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The First Awareness: Meditating on the Body

CYNDI LEE      PHILLIP MOFFITT

REGINALD RAY      TENZIN WANGYAL RINPOCHE

 

Meditation is most often thought of as a mental or psychological practice. In what way is it also a body practice?

CYNDI LEE: To me, starting with the body is a no-brainer. If you can’t sit upright, if you have bad digestion, if you don’t sleep well, that makes it pretty difficult to have mental clarity and stamina. It’s essential to have strength and stability in your body if you want to cultivate it in your mind.

PHILLIP MOFFITT: In the Theravāda tradition, the Satipaṭṭhāna-Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta presents mindfulness practice in the form of the four foundations. The Buddha lays out the spectrum of awarenesses in this teaching, and the first awareness is “awareness of the body in the body.” This becomes the foundation on which the other awarenesses of your experience are to be understood. We come to understand how our awareness of the pleasant and the unpleasant in the body controls the mind. Then we move to awareness of the mind states themselves, but these utilize the body as well.

I’ve found that students who don’t have the ability to stay aware of what’s going on in the body are much less likely to develop in their practice. They get stuck.

What does “awareness of the body in the body” mean?

PHILLIP MOFFITT: It means orienting toward direct, nonconceptual experience. Not staying in your head. I use the term “dropped attention,” which comes from Aikido. We drop out of our head and into direct experience, which is often called the “felt sense.” We are talking about knee pain as a direct experience, not our view and opinion about knee pain. There are so many different awarenesses that arise out of that.

In modern terms, we are deconstructing phenomena. We are looking at moment-to-moment phenomena as they arise. The Buddha was the original deconstructionist, and the body is a great laboratory for practicing deconstruction. We can experience phenomena, rather than the soap opera of our lives that goes on up in the old coconut. “Oh, my knee hurts. What’s gonna happen to me in the future? I’m not going to be able to walk!” We get outside that story and start to see the phenomena in deconstructed form. We start to see the nonself aspect and the dukkha, and we see that it’s always changing.

REGINALD RAY: The question of the role of the body in meditation assumes there’s meditation and there’s a body. What is it that meditates, though? In a sense, it’s the body that meditates. As Phillip said, awareness is not localized in the head. It pervades the body, and when we tap in to the fundamental awareness of our person, we are completely contained within our somatic experience.

The reason we ask this question is that we objectify the body as somehow separate from our awareness, separate from our minds, but that’s incorrect from a Buddhist standpoint. We can rephrase the question as, “Who or what is meditating?” The answer is that our whole being is meditating. The body is the locale of that awareness; it is the one and only gateway for the meditative state.

Engagement with the body is at the heart of spirituality. It may be at a coarse level at the beginning, but if you go far enough in working with your body, you discover your fundamental being beyond time and space.

TENZIN WANGYAL RINPOCHE: In our tradition, we often talk about practice from the perspective of the body, the flow of the wind (prāṇa), and the arising awareness of the mind. The average person can deal with the body much more easily than working immediately with the flow of wind, energy, or the subtleties of awareness of the mind.

So it’s good to start with a good sitting position such as the five-point or seven-point posture. The moment somebody is sitting in one of those positions, all the channels and the chakras align. That supports the good flow of the wind, which supports awareness. The mind requires much less effort to be in the state of awareness.

The role of the body, then, is to help the wind, and the wind helps the mind. It would be almost impossible for someone to bypass the body and the wind, to directly force the mind to achieve sudden awareness. We can avoid trying to force the mind to be quiet by working with the body. When you try to tell the mind to sit quietly, it often does the opposite. When you’re trying to tell mind what to do, mind never listens. But if you create the right causes and conditions with the body, mind will follow.

Why are so many people interested in yoga? Because it’s easy to follow. Of course, it’s not necessarily easy to do, but it’s much easier than dealing with a lot of complicated stages of mental practice. The popularity of yoga is a wonderful thing because it can become a door to Dharma. It can start as an interest in fitness, well-being, and health, and gradually become the door to higher understanding.

CYNDI LEE: I agree. For most people it’s easier to start with the body. You can feel it. You can touch it.

People come to yoga for a variety of reasons, but stay for different ones, which usually have some relationship to Dharma. In the yoga tradition, the very first two limbs are yama and niyama—how we behave in the world and how we interact with other people. After that comes āsana, the codified physical system of aligning muscles and bones to promote radiant health—this is what most people associate with the term “yoga.” The limbs after āsana—prāṇayama, pratyāhāra, dhāraṇā, dhyāna, and samādhi—are subtler and take us into the meditative realm.

Yoga is definitely a door to the Dharma. Processing takes place. Even when people aren’t aware of the four foundations of mindfulness, the experience still happens to a certain degree. It isn’t magic, though. People need to be taught how to relate to what they’re feeling. For example, how to be aware of the intricacies of the knee pain they’re experiencing, as Phillip was describing, rather than being caught up in their story line about it.

PHILLIP MOFFITT: In fact, every āsana is a form of meditation. There is a one-pointedness to every single āsana, and if you find that one-pointedness within the practice, it changes the practice. Even if you’re not informed about a particular map of how energy moves in the body, you discover blockages, and the awareness itself starts to open up the channels.

CYNDI LEE: I would add that there is not only the one-pointedness of the āsana—what I would call the śamatha aspect—but also panoramic awareness. You feel the energetic circuitry in space in a room with other people. It becomes a template for how we are with other people in the world.

