Next, begin relaxing the feet. The basic principle of body work is that tension maintains itself when we’re not aware of it. As soon as we put our attention into a certain area, then we can begin to relax that area. We develop the capability of letting go of that tension. When we really feel it, we can begin to let it go. That doesn’t mean that it disappears all at once, but it begins to melt.
When we are first learning this practice, we work in some detail. Start with just the big toe. Put attention into the big toe. See if you can feel the sensations connected with the big toe on both feet. You’re going to work in parallel fashion, doing both sides of the body at once. Can you feel the tip of your big toe? Can you feel the top of your big toe? Its tip and its sides? The underside? The center of its mass? Feel the tension in the big toe, put your awareness right into it, and begin to let it melt or dissolve.
Where or how does it melt? It melts down into the earth. Throughout this ten-points practice, we’re feeling a particular part of our body and letting go of the tension, letting the tension travel down into the earth. There is a release of energy downward.
As you feel the tension, you may notice there is a kind of softening that begins to occur. It can happen in the toe itself or in the adjacent area. You’re feeling your big toe, and maybe the softening is back where the toe joins the foot. It may be just a slight softening at first. The more your attention goes in, the more the melting process can occur. How long should you stay with the big toe, working with it? Stay with the big toe—and each subsequent toe, part of the foot, and other area of your body—until you feel that you are sensing something and making a connection with this part of your body.
Now go to the second toe on both feet. Feel it, feel its mass and density, feel the tension—and begin to release. Then feel the middle toe. Feel the sensations, a little bit of tightness. Release. Relax.
Even if it seems that you can hardly feel your toes at all, even with good attention, just put your awareness there with strong intention. That’s the important point: your intention as well as your attention must be there. In time, the toes will begin to wake up. Don’t be concerned if you can’t completely follow the practice at first. It will unfold for you really quite quickly over the first few weeks of practice.
Next, move to the fourth toe. Try to feel the fourth toe in as much detail as you can: the tip of the toe, the nail (yes, your awareness can include “inert” parts of your body), what’s under the nail, the mass of the toe, where the fourth toe joins into the foot. There’s tension in every single muscle group, down to tiny, even miniscule, places. Our whole body is actually riddled with the tension of ego. Ego is a process of somatic holding on. This is something that’s well known in Zen tradition. Holding on is an ego process. Letting go is a somatic process. When we let go of our ego, we let go of our body. When we hold on to our ego, we hold on to our body. So in working with the body, we’re actually getting at the very roots of the ego process. We let the tension melt, and at the same time, we’re letting our constricted awareness melt and open.
In the process of releasing, make sure that you are releasing downward, through the soles of the feet, emptying the tension into the boundless space of the earth beneath. The downward release is critical to actually being able to let go fully and make a connection with the earth beneath us, our larger “body.” Trying to release upward somehow doesn’t work—it is too mental and doesn’t really include the body. If you try to release upward, you will lose your body in the process and find yourself more tense and somatically disconnected. Releasing sideways also doesn’t work, because that is basically like sending your “stuff” into the interpersonal network, toward others. Our fundamental feeling about others won’t permit full letting go. The earth, the place of all origins and the place to which we ultimately return, is the right and fitting space to which we can truly let go, to experience the sense of being received and loved when we do.
Come to the baby toe. Work with this in the same way. Now you’re feeling all five toes. Feel them, and let them begin to melt. Now, come to the ball of the foot. See if you can feel the tension around the ball of the foot. Now come back up into the interior of the foot, the bottom of the foot, the lower part of your foot away from the toes, and then the inside of the ball of the foot. There’s a lot of holding around that. See if you can feel it, and begin to relax. Then go into the outside of the foot, just behind the baby toe.
Now we come to the arch of the foot. Start at the surface of the arch, and then let your awareness trace the tension back into the interior of the foot behind the arch. This is typically very tight, with a brittle, vulnerable kind of tension—very taut, rigid tension. Then come to the instep and the interior of the foot. Feel the tension; just simply feeling it, it begins to melt. You have the sense of letting go, of letting the tension very gradually begin to dissolve. Then come to the ankle bones on the inside, the ankle bones on the outside, the Achilles tendon. Work with each area until you sense something there and feel you are making a relationship with it. Your awareness may be very marginal at first.
Again, tension is traveling down. Now you’re feeling your whole feet and letting the ongoing melting, dissolving, relaxing, letting-go process unfold. The energy is traveling down. It’s like a continual current of energy down into the earth. See if you can feel that.
