INSIGHTAotearoa
A newsletter for New Zealand's insight meditation practitioners and communities
98 Riverside Road, Gisborne, 4010 Aotearoa New Zealand
deborah @ insightaotearoa.org | ISSN 1177-5076
MAY 2009
IN THIS NEWSLETTER YOU'LL FIND...
1. EDITORIAL: MINDFULNESS OF THE BODY
2. Inside Out: Meeting Life With Your Whole Body
3. Awakening in the Body
4. Mindful Yoga
5. Poem: Kiss the Earth
6. Poem: All the Hemispheres
7. Questions ... questions ...
8. Sangha news
9. The Last Word: Mindfulness of the Body
>> +==0==+ >>
1. EDITORIAL: MINDFULNESS OF THE BODY
This May edition of INSIGHTAotearoa focuses on mindfulness of the body. The opening article by Tara Brach: Inside Out: Meeting Life With Your Whole Body, inspired a lively discussion in our Gisborne sitting group several weeks ago. This led to further inquiry into mindfulness of the body and gave birth to this May theme for INSIGHTAotearoa. I trust the supporting articles by Phillip Moffitt, Jon Kabat-Zinn and Gil Fronsdal are equally inspiring and informative.
One who has realised mindfulness of the body is one who has realised the Deathless.
-- The Buddha
I will be away on holiday in the USA during May and June. Gaye Sutton has agreed to join our editorial staff in my absence. We can all welcome a different flavour for our June INSIGHTAotearoa. Thank you in advance to Kanya, Peter and Gaye.
Blessings,
Deborah White
>> +==0==+ >>
The first aspect of sitting is being-in-the-body. This is the basic ground of practice. When we first sit down to meditate, we take a specific posture. The important point is not which posture we take, but whether we're actually present to the physical experience. Being-in-the-body means we're awake, aware, present to what is actually going on.
-- Ezra Bayda
>> +==0==+ >>
2. FROM THE INSIDE OUT: MEETING LIFE WITH YOUR WHOLE BODY
-- By Tara Brach
There is one thing that, when cultivated and regularly practiced, leads to deep spiritual intention, to peace, to mindfulness and clear comprehension, to vision and knowledge, to a happy life here and now, and to the culmination of wisdom and awakening. And what is that one thing? It is mindfulness centered on the body.
-- The Buddha, Anguttara Nikaya
Awareness of sensations is the first foundation of mindfulness because whatever we experience—feelings, emotions, thoughts and sensory perceptions —also arise as sensations in the body. We practice mindfulness of our body by opening to the changing stream of sensations without grasping or resistance. We may feel fear or joy, the intensity of aliveness or numbness. The Buddha states that this mindfulness is not a distanced kind of witnessing and suggests that we “observe sensations within sensations.” This means not imagining our hand, but directly feeling the energy that is our hand. We are training to experience the body from the inside out.
When we first begin this practice, we usually notice what the Buddha described as “seeing the waterfall” of thoughts—judging, commenting, worrying, planning. This waterfall, energized by our basic conditioning of wanting and fearing, carries us away from experiencing the moment. When sensations become unpleasant, our first reaction, such as a flinch, is instantaneous and unconscious—we try to get away from what we don’t like. We then compound this reaction by taking the unpleasantness personally. If we’re not mindful, the bare experience of sensations can, within moments, proliferate into suffering.
The chronic fatigue and headaches my friend Louise suffered made her feel that she was basically flawed. Every time her body became achy or tired, she immediately began to condemn herself. Assuming that sickness was a reflection of her weak character, each cycle of illness deepened her feelings of shame. She fearfully fast-forwarded into the future — I’ll never get well — and felt swamped in depression. Louise used food, mystery novels and obsessive thinking to leave her body and avoid feeling pain and fear. Some days she felt as if being sick and defective defined her entire existence.
Reacting against unpleasant sensations is a muscle—it gets stronger with exercise. As Louise discovered, our past habits of reacting color how we perceive and respond to the present moment. Rather than simply feeling the sensations of a headache, Louise was also reacting to her historical experience. A headache meant she was flawed and that her life would always be miserable. With each new arising of unpleasant sensations, she repeated the same sequence of reactions: pain, flawed self, fearful self, depressed self.
