The What, Why, And How Of Body Mindfulness

In this talk we explore the power of gaining greater awareness of the constantly changing flow of body sensations. The body is always in the present, no matter where our minds happen to be time and space-traveling to, and so it is a powerful tool for returning to what's truly happening. In addition, in diving deeper into our five senses, we gain wisdom into our emotional state, gain greater awareness of our phsyical body (such as with pain), and see the impermanence of all experience.

Transcript

Hi there.

Today we'll be talking about the concept of mindfulness of body and we'll kind of touch on what that is,

Why mindfulness of body is so valuable,

Such a valuable practice,

And we'll talk a little bit about the how of mindfulness of body,

Which can be explored in guided meditations,

Either mine or the many guided meditations out there.

So the definition I like to use for mindfulness in general is attentive and accepting awareness of one's present moment experience.

There's those three key pieces.

There's the awareness,

The attention piece,

Like placing the attention on a part of our experience.

There's the acceptance piece,

Or I like to think about it kind of as acknowledgement because a lot of people think about acceptance in this kind of like pass,

Like passive rollover way.

So I like to think about acknowledgement of this is what this experience is like right now,

Just kind of seeing that and not resisting it.

And then there's the present moment piece of the definition.

And that is to say that we're always,

The focus of our attention and our acceptance is on what we're going through at this exact moment.

Not something that's happening in the future or something that's happened in the past,

Whatever.

Generally,

We often think about there being kind of three facets of our experience in any given moment.

That's the physical,

The mental,

And the emotional.

So our kind of body senses,

What's happening in our mind and what's happening in our emotional state.

Or sometimes people often say our heart.

So that's the definition that I like to use for mindfulness.

And so that definition is true throughout all of the facets of experience,

The physical,

Mental,

And emotional.

And today we're talking in particular about the physical aspect of our experience.

And the way we do that is exploring the body.

Why this is such a useful tool and an aspect of mindfulness is also multifaceted.

There's definitely some strong reasons.

I'll kind of go over some of the key ones that I think are reasons that I think mindfulness of body is so beneficial.

The first one is that it is the strongest anchor we have to the present moment.

Most of us,

Most of the time,

Are doing what Tara Brock calls the body's most powerful tool.

Tara Brock calls time and space travel because we are kind of at least some percentage of our attention and then our awareness is likely in something that we're thinking about that relates to the past.

Some experience we've been through and kind of processing it,

Thinking,

Rehashing it,

Or something that's coming up in the future that we're trying to predict and plan for and possibly are worrying about.

Or maybe having some in the moment judgments about interpretations of the moment,

Which is more rare.

Most of what we're often kind of caught in is thinking about the past or thinking about the future.

So we're kind of a portion of us and we can feel this pretty experientially that we're moving through our day,

But most of us have some recollection of times where we're kind of spaced out because we're kind of halfway somewhere else or more than halfway.

We're kind of thinking about something up,

We're thinking about a meeting that's coming up that we're worried about,

And we're eating lunch,

But we have no awareness of the food we're tasting because we're very little because we're thinking about this meeting that's coming up and we're kind of actually visually going through it.

And now we have research that shows that when we visualize an orange,

For example,

All the kind of same neurons are firing when we're visualizing an orange as when we are thinking about,

Or sorry,

When we're visualizing or thinking about an orange as when we are actually seeing an orange in real life.

It's just to a lesser degree.

It's not as strong,

But it's the same effect is happening in our brain.

And so that's actually happening when we're visualizing future and past times as we're kind of actually,

Our brain is partially there and yet our body is always here,

Right here,

Right now,

Whatever we're going through,

Our body has no choice.

At least for those of us who don't necessarily,

Maybe there's some quantum physics that can prove me wrong.

But for the most part,

We believe in our most of us experience,

Okay,

Our body is moving through time and space,

But it's right here right now,

Wherever our mind is,

Wherever our attention is.

