Talk: Meditating With The Body

Meditating with the Body is a course of practice and study offered by the Dharma Ocean Foundation to help modern people reconnect with the reality, goodness, and health of our basic human situation, grounded in our bodies. This is an excerpt from a talk that Reggie gave at a residential meditation retreat in Crestone, CO on the view of Meditating with the Body.

Transcript

When we work with the body in the same way as when we work with meditation practice in general,

It's very important to have a correct view of what we're doing and why we're doing it.

So I want to talk once again a little bit about the view of working with the body in meditation practice.

When we are meditating,

Our goal is not to attain a particular state of mind.

Even though when we sit down we always have some idea of what we're looking for,

And usually it's a state of peace and rest.

But the actual process of meditation is making a relationship with our experience as it arises in the practice.

And therefore it's very unpredictable.

We really never know what's going to happen.

And the body plays a very important role in this.

Depending on how we work with the body,

We could be trying to cultivate some kind of ideal state,

Which is known as spiritual materialism.

In other words,

Trying to develop some further home for ourselves,

Some further security.

Or we could surrender to the process of meditation itself.

And it has very much to do with how we work with our body,

Which way we go.

If we approach our practice and we take our posture in a rigid way,

And we're looking for some kind of static,

Immovable posture of meditation,

We're encouraging a mind that is going to be dead and frozen and stuck,

Basically.

So I know that a lot of times we have a feeling that when we sit down we just want to kind of get into the right posture and then meditate.

But that approach is actually going to deaden our meditation practice.

The other approach is,

The one we've been working with here,

Is that we begin to assume our posture as a result of exploring our own inner physical space.

We explore our own inner physical space and we get to know what is actually going on in our bodies.

Now,

In this culture,

When you speak that way,

People go,

You know,

Explore your own inner physical space and they think,

Whoa,

You know,

That's heavy.

But throughout the Buddhist tradition,

Throughout its entire history,

People will tell you,

Well,

Of course that's what you do.

You have to begin by taking your seat and finding your energetic center and knowing your body,

Exploring it and discovering it.

That's the whole process.

And when you do it in that way,

Then what happens is,

As we've talked about,

All of the karma that is locked in our bodies begins to loosen and begins to come to the surface.

As I mentioned the other day,

When Freud did his work,

The end of the 19th century and early 20th century,

He began to realize that human growth can only happen,

Human development can only happen when the ego,

And this was a term that he coined,

Begins to relinquish its hold and begins to admit into the field of awareness a lot of things that it didn't want to see.

And he and later psychologists conceived of this as they called it the unconscious,

They thought of it as a dimension of the mind,

And it was basically up here.

As I mentioned the other night,

It's now very widely believed that all of the memories and experiences and painful and pleasurable things that have happened to us in our lives actually reside in the tissues of our body.

And that's where the unconscious is,

It's actually in our tissues,

It's in our muscles,

It's in our tendons,

And it's in our bones.

And in order to make the journey of meditation,

We need to begin to unlock the body,

We need to begin to unlock the secrets of the body.

Every time that we turn away from a painful experience,

Our awareness shuts down more.

Every time we,

In meditation practice,

We find that part of our body where that particular painful memory is stored in the form of tension and holding on,

And we bring awareness into it,

We breathe into it,

And we begin to open it up,

And that painful memory comes to consciousness,

And we live through it,

Which is what we do on the cushion,

You know,

We're constantly living through all kinds of things that arise in our practice,

Then our awareness,

It's almost like you're putting fuel into a fire,

And the fire burns brighter,

Our awareness burns brighter.

In the Tibetan traditions,

They actually have a whole series of techniques,

Which I've mentioned,

Called the six yogas of Naropa,

Which are specifically designed to open the inner recesses of the body,

And bring,

In a very rapid way,

Bring karma that is unripened to the surface so it can ripen.

And what they say is actually,

If you are a practitioner and you've been practicing for a long time doing shamatha vipassana,

And you feel stuck,

You feel like somehow you can't,

Something isn't,

You know,

Something isn't really working there,

This is the practice that you do,

You go back to your body,

And you start breathing into different areas of your body in a certain way,

Releasing the areas of holding,

It brings relaxation,

But it also brings the surfacing of all kinds of karma,

Physical karma in the forms of sickness and disease,

Psychological karma in the form of memories,

And very strong feelings,

And sort of seeing the world in a much more naked way,

And so on.

In the Western Buddhist tradition,

We haven't really worked with the body very much,

And yet we need to,

Because more than any Buddhist culture that has ever existed,

The body has become a repository of most of our awareness,

And if we don't work with our body,

We can only get so far.

When you are working with meditation,

You have to go to the place where the secrets are hidden,

And where the pain is buried,

And where the awareness is shut down,

And for us it's the body,

So that's the basic view,

And that's why we need to really learn how to do this work,

And what I've noticed is that people who work with their bodies in the way that we're doing it here,

Their emotions are much less likely to get stuck,

And when they get stuck,

They don't get stuck for as long.

The movement keeps going,

And you don't find people sort of in a frozen state.

To explore more Somatic teachings with Regi Ray,

Please visit his Insight Timer profile,

Or the DharmaOcean website at dharmaocean.

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Reviews

New perspective for me. Much to ponder. I hope to learn more about the divine messages within the body. To awaken within through the entire body, not just the mind. It

Thank you 🙏💗🙏💗🙏💗

Love this simple yet revealing explanation of exploring the constrictions we hold and the benefits of somatic mediation.

Thank you so much for this wisdom - it’s good to hear as it resonates with how I feel about the body, which is so often neglected in any meditative or mindfulness practice.

Thank you for this lovely and concise explanation.

Sounds like a solid path to pull the plug out of our assminds

Very nice. I love this focus on the somatic experience. Thank you.

Amazing talk and very true. A tough but empowering and journey of deep awakening to go into pain with a new understanding and find strength thanks

Words I have been waiting my whole life to hear. Thank you

Excellent! Thank you. 🌷🌷🌷

Very interesting, can’t wait to hear more🙏

Your talk helped sum up and validate why the body scan practice has been so beneficial for me. In search of chronic pain relief, I befriended the body scan several years, ago. After being just a “brain” for many years, I work daily on feeling and sensing my emotions in the body. I look forward to listening to some of your meditations. Thank you for helping me further my practice. 🙏

Thanks. I look forward to choosing your talks again. Very interesting because you explain in a way I understand. 🙏🏻❤️😊

Informative talk!

Such great information. I look
forward to exploring and learning more. Merci beaucoup 🙏🏻☀️

Succinct but helpful pointer to the importance of working with the body in meditation. Thanks Reggie!

Excellent insight. As a person with physical challenges now that I did not have years ago, a static posture is very difficult for me to sustain. It is, however, how I practiced long ago. I have noticed a distinct difference in the depth and quality of my practice since beginning to move, however much, and listen to the needs of my body as I practice. It was wonderful to hear this also coming from another source as having been an observed and accepted thing beyond just my own experience. Thank you so much for sharing this with me and the world. I see the light in you. 🤲❤️🤲

So helpful and easy to comprehend💜

Very enlightening for me, as I have felt that the dis ease in my body can only be released through meditation and working with it to heal the unrippened karma of this and previous lives.

I love this. Thank you so much Reggie.