Holding subtle tension with compassion

So beginning the practice by allowing your awareness to make the descent into your present moment, experience of your body, of your senses, your heart. Part of what’s happening when we start meditation is we’re shifting the kind of center of importance in our awareness, in our psyches. We’re shifting from assigning a great importance to stories, to thoughts, to assigning much more importance to our immediate embodied experience of being. So just let that process happen. Acknowledge that right now stories aren’t really important. They’ll still be there later if they’re needed. Just coming into your body, landing into your seat and sensing how it feels to inhabit your body this morning. There may be a descriptor for this; there may be a word that seems to apply—tired, anxious, relaxed. But such words will always be kind of rough approximations. To actually know the experience, we have to just look with even more curiosity, intimacy. Sometimes we assume for some reason that in order to meditate successfully, we might need to feel a certain way; we might need to feel still or calm. This can blind us to all of the ways that we’re not still or calm. So just throw out any such notions that are not useful and embrace exactly what’s going on right now in your body, knowing that this is exactly the place to be in your practice. Stillness can come from a lack of resistance rather than from a lack of movement or an artificial kind of pinning down of our inner life. We may be able to notice the inseparability of our physical and emotional experience. The body feels like this partially because the heart is like this, because there’s this mood, this emotion that flavors and colors the sense of the body. We can also feel emotions creeping up on us, identifiable sensations. Sense of movement in the chest like a buzzing or a kind of hollow tightness in the belly, or a sense of warmth somewhere in the body. Just take your time to allow your body and your heart their fullest expression in this moment, not boxing anything in. We can tune into the breath. Having met ourselves deeply in this moment as we are, we can use the breath as a place to steady ourselves, allowing the breath to take us deeper into connection with our experience rather than to try and reach some preconceived state of mind. Actually staying with the breath can just kind of open out, harmonize, make space for, and soothe everything that’s already happening and allow us a very different perspective, a more expansive, more free perspective. So we’ll spend a moment just receiving the breath into the whole body, so we don’t want to narrow ourselves down too much to focus on the breath in a way that excludes the rest of us. We can stay sensitive to the wider awareness of everything that’s happening, of the many sensations making up your body, the emotional atmosphere, the hum and whir of thoughts, and your external senses of hearing and smell. There’s a way the breath can kind of touch all of our experience and harmonize and join together these different layers of experience, rather than being just a place to kind of exclusively focus on. So we can stay with this wide awareness of the whole body—fingers, toes, head, everything in between—constantly animated with sensation, as our body always is if we’re paying the right kind of attention. And the breath is this movement, this process that touches every part of this body. Every cell in your body is respiring in every moment. Maybe you can kind of sense this, the way your whole body responds to the in-breath and the out-breath. We’re going to stay with this for another minute or two, but we can just sense or imagine as much as we can that the breath is just delivering compassion to every corner of the body. As we breathe in, we receive this care and compassion. The way that we receive it is that it sort of enters into our very way of paying attention to the body, as if the transparent liquid of our awareness was just fragranced with a few drops of essential oil. As we breathe, we can just encourage this way of meeting experience that brings a kind of interested but spacious care. This is a direct application of compassion in our very awareness, in our very attention. It’s one of the most helpful things that we can use in our meditation. More than almost anything, it can help us to find that place where we’re really able to allow our experience to do its own thing. Let go a little bit of the sense of control that just generally follows us around most of the time. You can always use your imagination in any helpful way, imagining that this compassion that we’re breathing into our awareness is a particular color or is originating from somewhere like the depths of the earth or the sky or some imagined figure—Kuan Yin or your pet or your nephew. It doesn’t really matter the specifics. What matters is that we can skillfully use our imagination to have an immediate experience. And just being really aware of how your body responds to this influx of compassion. However, we may be feeling it—in big ways, in small ways—as we infuse our awareness with this care and this sort of light-heartedness as well. It’s not a heavy thing; just sense and feel what that does to the felt sense of your body. And then as we tune to the body in this way, as a whole, as an overall field of sensation, we can notice that this field, this space of the body, there are some parts that feel more spacious and more smooth, and other parts that feel more jagged or tight, rocky, bumpy, turbulent. You might just check in with a few places to see if you can sense these differences. How do the palms of the hands feel? Often there’s a kind of warm, neutral spaciousness. How does the forehead feel? This can be a very common place for tightness to show up. How do the shoulders feel? How about the belly and the chest? What about the legs? Just trying to notice that there are differences not just in the kinds of sensations that arise in these parts, but the very kind of sense of the fabric of the body in these parts. In some places, maybe there’s a sense of fast vibration; it might be some pulling, some pressure. These are all the hallmarks of some kind of tension, subtle or not so subtle. There’ll be other places where there’s not so much going on, kind of space, relative stillness, maybe a kind of warm glow. And so we’re gonna take some care with these parts that are feeling more tense, and we’re not going to just go in and ask them to relax. This is fine at a more gross level, but when we’re dealing with subtler tension—these subtle knots that constrict our experience a little bit—actually holding them with the right kind of awareness is a more sustainable and appropriate way to allow them to unfold in their own time. And if possible, we’re going to try and keep this sense of the whole body, the wider space of the body, even as we bring this compassionate awareness to areas with subtle tension. This keeping our awareness wide prevents a kind of narrowing down over what’s tense and making it the kind of center of the universe. So with this sensitivity to the whole body, identify some region where there’s some of this jaggedness, movement, tightness, pressure, and become very interested here, rather than just leaping to, “It would be nice if this stopped.” Become very interested. Be very clear about what this sensation feels like. Is it moving when I stay with it? Does it get more or less intense? Is it coming and going, or is it constant? And we can notice too, the secondary resistance and tension that sort of encases the original sensation, a sense of broader contraction in the body. This is in a way a manifestation of the Buddha’s second arrow and being very clear when there’s any sense of trying to push this experience away, trying in some effortful way to not have this experience. This will be there in some way—obvious or subtle. And this comes with that secondary reaction of tension. So we’ve got the raw sensation, this pulling or twisting or jaggedness that might be very subtle; it might not be something you’d normally call really unpleasant. There’s some kind of disturbance, and then you’ve got the resistance, the pushing away, and the sort of broader pattern of tension that arises in response to this. And the kind of message, subconscious thought, the mood that this is not welcome. I don’t want this. Having identified all of this, now we can just hold it all with this compassionate awareness. None of this needs to change, not even the resistance. It may change, but that’s up to it. Our job is simply to witness this whole pattern with kindness, curiosity, goodwill. You can just notice and appreciate any sense of ease that comes with holding these patterns of tension in this way. It might be quite subtle, but there may well be a sense of things becoming a little bit softer around the edges. And it’s helpful to notice this. You may stay in one place applying this curiosity and compassion, or you may feel like you want to try it in a different region that’s got some subtle tension, and then again becoming really clear: What is the raw sensation? How is it evolving over time? And then where’s the resistance, the sense that this shouldn’t be happening, and the broader pattern of tension that surrounds the raw sensation? And then we just hold this whole process with an easy, light-hearted kindness, not making a problem out of anything. Just carry on like this for the last minute or two of this practice.