Because the body is the strongest anchor we have to touching back to what's going on right now.

It's an incredible place that we can touch peace at any time.

Our mind is one of the main things that can really cause a lot of suffering and can be kind of the place that we kind of make problems and make the moment more complicated or more scary than it is because we're lost in that other stuff.

And if we could just kind of come back to what is this moment actually like through what is our body going through?

What is it actually like to sit in this moment?

It often is really peaceful because it is a more peaceful state then kind of wherever our mind is.

Another big benefit and reason for exploring mindfulness of body is that it's a way to explore all experience.

And by that,

I mean that,

And I talk about this in other talks even further,

But it is a way to develop greater insight into our experience.

And it's a huge tool in particular for exploring and developing insight on our emotional state.

There's a book called The Body Keeps the Score.

And I think that's a good way of simply explaining that our body kind of always gives us an indication of what we are going through emotionally,

Even when sometimes we're not necessarily aware.

So you likely have some awareness of some of the physical manifestations of some stronger emotions.

Like sadness is an easy one to see for most people,

Right?

We get this kind of frown,

This upside down smile on our face.

We might kind of have like a really distorted face and obviously tears are a physical manifestation of sadness for many of us,

Especially a lot of grief.

We might actually kind of curve off shoulders,

Roll up in a ball,

Hold ourselves with anger,

Right?

We often have kind of a tensing of the face,

A tensing of the neck,

A tensing of the chest,

Maybe even clenching of fists if it's really dramatic,

Maybe flushed face,

Things like that.

As you develop greater insight into your bodily experience on a moment-to-moment basis,

You'll actually be able to see the even more subtle emotions.

When it feels like there's not a kind of big emotional state,

You can still kind of see these like moment-to-moment changes in your emotional state,

In your body,

In your body.

It kind of could be even a small tightening of your belly with a kind of stressful meeting coming up or a stressful conversation that you need to have someone that you care about,

Or like maybe a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of sweating or flushing with maybe some embarrassment in a small way or things like that.

So we also kind of as part of this point,

It's a developing of insight.

It's a kind of tool for exploring all of experience,

Including emotions,

And also including thoughts,

And so we're going to kind of go through this in a little bit more detail.

But I think it's a tool for exploring all of experience,

Including emotions,

And also including thoughts.

It's a little bit subtler and harder to see,

But it really is a tool for developing insight into the entirety of our experience.

So we see our bodies for the most part as this thing and often only pay attention to it when it's not working,

But we can also see it as kind of a changing flow of experience.

There's a story I like from one of my teachers that he was was asked and got the honor of being present with during the passing of one of his teachers,

One of his greatest mindfulness teachers,

And that teacher who was passing was just kind of vocalizing in a very light way the physical sensations that he was going through as his body was leaving him and he was leaving his body,

Or however you want to think about that.

And so he would say,

Like,

Seeing is gone and no longer have the sense of sight.

Hearing is gone.

These kind of light mental notings of physical experience changing.

And this is a really extreme example,

But in a moment-to-moment,

Day-to-day life,

Our body is constantly going through changes,

And we see dramatic evidence of us,

Our aging or our body changing in various ways in,

You know,

Maybe gray hairs or wrinkles around our eyes,

But really it's truly happening all the time.

It is a constantly changing flow of experience,

Just like the day,

You know,

Just like the weather is kind of changing from sun to very subtly changing to sun to very subtly changing to a gray sky to those clouds slowly dissipating.

Just as in our body,

There is just kind of this,

There's no kind of hard lines ever.

It's just kind of this constant changing flow of experience.

And that can,

This is,

That brings me to the third and last big why that I want to focus on in terms of why mindfulness and body is so powerful,

That because of that,

Because of it being a constantly changing flow of experience,

It's a really incredible way and tool and place to cultivate that acceptance piece of the definition and the acceptance being kind of the opposite of judgment or reaction or resistance or these reactionary tendencies we have to many of life's experiences,

Whether they're small moments or big moments.

