Transcription
Good morning, everyone. I think, as Christina said in the opening talk, this first week, we're really just going through some instructions quite briefly in the morning sessions. So I want to continue with that, and today look at the body, the first foundation of mindfulness.
Before I go into the body, just some general things. It's a really good question to ponder: what actually is practice? What are we doing here? What is it that we're engaged in? For me, sometimes I like to sum it up as: practice is learning ways of looking, ways of relating, ways of viewing and seeing experience, existence, phenomena, ways of looking that bring freedom, that decrease suffering. Maybe that sounds a little odd to you; I don't know. But there's quite a lot in that. In a way, you can sum up the whole of practice as just that. That's actually what we're doing. Any form of practice is that.
So that's a big overview. As I said, there's quite a lot to that. Then we have these four foundations of mindfulness. Many of you will be very familiar with this. Why the four foundations of mindfulness? Well, lots of reasons. But one is that these are areas, this body and feeling and mind, etc. -- we'll get into that -- these are areas that, as human beings, we suffer in and in relationship to. The relationship with the body is often quite complex. The relationship with vedanā, with the feeling-tone, it's where we get entangled, and with the mind states, with the emotions, etc. So the Buddha is saying look at these areas, look very carefully at these areas, because this is where a lot of problems are. And where there's a problem, there's the potential of freedom.
So this morning, just about the body a little bit, and just really quite brief, a few possibilities that you can follow if you want to. But if we take this idea that practice is learning ways of looking, learning new ways of looking that bring freedom, that open up our sense of what's going on in the moment, our sense of experience, and we flip that around and say oftentimes the way that I'm looking at existence, the way that we look at existence, the default, habitual ways of looking at existence bring trouble. There's something in the way we view things, in the way we react to things, in the way we think about things, in the very way we perceive things, that trouble is sewn up in that.
And particularly with the body. We can see this. Oftentimes, the way of looking that we have at the body is problematic -- it brings trouble with it. How much suffering, how much pain, and even intense pain, because of the comparing of the way this body appears, in comparison to the way it seems to me that that body appears, or that body appears? How much? It's a multi-billion dollar industry. So much pain wrapped up in that, can be. How much torment can there be, and difficulty in the way of looking, in the way of relating to the ageing process? This is something that the body has to go through -- the body vulnerable to illness, and the body that will die. The usual ways of relating to these facts of the body -- this body does look different than that body, this appearance -- somehow, in the ways of looking, it brings more problem to it.
Oftentimes, what's at the centre of the problematic constellations is the self, that we bring in the self and self-identity, identifying with the body, in a way that's really not helpful. This is actually very complex; I don't think we can completely dismiss it. But let's just say we bring it in in a very unhelpful way, so that these things -- the way this body looks, the appearance, the way it ages -- we feel it as indicative or reflective of our self-worth. Then that's just a slide into more and more dukkha. Somehow my sense of self-worth, my sense of value of this, as a human being, and of myself, is wrapped up in this comparison. Self has gotten into the body. And with all that, so often, the self comes, the whole view is too tight, wrapped around the self, and we become blind to the miracle of the body, blind to this incredible organism, because the whole view has been tightly shrunken around self-view with the body.
So the Buddha comes with his teaching on the foundations of mindfulness, and in the Pali he says, kāye kāyānupassī viharati, which means something like "dwells viewing, regarding, contemplating, considering the body in the body," or "with respect to the body," or "as the body." In other words, what he's saying is really look at this body, really consider it, really contemplate it, not in terms of self, not in terms of comparison with other, not in terms of how much do I value myself because of what the body appears or feels like in this moment, but just as body -- a simple fact of nature like that. So right from the beginning, and this is right in the beginning of his instructions on the mindfulness, there's a shift of mode. He's saying can you just click into another mode of contemplating the body, and see if you can relate to the body like that, and see what happens if you hang out and meditate on the body with that mode shift?