The chain of reactivity to unpleasant sensations is most extreme if we have been traumatized. After the terror and wounding of such experiences, the reflex to push away pain goes into overdrive, severing us from major parts of our physical and emotional life. Over the years, this buried fear and pain is periodically unleashed. Our partner might raise her voice in irritation, and the full force of historical wounding — all the terror or rage that lives in our body — can be triggered. Whether or not there is any present danger, we feel at risk, compelled to find a way out of the pain.
Even if we haven’t been traumatized, we’re conditioned to disconnect from our physical experience. In contrast to indigenous cultures that are more at home in the physical world, our Western culture views nature, including our living, dying bodies, as something to mistrust. Not only do we try to ‘kill’ pain, we control and subdue pleasure as well. Early on we learned that our natural urges—being exuberant and wild, sexual and aggressive —were frowned upon. We learned that to be good we had to get rid of certain feelings. In order to belong, we split off from the full aliveness in our body. For many, it’s not until we reach middle age that we realize we’re out of touch with our wildness and vulnerability, our playfulness and vitality.
Coming Back to Our Body
We heal by reconnecting to the parts of our experience that we habitually push away. Yet, because we feel so unsafe, especially in the aftermath of trauma, opening mindfully to our physical experience may happen gradually. We begin by learning to put our toe in the river and, compassionately, step back when necessary. We do what we can to create a conducive inner environment—relaxing our body, sending ourselves messages of kindness. Sometimes we need the support of a meditation teacher, healer or therapist to help us ease into the raw sensations that we’ve been avoiding.
What happens when we bring a clear, kind attention to the sensations in our body? If we feel angry, what happens when we open to the heat and explosive pressure of anger? As we recognize the intensity of these sensations with awareness, the energy, rather than getting trapped, continues on its natural course. The knots of anger unfold, transform and eventually dissolve. This doesn’t necessarily happen right away. Like the weather, anger comes and goes and, sometimes, it’s turbulent. We might find that by making room for today’s anger, we open the door to old, buried anger. Or we might find that anger turns into hurt, fear or loneliness.
In both Buddhist psychology and Western experiential therapy, an accepting awareness of sensations is central to transformation. Emotions, a combination of physical sensations and the stories we tell ourselves, continue to cause suffering until we experience them where they live in our body. If we bring a steady attention to the immediate physical experience of an emotion, past sensations linked to it are “de-repressed.” By releasing the charged pockets of historical pain, we become increasingly able to meet new situations with a wakeful and fresh presence. As we bring a gentle attention to our body, we reclaim our life and our spirit. We discover, as Rumi writes, that “The cure for the pain is in the pain.”
In both Buddhist psychology and Western experiential therapy, an accepting awareness of sensations is central to transformation.
Seeing Life As It Is
When asked to describe her spiritual practice, a Zen nun from fifteenth century Japan said, “I meet life with my whole body.” Awareness of sensations brings us fully into the present moment. When we meet as pure sensation whatever arises, we see clearly how everything is constantly changing; how there is no self causing sensations to arise, no self that sensations happen to. They arise and pass on their own. By attending to the life of our body, we begin to see that we’re part of the natural world. This entire universe is made up of changing, moving energies, and our bodies are one element of the dance.
In the moments when we wakefully let be, we experience life as it is. As Hakuin Zenji wrote, “This very place is the Lotus Land, this very body, the Buddha.” The Lotus Land is the cherished place of awakening that is always available in the present moment. When we meet life with our whole body, we are the Buddha—the Awakened One—beholding the changing stream of sensations, feelings and thoughts. Everything is alive, the whole world lives inside us. As we let life live through us, we experience the boundlessness of our true nature.
>> +==0==+ >>
Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts.
-- Thich Nhat Hanh
>> +==0==+ >>
3. AWAKENING IN THE BODY
-- by Phillip Moffitt
Many meditation students view body awareness as just a starting point for their practice. They tend to skip over it in order to focus on their mind states and emotions, believing that’s where they will experience the deepest insights. But the truth is, your body is the ideal mirror for discovering the Buddha’s great truths of suffering (dukkha), change (anicca), and “not self” (anatta).
