In his book ‘Touching Enlightenment’, the Buddhist teacher Reggie Ray makes the point that many western meditation students spend a lot of time in their heads and very little in their body. Meditation practice is all too often seen as a mind practice with very little to do with somatic sensations. He goes on to say that unless we fully embody our practice, and allow it to include our physical nature as well as our mind, we will end up as a set of disembodied heads, further away from enlightenment than when we started. I tend to agree.

To me it seems strange that we have come such a long way from an embodied practice since it seems to have been part of the intention of the Buddha to learn mindfulness of the body as a base before adding anything else. However, I guess now there are far more sensory distractions and intellectual pursuits to be had than there were in India two and half thousand years ago and perhaps we need to emphasise the physicality of practice more now than ever before.

Getting the correct posture for meditation seems to me to be the starting block for an embodied practice, just as a relaxed mind is the best point from which to begin meditation. Spending a few minutes to feel the body on the cushion is a good way of settling the body and mind before practice but yet how many of us go straight from everyday activities into mental meditation without this preparatory step? I am certainly guilty of it! Yet the mind cannot be relaxed unless the body is. This preparatory stage pays dividends in our practice.

The mindfulness of the body is addressed by the Buddha in both the sutra on the mindfulness of breathing (Anapanasati Sutta) and the sutra on the four foundations of mindfulness (Satipatthana Sutta). In both of these key Pali texts, mindfulness of the body is the first step and it seems implicit, if not explicit, that this has to be firmly grasped and worked with before proceeding on to the three later stages – mindfulness of feelings, emotions and thoughts. When the meditation is lost, the practice begins again with the mindfulness of the body and works onwards once this is re-established.

In the Satipatthana Sutta, the Buddha instructs us to ‘breathe with the whole body’. The breath itself is a key part of most meditation practice and can also be the gateway to the sensations of our whole physical body. The quality and frequency of the breath is an indication to how much tension we are holding onto and by breathing into each part of the body in turn we can become completely awake to our whole self.

The two aforementioned sutras seem strangely ignored in both Tibetan and Zen Buddhist traditions (although Thich Nhat Hanh grasps their importance) but surely must form a basis of any attempt to embody practice? And embodiment has to continue away from the mat – being aware of the movement of the body and the sensations from moment to moment, especially at times of stress and aversion – when negative emotions arise and threaten our equilibrium. Being aware of emotions at their somatic level takes away much of their power. This can be observed with emotions such as jealousy and anger that we all experience in our lives. Instead of focussing on the thoughts which arise at this time as we tend to want to do, check in with your body and see how the emotion feels. Where do you feel jealousy in the body? What does it feel like? Without the thoughts that accompany it, isn’t an emotion just another set of sensations?

The truth is that being aware of somatic sensations brings you into the present moment, while conceptual thoughts take you away from that. Mindfulness of the body should be the first step of any practice, and key throughout the whole spiritual path. Enlightenment can only be reached through the physical body we are in. There is no other way.

Books on embodied practice
Johnson, Will. 1996.  The Posture of Meditation. Shambhala.
Johnson, Will. 2005.  Yoga of the Mahamudra. Inner Traditions.
Ray, Reginald. 2008.  Touching Enlightenment. Sounds True.

Books on the mindfulness suttas
Buddhadasa. 1998.  Mindfulness With Breathing. Wisdom.
Hanh, Thich Nhat. 1992.  Breathe, You Are Alive! Rider.
Hanh, Thich Nhat. 1993.  Transformation and Healing. Rider.
Rosenberg, Larry. 2004.  Breath by Breath. Shambhala.

The life of an individual is the life of his body… A person who doesn’t breath deeply reduces the life of his body… If he doesn’t feel fully he narrows the life of his body… In effect,  most people go through life on a limited budget of energy and feeling.

Alexander Lowen, Bioenergetics

One of the things I have noticed or rather felt in my formal practice was that it was missing the bodily aspect even though often times during a sitting I’d stay with pain, physcial discomfort or other sensations in the body.  If being human involves living in this human body would it not be more helpful to use it in meditation in a more direct way?  I took up the asana practice as a way of engaging both body and mind  into the practice in a more direct and dynamic way but was open to furhter explore movement as part of spiritual practice.

Photo: Ralph Weidne

When I first heard Hokai Sobol talk about  history and basic practices of Japanese Shingon on Buddhist Geeks I immediately responded to the idea of what to me sounded like a more embodied meditation practice than what I found zazen to be. I contacted Hokai and with his encouragement and support joined his group in downtown Rijeka for a week end of intensive Shingon practices in the last week of May. (The brief account of the experience will follow shortly.) Although it was hard to say what this experience would lead to in the future, I knew it was the beginning of a new journey. Shingon training helped me realise that spiritual life for me actually meant embodied spiritual life.

