The Flowing Body ~ A Self-Connection Meditation

"In deep silence, the self contemplates the body" — Nisargadatta Maharaj

When we bring awareness to the body, we may discover something surprising: it has no fixed boundaries in space or time. Instead, our direct experience is a flowing stream of sensations and energies — liberating to recognize, yet often perplexing to the habitual mind.

This practice, inspired by teachers like Rupert Spira and Michael Taft, invites you into self-inquiry through gentle investigation of your lived experience. We will explore the body not as an object, but as a dynamic flow — deepening self-connection, presence, and freedom.

The session concludes with a few minutes of silence, allowing the insights to settle naturally.

sound: Samuel F. Johanns
image: Getty

Transcript

Welcome to this experiential experiment where we're going to sense into the non-dual experience of our own body.

So that's how I would like to invite you to approach this session as an experiment.

We're going to do a few experiments and we can do this in a very relaxed way.

So first off I want to invite you to get as comfortable as possible,

Whatever that means for you today in this moment.

There's no real need to sit absolutely still but it does help to have some stillness in your posture whether you're laying or walking or sitting.

If you're walking then stillness means tuning into your body and inviting some slowness and if you want to then you can just take a few deeper inhalations and exhalations and allow especially the exhalations to relax your body a bit more and whatever you have on your plate right now,

Whatever tasks or to-dos or concerns that are that you are aware of just take an intentional moment and put those aside just for the duration of this meditation.

They will be there when you're complete with this session.

So just for a moment let's do nothing at all,

Just breathing for a few moments.