In the Anguttara Nikaya (sutta I, 21) the Buddha states, “There is one thing, monks, that, cultivated and regularly practiced leads to a deep sense of urgency…to the supreme peace…to to mindfulness and clear comprehension…to the attainment of right vision and knowledge…to happiness here and now…to to realizing deliverance by wisdom and the fruition of Holiness: It is mindfulness of the body.
Despite the Buddha’s recommendation, practicing mindfulness of the body is often overlooked as an opportunity for awakening, even when the body is demanding attention. For instance, recently a student informed me at the beginning of a ten-day vipassana meditation retreat I was leading that she would not be able to sit still through any of the meditation sessions because she had fibromyalgia. During past retreats her pain had become so intense after fifteen minutes of sitting that she either had to lie down on the floor or leave the hall. I assured her that we would work with her limitations and expressed sympathy for her pain. Then I asked for more details. Listening to her story, it became clear that this well-meaning yogi was conflating two separate experiences, and it was making her miserable. Yes, she had genuine physical discomfort, and at times her body hurt a lot. But she had also developed a reactive mind state to her difficulty. She anticipated that her body was going to hurt even before discomfort arose, and she reacted by becoming stressed and anxious. So even if the pain was minor, she contracted into it. Her mental experience of pain far outweighed the physical experience. And on those occasions when really strong physical pain arose, she fell into negative speculation about how long it would last and how difficult it would be. By conflating her physical experience and her mental reaction, over the course of three years, the pain became her identity—she took birth as a “fibromyalgia person.”
The Buddha taught that being mindful of the sensations that arise in your body without clinging to them is essential to spiritual practice. In the Majjhima Nikaya (sutta 36), the Buddha says, “If the body is not mastered by meditation, the mind cannot be mastered. If the body is mastered, mind is mastered.”
I encouraged the student with fibromyalgia to take a fresh approach to her meditation practice and suggested that a new relationship to her body was possible. During the retreat I taught her some of the many ways she could make her experience in her body the primary object of her meditation. To her credit, she was willing to give this new body orientation a chance, despite her disbelief and anxiety. At the end of the retreat, she reported that, for the first time, she had sat through every session. To her amazement, she had had only mild physical discomfort, and she felt as though she was finally starting to understand why vipassana practice is called “insight” meditation. She also wondered why this retreat had been so different from the others and whether her body would behave so well when she returned to her daily life. “You have begun to use your body as your teacher,” I told her, “and if you make mindfulness an ongoing practice at work and in your home life, it will continue to serve you. But body awareness is not an aspirin you take for pain relief. It is a practice that frees your mind from suffering, regardless of conditions.”
Cultivating a Felt Sense of the Body
Inspired by the Buddha’s words and by my own experience, I have made awareness of the body a focal point of my teaching. For the last six years I have been part of a team of Spirit Rock teachers that offers an annual retreat called “Awakening in the Body,” in which all the dharma teachings are body centric or First Foundation based. At these retreats we teach two movement classes each day, in addition to walking meditation. In the weekly meditation group I lead, I incorporate movement between sittings. And during most retreats I teach, I include “mindful movement yoga” or have a guest instructor teach yoga or chi gong. These years of emphasizing body awareness in meditation has shown me that it is an effective practice for many Western students, who are all too often engaged in conceptualization. You are embodied consciousness. It greatly limits your developing wisdom if you fail to include the body in your meditation.
In practicing mindfulness of the body, it is your direct experience or felt sense that is important, not your judgments about your body, your wishes for what it might be, or even your stories about how your body came to be as it is. The Buddha called this felt sense “awareness of the body in the body,” meaning that your attention has dropped into the actual physical experience rather than your views and concepts about the body.
You can experience this felt sense or dropped attention through the following exercise: Hold your right hand up and begin by looking at the back of it. What do you see? You might notice the skin color, the veins, and whether there are any wrinkles or scars. Now turn it over and look at your palm. You might notice its shape or the length of your fingers. Alternate between looking at the front and the back of your hand. You might observe the length of the various finger bones in relation to each other or the size of your knuckles. You might notice the pattern that the lines make in the palm of the hand. Just witness these things. That’s a kind of mindfulness, right? However, because you are a removed observer, it is not the same as the felt experience. You are not directly experiencing the essence of “hand.”
