From Suffering to Peace

Embodied attention is a foundational component of mindfulness practice. It serves as a vehicle for establishing awareness anywhere. Over time we come to live in accord with the maxim: “Wherever you go, there you are.” Wherever we go, there we can be present. But the point of mindfulness is not just to be aware but to look deeply into the true nature of experience, including the body.

“Who am I?” is an elusive query that has plagued philosophers, mystics, and meditation adepts alike, along with neuroscientists, psychologists, and biologists. What is this mysterious thing called me? Who owns this body that “I” inhabit but over which I have little control in terms of getting sick or aging? How is it that I can know myself, can be aware of my mortality, can observe my body, and yet have so little agency over the process? Who exactly is running the show? Why is it that I wish to do one thing, but then watch my body do exactly the opposite, seemingly against my wishes?

These questions rarely yield firm answers, yet this inquisitive attitude keeps us looking. Without inquiring into the mystery of being human, we will never fully know ourselves. Yet the point isn’t necessarily to come up with a simplistic answer to this mystery but to keep plumbing its depths, so we can live our way into our understanding. As Rilke once wrote in Letters to a Young Poet:

Try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms, or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers which could not be given to you now because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Inquiry into the nature of the body, into who we really are, invites us to examine our existential nature. In one sense, we are Homo sapiens, having evolved into a particular form with a head, limbs, torso, and five senses. But what animates this body? What dictates how our legs move, and sends electrical impulses so our hands can paint, drive, and put food into our mouth? Are we really the same person despite all the changes to our body, once small enough to emerge from a woman’s body and later as big as our parents; once only able to crawl and now able to run marathons? As we become more aware through sensory contact with our body, these questions can take on a pressing importance.

The body is a wonderland to explore. I am in awe of how the body heals. I recently cut my finger while chopping onions (perhaps not as mindful as I should have been!), and afterward I watched a biological miracle play itself out. First, my finger bled, and then without any conscious direction, the wound formed a scab to protect the damage and stop the blood flow. Over time, the scab slowly reduced in size until, miraculously, the rip in my flesh was again healed skin, as if nothing had ever happened. The body is a mystery that seems to function all by itself.

What is so astounding is how this organic process functions without any seeming intervention from “us.” Our taste buds replace themselves every ten days, so they stay fresh and receptive, which may be why strawberries taste so good. The body grows a new liver in less than twenty weeks (perhaps a good thing given how much junk food we eat!). The largest organ of the body, the skin, is fully replaced once a month. Even our dense skeletal structure, with its more than two hundred bones, is completely overhauled once every seven years. We get a new stomach every three months! Aside from the cornea, the eyes are one of the few body parts that don’t renew themselves. Perhaps this is one reason why our eyes say so much about us, the windows of the soul.

All of this begs the question, who are we? If the body continually replaces itself, part by part, am I really the same person as I was last Christmas, or ten years ago, or when I was a teenager or a baby? And if this process is happening by itself, then who is this “I” who thinks it is in control? We like to think that the self, our thinking mind and personality, is running the show, but if our bodies function on their own — healing and aging regardless of what we think, do, or say — then perhaps we have less ownership than we like to think.

There is an old Sufi story about a crazy wise guru named Mullah Nasruddin. One day he goes into a bank to cash a check. The teller asks him for some identification. After searching frantically through many pockets in his coat and trousers, he is unable to find his wallet. Finally, he smiles, pulls a mirror from his bag, looks at himself, and says wryly to the teller: “Yep. That’s me.” How often do we do the same thing, looking in the mirror at our face as if to confirm, yep, that’s me. But is the body we see really who we are?

Mindfulness practice brings an intimate introspection to these questions and reveals that things are not always quite what they appear. This inquiry can overturn our preconceived notions of who we take ourselves to be, inviting us to hold things from a different and sometimes radical perspective.

