Meditation Technique pt. 2: Mindfulness of Body

When practicing mindfulness, you might find that there is an overwhelming amount of things going on. What to be mindful of? Where to start? Or, you might find that there doesn't seem to be much of anything going on. Both situations are ones that I experience regularly; some days seem to be more action-packed than others. In either situation, knowing how to direct your attention to a particular aspect of your experience can be a good way to establish mindfulness.

The Theory:

Sitting in a tree in Cambodia.

Sometimes, I let my experience direct my attention, and other times, I direct my attention myself. What I mean by that is that if I find that I have been lost in thought, when I have that experiencing of "coming back," I often will acknowledge what has happened, and then direct my attention to something that will ground me in the here and now. If I find that I had been planning for the future, I might acknowledge it by labeling it, "planning, planning, planning." Or, sometimes I chose different vocabulary, such as "planning mind." The vocabulary that you choose isn't important, the important thing is that knowing is happening, and that you are mindful of the knowing. That is what I mean by acknowledging. 

For some, mindfulness of the knowing happens without the need for  using a mental note, and for others, noting is necessary. Especially when dealing with the mind and mental formations, I find that noting is an effective method for identifying what is happening, or what has just transpired. For example, it's quite impossible to note "lost in thought" as you are lost in thought, because there is no mindfulness of the fact that "lost in thought" is happening until it has already happened. If you were mindful of it while it was happening, you wouldn't be lost in thought, you'd just be thinking. In that case, you would able to label it "as it is happening" simply by noting, "thinking, thinking, thinking." The tendency of the mind, once it has been figured out, is to stop proliferating, so you might experience a cessation of your thoughts somewhere in the process of your labeling. Either way, the practice is the same, continue to be mindful by acknowledging the knowing of whatever is happening as your life unfolds, from moment to moment. 

Okay, okay, I know that this is a bit of a mental pretzel, so let me elaborate, and try, unsuccesfully, to simplify it. One problem is that we are limited by the words we chose and the way in which they strike us. Some have different ideas about a certain word than others, and it's impossible to please everyone, so the challenge of the writer is to pick a meaning and stick to it, and the challenge of the reader is to determine that meaning and not allow pre-conceived notions to interfere with the ability to comprehend what is being said. Mindfulness, concentration, awareness, knowing, WHAT? 

Try this one on for size, and bear with me if it's not your usage-of-choice. The way we experience life is through one of the 5 sense doors and, what is considered the 6th sense door in Buddhism, the mind. There is nothing that we can experience outside of what we can see, hear, taste, touch, smell, think, or feel on the mental/emotional level. That's not an attempt to put the wide range of human experience into a little box, it's just an observation that the Buddha made. When an object comes in contact with one or more of these 6 sense doors, we have the experience of knowing. That is to say that the mind presents itself to receive the incoming message. The object arises, as does the mind.

For example, when a gun is fired, we hear it. This experience of hearing is likened to us knowing that there was indeed a sound. It's not the type of knowing that takes place after that, the knowing that tells us that the sound came from a gun, that is a different knowing. This is simply the knowing that recognizes the experience of hearing. As we find out, this type of knowing can go on unnoticed. It can be lost in the jumble of what is going on in our minds, and we miss a lot of what we experience due to being lost in thought. In this practice, what we are interested in is whether or not there is mindfulness of the knowing.

What I mean by that is whether our attention is present. Do we realize that hearing is happening, or are we lost in thought, ignorant of the fact that we just heard something. When the object that meets the sense door is the sound of a gunshot, chances are, it will win our attention, as gunshots tend to be quite loud. But what if it is something that is sometimes harder to notice, like anger or judgment. Are we lost in the judgment, or do we recognize that judgment is at work in our lives?

Let me use another example, one that more commonly lacks mindfulness. When we think, we often aren't mindful of 1. the content, and 2. the fact that we are even thinking in the first place. This is the experience of being lost in thought. When we practice mindfulness, that means we try to be mindfulness, not that we are mindful all the time. That's why it's called a practice. I am speaking for myself here, and most practitioners who aren't yet masters. While trying, sometimes we realize what we are experiencing, and other times, we are baffled. The one thing that all of us share is this experience of "coming back." We suddenly realize that "we" have been somewhere else. By "we" I mean our attention. Maybe we were lost in a memory, or daydreaming about the future. Maybe we were wrapped up in some fantasy or anxious about that upcoming school or work assignment. It is at this moment of coming back, that we can make sense of all of this rambling that I've been doing. 

We all know what it's like to be lost in some sort of mental activity, and we all know what it's like to suddenly arrive in the moment and realize that we have been elsewhere. The interesting thing is that sometimes, we can remember where we've been. In these situations, we can remember the content of the mental activity, which is the first thing I mentioned that we often aren't mindful of when we think. So if we don't realize it "as it is happening," but somehow we can remember, what is it that remembers? In my usage of vocabulary that I've chosen today, it is the faculty of knowing. Knowing was happening the entire time, but our mindfulness wasn't there. That is to say that while we were thinking, we were lost in thought, and didn't realize that we were in fact thinking. There was just thinking, not the observant perspective of mindfulness. 