And then, in the sutta on mindfulness, he goes on to explain many possible ways of practising. Interestingly, in the Insight Meditation tradition, we leave most of them out, if you ever read the sutta. Maybe we'll revisit that. And we focus on just a couple, which are very important. So the first one that the Buddha emphasizes is sampajañña in Pali. It means 'clear comprehension.' It means knowing what's happening with the body. So right now, I know that I'm sitting. I know that I'm waving my hands around trying to explain something. [laughs] If one moves the head to look at Phil, one knows what's happening. Reaching out to turn a door handle, to open the door, to pull the door, push the door, one knows what's going on in the body. There's a general sort of inhabiting of bodily existence. Walking around in the corridors outside, one knows one's walking. One feels one's walking. One feels these movements.
So this is really important, this sort of basic knowing of the disposition of the body, of the activity of the body, with a degree of, as I said, mindful sensitivity, inhabiting of the bodily experience. Why is that important? Because it's very grounding. It's very simplifying. Walking down the corridor, the mind can be thousands of miles away, a different time in the past or the future. Being in the body, collected in the body, brings the consciousness to a sense of grounding and a sense of simplifying. Very beneficial. It feels good. And for the mind to make a home in the body, really, really helpful for the whole rest of meditation. In other words, there's a reason that the body is the first foundation of mindfulness.
So to dwell in the body, knowing: what is happening in the body? What is the body doing? Then, interestingly, in the Insight Meditation tradition, we sort of add something in the body awareness, which actually isn't really there in the sutta, but that's okay. It's completely fine. It's actually very helpful. We add something: can you then, in this awareness of the body, bring a really close investigation, this inhabiting of the bodily experience? So really close to the texture of the experience. Sometimes people use the word 'bare attention.' In other words, can you really meet what's going on? What is the experience when I look and feel into the body?
[10:25] When we do that, if you do that meditatively, whether it's in walking, or sitting, or whatever, eating, a whole world comes alive, a whole world of experience. We see there are these shifting textures of sensations, warm and cool, pressure, lightness, tingling, vibrating, contraction, expansion. All this is happening, this whole other world of sensation, of life within, movements of energy. If I can see that, if I just sustain a very close and careful attention on the experience of the body -- not just in sitting, but wherever. Washing the hands, what does that feel like? What's the experience in the hands? Tasting food, and the experience in the mouth. Or smells. Holding a hot cup of tea in the hands, what's that experience? The warmth, the heat being communicated. The wind, the rain on the face outdoors.
With all this, there's a deepening of the intimacy with life, that we're really, through this, connecting to our actual, basic experience of existence. We are natural, bodily, physical organisms. Really to come close to that, and touch that, and to open to that, and feel that intimacy -- something very fundamental. To have gone through life and not to have been intimate with that, maybe that would be a great shame.
When one does this, you can either focus in on a certain area, like that hand holding the hot cup of tea -- what does that feel like, really, there? Or, also very helpful if you can get the hang of this, is sitting or walking with a sense of the whole body in awareness. It's as if awareness encompasses the whole space, the whole field of texture, of energy, of vibration, of sensation, all at once, and one is just dwelling in that. Really, really useful practice if you can find your way into that.
Now, of course, sitting and walking all day, particularly at the beginning of the retreat, oftentimes what we encounter in terms of bodily experience is actually quite difficult. The body gets stiff and achy, pain, etc. So we have to somehow include this in our practice. Pain in the body is part of life. It's part of existence. Having a body is difficult at times. There's no question about that, absolutely no question about it. So something in this practice, if I want to be open, if I want to open to the wholeness of life, it also means including that which is difficult, which means bodily pain. Somehow that is part of the totality and the mystery of existence.
But it's not an endurance test, or we're not out to prove anything by sitting hours and hours with the body racked in pain. That's really not the point. It's not something to prove. Rather, as all practice, is there the possibility of more freedom in relationship to, in this case, bodily pain, bodily discomfort? So we feel trapped, or locked in, or oppressed by the difficulty in the body, and practice is just coming, the Buddha is just coming and saying, is it possible for us to feel more free in relation to this experience? Of course the answer is always yes, it is possible. Yes, it is possible, if -- going right back to the beginning -- if I can find those ways of looking, something in the ways of looking, the ways of relating, if it can shift to open up the freedom. So whatever difficulty I'm experiencing, some more freedom is possible if I can find the right way of practising.
