KNOWING THE BODY FROM WITHIN

KNOWING THE BODY FROM WITHIN

There's an old Peanuts comic strip where Linus comes up to Lucy and says, "Feel how cold my hands are." So he touches her and she says, "Brrr, yes, they are cold." Then she asks, "But how do you know how they feel when you're inside them?" And this is a big problem for most of us. We're not really that conscious of how we feel the body from within. Yet this is the area where the Buddha says you're going to find the Dhamma. The texts talk about touching the Dhamma with the body, even seeing the Dhamma with the body.
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Where you're experiencing the body right now: That's where the important things are going to be discovered. The experience of concentration is going to be sensed right here. Even when you go into the formless realms, it's going to be right here where your sense of the surface of the body begins to disappear. Right where the body was felt, that's where you're going to start noticing space and consciousness. When your awareness of the deathless comes, it's going to fill the area where your body is now. That's where the Dhamma is seen and touched.
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So right here is where you want to look. And get used to looking again and again and again, so that you can see things more precisely and accurately...When most of us look at this sense of the inside of the body, we can notice whether we're feeling well or not well, but that's about it. Some people can't even experience that much, can't even experience the body. Either because of abuse when they were small or some other trauma, they have trouble feeling their bodies, being sensitive to what's going on inside.
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One way to get around that is not to imagine that you're looking at the body from the area of the head or the eyes. Instead, back up into the body: Notice how the back feels, notice how the different parts of the body feel as you back into them. And use the breath as your guide. Think of the different aspects you notice in the body as an aspect of the breath energy.
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Altogether, there are four elements or properties that make up our sense of the body from within: breath, fire, water, and earth. The sense of energy -- which can be either moving or else still but buzzing -- is breath. Don't think of the breath only as the air coming in and out of the lungs. It's the energy buzz throughout the body. When you start thinking of the body as an energy flow or energy buzz, you begin to notice parts of the body where the flow or the buzz is not quite right. You might have accepted them in the past as feeling solid, thinking, "Well, that's where the bones are. That's where the muscles are tight." But if you tell yourself, "This is breath," you realize that some parts of the breath seem to be stuck; others are stagnant. They don't move. They don't flow. What can you do to get them to move? What can you do to get them to flow? Changing your perception will also change your questions, change your ideas of what's possible.
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Then there's the warmth, the fire property. Sometimes it seems too warm, sometimes not warm enough. Which parts of the body are warmest right now? Do they feel comfortable or overly warm? If they feel comfortable, think of spreading that warmth throughout the body, to the places that are cooler. If you're feeling too hot, you want to do the opposite: Look for the cool areas and think of the coolness spreading throughout the body. That's the water, coming in to dampen the fire.
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Earth is a sense of solidity or heaviness. Does the body feel too heavy, or do you feel too lightheaded? Can you bring things into balance? If you're feeling too heavy, think more of lightness, the breath energy lifting you up. If you're feeling too lightheaded, think more of earth: There are bones, there's all this solid stuff in your body that can keep you grounded.
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Once you've been able to detect these different properties within the body, the next step is to try to bring them all into balance so that things are not too warm, not too cold, not too heavy, not too light. They feel just right. When the body is brought into balance, your sense of the breath is going to change. The energy flow in the body becomes less and less a matter of having to pull energy in from without. It's more that the pores of your skin are wide open, and they connect with breath channels throughout the body. Different parts of the body are nourished with breath energy, and all you have to do is think of them sharing the breath energy with one another, with other parts of the body that seem more starved. The more the breath channels connect within the body, the less you're going to need the in-and-out breath.
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This is important, because the more things come to balance and stillness like this, the more clearly you'll be able to see what the mind is doing right here -- and particularly the very peculiar activity that the mind has of taking a sensation in the body and using it as a kernel for a thought. It becomes a little symbol in the mind and then the symbol turns into a thought world. The more quiet and balanced things are in the body, the more clearly you will be able to see this happen -- and how arbitrary the whole process is.
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Of course, this process does have its uses. It enables you to think and function in the world. But you also want to be able to pull yourself out at any time, in case a thought world turns vicious, so it's good to gain practice in just staying with the body. Think of "body, body, body," keeping the body in and of itself as your frame of reference. If a thought does arise, and you can sense where in the body it's lodged, think of breathing through that spot. Or just think of the energy in that spot untangling itself and getting connected with the energy of the different parts right around it, dissolving the tangle.
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When you can stay with the sense of the body and not get sucked into a thought world, it's called keeping the body in and of itself as your frame of reference. This is why the Buddha starts here when he teaches mindfulness..."
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Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Excerpt from "Knowing the Body from Within"

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Read the full essay here:

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/meditations5.html#knowingthebodyfromwithin

Or in the eBook Meditations 5:

http://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/Writings/Meditations5_v140401.pdf

Or in the eBook Meditations 5:

http://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/Writings/Meditations5_v140401.pdf