In this practice, we are spending a lot of time with the feet, and there are some important reasons for this. For one thing, as Chinese medicine makes clear, energetically, the foot is directly and powerfully connected with every other part of the body. All the major meridians can be accessed through the feet. Second, we focus on the feet because we are developing a level of intention, attention, and awareness that, once cultivated in our work with the feet, will enable us to move more quickly, with precision, depth, and subtlety, throughout the rest of the body.
As you practice with the feet, notice that the rest of your body is starting to respond as well. When you work in any part of the body, and particularly the feet, the whole body is affected. So if you find a call to release in your lower back, or your shoulders, your hips, or your midback—no problem. Feel the invitation of the body to release, accept it, and let go.
Next, the ankles. Now you’re relaxing the feet and the ankles. Then you’ll move to the lower calf muscles, energy traveling down through the feet. Soon your whole leg can begin relaxing. Include the shin bone—the bones hold tension just as much as the other parts. It can be quite surprising for beginning practitioners exactly how aware one can become of tension in the bones. Relax the muscle on the outside of the shin bone as well.
Now the whole lower leg. Feel the tension in the lower leg and the feet, and release down into the earth. It’s as if you’re just letting go, abandoning, releasing, relinquishing your grip on the body. Let your feet sink into the earth. Your whole lower leg, your ankle, your feet are dissolving into the earth. Release all the tension—feel how exhausting the maintanence of tension is. Tension—it’s so exhausting to have an ego, and to have to constantly hang on. Now you’re invited and given permission to release that.
Come to the buttocks on either side. Feel them contacting the earth. Let the whole pelvis relax and release, and shed its burden of tension down through the buttocks into the earth. Pay particular attention to the inner thighs, up high where the femur joins into the hip sockets on either side. On the inside of the upper thighs is the bottom part of the psoas muscle, often a place where we can feel a lot of tension and holding. The psoas muscle is the longest muscle in the body, and it’s a very important muscle because it’s what joins the upper and lower halves of the body. The ultimate source of the ego is in the psoas. So in working with the psoas, we’re working with the whole process of grasping and fixation. As it attaches in the upper part of the inside of the thighs, the psoas runs over the pubic bone, back through the pelvic cavity, and attaches on the lumbar spine and the bottom vertebra of the thoracic spine. It is very central to the process of rele
asing tension. Usually you can feel it mainly on the inside of the upper thighs. Feel the tension there, and begin to invite the psoas to release and relax. In sitting practice, a tight psoas is often responsible for a lot of our physical discomfort, especially in the lower back and the hips.
Right now, you’re working on the psoas with direct awareness, feeling the tension, releasing. Feel the outside of the hips; again, release, relax. And now the energy is traveling down through the buttocks into the earth. Move your awareness into the pelvic girdle and the bones that make up the pelvis; move it especially into the pubic bone. See if you can feel the internal skeletal structure of your pelvis, at least to some extent. The front part of the hips, the hip bones themselves, the pubic bone, the tailbone: you’re just going to work on the bones for a little while here, feeling and releasing downward.
Now move your attention to your knees and the full length of your thighs. The direction is down through the pelvic cavity, through the buttocks, into the earth. We are working with the two buttocks, but you will notice that the sacrum and the tail bone are also points of contact with the earth underneath. You’ve done the two feet, used them as a point of contact with the earth, and now you’re going to use the two buttocks. The energy is sliding down the front of the thighs and the back of the thighs through the buttocks into the earth. It is also sliding down through the femur, down into the hip socket, down through the buttocks into the earth.
As you do this, imagine that your buttocks and your whole pelvis are dissolving and melting downward. See if you can feel your pubic bone, hip sockets, the outside of your hips, your sacrum, your tailbone. Come into the genital region, the perineum, and the anal area. Explore each with close attention; find the tension, and release, relax downward. Especially in the perenium, the area between the genitals and anal area, right between your sitz bones, there is a great deal of energy and tension. Even if your perineum was damaged because of an episiotomy, the inner energetic perineum is intact. It’s the outer body that has all kinds of problems, but the inner body doesn’t. It’s whole. The more we tap into the inner body, the more the outer body becomes whole as well.
Pay special attention to the anal region and the interior of the lower belly. You’re just relaxing, releasing tension so it can go down through the buttocks. There’s a sense of a huge burden being released when we do this work, which is the burden of our ego. We have this job of trying to maintain ourselves through hanging on to our body, freezing our body so that we don’t feel. That’s how the ego survives, strangely enough. You’re relaxing, releasing, letting go of that continual effort.
