Sensing the body held by, and made of, awareness

So we’ll spend the first few minutes just establishing some kind of meditative awareness in the body, just beginning to welcome, explore, and allow your direct experience in a very fresh and simple way. And as always, as part of this, it’s really helpful to just check in: how is the body, what’s moving in the body, and what’s the general feel? Just checking in with the mood, the emotions, feeling whatever emotional atmosphere is present and sensing how this colours the experience of the body, just allowing and welcoming this too. Then connecting with the breath, or rather receiving the breath in a more intentional, wholehearted kind of way and bringing this subtle awareness and sensitivity to it, using this subtle awareness to appreciate the breath and to really closely and in a lot of detail experience it in a fresh way. You can just notice how the wider sense of the body is impacted by the breath or is animated by the breath. So feeling how the body experiences a kind of lift, a kind of brightness with the inhale and a bit of a deepening and a release with the exhale in the very sense of the fabric of the body, beginning to recognise the body in its raw experiential form as a kind of space of experience, a kind of field of sensation. To help with this recognition, we can just open to the very many sensations fizzing and popping in the body, the tingles in the fingers and the toes, the sense of very subtle vibrations here and there in the body, regions of different temperature, regions with more tension or less, constantly shifting. So witnessing all of these sensations without paying unique attention to any one of them, get this sense of the body as this seething mass of experience, as if the space of the body was like a body of water. And the sensations that make up our experience of the body are ripples, currents, waves. And we’re interested in really tuning in to the sense of this whole body of water, this whole space, not so interested in this ripple or that ripple, but more the global totality. If you can begin to notice what is the shape of this space? Does it have a shape? You might even be able to notice at times the projection of an anatomical body onto this space. Or it might rather feel like the sense of the anatomical body emerges out of this space at times, and at other times we can relax more into the sense of a very shapeless field without clear edges and without clear form. As we continue to really tune into this sense of space, we might be able to perceive the sensations that animate this space as being made of the space, just like with the body of water analogy, the ripples are made of the pond or the lake or the sea. And you can continue to use the breath as a place to sort of centre this awareness, but just being clear that the breath is one movement, one kind of current within this space. From here we can gradually open out the awareness to include more and more realms of experience. Taking in sounds again, staying with this sense of space, you might even be able to include thoughts and emotions. Noticing how thoughts kind of drift through this space in a kind of wispy way, noticing how emotions kind of colour and flavour regions of this space, noticing how sounds cause their own kinds of ripples. We’re kind of moving from the space of the body to the overall space of awareness. It’s possible to sense this in a couple of different ways. We can sense that this space holds everything, holds sounds, holding the moment-to-moment arising of the body in direct experience. And when the body is held like this in this space, it’s clear that there’s no solid, enduring experience of the body. The body is kind of arising in each moment as a unique constellation of sensations. With this sense of awareness holding experience, we may even be able to sort of perceive that that’s not really how it is. It’s not that awareness is one thing, a kind of container, and experiences are objects in the container. It’s much more that awareness is this medium. Consciousness is this kind of raw material, which experience is a kind of shaping of, or a vibration in, or a ripple in it. But to see it this way, we sort of emphasise this artificial duality at first. Consciousness is this wide space that sits in contrast to its contents, which are impermanent, arising and passing constantly. Then if we linger for a while in this space, we can begin not to need that artificial duality, just sense that experience and consciousness are kind of made of the same stuff, so to speak, in direct experience. This doesn’t need to have any ontological or metaphysical claims associated with it. We’ll just spend a couple more minutes in silence, just exploring this sense of the space of awareness and experience, ripples, vibrations, currents in this space.