We,

You know,

If we're deliberately sitting in meditation for,

Let's say we decide upon a half hour in that time,

We have a lot of physical sensations that can arise from light things like maybe,

Oh,

I'd like to get up and get tea right now.

And feeling that kind of,

That little like ping of desire come up to,

Oh,

I'm hungry.

I haven't had breakfast yet.

Oh,

I want to get up and eat.

To stronger physical pain that we may experience.

And we may have kind of a general,

Generally in our life,

And maybe feels worse during meditation or certain pains that arise during our practice.

So it's a really incredible pathway to understanding impermanence,

The ever-changing flow from one moment we can see,

Oh,

I wanted to,

That last one I wanted to get up and get tea and,

Oh,

Actually now I don't actually have the desire to go get tea.

If I just watched that experience and the next moment is actually different.

Or the experience of pain can often be a really interesting nuance or nuanced flow of different physical sensations that sometimes we kind of think of as a monolith.

But when we kind of look at the pain,

We see,

Oh,

There's certain parts of it,

They get bigger and smaller or more acute or more broad.

And we see how it's actually quite different in every single moment.

So you see this impermanent nature of all of our experience.

And we also,

That is also a great insight into the unsatisfactory nature of all experience and the fact that we actually don't have a lot of control over a lot of it.

It is our body.

And yet a lot of what it's doing on a moment-to-moment basis is not what we have control over.

I mean,

The aging process being one that people have talked about for since the beginning of time and developing an elixir of life,

Stop the aging process.

And yet on a moment-to-moment basis,

My body is going through changes that relate to eventually me,

My body not stopping working,

Right,

And not existing anymore.

So we develop,

The body is a portal to develop insight into exploring all of this nature of experience.

The how of mindfulness of body is something that I definitely invite you to explore in your meditation practice.

And there's a lot of amazing offerings for ways to do that here on Insight Timer.

The first I'll mention just generally is for the most part,

Very simply,

It's the mindfulness of body is exploring the body through the five senses that we have.

For those of us who have all of those senses in physical tact.

So we think of the five senses typically as sight,

Seeing,

Hear,

So and then the sense of sound or hearing,

Sense of taste,

The sense of smell,

And then the sense of kind of like physical touch,

The physical sensations that our body experiences.

So all of those senses are a portal to developing mindfulness of body.

And there are many different styles of meditation for exploring mindfulness of body.

And essentially meaning you can you can explore any of the five senses,

So you can do an entire meditative practice,

Just exploring the changing just exploring sounds just exploring the sense of hearing,

For example.

And all of these are,

Are the same,

Have the same benefits and are a portal to experiencing the present moment.

So any of the five senses can be focused on the same in the same way with the same benefits we've just discussed in this talk.

So physical sensation is one of the more common ones because of the body scan practice being a really popular and really,

Really useful tool.

So you can essentially body scan is just kind of going through the scanning through with your awareness through the physical body kind of piece by piece,

And noticing what physical sensations are present or or don't seem to be present.

And that's a really useful,

Useful practice.

There are other common common mindfulness of body practices include walking meditation,

Which is a really useful way to explore mindfulness of body and what the body is going through a moment to moment basis,

Including the physical sensations internally or the physical experiences and kind of internal to the body that as you walk,

And then also kind of the external things going on outside the body,

Including kind of the feeling of wind on your body or the warmth of the sunlight or the sounds that you are experiencing as as you're walking.

And then eating meditation is another really nice one.

There's lots of guided meditations,

Guided eating meditations out there,

Where you're particularly focusing on the sense of taste and also the sense of smell,

But also there's always sounds associated with eating and physical sensations associated with eating.

So but it's primarily focused on the sense of taste.

And so that's another really nice common way to explore mindfulness of body.

So I'll stop there and invite you to explore this topic in in some formal practice,

Either with me or with any of the amazing teachers out here on Insight Timer.

Thank you.

Have a lovely day.