Let's step out of this theory a bit and into the actual application of practicing mindfulness of body (yes, I have been mindful of my digression this entire time).

Shwedagon Pagoda, Yangon, Myanmar. 

The Practice:

While sitting comfortably, bring your attention to the experience of sitting. Take it all in. Whether you want to do so by using mental labels, or by acknowledging the knowing element of your experience without labeling, is up to you. You may notice the feeling of your sitz bones coming in contact with the chair or cushion or floor. You may notice that your abdomen is rising and falling as you inhale and exhale. Any adjustments that need to be made to ensure that you can sit relatively still and with some level of comfort, should be made at this time. 

Having gotten a good feel for what it is like to be alive while sitting here in the moment, you can begin to zoom in, and isolate more detailed aspects of your experience. You can decide whether you want your experience to direct your attention, or whether you want to direct it yourself. If you have a shooting pain in your knee or back, that is an obvious place to go next and that would be an example of letting your experience direct your attention. Whenever some aspect of your body takes the center stage, give it the microphone, and then sit back and watch it. When nothing is really calling you, you can practice choosing, and in that case, you can zoom in or out, choosing to return to the sitz bones, the abdomen, any pain you may have, or an itch, or the overall experience of sitting.

"It doesn't matter what you are mindful of, it just matters that you are mindful."  Eric Kolvig

If you are choosing to practice mindfulness of body and nothing else, then every time you are distracted by a sound or a thought, come back to your body. You may do so by gently returning to some aspect of the experience of sitting immediately, or you may, for the sake of record keeping, make a mental note of whatever it was that stole your attention before coming back to your body. 

If you are choosing to practice mindfulness of body along with the other practices of mindfulness, you may choose to stay with whatever experience distracts you. That is to say that if it starts raining, you might note "hearing, hearing, hearing" for as long as you'd like, staying with that experience of hearing the rain. No need to get wrapped up in the content of what you hear, just label it as "hearing" and stay with that direct experience. Or, if you start thinking, you can not only identify "judging mind" at work, but you can also stay with the mind and see what happens next. In this way you can continue to identify, and note if you choose, whatever mental activity you experience, for as long as you want, before coming back to the body or moving on to another sense object. 

The Anchor:

If you have chosen to incorporate multiple aspects of mindfulness into your session, it is good to have an anchor, or something to return your attention to, to keep you grounded. The body/breath is usually the best object to use as an anchor, because it is always there. Thoughts come and go too quickly, and are too slippery to be an anchor. Hearing may or may not be prevalent at any given time, depending on our environment. But either the breath or body, which are really sort of connected, are much more reliable and are easy to locate. 

Now you might be wondering, should I just practice mindfulness of body or should I incorporate all the sense doors? There is no right or wrong answer. In general, since we are looking to be aware of what is happening from moment to moment, and what is happening isn't limited to just one sense door, it's probably better to spend the majority of our time practicing with all the aspects of mindfulness. That being said, just try, at least once, to move through the different sense doors, one at a time, singling them out for a certain length of time, ideally for the entire session. Then you can experiment with mixing them, or going back and forth, in other sessions. 

During that session, when you single out those aspects of your direct experience that come in through the body, you may gain some insight into a wonderful world that is constantly bursting with life. Sometimes our bodies feel so dull and lifeless, but that's usually just when we aren't connected to them. If we learn to tune into our bodies, we find that there is always something happening. In fact, there is always a lot happening! 

From gross sensations to subtle ones, we can play around with this zoom lens, learning to "take it all in" one moment and single out the tiniest sensation in another. If you like to label, you might find yourself labeling "pain, pain, pain" on a regular basis. But what is pain? What is it really like? See if you can investigate further, and get past the mental formation of it. Upon a closer look, you might find that the experience of pain includes things like burning, heat, numbness, throbbing, aching, or shooting pains.

Other things you might find in your body are heaviness or lightness, dullness or vibrancy, warmth or coolness. You might find sensations that are stagnant and others that are in motion. You might be able to feel your heartbeat. You might get a sense of your skeletal arrangement, how your vertebrae are stacked on top of each other. You might just sense a heavy blob devoid of all feeling. You might gain insights into the nature of form and the impermanence of all things. 

The truth is, I don't know what you might find, and neither do you, unless you look. Not only will you find yourself more connected with your body, but you will also be strengthening your ability to concentrate and be mindful. You will have a sensory experience, there will be knowing, and by acknowledging the knowing, you will be mindful. In this way, you won't be lost in your thoughts, you will be alert, and able to identify and acknowledge the different aspects of your experience as they arise and pass away, always aware of what is happening. To me, life is too short to be sleepwalking most of the time. Even though this practice takes effort, discipline, and determination, the rewards of actually being here to enjoy these fleeting moments of our lives seems to make it all worth it.