that. And the body will let you down. The body will let us down. Can we hold that paradox in a way?
Typically as human beings we get drawn in, we get pulled into a relationship with the body that's actually not helpful. It's not helpful. We get caught up in unskilful ways of relating to the body around appearance, around whatever it is. They're not helpful. This is just normal for human beings. Can we learn to develop relationships with the body that dissolve, decrease, our suffering in relationship to the body? Basically our life depends on it. The quality of our life depends on it. It's actually that simple. We keep getting pulled into these unskilful relationships in all kinds of ways. And they do have some -- there is some hit to them. Someone says, "How old are you?" And they say an age, and it's two years younger than you actually are, and you think, "Ah ..." [laughter] Big deal, you know? It feels good, but how good? Can we work on relationships, developing a relationship with the body, that actually decreases suffering?
So there's anicca, dukkha (this unsatisfactoriness). The last of the three characteristics is anattā, not-self. This body is not me, not mine. It's not-self. We have to tread a little bit carefully here. Again, all of this is a kind of balancing practice, a paradox. I think there is a real place for this sense of preciousness of, love of, one's own body. This is my body, a unique manifestation in the universe. Like it or not, there's never been a body like this before. [laughs] Something in that uniqueness -- can we get a sense of my unique body, the gratitude, the wonder, the love? How often do we touch ourselves with real tenderness? There's only this. This is what I have, and it's me, in a way, at one level. It's me. My body, unique. And, at the same time, it's not-self. It's not me, not mine. It's anattā, the Buddha said.
So how is it anattā? How is it not-self? It's not controllable. I can't say to the body, "Don't get ill." I can't say, "Don't age." I certainly can't say, "Don't die." There's a lot of effort and money in the culture, obviously, going into preventing two out of those three, or even three out of those three, but it's futile. It's futile. Body is uncontrollable. We have a certain amount of control, but fundamentally, it's not-self, and therefore not controllable. We can't say it's self.
[40:13] Ramana Maharshi, one of the great Indian sages of the first half of the twentieth century, he said, "Seeking liberation while being identified with the body is like trying to cross a river on the back of an alligator." It's not a very good idea. [laughter] It's not going to work very well. There's this word in Pali, paṭinissagga. It's a funny word. It means 'throwing back' or 'giving back.' Throwing back, giving back. And to contemplate that in the meditation. Can we sit there in the stillness of meditation, with the life of the body, and the sensations of the body, and the breath coming in and out, and actually just give it back? Give it back to the universe, give it back to the nature, throw it back? Can we see the body belongs to nature? It came from nature. It sure as hell is going back there. It belongs to nature. It's not my own. And actually sit in the meditation, walk, stand, whatever it is, and give it back: it doesn't belong to me, it belongs to nature. Give back the sensations. Let the universe own them. Let nature own them. And the form of the body, give it back. Can we contemplate in our practice this fact of the body coming from nature and returning to nature? Contemplate that in a way that somehow the heart is opened and touched by that, not that it's cold or nihilistic or even scary. It's just somehow the heart is touched and opened, and we get a sense of the freedom there.
We do tend to identify with the body. It's extremely normal. "I am an ill person," if there's long illness. "I am young," "I am old," "I am ageing," "I am ugly," "I am beautiful," "I am plain," "I am this or that." Can we learn, can we develop as a practice more and more, this lessening of the identification, non-identification?I I really want to stress: this is a practice. We practise letting go of identification. The habitual mode of human consciousness is to identify with the body. Basic, normal mode of human consciousness. Can we practise, develop, a mode of seeing the body, a mode of relating to the body, where we're actually developing less identification, letting go of identification? Yes, we can. [laughs] As we do that, one of the things that happens is that the senses and perceptions of duality in relationship to the body begin to decrease. What do I mean by this?
The sense of illness and health, age, youth, da-da-da-da-da, begin to decrease, because we're not strengthening them through identification. We're not making them more prominent, to stand out more, through identification. So sometimes it can be, as I mentioned, sitting with illness or ill health or discomfort, and letting go of this aversion, letting go of identification, actually one feels after a certain time, "I can't find the illness. I can't find it." I look for it, but when I look for it, I can't find it. I cannot find it. As I said, with all respect to those who are ill or suffering illness. When I look for it, I cannot find it. Sometimes, ill or not, one is sitting in meditation and there's a certain calmness that opens, the mindfulness is permeating the body, filling the body, this kāyagatāsati, mindfulness immersed and filling the body, and in the stillness, can begin to happen for dedicated practitioners that the boundaries of the body can begin to dissolve. I'm not sure, sitting there in the body, and not really sure where the body ends. The form of the body begins to get very amorphous or very spacious even, like there's nothing there but space, or just the dance of sensations appearing and disappearing. The whole form seems to have dissolved a little bit.
Can be, can be in that sense -- and again, I'm just pointing at possibilities here, just pointing at some possibilities -- can be in that sense, because the body boundaries have dissolved a little bit, there comes a sense of oneness. Where do I end and you begin? Where do I end and the rest of the universe begin? A sense of oneness begins to wash through the experience. This can happen over and over for a person in meditation. We begin to wonder, what is the body? Where is the body? Noticing the perception changes. Can this perception change in a way that the heart is actually touched and opened? One might see, over and over, the perception changing. If it changes enough, a person can begin to wonder, well, which is the real perception of the body? Which is the ultimately real perception of the body? And I actually see, there is no ultimately real perception of the body.
The Buddha once said, what is this body that we experience? He said, "The body is a point of contraction." It's a very odd-sounding phrase, but it's actually worth reflecting on. The body is a point of contraction. One of his more cryptic sayings. If, in our practice, in our life of practice, if there is this dissolving of the body to some degree, can we feel the freedom of the non-limitation in that? It's important to feel that freedom.