Now rest your hand for a moment. (I’m going to ask you to close your eyes, so you’ll need to read ahead, and then do the exercise.) With your eyes closed, raise your hand again. Start to move your hand in space. Let the wrist move with the hand. You might curl the fingers in toward your palm, then extend them out a little. With your attention, “feel” the thumb, the forefinger, the middle finger, the ring finger, the little finger, the palm, and the back of the hand. Lower your hand and open your eyes. This is a very different experience than looking at the hand, is it not? This is the felt sense of the body; it is nonconceptual and lies within the experience itself.
My student with fibromyalgia had some access to this felt sense, but she was so imprisoned by her habitual reactions to what she felt that she could not let her body sensations just be; instead, she tried to avoid, resist, or overcome them. As we worked together during the retreat, she learned to develop what’s called “relaxed attention” as a means of softening into awareness of her physical sensations, regardless of whether they were pleasant or unpleasant. By learning this skill she began to find ease with her physical pain. While her discomfort was real and at times difficult, it was just the sensation of pain in the body. Her suffering, for the most part, was the result of her mind contracting and clinging as it collapsed into reactivity.
The same phenomenon happens around emotional suffering. It too registers in the body. Then the mind contracts and clings, causing the emotional suffering to grow exponentially. But you can use the very same relaxed attention and softening into awareness of your emotions to gain freedom from suffering. For example, the next time you’re feeling hurt and angry because you think your significant other doesn’t hear or appreciate you, rather than succumbing to these hindrances of mind, stay with them as body experiences. You may sense tightness in the belly and around the eyes from the hurt and some heat from the anger. Meet these body experiences with mindfulness and compassion by saying to yourself, “Hurt and anger feel like this.” This is softening into your emotions. You do not judge your feelings, nor do you try to get rid of the hurt or the anger; you simply stay with the sensations, and they will self-liberate in their own time.
Developing Relaxed Attention
To feel the difference between relaxed attention with softening into awareness versus reactivity and clinging, continue with the exercise. Place your right forearm in the palm of your left hand and just feel that for a moment. Now, pretend that you don’t trust your left hand. Keep the right forearm touching the left palm but hold a little tension in the back of the right hand and the forearm, such that they’re slightly hovering above the left hand. There’s contact, but you don’t trust the contact to support you. Now let that tension go, and drop your right forearm into the palm of the left hand. Push down as though you can’t trust the hand not to throw your arm away, so you’re going to hold it there. Now just relax and let the forearm rest in the left palm.
This feeling of resting the forearm—neiither hovering nor pushing down—is like relaxed attention. Can you feel the difference? You may be responding to strong desires and difficult situations in your daily life by pulling away from (hovering) or leaning into (pushing) the moment. Neither of those reactions helps you meet life with ease. The cultivation of relaxed attention, however, will prevent you from falling into reactivity.
Through practicing mindfulness of the body and relaxed attention, you learn to be with whatever sensation is arising in the body, regardless of whether it is pleasant or unpleasant, without trying to hold on to or push away the experience. Such is the freedom taught by the Buddha. Having mastered the body, you are then able to turn your attention to your mind states, all of which register in the body, and gradually learn to become nonreactive to each of them. As a result, your mind becomes spacious, alert, curious, and equanimous, and you are able to proceed to the more subtle levels of meditation practice, which require that your mind not be hindered by difficult states.
But as is always true in meditation practice, you have to start where you are, and most likely that is with a fairly undeveloped relationship to your body. So in addition to simply cultivating increasing body awareness, you can also reflect on the nature of the body as a storehouse of your past experience, as a means of staying present in the moment, and as a gateway to liberation.
The Body As Storehouse
As you begin to practice mindfulness of the body, you discover that it is the storehouse of all the physical and emotional events of your life to this point, starting with your genetic inheritance. Through reflection you gain the insight that these conditions, while unique to you, are actually impersonal, like conditions in nature, and that clinging to them with anger, resentfulness, or self-pity only adds to your suffering. Your liberation lies not in what the body has stored from the past but in how you respond to whatever manifests in your body in any given moment. This is the insight of karma—that what is happening in this moment is dependent on past seeds of action that are now blossoming due to the right causes and conditions. Your freedom, now and in the future, will be determined by how you respond to these impersonal conditions. Are your actions wholesome or not? This is awakening in the body.