One of the early instructions many of us received was not to focus or “centralize” on the body. We were told to go beyond thinking of ourselves as our body. How do you understand this teaching in relation to the strong focus on the body you’ve all been speaking about?

REGINALD RAY: When we’re instructed not to focus on the body, we’re being taught not to focus on our idea of the body, the body as we currently experience it. The more you explore your physical body, the more it dissolves into energy, and you realize that even the idea of having a physical body is mistaken. The body is an energetic phenomenon onto which we have superimposed the idea of solidity.

PHILLIP MOFFITT: The body is the way to get into this moment, and to develop a continuity of presence, of being.

REGINALD RAY: At a very deep level, we can talk about experiencing the Buddha’s body, the three kāyas. The nirmāṇakāya, or “created body,” is the flesh and blood physical body, but it’s understood as pure. The sambhogakāya, or “body of enjoyment,” refers to the energetic world, the invisible world of symbol and magic. The dharmakāya is the ultimate body, the body of reality itself.

All those kāyas manifest within the body, so when we talk about not focusing on the body, we are not suggesting that spirituality is elsewhere. That just puts you back up in your head.

How is something as rarified as the sambhogakāya and the dharmakāya still “body” in the sense that we understand body, as the thing with ears and nose and toes?

REGINALD RAY: We have a cultural understanding of what the body is, but we have to realize that lots of people in different cultures look at the physical body and see very different things. Some look at a body and all they see is physical phenomenon defined by modern biology, but a meditator can look at the body and see that as a conceptual overlay.

What the body actually is, as Phillip said, is a continuous flow of sensations, none of which is solid. At a further level, someone could look at this body and see pure energy. They literally don’t see anything physical. An enlightened person would see space. From our literal, modern viewpoint, it sounds very ethereal to talk about the body’s energy, but that’s actually what the body is for some people. We can deconstruct our ideas of the body as a definitive phenomenon. It isn’t one solid, predetermined thing. It’s an open field for investigation.

TENZIN WANGYAL RINPOCHE: In my tradition, we refer to body, speech, and mind as the three doors. The body is a doorway into the nirmāṇakāya, speech into the sambhogakāya, and mind into the dharmakāya. If we engage these well, they become gateways to enlightenment, to buddhahood.

In the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, the Buddha asks us to delve further into the body—to explore its many parts and subparts, the fact of its decay, the fact that it is a bag of guts. What is the benefit of this teaching?

REGINALD RAY: Those teachings work with the way we hang on to the body as a reference point. They’re trying to help us let go of that process of hanging on. This frees the body to be itself. It doesn’t deny the body. It doesn’t put it down. It just frees it from our grasping and fixation, our trying to use the body as a source of security, which obviously blocks us and locks us up.

PHILLIP MOFFITT: If we grasp one way, it’s eternalism. If we grasp the other way, it’s nihilism. And neither of those lets the body be what it is.

Do people who have stayed with a body discipline a long time begin to let the body be what it is, just by continued exposure to working closely with it?

REGINALD RAY: There’s a lot of potential experience in working closely with the body, but without some sort of spiritual mentoring we really can’t go anywhere. That might be one of the main dilemmas in our culture. So many people are working with the body, but if the spiritual outlook isn’t there, the full extent of what’s possible in working with the body doesn’t come to fruition.

CYNDI LEE: At OM Yoga, people are trained with that kind of orientation. So when they get more advanced, they get more interested in the experience rather than the story line about the experience—what they can and cannot do anymore, for example. Instead, they consider: What am I feeling? What am I experiencing right now? How is it changing? It becomes an immediate meditation in the body. We teach people that kind of immediate attention from day one, but it takes a while for people to sustain intense interest in what’s going on with the body at an intimate level.

PHILLIP MOFFITT: I start guided meditation by saying, “Bring attention to the body—not your body, the body. I’m pointing to a phenomenon occurring right now.” I continue by saying we are not judging, comparing, or fixing the body. Those three tend to be our primary relationships with the body: Do we like our body? How does it compare to our body before, or to others’ bodies? What’s wrong with it that we need to repair?

If you’re judging, comparing, and trying to fix your body, you’re in duality: it’s the body you want vs. the body you have. This separation is creating solidity, and it happens on some very subtle levels. So one of the teacher’s major jobs is to facilitate students becoming present for their own experience, as opposed to saying to them, “This is what you should notice about your experience.” At that point, life is teaching them, life is leading them forward.

Fixing in general seems to be a big hang-up in our society, but it’s particularly the case when it comes to the body.

CYNDI LEE: That’s a big challenge in yoga. You’re in downward dog and your hamstrings are too tight and your stomach is too big. Then you hate yourself. But after a while, your hamstrings loosen up. The body is an incredible venue for shifting our paradigm of attachment and aversion. We start out objectifying ourselves, objectifying each other, but as we go on, there’s really no problem to be fixed.

REGINALD RAY: All of what we’ve been talking about—respecting the body, making room for it, not exiting into mental judgment—is what we call maitrī, love of our own personhood. And that is the basis for compassion for other people. Working with the body in a deep way is the ground of generating genuine compassion. It’s based on acceptance of one’s own experience, not just an idea of doing something nice for someone else. With such close attention to what’s happening in our experience of being human, it’s unavoidable that we’re going to take the same attitude toward other people, welcoming, accepting, and being with them in the same way.