session7.pdf

Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction

Homework

Week 7

Homework:

• Practice mindfulness formally for 45 minutes every day for 6 days this week

using Sitting Meditation CD and alternating every other day with the Body

Scan or one of the Yoga CDs.

• Read and reflect upon “Full Body, Empty Mind” article

• Read and reflect upon: “Emotional Alchemy” article

• Continue to cultivate your intention to increase your level of awareness during

daily activities such as: eating, showering, brushing your teeth, washing dishes,

taking out the garbage, reading to the kids as well as awareness of the body and

opportunities to practice yoga and cultivate mindfulness during the day.

Reflections

Shadows of the past are vague, and the future is too distant to come into focus. Now is brightly

illuminated and richly colored. Today I will remember to keep my mind in the present. Now is all

I have. Now is all anyone has. – Judith Garrison

Yesterday is but a dream, tomorrow is but a vision, but today will lived makes every yesterday a

dream of happiness, and every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well, therefore, to this day. –

Sanskrit proverb

The gift of life with all its joy and splendor is in the moment at hand. Now it is ours to relish and

enjoy; now it is our to cherish and to hold, but only for the moment. – Adolfo Quezada

The past is past, and the future is yet to come. That means the future is in your hands– the

future entirely depends on the present. That realization gives you a great responsibility.

– The Dalai Lama

www.BeMindful.org Steve Shealy, PhD 813-980-2700

Full Body, Empty Mind By Will Johnson

(this article is taken from Tricycle Magazine, Fall 2007. See: http://www.tricycle.com/)

Will Johnson explains that by turning our awareness to the full range of physical

sensations, the body becomes a doorway to awakening.

In many Buddhist groups, the body is addressed only in basic instructions on posture for

meditation, sometimes lasting no more than a few minutes. Many practitioners are

drawn to body-based practices such as yoga, martial arts, or the Alexander technique to

complement or even enable their sitting practice, but they are often on their own when it

comes to integrating these traditions with their larger spiritual path. What is being lost

in this gap? One of the most convincing voices for the importance of the body in

meditation belongs to Will Johnson, author of several books on the topic, including The

Posture of Meditation; Aligned, Relaxed, and Resilient; and Yoga of the Mahamudra.

Johnson, the director of the Institute for Embodiment Training in British Columbia,

Canada, began his Buddhist practice in 1972 and was certified in the deep bodywork

system of Rolfing in 1976. Drawing on his experience in these traditions, Sufism, and

others, he now teaches embodiment training, what he calls “a path of awakening that

views the body as the doorway, not the obstacle, to personal growth and spiritual

transformation.” I exchanged emails with Johnson to discuss how meditators can explore

the body and what they might gain from the practice. –Andrew Merz

You’ve said that in order to experience emptiness of mind, one must first experience

fullness of body. While this intuitively resonates with many meditators, clear explanations

of why that is true and how it can be integrated into a Buddhist meditation practice are

hard to find. How do we start to understand this view in a Buddhist context, and how do

we address it without feeling as though we are detracting from our usual sitting practice?

This focus on awareness of the body is what, for me, the teachings always kept leading to.

The part of the Four Noble Truths that attracted me the most, for example, was the

explanation about why we suffer. The Buddha’s observation that we create upset for

ourselves when we’re in reaction, and that we manage to do this to ourselves through the

twinned actions of desire and aversion, just rang true.

The teachings tell us that actions disturb our peace of mind, but what I’m suggesting is

that we can’t just look to what we conventionally call our mind to sort this out. Reaction,

clinging, and aversion are physical actions that the body performs and that, no matter

how subtle, create muscular tension through the repeated motions of either “pulling

toward” (desire) or “pushing away” (aversion). Repeat anything often enough, and you

create holding patterns in the body that predispose you to continue doing that action.