For example, you may have inherited favorably proportioned leg bones that make it possible for you to sit cross-legged in meditation without any discomfort, or perhaps you inherited disproportionate leg bones that make it difficult for you to sit for long periods, even in a chair. In either case, you learn to sit in meditation with your body just the way it is, feeling neither superior nor inferior. These are simply conditions, and your practice is to respond to these conditions from your deepest values. Similarly, you might have inherited a gene that increases your chances of developing cancer, or maybe you are haunted by an injury or an act of abuse in your childhood. Rather than being angry that those conditions are unfair, you make your life worthwhile just as it is. Again, what’s given is not your business; it’s how you respond that determines your happiness and well-being. Of course, you work to improve those difficult conditions that can be affected, but you stop resisting their existence and feeling victimized, inferior, or resentful.
Various memories from the storehouse of the body will inevitably arise during meditation. Many of them are unpleasant, and you may have a tendency to get caught up in your emotions about them. If they are pleasant, your mind may be drawn into fantasy or planning and lose awareness. But if you stay in the body regardless of what arises from its storehouse, then you not only maintain awareness, but you also actually start to affect your experience. For example, when a difficult memory from the past shows up, instead of pushing it away, simply notice how it feels in your body in this moment. If it’s a longing for something you missed or once had but is now lost, rather than clinging to it as a desire, focus on it as a body experience in this very moment. You will discover that being mindful of all that arises as sensation from the storehouse of your body purifies the charge that the memory possesses. This purification happens spontaneously, without any doing on your part. Sometimes it takes the form of releases—the body will make spontaneous movements or you will feel vibrations, heat, or pressure release within. Sometimes you will notice the release in the moment it is occurring; other times you may not notice it until days or months later. A number of students have told me that the best bodywork they ever experienced happened during sitting meditation. When you let loose experience that was defining and limiting you, it’s like having a great psychotherapy session without having to pay for it. By bringing relaxed attention to your experience, you facilitate this process of purification and release. Like the exercise in which you rested your right forearm in your left hand without pushing or hovering, you can bring relaxed attention to the storehouse of the past as it unfolds in the present.
Coming into the Present through the Body
You can learn to utilize mindfulness of the body as a way of training yourself to stay present in this very moment. It’s quite a feat to stay mindfully present in your body despite of the pressures and responsibilities in your life, not to mention all your anxieties and uncertainties. Most people are mindful of their own embodied presence for only brief moments, usually around specific functions; more often than not, they are lost in the past or the future or in escaping altogether through disassociation or distraction. But if you are not mindfully present, you are missing the unfolding of your precious human life and you are forsaking any chance to consciously participate in how it unfolds.
Developing and maintaining a constant awareness of the body is by far the most effective way to learn to stay present in the moment. Try coming into the present through the body the next time you are sitting in a meeting at work, feeling restless or anxious. First, drop your attention to your pelvis resting in the chair and feel whatever sensations arise. Then, notice one specific sensation in your hands and feel the movement of a single breath. Finally, observe what happens to your mind. When you focus your attention on specific body sensations, it frees you from the story in your mind that’s causing you to be reactive, and it allows the possibility of softening into the moment just as it is. You may have to do mindfulness exercises like this a few times, but the feeling of embodied presence will arise, and eventually you will discover a sense of well-being.
One caution: it takes time to develop mindfulness of the body, which is why it is called a practice. My advice is to not go looking for results, but rather to commit yourself to being present in your body as a way of meeting life that reflects your deepest values. When you are willing to feel your own embodied presence no matter what conditions are arising, you have taken a major step toward your own liberation.