But even at this point I did not really know an embodied life meant. For starters, I kept on objectifying the body, thinking of it as a tool to be used and maintained rather than having a value of its own.  I also wrestled with the feeling of guilt and was ambivalent as to whether I should pick and choose practices and traditions as I went along or if  it would be more helpful to “take one seat” as Jack Kornfield advises in “A Path with Heart” and stick with it.  In a way I saw trying out new practices as an admittance of my own “failure” with zazen.

Since I started doing sitting meditation one of my legs (or both) would inevitably fall asleep and for the most part the sitting would evolve around staying with those sensations in the body. I know it is not harmful for my health and would probably pass with time so I just accepted it as something I could sit with and even learnt to appreciate as those sensations in the body helped me stay connected to it and the breath.  With time those sensations built a background for my sitting, something I sort of knew would be there and I guess I started identify the sittings  with.

Doing some yoga practice right before the sitting has proved to be very successful in helping me get grounded in the body and those sensations in the legs suddenly disappeared altogether. Now the body feels alert yet relaxed and pleasantly warmed up. However, I soon discovered that when the body is more comfortable the mind is more likely to wonder away and engage in daydreaming and I have to apply more effort to sustain concentration.

I find myself wishing one condition away in preference of the other only to find out that the latter is not at all as I imagined it to be.

Friend, please tell me what I can do about this world
I hold to, and keep spinning out!

I gave up sewn clothes, and wore a robe,
but I noticed one day the cloth was well woven.

So I bought some burlup, but I still
throw it elegantly over my left shoulder.

I pulled back my sexual longings,
and now I discovere that I’m angry a lot.

I gave up rage, and now I notice
that I am greedy all day.

I worked har at dissolving the greed,
and now I am proud of myself.

When the mind wants to break its link with the world
it still holds on to one thing.

Kabir says: Listen my friend,
there are very few that find the path!

From Ecstatic poems by Kabir, versions by Robert Bly

As in the above mentioned story my own experience, too, unfolded on a road and in a somewhat chaotic and exotic for an outsider environment. The unusual situation made it easier for me to no longer be clinging to the old image of me and what I possibly could or could not do.

Master Dogen’s words start making more sense: “…to study yourself is to forget yourself; to forget yourself is to be awakened and realize your intimacy with all things.”

Can we become intimate with all things through conceptualising and analysing? My Dharma sister Sara (the cat that lives with me) never analyses anything and seems to be having a good life. I suspect that animals and kids do not go around rationalising the world and settle for simply living in it.

It is not easy to see myself with the new eyes when the surroundings are the same. Or are they? Through yoga and zazen I have learned that one way to not get trapped in the endless stories is to stay connected with the body and to follow it.  It is more than just about the “gut” feeling.  Our bodies are wired to collect and process the information so we can quickly respond to the situation but we believe the best decisions come from the head. Yet – applying the rational approach to this all-pervasive belief – can we really know that this is true? My own experience of overanalysing and overplanning has proved me wrong on more occasions that I would like to admit to myself and to Sara (the cat).

The society conditions us to not trust our bodies and override whatever they have to say to us. One example that comes to mind now is the diet pills that dampen the feeling of hunger. What they actually say is that hunger is something negative and is to be avoided. Yet how would we know when to start eating and when to stop if we don’t feel hunger to begin with?

Our bodies receive and store our emotions and by being curious about the ways we react by checking in with the body we can learn tons about ourselves. Yet again the society encourages us being “in control” of our emotions which takes the expression of stifling them.

Thomas J. Leonard writes about this: “What happens when immediate responses are stifled is that people lose track of the full measure of their feelings, along with many things they might have learned from the tendencies revealed by those responses. In order to appear competent and in control, they end up cultivating internal numbness, a widening distance between their minds and their bodies. Trying to preventing getting stuck in an overly reactive mode, they end up stuck in a response-containment mode, which blocks self-knowledge. And self-knowledge is the key to evolving”.* Leonard’s point is that being in tune with our feelings – positive as upsetting – allows us to pick up on all possible environmental clues and use this valuable information to create a more fulfilling life.

Being aware of one’s responses is not the same as flying off the handle and “losing it”. It is allowing myself to experience the feeling as it is – raw energy – and putting the story aside. Again – “Feel the feeling, drop the story”. However, it is exactly what we often have resistance to. I feel nervous about giving a call to the friend I had falling out with and not liking the feeling decide to not make this call and just let this opportunity go.  Another way to approach the situation would be to feel the feeling, see where it comes from (some sort of expectation) and take the step anyway.  I know a Zen teacher who would say that not making this call is alright, too, and I get it, I really do but honestly which of the two choices would I want to be a metaphor for my life?

…If you don’t break you ropes while you’re alive,

do you think

ghosts will do it after?…

Kabir, Ecstatic Poems (Translated by Robert Bly)

* Thomas J. Leonard, “The Portable Coach”