Sitting practices that focus on relaxing the underlying tensions and holdings you feel in

your body, as well as restrictions to the breath, help you mitigate the legacy and habit

patterns of reacting, clinging, and aversion.

www.BeMindful.org Steve Shealy, PhD 813-980-2700

As the eleventh-century Mahamudra teacher Tilopa said, “Do nothing with the body but

relax.” When we start to relax, we start feeling the body. Tensions and contractions in the

body serve as a numbing blanket that keeps the tiny physical sensations that exist on

every part of the body from being felt. Learning how to relax while remaining upright in

the sitting posture allows the body’s full range of sensations to come out of hiding and

make their existence felt. It’s always struck me as peculiar: If I know that sensations can

be felt to exist everywhere in the body, then why don’t I feel them? And what effect does

blocking out awareness of feeling have on me? And finally, if the mind that is “lost in

thought” is somehow dependent on my not feeling the sensations of the body, what

happens to the mind if I let myself feel the entire body, head to toe, as an unbroken field

of sensations? The sitting posture itself can be a kind of crucible for burning off the

tensions and restrictions to body and breath that all too often keep us lost in thought and

unaware of feeling presence.

A good place to start is examining what happens to the body when you’re lost in thought.

This, of course, is tricky to do, because when the mind is off wandering in involuntary

thought, you’re not very aware of the body at all. But if you can include an observation of

the body while you’re off in a thought, you’ll find that the condition “lost in thought” is

directly accompanied somewhere in the body by muscular contraction and tensing,

stillness and rigidity, and a subtle contraction or holding quality to the breath. In other

words, when you’re lost in thought, you’re tense in body. It follows, then, that if you can

consciously work with the body during your sitting practice to soften and relax the

tensions and allow more resilient and natural movement to accompany the passage of the

breath, the chatter of the mind can be reduced, and your practice can start going really

deep.

Once we begin to burn off the tensions and restrictions, how is this release manifested in

the mind and emotions?

Vipassana teachers speak of sankharas, the accumulated residues of resistance and

reactions that we store in our bodies and that, through long, focused hours of meditation,

gradually come to the surface of awareness in the form of sensations (often not very

pleasant ones). If we can simply feel them without reacting to them, they eventually burn

themselves up and disappear, leaving a much more pleasurable shimmer in their place

(that is, until the next deeper level of sankharas make their way to the surface to be felt,

accepted, and released).

Wilhelm Reich, one of the earliest Western psychotherapists who became interested in

how the energies of the body affect states of the mind, believed that what we call the

unconscious is not stored in some remote repository in the brain but rather in the soft

tissues of the body. Think about this for a moment, because it makes a lot of sense. Even

though we know that sensations can be felt to exist on every part of the body down to the

smallest cell, most people, most of the time, have very little conscious awareness of the

felt presence of their bodies. In other words, we are unconscious of the presence of

sensations, and so it is in the unfelt sensations of the body that the unconscious is to be

found. I would suggest that most people, at any given moment, are probably only aware

of 5 to 15 percent of their bodily sensations.

www.BeMindful.org Steve Shealy, PhD 813-980-2700

The work of Buddhism is to awaken, to come out of the sleepy dreams and notions of

reality that we hold to be true and replace them with a direct experience of what is more

accurately occurring. To awaken in this way, we need to become conscious of what’s

actually going on at the very depths of our experience.

So when we unlock a particular physical tension, are we also releasing potentially difficult

emotional aspects of the clinging or aversion that originally caused the tension? Many

people report strong emotional reactions to bodywork—memories of a childhood trauma

arising during massage therapy, for instance. In Buddhist terms, is this our karma stored

in the tension in our bodies?

For Western somatic therapists and Theravada Buddhists alike, much of the work that

needs to be done is to rekindle a felt awareness of the whole body as a field of vibratory

sensations. I sometimes joke with people that as we start to become aware of bodily

sensations, we very quickly realize why we haven’t wanted to feel them! We may have

visions of relaxing the body and opening to an awareness of shimmering bodily sensations

that feel like soft falling rain, but more often than not what we are first going to have to

go through is a phase in which we feel highly intensified, sometimes very painful

sensations, and through these periods of practice we face our karma directly. When we

silently weep in our meditation practice over the discomfort we might be feeling, it is

likely that a sankhara of sadness has come to the surface and is being released through

that sensation of pain. When we get angry and irritated in our meditation because of

what we might be feeling, it’s likely that a sankhara of aversion has emerged out of the

repository of our unconscious.