The Body as a Gateway to Realizing Dharma
Having discovered this profound level of access to your own embodied presence, you begin to use the body as a gateway to realizing the liberating insights of the other three foundations of mindfulness that the Buddha identified: mindfulness of feeling, mindfulness of mind, and mindfulness of dhammas. You begin to notice in your body how each moment of your experience is conditioned by pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral feelings—the Second Foundation of Mindfulness—and you observe that when you have no mindfulness, what your mind says and does is largely determined by these feelings. Then you turn your attention to the state of the mind itself—the Third Foundation of Mindfulness. It is often easier to identify the state of your mind by noting your body sensations rather than your emotions. Emotions are so charged and so engrossing that perception of them becomes fuzzy, whereas the body tends to clearly manifest what’s happening. Finally, you can begin to look at the universal characteristics that the Buddha identified as they are manifesting in the body—the Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness. You begin to see how the mind is hindered by desire, aversion, restlessness and worry, sloth and torpor, and doubt. You also notice the mental factors that lead to enlightenment, such as strong energy and equanimity.
You probably have a felt sense of the Four Noble Truths, which are at the core of and encompass the Buddha’s teachings. The Four Noble Truths are: Suffering—also described as stress, unease, or dissatisfaction—inevitably arises when the mind is untrained; The cause of this suffering is the mind’s tendency to cling to its preferences; Cessation of this clinging and, therefore, the cessation of suffering is possible; and There is a way, which the Buddha called the Eightfold Path, to find this liberation.
Through mindfulness of the body, you begin to see why the Buddha began with the First Noble Truth, dukkha, the stress and anxiety interwoven in all life. You can also experience in your body the Second Noble Truth, since you cling to getting and keeping what is pleasant to the body and removing or avoiding what is unpleasant to it. Through the body you can also discover the liberating insight of the Third Noble Truth: you have choice. In this very body, in this very moment, you can choose to not succumb to reactions to the arising of pleasant and unpleasant. You don’t have to move, for example, because at this moment your leg is hurting. It’s just your leg hurting. Nor do you have to react to something hurtful someone has said at work. Yes, it was unpleasant, but it was just unpleasant. Suffering arises from your unwillingness to be with this moment just as it is. It causes you to distort what’s true in life because you are demanding that the moment be shaped to the way you want it.
When you choose to be present with your body when it is in pain or when it is feeling the tension and contraction caused by your wanting mind, you are accepting your life experience just as it is, in this moment, without clinging. This feeling of nonattachment and nonreactivity is similar to how it feels when you do the exercise of letting your forearm rest in your palm without pushing or hovering. It is a way of meeting life in which you don’t add anything unnecessary to the experience. You don’t identify and contract into it. Like the yogi whose body pain ceased to be an issue, your life gains ease. Each time you have such a moment, no matter how brief, you have a little taste of all the future moments in which you can have such ease. You are aware of your body as a gateway to liberation.
Phillip Moffitt is a member of the Spirit Rock Teachers’ Council and the founder and president of the Life Balance Institute. He teaches vipassana meditation and mindful movement at retreat centers throughout the U.S. His book Dancing with Life: Buddhist Insights for Moving from Suffering to Joy is published by Rodale.
>> +==0==+ >>
A Zen student walked in to see the master. Sitting down, he blurted out, "There's something terribly wrong with me!" The master looked at him and asked, "What's so wrong?" The student, after a moment's hesitation, responded, "I think I'm a dog." To that the master responded, "And how long have you thought that?" The student replied, "Ever since I was a puppy."
>> +==0==+ >>
4. MINDFUL YOGA
-- By Jon Kabat-Zinn
For a number of years in the late 1970s, Larry Rosenberg and I taught back-to-back evening classes in a church in Harvard Square. He would teach vipassana meditation (a Buddhist practice of mindfulness), and I followed with mindful hatha yoga. The idea was that everyone would take both classes. But Larry and I were always bemused by the fact that most of the people in the meditation class didn't want to do the hatha yoga, and most of the "yogis" didn't come for the meditation class.
We saw the hatha and meditation as different but complementary doors into what is ultimately the same room--namely, learning how to live wisely. Only the view from the doorways was different. We had a definite sense that the meditators would have benefited from paying more attention to their bodies (they tended to dismiss the body as a low-level preoccupation). And the hatha yogis, we felt, would have benefited from dropping into stillness for longer stretches of time and observing the arising and passing away from moment to moment of mind/body experience in one sitting posture. We didn't push our view of this on either group, and we tried not to be too attached to who showed up for what, especially since we saw the essence of what we were both teaching as identical. Nonetheless, it was an interesting phenomenon.