At times, in deep meditation, the sense of one’s body can appear to dissolve and challenge our conventional notion of what a body is. The usual perception of having physical boundaries can fall away, and we can experience ourselves as vast as space with no obstruction. At other times, we may feel the body to be so empty it is like air — transparent, light, and ephemeral. We can also sense the body as mere vibration, pulsing electricity, like waves of photons colliding. Every day, the body completely disappears from consciousness as we enter deep sleep. In fact, for a third of our lives, we live on this earth without any awareness of our body in this state. If all these empirical experiences are real, then what is the true nature of the body? Might it include all of these shape-shifting realities?

The investigation reveals our physical form is not as fixed as we like to think; it is an ever-fluid process. Insightful awareness clarifies that the body is not actually “our” body! We don’t own or even control much of our body. What becomes clear is that the body is not ultimately who we are. Yes, we have physical form, a shape, a body that ages. Yet who we are is beyond this physical form, beyond definition, category, or any other limited concept. When we misattribute the sense of self to our body, it is clearly a case of mistaken identity. (Later chapters will explore the issue of identity further.)

What we call the body is a construct made up of a matrix of physical processes that have no beginning or end, in the same way that the elements that comprise us do not disappear when we die but simply merge into new forms. It is analogous to a bunch of water molecules bound together as an ice cube. We know the water is just in a temporary, conditioned frozen form. So, too, are the elements that comprise our body.

Our final invitation to explore the nature of the body is at the time of death. From the perspective of awareness, we can see how the body deteriorates, but the clarity of presence can pervade and endure even in death. My first Insight Meditation teacher, Christopher Titmuss, recounted a story from his time as a Buddhist monk studying in southern Thailand. He had developed a friendship with a monk named Por Long Bhut who had developed liver cancer but refused all medicine and painkillers. In his final hours of life, the monk invited Christopher to lay down beside him on his bamboo mat in his hut. “Time has come,” he said. Death was close at hand.

Christopher recalled the elder in the final hours whispering faintly about how each sense was fading away one by one. Christopher recounts: “After an hour or so, Por Long Bhut whispered to me in Thai — ‘No seeing.’ Then he said a few minutes later, ‘No hearing.’ Por Long Bhut never reacted. He knew deep inner peace before, during, and after the diagnosis of cancer. Por Long Bhut’s depth of mindfulness and meditation along with the clarity that he was not the body helped make his transition smooth from life to death. He was a liberated and untroubled human being.”

Clearly, the Thai monk felt no agitation about dying, for it was clear to him that he was not the body. This is the liberating power of mindfulness, which frees us from the constraints of the physical body and of our misidentification with it, even at death.

• PRACTICE •

Exploring the Selfless Nature of the Body

Assume a comfortable meditation posture and close your eyes, turning the gaze of attention inward. Open your awareness to hearing and become present to the ebb and flow of sounds. Notice how sounds are known quite effortlessly with mindfulness. Rest in that spacious awareness for a few minutes, noticing how it happens all by itself — a sound arises and there is a simple knowing each time.

Now turn your attention to include awareness of the landscape of the body. Notice as physical sensations appear and disappear; these are also known quite naturally without any need to make an effort. Perhaps you feel the contact of your legs or buttocks with the chair or cushion you are sitting on. Or you may notice the temperature of the air on your skin or the touch of clothing. Attend to the variety of physical experiences for a few minutes, and notice how these sensations come and go by themselves and how easily they are sensed in awareness.

In the same way, sense the breath, moving like a perennial inner tide of inhalations and exhalations. You don’t make the breath happen; it moves by itself, ceaselessly flowing, keeping the body alive. Notice any feelings or thoughts about this understanding, how bodily life simply maintains itself organically through all kinds of biological processes. Be aware of the breath for a few minutes in this way.

Then shift the attention to the heart as it beats, the pulse in your veins. Reflect on how the heart, like every other organ, operates according to its own nature, without any prompting from you. In this way, sense directly how each organ of the body operates on its own, and how you are simply a witness to the process. Notice how that observation touches you and affects your relationship to your physical experience. Continue this observation through the day, noticing how the body miraculously functions by itself, selflessly.

• • •