Not any particular way if you're done with your longer exhalations and inhalations just simply let that go and allow yourself just for a moment to do absolutely nothing and I want to invite you to take that attitude of doing nothing into the rest of this practice except for a few invitations and instructions that I will propose because we're mostly going to observe and to observe you actually don't have to do anything in fact the less we do the better we are at observing and so I'll take you through a few questions and experiments and specifically I wanted to invite you to visit the body when we speak about or think about our body it automatically becomes kind of a thing right you can kind of see your whole body in your mind's eye and interestingly even if we have our body in the mind's eye we're most likely also connected to some kind of direct image of the body so it's always a bit of a mix between a concept and an experience and so I want to tease that apart a little bit more so again when we talk about the body or perhaps when you saw the title of this meditation there was this immediate image it's kind of clear it's distinct it's a body that exists in space that has interactions with other bodies and objects and the interesting pivot point that I want to introduce here is that this distinct objectified body is not actually how we experience the body when we look a little bit closer at how we actually experience our body and then immediately we see that yeah we are going to dismiss our thoughts or ideas about the body because those thoughts and ideas are not really an experience right thoughts are kind of these ephemeral flashes that exist outside of time and space so we're really using the body to look at the body because of course the body is the only thing we have to have an experience so tuning into the experience of the body just do that right now so meaning you can kind of notice that there is seeing happening and hearing and maybe feeling tasting smelling and for the purpose of this meditation by the way it may be good to point out that you're actually invited to keep your eyes open because we're using also the field of vision for our inquiry and if you have never done that before it can be a fun experiment and maybe you already had your eyes open but yeah please open your eyes for this experiment and so I'm inviting you to notice just take a moment that in your direct experience right now there is of course maybe for some of you some senses might be impaired but generally speaking there will be seeing hearing feeling tasting smelling sensing how can you kind of find those experiences even if just a little bit or maybe for ease let's take specifically the experience of seeing so the first thing I want you to immediately notice is that seeing is a process right seeing is not an object we can kind of see objects but the actual experience of seeing is the process that we call seeing and can you notice that in the experience of seeing just look at anything or you don't even have to focus you can also have a open gaze but whatever your visual experience is right now can you notice that there is no separate observer present there is no separate observer there is no seer seeing for instance your body if you look at your body at least not in the sense that there's any separation ultimately between what you might call the seer that you right the scene your leg for instance and the process of seeing so let's take the leg and apologies for those who may be in a wheelchair or don't have legs right so then take another body part but if you look at your leg in my example what is actually there in experience just take a look right now and see what's actually there and notice also when you look at your leg that it's quite likely that your mind is trying to tell you what you're seeing right you might have this thought oh yeah leg leg leg floor whatever right do you notice that as well and what i specifically want to invite you to notice is that what is there is what we could call seeing as a verb not as a noun again it's a process and just as another experiment looking at your leg in your experience so not in your mind not in your concepts but in your actual experience right now is there anything else than seeing just have a look what else is there besides this experience we call seeing and of course the answer is that actually in experience there is nothing else than seeing and this goes for all the senses with which we have actual contact with what we call the body so can you tune into that open boundless sensing of this flowing experience in several dimensions that we call hearing feeling seeing etc can you feel into that right now into the pulsating flow of this meandering experience we call the body and maybe if you're doing that there's the sense of no actually i can see the body and it's separate and even if that is not true for you let's do an experimental check anyway okay and i want to again invite you to look where in the visual field is there an actual separation where are there separations between what you call your body and the floor or between a poster and the wall or anything and if you think you've found a separation look closely at that separation maybe there is you know what you call the frame of the painting and the wall next to it right and then the mind creates this separation that's probably happening immediately and subconsciously that's why it's so easy to work with and then i want to invite you to a little flip so look at any separation that you see what we call a separation and then can you switch or flip your perspective and instead notice that what your experience is one unseparated boundless flow of vision of seeing so just kind of you can even kind of unfocus wherever you're looking at and just take in the whole visual field and notice notice there are actually no separations separations are not necessary they are not truly found there are color differences different hues even but an actual boundary is not to be found it's one experience there's one visual field you could say existing as a streaming of colors and hues and shadowy parts and lighter parts and so there are these different colors just as there are different temperatures different sounds so obviously we can discern but ask yourself the question does discernment of different qualities within the flow of experience mean separation or does it mean separation of the body and the mind again i want to invite you to look take your entire visual field so kind of again if you're focusing again on focus take your entire visual field if you're perhaps blind and take the entire auditory field or the entire felt sense of the body field and then look for separation again discernments are probably there if you're using the body sense and you can feel all kinds of sensations if you're sensitive or you can hear all sorts of sound but are there actual separations are there actual boundaries and if you think you found one look closer so if i'm just as an example i can see a poster on my wall that's behind the screen i'm looking at and i i see what i call a frame so i have all these names for different colors in the room right but the separation exists in my experience as different colors but there's no place in my actual visionary experience where there's a flip to another object it's it's still one field it's not it's not homogeneous but just as the tomato soup has different colors it's one soup it's one tomato soup of visual experience that's what i want to get you at that sense of oneness and it doesn't mean that it's homogeneous or monotonous it's a heterogeneous discernible oneness do you see that in your experience right now so you can practice this at any moment especially