Over the years, my own experiences of combining mindfulness meditation practices and hatha yoga into a seamless whole prompted me to experiment with different ways of bringing these ancient consciousness disciplines into contemporary mainstream settings. I wanted to explore their effectiveness in transforming health and consciousness. How might they be connected?
For one thing, the hatha yoga had the potential, I thought, to help reverse the huge prevalence of disuse atrophy from our highly sedentary lifestyle, especially for those who have pain and chronic illness. The mind was already known to be a factor in stress and stress-related disorders, and meditation was known to positively affect a range of autonomic physiological processes, such as lowering blood pressure and reducing overall arousal and emotional reactivity. Might not training in mindfulness be an effective way to bring meditation and yoga together so that the virtues of both could be experienced simultaneously as different aspects of one seamless whole? Mindfulness practice seemed ideal for cultivating greater awareness of the unity of mind and body, as well as of the ways the unconscious thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can undermine emotional, physical, and spiritual health.
This personal exploration led ultimately to developing a clinical service for medical patients in which we used relatively intensive training in mindfulness meditation practices based on the vipassana and Zen traditions, along with mindful hatha yoga, with medical patients suffering with a wide range of chronic disorders and diseases. This program evolved into an 8-week course, now known as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR).
MBSR is now offered in over 200 medical centers, hospitals, and clinics around the world. Many of these programs are taught by physicians, nurses, social workers, and psychologists, as well as other health professionals who are seeking to reclaim and deepen some of the sacred reciprocity inherent in the doctor-caregiver/patient-client relationship. Their work is based on a need for an active partnership in a participatory medicine, one in which patient/clients take on significant responsibility for doing a certain kind of interior work in order to tap into their own deepest inner resources for learning, growing, healing, and transformation.
Hatha yoga has played a large and critical role in this work from the very beginning, and many yoga teachers have been drawn to teach MBSR. Through a seamless integration of mindfulness meditation and hatha yoga, MBSR taps into the innate potential for healing that we all have. It mobilizes our ability to cultivate embodied wisdom and self-compassion; and by so doing it teaches us to live our life and face whatever arises with integrity, clarity and open-hearted presence.
Mindfulness lies at the very core of Buddhism in all its forms. Yet its essence is universal in that it is about refining attention and awareness. It is a powerful vehicle for cultivating deep insight into the ultimate causes of suffering and the possibility of liberation from that suffering.
The ancient stream of hatha yoga practice is another of the great consciousness disciplines. My first taste came in 1967 at a karate school in Boston, where a young Vietnam veteran named Tex was using it as a warm-up. I quickly fell in love with the yoga. I was training in the Zen tradition at the time, and the two seemed to complement each other perfectly. That conviction has only deepened over time.
The appeal of hatha yoga is nothing less than the lifelong adventure and discipline of working with one's body as a door into freedom and wholeness. Hatha yoga was never about accomplishment or perfection, or even about technique by itself. Nor was it about turning one's body into an elaborate pretzel, although the athleticism that is possible in hatha yoga (if one can manage to steer clear of narcissism) is a truly remarkable art form in its own right. Certainly, we are seeing a marvelous flowering of interest in many different kinds of hatha yoga in mainstream circles now. The question is, how mindful is it, and is this flowering oriented toward self-understanding, wisdom and liberation, or is much of it just physical fitness dressed up in spiritual clothing?
Mindful yoga is a lifetime engagement--not to get somewhere else, but to be where and as we actually are in this very moment, with this very breath, whether the experience is pleasant unpleasant, or neutral. Our body will change a lot as we practice, and so will our minds and our hearts and our views. Hopefully, whether a beginner or an old-timer, we are always reminding ourselves in our practice of the value of keeping this beginner's mind.
Jon Kabat-Zinn is Professor of Medicine Emeritus and founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He teaches mindfulness meditation as a technique to help people cope with stress, anxiety, pain and illness.
>> +==0==+ >>
5. POEM: Kiss the Earth
--By Thich Nhat Hanh
Walk and touch peace every moment.
Walk and touch happiness every moment.
Each step brings a fresh breeze.
Each step makes a flower bloom.