Certainly in meditation this kind of thing can happen. We can also reflect on it more consciously. So we're walking outside, or standing outside, or going for a walk, whatever it is, and begin to reflect on the elements: earth, air, fire, water. We pass a puddle on the lane or it's raining -- is that water element so different from the tears or the urine or the sweat? Water, inside, outside, same. Cycles of nature. Or the air. We just breathe it in and breathe it out, and the trees are breathing in and breathing out. When does the air become 'me'? Heat, inside, outside. It's the elements. There's this permeability of the body. And the earth -- is this solidity [presumably points to body] really different from this solidity [taps hard surface]? It's the same. At one level, it's the same. Or you eat some soup. Soup's kind of a fluid food. At what point does the soup become 'me' and 'my body'? Or the sacred food of porridge, which seems to be a staple for all retreat centres I've ever been to. Retreat breakfast. It's kind of slimy, gungy, fluidy food. When does that become 'me'? In the intestines, it's permeating through the walls.
Or you could reflect: here's this body. If I chop off my foot, is it still a body that's left? Okay, I'll chop off the other foot. I'll chop off a leg. I'll chop off an arm. How much can I chop off and we still look at it and call it a body? 'Body' is a convention. You can't actually find the body, even intellectually. We begin to experience this in meditation too.
We say in Dharma language that the body is empty. It's empty of inherent existence. Listen to this from the Buddha:
Suppose that a large glob of foam were floating down the River Ganges, and someone with good eyesight were to see it, observe it, and appropriately examine it. To them, seeing it, observing it, and appropriately examining it, it would appear empty, void, without substance. For what substance would there be in a glob of foam? In the same way, a practitioner sees, observes, and appropriately examines any form [any body] that is past, future, or present, internal or external, blatant or subtle [so any sense of the subtlety of the body or grossness of the body], common or sublime, far or near. [Sees, observes, and appropriately examines any form.] To them, seeing it, observing it, and appropriately examining it, it would appear empty, void, without substance. For what substance would there be in form?[1]
[50:56] Another beautiful quote from the Buddha, in a similar vein:
Knowing this body is like foam [same metaphor, knowing this body is like foam], realizing its nature -- a mirage -- cutting off the blossoms of Māra, you go where the King of Death cannot see.[2]
This body is, as the Buddha said right from the beginning, subject to ageing, sickness, and death. Fundamental. That's the experience that we typically have of the body. Subject to ageing, sickness, and death. How are we in our lives with ageing, sickness, and death? How are they for us when there's identification with the body? If we're young, they can seem a little bit abstract or theoretical. But ageing, sickness, death. We are, as one teacher in Thailand, Ajahn Buddhadāsa used to say, "brothers and sisters in ageing, sickness, and death." He would start talks that way, and everyone would be like ... [laughter] This is a fundamental truth of our life. How are ageing, sickness, and death, fundamental to our life, when we identify with the body? Not good. Not nice. Not pretty. Dukkha, suffering, painful, scary.
How are we with ageing, sickness, and death, if we do not know that which is not subject to ageing, sickness, and death, that is deathless? How is ageing, sickness, and death for us when we do not know that which is deathless, not subject to ageing, sickness, and death? Very, very different. The more we identify with the body -- let me put it another way: it's identification with the body that is part of what prevents us seeing the Deathless and knowing the Deathless, realizing the Deathless, realizing that which is not subject to death, that which is transcending of death, transcending of our life, transcending of time. It's partly our identification that blocks that seeing. We become, partly through this identification, we become mesmerized, totally mesmerized and entranced, with the dualities that the body seems to hold -- health and sickness, ageing and youth, pleasure and pain, beauty and non-beauty or ugliness or whatever. We become completely wrapped up in that, and it closes our seeing.
Can we learn -- this is what practice offers us -- to see differently? To me, that's what insight meditation is. It's learning to see differently. Practising learning to see differently. Can we all learn to see differently so that we are less or not under the spell of these dualities and appearances? The less we are under that spell, the more freedom there is. So the Buddha said, when he talks about mindfulness of the body, he says unequivocally, "This leads to the realization of the Deathless. Mindfulness of the body, when pursued, when developed" -- these are his very words -- "leads a person to realization of the Deathless," realization of that which is beyond all this, beyond time, beyond life, beyond death, which can then, in a way, shine through our life, permeate through our life, and change the relationship with ageing, sickness, death, and all the rest of it.
So that's there. The Buddha's saying right from the first: that's there. In a way, we decide what we want from practice. We decide how much freedom we want. That's up to us. And it's all there in the Dharma. We can decide we want some degree of freedom with the body, less painful relationship with myself, with the body. The current of the Dharma goes all the way through. It's all good. We can decide that. How much freedom do we want? And it's up to each of us to say that, but it's all there in the Dharma. All there in the flow, in the current of the Dharma. I think it was Christina who said in the opening talk, the Dharma has one taste. Just as the great ocean has just one taste, the taste of salt, so the Dharma has one taste and one taste only: the taste of liberation. We decide where we get off there, and it's fine. We can have a bit more freedom, a bit more openness with the body, a bit less pressure, or more and more and more and more.
Whatever it is we decide, these are some of the possible avenues that are available to us. As I said, in terms of insight meditation, we can be with the breath or the mettā, whatever it is, and then just go out to what seems like it's insistently calling. If the body is insistently calling, just to explore that. Or when there's some calmness, just deliberately letting the breath go, letting the mettā go, and going out to investigate the body and the life of the body in some of these ways.
Okay. Shall we have a couple of quiet minutes together?
