The Space of the Body

So just beginning this transition into meditation in a really drama-free way, not bringing with us too much in the way of effort or tightness or pressure, can simply turn a little bit more towards our direct experience. You can notice the shape that your body has made, sensing where your body meets what’s underneath you, and just sensing this shape that your body’s made, sensing the qualities embodied in that shape. So is there a lot of uprightness? Is that bordering sort of shading into rigidity? Is there relaxation and ease, or is there a slumping in the body? You don’t need to immediately correct any of this; just be very clear about these qualities that are wrapped up in the shape that your body is in. Using this as a way to really check in with yourself this morning, the shape that your body’s made, the qualities that that implies, can you feel you can also tune into whatever’s prominent in your experience of your body, maybe some parts of the body that are asking for more care. So just meeting those with this friendly kind awareness and being aware of your emotional state this morning, noticing the mood that’s present and see if it’s possible to sense this physically in your body somatically. So it may be that whatever your emotional state is, is kind of correlated with a particular sensation or with an experience in a part of the body. Something in the heart or the throat or the belly might be letting you know something about emotions that are present. Or if there’s more, a sense of a more subtle kind of mood around it, maybe you can tune in to the sort of general feel of your body beyond this sensation or that sensation. And you may notice how the kind of flavour of the body, the texture of the body, is kind of coloured by our emotional state. And even if what we find when we check in with our emotional state is a kind of numbness or not feeling, this too can be felt. The numbness can show up in this space of the body. And then beginning to become aware of your breath in particular and drop any notion of concentrating or focusing, drop any sense of needing to hold the breath in awareness or go find the breath. The breath’s just here, and it takes no effort at all to receive what’s already happening. So just situate yourself in your body, perhaps in your belly, and from this nest in your belly, you can just receive each breath. We can really try and bring qualities of compassion and curiosity to our experience of breathing. Meeting each breath like greeting a good friend, really listening, attuning to ourselves, showing ourselves the kindness of being interested in our experience. We don’t know what it’s like to breathe. We can’t ever know what it’s like to take the next breath. The only way to know is to be there to experience it. And if we bring this interest and curiosity, the experience of breathing can become a rich, nuanced, even pleasurable experience. Then we’ll begin to expand our awareness to take in the whole body. So to help establish this kind of whole body awareness, we can do a quick tour first. So you might just sweep your awareness through your feet, sensing all of the micro tingles present in your toes whenever you look in the right way. Sweeping awareness up your legs, just meeting and caring for the areas of tension and relaxation that you find on your way. Feeling the sort of spacious lack of sensation in some parts of the legs that aren’t really receiving much from the outside world. Continuing to bring awareness through the pelvis, the lower belly, the lower back. Feeling that where your buttocks are resting on the ground, there’s a seemingly solid sensation. But when you actually stay there for a moment, it’s constantly shifting, a set of smaller sensations bubbling away that get sort of assembled into something more solid by the mind. Continuing to bring awareness up through your torso, through your chest, your upper back, sensing whatever there is to be sensed here and the neck, the head, sensing the tense areas of the face and the relaxed areas. Maybe even noticing how tension in the jaw or the forehead or the neck or the shoulders again seems solid. If we stay there for a moment, we can notice it’s kind of pulsating, vibrating, becoming a bit stronger, a bit weaker, and bringing awareness to the arms and the fingers. Feeling the micro sensations in the fingers, the subtle tingles, and particularly tuning in now with this sense of the whole body to the quality of change. So noticing that in each moment there are an uncountable number of sensations arising in your body. And in each moment, there is a completely unique constellation of sensation never to be repeated. Maybe we can sense the body like the kind of flicker of light on a screen, on a cinema screen or something like that. Each sensation a dancing play of light just temporarily animating the screen. And we want to really take in this whole dance of physical sensation. If your awareness becomes hooked up and narrow around one part of the body, one part of this field of sensation, you can just do a quick sweep of the body again, noticing more and more sensations and coming again to this sense of this changing, bubbling, dancing play of sensation. And so as these sensations keep popping into existence, shifting, changing, and then disappearing, we can tune in to the kind of field that holds all of these sensations, the space of the body. So if the body sensations are the play of light on a screen, can we really notice the screen? This kind of whole space, it’s not really separate from the sensations. In fact, it’s kind of the thing that the sensations are made of. But we can kind of rest back into the field of physical experience and we can just be this space in which sensations just continue to fizz and pop and play. And as we tune into this kind of field of experience in this way, it may happen that a pleasant sense of space or freedom or expansiveness arises. Maybe quite mild, maybe quite subtle, maybe you wouldn’t notice unless you were directed to. If this is the case, just appreciate this and welcome this sense of spaciousness. We can get the sense that this space, as we deepen into it and tune into it more, can really hold everything. It’s not troubled by the sensations that come and go within it. Just like waves don’t trouble the ocean. And for the last couple of minutes, we can rest in this sense of space and we can include all the other aspects of our experience: thoughts, sounds, emotions, and we can just let them all come and go within this space of awareness.