So if there's pain and discomfort in the body, oftentimes -- just in terms of maybe something helpful to work with it -- the rest of the body, of course, contracts, and there's a tension in the rest of the body. So first thing to do might be to actually check the rest of the body, and relax the rest of the body. If I have maybe a pain in my lower back or my knee, it might be that I notice my shoulders are tense, or my belly is tense. And that doesn't need to be. It's a secondary reaction. Just relaxing that secondary reaction can be really helpful.
Exploring the edges of the pain. It probably does not take up the whole body, so where does the body feel okay? Hanging out there a little bit to get some perspective. Are the edges of the pain completely sharp, or are they more kind of gradual, amorphous, muffled? If you want, you can kind of make the attention like a microscope, that it kind of probes into the pain, getting underneath that label, "pain," which is a word, a very loaded word. What happens when we get underneath it and really see what is this experience? Sometimes it's possible to notice how the labelling of something (in this case, pain) actually creates a thing and makes it more oppressive. The very way that the mind describes something is part of the mind creating something.
It's possible to, as I said, be quite focused, microscopic, one-pointed with the attention to the pain. You can also work in kind of a complementary way of opening the awareness out to be really spacious. This is very, very skilful if you can get the hang of it. You can use hearing. It's just rain at the moment, but when the birds get going, sounds come from all different directions and distances, and that can help the awareness open out and become more spacious. What happens when there's pain is that the mind contracts. Not just the body, but the mind contracts around pain. Aversion to the pain -- we want to get rid of it; I want this pain to go away -- it shrinks the natural spaciousness of the mind. Aversion contracts the natural spaciousness of the mind. That shrinking is like a pressure. Like a pressure cooker, it heats up the pain, so to speak, putting it under more pressure, and it actually gets worse through the contraction around it. So it can be really skilful to actually open up the space, open up the space, open up the space.
Then this pain in my knee, or back, or whatever it is, is actually just one part of a much bigger space. It's one part of something that contains much more, is open to much more. That already is a very, very helpful perspective, because it's minus the contraction. It might be I also get the chance, within that spaciousness, to notice what my relationship is with the pain. Almost certainly it will be aversion: I want to get rid of it. It might be gross aversion: the mind is screaming. It might be very, very subtle: there's just some kind of recoiling, pushing away energetically. Really good to notice that. Is it possible that that relationship with the pain can be relaxed? Can we move to a sense of really, really allowing, allowing, allowing? That would then be a way of looking, a way of relating to the pain through really emphasizing allowing. Very, very fruitful. And it's a practice; we develop at it.
[19:28] If there's discomfort, the encouragement to work with it, but to really see what your edges are and not overstep them. Move when it's too much. Playing one's edges, but always with kindness, that the whole practice is a movement of kindness. It's a kindness to investigate pain, because we find a way of caring for the pain, and caring for ourselves in these skilful ways of looking. It's a form of kindness.
Now, it's a little strange giving instructions on the four foundations of mindfulness, because some of you are doing concentration practice, and some of you are doing mettā practice and other things. So I'll say something else, as well. Of course, you could be sitting or walking in meditation, and the bodily experience at times, for some people at times, is not unpleasant, is not difficult. There's not discomfort. There's actually pleasantness there, pleasure. Now, this is actually quite important. Especially if you're doing concentration practice, it's important to really let that be included in the experience, and very much included and even quite central in the concentration practice. You want to really let yourself enjoy it. Similarly with the mettā practice. The Buddha says, "sensitive to the whole body," the concentration and mettā. We want this field here -- we want to be open to how it feels, because that sensitivity, and particularly when there's pleasure, and the enjoyment of that, the opening of that, it will be a real resource, and something that deepens the concentration and deepens the mettā. So you're kind of gathering it without grasping at it. But to really let yourself enjoy, and not worry about getting attached to it.
Of course, with the bodily experience, probably most of the time -- certainly some of the time -- there's nothing particularly dramatic going on in the body. It's not particularly unpleasant or uncomfortable, and it's not particularly pleasant. Then, usually, it feels it's not very interesting to us. But maybe it might be really helpful, again, to dwell, as the Buddha says -- viharati, to dwell, to abide --in that field of the body, and exploring the life, the sensations, that kind of dance, the movement of sensations in the body. As I said, after all, this is my life, and this bodily experience is part of the mystery and the wonder of my life, rooted in nature.
