The body as gateway to open awareness

Okay, so in this meditation, we’re going to use the body to move into a kind of open awareness, wide awareness, and a kind of holistic awareness that can meet experience and the body and the heart and the mind as one thing rather than as a collection of different experiences. The way we’re going to do this is by emphasising effortlessness. So we’re going to try and get there without huffing and puffing too much. That’s the plan. To begin, let’s just bed this intention in tension for effortlessness. Perhaps dropping in the understanding that it doesn’t actually require effort to be aware. Awareness is already happening, always. It’s like all we need to do is sort of be there, step into that, step back into that, so we can take that step into this awareness that’s already present, holding our bodies. Just notice if there’s any habit of sort of assuming awareness to be something that comes from your head and then looks at things like a flashlight, like a laser beam. This is one way that attention can feel, and it’s totally okay for it to feel that way sometimes, but we’re looking for something less effortful. Instead of needing to go out and notice the body as if the body were somewhere else, we can just recognise that the body is already kind of lit up by awareness, and it’s lit up by awareness from the inside. Awareness inhabits the body, or even more accurately, the body inhabits awareness. The body is held by awareness. If this sounds at all abstract, just come into a sense of feeling your body from the inside as it is right now. As we sort of step back into this recognition of the body held by awareness, we can just encourage a sense of ease, a sense of welcoming ourselves exactly as we’re showing up. Maybe you can even notice that awareness itself, the quality of knowing, of illumination, doesn’t judge, it doesn’t resist, it doesn’t push away, and it doesn’t even judge judgement or resist resistance. So, as we allow the body to be held by awareness, to be known by awareness, to be lit up by awareness, to be met by awareness, whichever way makes sense for you to think about it, notice the many sensations moving through. You might just meet a few of these sensations: various tingles, the feeling of the clothes on your skin, the movement of your belly with the breath, the breath in your nostrils. We can meet each of these sensations and then just kind of sink back into the background awareness that holds it all. We can draw a contrast between attention and awareness. Attention is this singling out of this experience or that experience, focusing on one thing. Awareness is more like our peripheral vision, like the whole field, and it includes attention. Attention moves within the wider field of awareness. Something that can really help to establish and stay with this sense of wide awareness is to tune into not just the sensations that are happening in the body but also the underlying tone of your body. Depending on what’s going on today, that can feel very different. It might feel like a hectic sort of vibration, turbulence, strong currents of movement in this background space. It might feel like a very sweet flavour if there’s some joy or some open-heartedness around. You might notice a kind of lightness or buoyancy. It might just feel spacious and neutral. What we can notice is this flavour, this atmosphere. It’s not so much constrained to one place; it may feel slightly different in different regions of the body space. It doesn’t have a defined physical location. It can help to follow that tone, that texture, that flavour, and let it sort of lead you into this wide awareness. It may even be possible that we can notice attention sometimes moving and wandering. Attention itself may not be totally still. It may be possible that we can witness that from this wider awareness, this more holistic awareness. So the movement of attention itself is something that can be known. When we practise in this way, there’s nothing that needs to be done about this natural meandering of our focused attention. The only thing we need to look out for is if this movement of attention has started to trick awareness into becoming small or imagining itself as small, shrinking around a particular experience. Rather than using effort to move attention, we can release the effort that’s inherent in this contraction of attention around something, in this fixation. So, our path to this wide-open, spacious, inclusive, holistic awareness is through a releasing and stepping back out of contraction and a kind of effortful focus. We can see this in relation to many different experiences. Thoughts arise and often they’re met with kind of resistance or indulgence. In some way, they’re regarded as important and fixated upon. Instead of trying to let go of the thought and come back to some other experience, we just release this fixation, release this resistance, this contraction. If we’re able to access this sense of spaciousness, of awareness, this can feel like a relief, not so much a job to do but just a natural way of bringing ease. With body sensations too, there can be a sense of attention kind of going out and drawing circles around things, highlighting things and making them more sharply defined. Here’s the breath, here’s this tension in my face, here’s this tightness in my chest. We can notice this tendency to thingify things. We can recognise this too as an application of effort that’s unnecessary right now. We don’t need to know what this or that is called, which part of the anatomical body this or that is happening in. Instead, we can meet experience as one blob. All the sensations that we would otherwise have names for, the thoughts, and everything coming into your external senses—these are all part of this singular field. We don’t need to make this happen or imagine this to be the case. This sense will naturally grow as we relax. This drawing of circles around things, this picking out of experiences as separate, we can just rest in a sense of mystery, of not knowing and not needing to know. When we practise in this way, meditation becomes a releasing of labelling, of categorisation, of knowing this to be this way and that to be that way. It even becomes a releasing of an active way of noticing this or that. We can begin to see that actually when we release this activity of attention, actively noticing this experience or that experience, we can see experience more clearly, paradoxically, because we can situate it within this whole field, this whole mystery as it arises, fresh moment to moment. So we’ll begin to make the transition out of formal meditation. There’s no need to hurry. You can retain as much of this sense of mystery, of not knowing, and spaciousness as possible. Just become a little bit more clear about your body having a physical location, reminding yourself which way is up and which way is down. Letting the body move in any way it wants to, to re-establish its spatial boundaries, imagined as they may be. And then, when you’re ready, opening your eyes.