easy and fun to do with the visual fields and you'll maybe notice how pleasant it actually is to to touch into that connectedness that interconnectedness that oneness but this can be done with every sense so let's try another sense so let's take the sense of touch so what you can do perhaps is you can reach out your hand and touch your body so i'm kind of touching my leg right now and i can say yeah look i clearly feel that my body begins here right so try that touch yourself and kind of tune into that kind of normal thing we then kind of subconsciously think that yeah okay here my body begins right so kind of do that for a moment you know it's what we do when we want to know we're dreaming we pinch ourself but actually the thought of the body as a separate object is a is the biggest dream we all have Shrinisargadatta Maharaj is also always pointing to that there's a great delusion that is the idea mostly subconscious that we are the body in the sense that i am located in this separate space-time vehicle called the body and as we are seeing now in experience if those boundaries don't exist how can i be the body but let's go with another experiment so you are touching your body you can kind of sense into that idea that your body begins here and that's what i want to point to firstly that that is actually not an experience the experience my body begins here is more of an interpretation of the sensory actual experience and i want to unpack that again experimentally so we can do this together and one thing to point out for instance is that before your fingers touched your leg if you touched your leg if you are sensitive enough or if the air temperature is different enough from your body temperature you will have felt actually the stream of air touch your fingers before you touched your leg and of course when i say the air touched your finger that's another interpretation but we're using language here to speak about the unsayable okay so bear with me and so using that sense of touch in the same way as vision you know in vision if you recall we can clearly discern colors and navigate the world without actually needing the mental separation and so now let's do that with the sense of touch so your body actually fuels itself all the time but just as a fish will ignore the water it lives in we also tend to ignore the felt sense of our body in order to save energy and only notice things that are relatively important for the survival of the body as it sees itself right but notice what actually happened when you touched your body and it's not exactly that your body begins here again that's a statement my body begins here is a statement is not actually an experience and what i mean by not actually an experience is what when we really zoom into the the sense data of what's happening then we can say that the actual observation was a change in the quality of the continuous flow of your sense of touch so do it again if you want to kind of have your hand in the air you can even kind of move your hand in the air so you can feel the flow of air on your hand and then touch your body somewhere the actual observation if you notice is a change in the quality of the continuous flow of your sense of touch and in a quite literal way does that make sense i'll say it one more time the actual observation is not oh my body begins here the actual observation is a change in the quality of the continuous flow of your sense of touch so as we look at our experience this change happens all the time with all the senses and this is in fact all that we can actually and do in fact always experience constant change but no separation the mind extracts concepts you know a thing is a think someone once famously said but all there is is one continuous flowing flux of experience and the mind is of course very tenacious we are depending on your age conditioned for decades to believing the mind separations and objectifications they are super useful we're not kind of against the mind but i want to point you to the experience that is there before the mind's extractions and one way to kind of hack this right this this decades-long conditioning of believing the mind one way to hack this i want to propose is a leap of faith even if just an experiment so as kind of a shortcut towards this non-dual vision i want to invite you again just as an experiment to trust that this is true and you don't have to believe it after the meditation is over approach it like a thought experiment but in this case it's an experience experiment so just for a moment try to take on the perspective that there is actually no separation at all ever in actual experience see if you can see that just with that little bit of trust so i'm hoping to be able to get you to see that in experience there are no separate objects at the same time we can discern streams in the river that are completely integral and inseparable from the river inseparable from the river but still discernible as fluctuations of the flow and it is this non-separateness that informs the boundless nature of the body what we call the body because this boundlessness is a boundlessness both in time and in space and that means that there's another way to feel into this living limitlessness of our experience of embodiment because we can also sense into the space that we're in and that we are so let's do that as a final experiment so just let's take a breath again it's an invitation you don't have to do it but if you want to just take a moment and kind of reset you know clean the palette of your experience and just doing that by doing nothing and maybe kind of intentionally allow your face and your shoulders to relax a bit more maybe take a little deeper inhalation and exhalation because we're doing another modality now of testing we were engaging the senses earlier and now i want to actually directly feel into space with you and as you're breathing a bit deeper can you feel that space that is inside your chest when you breathe in and we can actually use the inner sense of the body to feel this expansion and that's kind of a shortcut into the spaciousness that we can feel in the body and can you use that maybe as a stepping stone to feeling the space in general in your body can you just kind of sense into the expansiveness the three-dimensionality of your body and not thinking about it but actually feeling into that so take a moment to just connect with that space inside your body and then you can keep that sense of space and now can you also kind of feel into the space around your body you're quite likely sitting in some room can you feel the space in that room and now can you feel or notice or find any boundary and don't go to your classical concept that will tell you yes my buddy no no actually feel that space inside yourself and feel that space outside of yourself and then notice if you can find any place where one goes into the other if you find a sensation on your skin for instance and think ah that is the boundary no that is what the mind says it's a boundary what you're feeling is a sensation and that sensation is happening in space right that sensation is happening in the felt space of your body and this one actually works better with your eyes closed so if you had your eyes open do this one with your eyes closed because it gives less interpretation possibilities for the mind so i'll give you a moment of silence to do this and the kind of direction i want you to consider is can you feel your body as this flow of sensing in space and i will actually leave you with this possibly beautiful practice so i'll give you some more silence for a few more minutes i hope you enjoyed this practice and please enjoy the rest in silence for a few more minutes thank you