So when I speak of relaxing the tensions and holdings in the body and breath through

sitting meditation practice, please don’t think that I’m implying that everything is going

to proceed like a pleasant Sunday outing in the country. More often than not, large

emotional and physical storms may occur during practice before the skies clear. But if we

can be courageous enough to work with the simple principles of alignment, relaxation,

and surrendered resilience during our sitting practice [see box, page 39], these storms do

seem eventually to abate, and what appears in their place is worth the price of admission.

Sometimes the clearing of the storms can take quite a bit of time (this is not fast-food

therapy), and it is for this reason that I increasingly prefer to enter into retreats that last

several weeks. Meditation practices that instruct students to focus solely on the activities

and contents of what we conventionally call the mind may unwittingly contribute to

keeping contained the deep unconscious sankharas, which always appear as sensation.

Many techniques can bring about a calming effect at the surface level of the mind, but if

we’re sincere about wanting to truly awaken and become truly conscious, we really need

to embrace the experience of the body as a focus of our practice and allow the deeply

unconscious and unfelt sensations to start coming out of hiding. And yes, this can be a

very intensive undertaking, one definitely not for the faint of heart! But what, really, is

our choice? We either face our karma and release the accumulated tensions of the past, or

we continue to avoid feeling the reality of the body and enshrine the tensions forever.

As you say, this does indeed sound like an intensive undertaking and one that many

practitioners today may feel they simply don’t have room for in their busy lives. When we

sit down and encounter our deepest unconscious feelings first thing in the morning, how

www.BeMindful.org Steve Shealy, PhD 813-980-2700

do we then get up and go about our day effectively? How can we approach this work in a

manner that doesn’t threaten to make us fall apart completely?

The kinds of emotional storms that we’re talking about generally only erupt during long,

intensive retreats. When we return home to our more familiar environment, things will

settle out after a day or two, and so I don’t think you really have to worry about falling

apart while driving to work. If we’re sincere about truly going deep and purifying out

some of the residue of our karma, then I think an intensive retreat at least once a year is

very important. When we come back from retreat, it’s helpful to keep up our formal

practice by sitting daily for an hour or for however long our schedule permits.

As important as formal practices undeniably are, I feel that it is even more important to

view the rest of our lives as “informal” practice. What I mean by this is that the

awareness of embodied presence need not be confined to the time spent sitting on our

meditation cushion. Every single moment provides an opportunity to relax the tendency

to create tension in the body and unconscious thought patterns in the mind, and this can

be a very gentle process. If intensive retreats are like turning up the flame on the stove,

informal practice is like simmering at a low and steady heat that is practically

unnoticeable and so allows you to go about your daily life without the emotional

upheavals that can occur during more intensive periods of practice.

I think of informal practice as “embodied mindfulness.” In truth, every single moment of

our lives presents us with a choice: either awaken to the reality of the present moment, or

stay sleepy and push aspects of that reality away. Sensations are here every single

moment. Why don’t we feel them? The visual field, in all its dazzling play, is here every

moment that our eyes are open. Can we remember to look and actually see? Sounds are

here constantly. Blocking them from our awareness creates a great deal of tension in the

body.

Let alignment, relaxation, and surrendered resilience be your physical guides not only in

your sitting practice but also as you go about your day. These three keys allow you to stay

in touch with embodied presence. Merging an awareness of body with the awareness of

vision and sound allows you to truly become one with this present moment. As you bring

alignment, relaxation, and resilience into your daily life, your breath automatically

becomes fuller and starts moving through your entire body, just as the Buddha suggested

in his description of meditation. Without forcing a thing, let your breath breathe you:

breathe into your entire body, and breathe out just as effortlessly. This condition, nothing

more, nothing less, is really the reward and benefit of the practice. And in this way you

can walk in full awareness through the city or countryside, like a knife cutting through

the softest butter. Always be on the lookout not to bring any tension into this practice.

Striving to attain this kind of awareness is simply self-defeating. Relax into presence. It’s

been there all the time.

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