I want to throw one more thing out, because many of you will have heard all of this before and been doing this kind of thing for plenty of retreats before. In case you want to refine this a little bit, let me offer something else. What happens if I were to take up what I've said so far, and just hang out meditatively, paying attention to the body, and paying attention to the body, and paying attention to the body and the experience in the body, with that mindfulness imbuing the whole body? At a certain point, certain aspects of existence will begin to stand out. One of them is the fact of impermanence. I just sustain mindfulness, and it becomes kind of obvious, the impermanence of the sensations, of the experience in the body, coming, going, arising, passing. That becomes, more and more, with mindfulness, almost glaringly obvious.
Another one that may become obvious just through sustaining mindfulness is that these body sensations, the experience of the body, it's not really "mine" or "me." I have no control of them. It's almost like they're just coming and going by themselves. We say they're anattā -- they're not-self. It's just arising and passing by itself. This body almost has a life of its own. So rather than the usual "me, mine, me, mine" that we have in relationship to the body -- "my sensation," "my pain," or "That is me, how I'm feeling in the body," there's a sense of "It doesn't belong to me. It's just happening." There's a shift in the mode of the perception, just naturally with mindfulness over time.
But then here's a possibility. Again, this is if you want to refine this, and if you've been doing this for a while. The possibility is then to pick up on those perceptual shifts, and actually deliberately get behind them. So deliberately see: is it possible to regard the sensations in the body, so to speak, through the lens of impermanence? I'm just looking for impermanence. All I'm interested in seeing is impermanence. Change, change, change, arising, passing. Then that becomes my way of looking. Or finding a way to see this body, and the life of the body, and the sensations of the body as not-self. It belongs to the universe. It's just happening. What would it be to sustain that way of looking?
These are incredibly powerful ways of looking, incredibly powerful avenues of meditation, profound, and very, very potent. They bring enormous freedom if you can find a way to work them. They're ways of looking. They're ways of letting go very deeply, ways of release. So they're available, and they bring deep perceptual shifts, and shifts in understanding.
So these are just some ideas. That's enough now. There's plenty more that the Buddha had to offer. We'll stop there. But behind all this, with all his teaching about this, for me, the thrust of what he's saying is this: we have this body, whether we like it or not. We're born into a body. This is a fundamental part of our existence. The body is vulnerable. It's vulnerable to injury, to disease, to decay. It's fragile. It's impermanent. It's subject to accident, to all kinds of things, to infection, to hurt. And yet, that body that is subject to all that, and vulnerable in that way, and impermanent, it can also become -- with the right ways of looking, with the exploration of finding the ways of looking that help -- it can also become, this very vulnerable body itself, can also become an immense and profound refuge for us in life, almost paradoxically, a real resource. There can be a really deep okayness with this body, and how this body looks, and how this body feels, and how this body is, and how it will move through time, and how it will die, even. So we're not saying that's not there, but through finding ways of exploring, ways of relating, ways of looking, ways of viewing this, rather than an affliction, it becomes a blessing, a deep, profound okayness through the body.
[28:00] So there are loads of ways of going about practice -- many, many. Some people, what's quite popular is to have one anchor, like the breath or something, and to stay with that, and then go out to something else, like the body, if it feels like it's calling you, if something is aching, and then to come back to your anchor, and go out to something else, and come back. That's a very popular way of practising, very fruitful. There's also the possibility of this, what the Buddha was saying, kāye kāyānupassī viharati, meaning really remaining focused on the body. In other words, the Buddha says "taking up your theme." Your theme could be the body. My theme is the body: I sit in this meditation session, my theme is the body. This walking session, my theme is the body. And just either the sensations in the body, or this totality of the bodily experience, or, as I said, the impermanence of the body sensations. There are lots of possibilities. But remaining focused on the theme, this was oftentimes what the Buddha would encourage his monks and nuns, practitioners, to take a theme, and to stay with it, and focus on it, see where it goes, see how it tunnels down to understanding and freedom.
Okay. So I'm going to stop there for this morning. Why don't we just sit together shortly, for a little bit?