Kiss the Earth with your feet.
Bring the Earth your love and happiness.
The Earth will be safe when we feel safe in ourselves.
>> +==0==+ >>
6. POEM: All the Hemispheres
-- By Hafiz
Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out
Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadows and shores and hills.
Open up to the Roof.
Make a new water-mark on your excitement
And love.
Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.
Change rooms in your mind for a day.
All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.
Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.
All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting
While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.
>> +==0==+ >>
7. QUESTIONS ... QUESTIONS ...
Do you have a question about your practice or about Buddhism in general? Send it in, and we will put it before a teacher. If it can be answered easily, it will be in a future INSIGHTAotearoa. Send your question to deborah @ insightaotearoa.org or by post to Newsletter, 98 Riverside Road, Gisborne 4010.
>> +==0==+ >>
8. SANGHA NEWS
To ensure safe delivery of this newsletter to your inbox (avoiding capture by spam filters), add newsletter @ insightaotearoa.org to your address book. If you receive your email directly from your internet service provider rather than using free email services such as hotmail, yahoo or gmail, it is also a good idea to go into your online mailbox using your ISP's webmail interface and add this address to your online address book. And if you receive INSIGHTAotearoa at work, ask your IT support people to add newsletter @ insightaotearoa.org to their whitelist.
This newsletter comes to you without a subscription price because our readers offer dana to support it. A traditional Buddhist generosity practice, dana received will be used to develop the newsletter, and the community that practices insight meditation. Regular automatic payments are very welcome. You can also post cash or cheques to 98 Riverside Road, Gisborne 4010, making cheques payable to INSIGHTAotearoa. Here is the bank account information:
Account name : INSIGHTAotearoa
Bank : ASB Bank
Branch : Lambton Quay
Account number : 12-3140-0285603-00
From outside New Zealand, the SWIFT code is : ASBBNZ 2A.
Mindfulness in Plain English can now be downloaded:
http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.htm
9. THE LAST WORD: Mindfulness of the Body
Many people ignore their bodies. The busier a person's life, the easier it is to discount the importance of staying in touch with how the body feels. Many people may be attentive to their body, but it is from the outside in; that is, they are concerned about body image and appearance. Mindfulness of the body is attention from the inside out. We notice what the body is feeling, in and of itself. We give a generous amount to time to be with the felt sense of the body. Not only does this help the body relax, remaining mindful of the body is a safeguard from getting wound up with mental preoccupations
Mindfulness of the body has several benefits. First, cultivating mindfulness of the body increases our familiarity with our bodies and with how the body responds to our inner and outer lives, to our thoughts and emotions, and to events around us. The Buddha saw the human mind and body as unified. When we suppress or ignore aspects of our emotional, cognitive, and volitional lives, we tend also to disconnect from the body, from the physical manifestations of our experience. Conversely, when we distance ourselves from our physical experience, we lose touch with our inner life of emotions and thoughts. The awakening of the body from within that comes with mindfulness can help us to discover, not only our repressed emotions, but also, more importantly, a greater capacity to respond to the world with healthy emotions and motivations.
Second, in cultivating mindfulness we are developing non-reactivity, including the ability to be present for our experience without turning away, habitually seeking or resisting change, or clinging to pleasant and avoiding unpleasant experience. All too often, our automatic desires, aversions, preferences, and judgments interfere with our ability to know what is actually happening. Learning to not respond automatically and unconsciously makes possible a deeper understanding of the present moment and our reaction to it, and gives us more freedom to choose our response. Being non-reactively present for our physical experience goes a long way in learning to do so with the rest of our lives.
Last, but not least, mindfulness of physical sensations helps us both to relax tension and to understand its causes.
-- Gil Fronsdal
>> +==0==+ >>
Thank you for taking the time to read this. If you would like to remove yourself from the INSIGHTAotearoa mailing list you can unsubscribe via the website: http://www.insightaotearoa.org. If you've received this from a friend and would like to be on the email mailing list, subscribe via the website: http://www.insightaotearoa.org. Write to Newsletter, 98 Riverside Road, Gisborne 4010 if you would like to receive this by post.
With Metta,
Deborah White, Kanya Stewart, and Peter Fernando