Attunement to the breathing body

As you take this shape that you’re going to be in for this period of practice, this supportive shape, you can use that as your entry point into the meditation. You can really feel the shape of your body, feel the posture that you’ve adopted and feel these qualities — the quality of ease, the quality of awakeness, uprightness, wholeheartedness. These qualities that are very valuable for meditation. And if we can borrow them from the posture, which is making life a bit easier for ourselves. And as we continue to tune into the shape of the body, you can also notice the quality of the texture, the feeling of this shape, how the body feels. And there are different aspects to how the body feels that we can take care to notice. There’s the patterns of tension. They’re always present in either subtle or very obvious ways. And there are different kinds and amounts of tension in different parts of the body. There’s also the kind of background sense of how tense the body is, how relaxed the body is as a whole. We can notice the face, the jaw, the shoulders, tension held in these places. We don’t immediately need to change that. Sometimes when we try and relax tension, it’s just like a game of whack-a-mole — it just pops up somewhere else. Instead, we want to encourage an atmosphere of presence and ease in which tension just sort of has less need to hang around. Just letting yourself be really okay with the areas of the body that are tense. There’s always going to be some physical tension in the body. So resting in this sense of really allowing, welcoming everything that we find in the body. Another level or another aspect of our embodied awareness is how our emotional state shows up physically, somatically, in the body. We can tune into this. You might notice it in the very felt sense of the body — in the way this whole realm of experience feels. There’s a kind of background vibration, hum, or flavour, or texture — however you want to see it — that reflects our emotional state. If we’re restless and agitated, it can feel like things are ping-ponging around inside our body, inside this space. If we’re relaxed and settled, it might just feel like a soft, warm glow. Other emotions, more solid emotions like joy or anger or fear, might show up as sensations of burning, or forms pulling. Just welcoming, allowing, caring for whatever you find here — actually no need for it to be any other way. And our practice isn’t about teleporting to some other place, but about relating to and perceiving where we are in a deeper, more nuanced, more spacious way. As we stay a while with this sensitivity to our embodied experience, you might notice that you’re just able to pick up more — more subtlety, more depth. It’s like when you walk into a dark room. At some point, your eyes adjust to the darkness, and you’re able to pick out more. We might not be able to name or even understand our immediate experience — and we don’t need to. Just stay sensitive and attuned to the shifting landscape of our inner world. Having prepared the ground in this way and created a bit of space, we can begin to tune to the breath. If we were to have done this straight away before this sensitization, this adjustment to subtlety, we would probably be with the breath on a more superficial level. Notice now that the breath can be felt in the whole space of the body. And there are some discrete sensations that make up the breath — the movement of the belly and the chest, even the shoulders, the air moving through the nostrils and the throat. And there’s also a sense in the whole body of a kind of lift with the inhale. This background texture of the body that we tuned into — feel how it kind of lifts, receives energy, becomes brighter. The exhale — it kind of relaxes, releases. We can be with the breath on any of these levels. We can be with just one sensation in the body, or with this whole movement in the whole body. We can be with this subtle energising and releasing that we can sense in the very texture of the body. The one to choose is the one that feels best right now — one that’s interesting enough to keep you engaged and accessible enough that you don’t wander off too much. A little bit of wandering off is just fine. So as we rest awareness in the body, receiving the breath, we can take care of our attitude — how we’re relating to the breath, the way that we’re aware of the breath. We want to be interested, and we want to be kind, gentle. Luckily, we have some barometers to let us know if these are getting out of whack. When we’re not really interested — we don’t really want to be here to experience the breath — we space out a bit. We sort of push the breath into the background and bring something more exciting into the foreground. Thinking about the future, making plans, whatever it might be. So this is our cue to bring more interest. We’re not concerned with bringing more focus — focus will arise naturally. Out of this interest and this gentleness, we get really close to the breath, really close to each cell in the body as it receives and releases energy from the breath. We’re interested in how this experience can evolve if we stay with it — interested to know the breath on a deeper level. And when the qualities of kindness and gentleness are absent, we feel this as a kind of dryness or harshness — probably a kind of tightness in the body, maybe even in the posture, maybe even in a mindset of achieving, getting somewhere. And then we can just sort of soften — soften into this atmosphere of kindness and gentleness and care. Soften the attention, make it less jagged. Really emphasise this wholehearted welcoming of our experience. So this is how we’ll practise for the last few minutes — bringing this deep sensitivity to the body, receiving the breath as this movement in the whole body, bringing interest, curiosity, kindness, and gentleness. And if, or when, a sense of harmony arises a little bit, or a sense of space — things start to soften, things start to open — notice this, enjoy this.