Just feel how, at first, you hold in the pelvic cavity and then, second, you release. It’s like dropping off to sleep, in the sense of that kind of letting go, except that you remain aware. Your awareness doesn’t disappear.
Now we come to the midback. Release from the front of the chest down through the midback, opposite the bottom of the breastbone. If you can’t quite feel the tension in the midback, come up to the front of your chest at about the level of your heart and allow the tension there—which is usually more accessible—to flow down through the midback into the earth. Take some time with this.
Next come to the shoulder blades. Feel the shoulder blades touching the earth. Feel all the tension behind the shoulder blades, up into the shoulder joints, and up into the upper back. Just try to put your awareness there, feel the tension, and then release. You have to feel the tension first; you don’t release right away. You take a moment, you feel the tension, you feel yourself holding on, then you release. Again, explore this a little.
Move into the elbows, pulling energy from the fingertips, down the hands and wrists, the lower arm down through the elbows, into the earth. From the shoulders, the upper arms, down to the elbows, sink, relax, release ever more deeply. Completely let go. You don’t have to hang on in this position. Really let go.
Now try to feel altogether the nine points you’ve been working with: two feet, energy traveling down, two buttocks, midback, two elbows, two shoulder blades, energy flowing down through all of them. Your whole body is releasing, relaxing, letting go.
As you’re lying here, you’re simply going to feel your body. In the earliest Buddhist tradition, one of the main subjects of mindfulness practice is not the breath, but is actually the entire body. So this is going to be what you’ll pay attention to. You’re going to have your attention from the neck down, in your body. Just be aware. Just be mindful of all the sensations of the body. If the mind begins to wander, just come back to your body. Do this for a few minutes. You’re in the body. You don’t have a head controlling things, observing—that head is gone. You just have a body, and that’s where your awareness is.
And then, finally, go into the head. Beginning with the face, imagine that the skin and flesh of your face is dissolving, down through the skull into the earth. Just completely relax the face. Relax the eyebrows. Relax the eyes, the eye sockets. Relax the nose, the cheekbones, the upper jaw, the lower jaw. Completely let go. Let everything drain down through the skull into the earth. Completely relax. The skull itself. The ears. Let all the tension you find flow down through the back of the head and into the earth.
Now put your attention on your whole body, all at once, feeling the ten-points altogether. The whole body is completely relaxing, completely releasing. You’re letting go of any fatigue, any burden, any tension, any cares, any thoughts. Everything is flowing down into the earth. You can scan your body, see where the difficult parts may be. For many people, under the shoulder blades is really tough. It’s a very adult kind of problem that the upright position creates. You could focus on that. Feel the tension underneath the shoulder blades, then release.
You can go right to the edge of going to sleep in this practice; that’s not a bad thing to do, as long as you can stay aware. It’s a different kind of awareness. It’s much more penumbral, a much more shadowy kind of awareness than you’re likely accustomed to.
Feel your body. Feel your whole body. Feel what’s going on in it, and release. Just imagine yourself sinking into the earth, dissolving into the earth.
At this point, you’re just aware. You’re not thinking—you’re just letting all the thoughts and all the physical tension dissolve.
Now that you’ve gone through the other areas, check back in on your inner thighs where the psoas is attached. See if you can see some holding there that you’d like to release. When you go into the upper inner thighs, it’s really the thigh bone you’re looking at. That’s where the psoas tension is. It’s right up against the thigh bone, the upper fifth of the thigh bone.
So you’re constantly scanning your body, you’re looking for tension now, and releasing. Through the feet, the buttocks, midback, elbows, shoulder blades, head. And you can let your awareness roam back and forth through your body, looking for points of tension. When you find them, really let them become uncomfortable, feel them become a little too intense, and then you can enter into them with your awareness. You can begin to take responsibility for the tension there. And release.
This concludes the ten-points practice, lying down. Take a few moments and, when you feel ready, you can sit back up in your meditation posture. Now you can either continue with your regular meditation practice, do the ten-points practice sitting up, or enter one of the other somatic practices. I’ll assume, for this discussion, that you are going to do the sitting up ten points practice.
B. Ten-Points Practice, Sitting Up
Now you’re going to go through the same basic process, but in a sitting up posture. The sitting up practice is a little different from the lying down version, but the principles and the process are the same.
Your feet and buttocks are touching the earth, possibly also your knees. You’re going to let your energy dissolve downward, taking all the tension with it. You’re feeling the earth under you really quite strongly, and allowing the tension of your body to dissolve into the earth underneath. There’s a steady stream
of energy downward. This time, you’re going to start with the crown of the head. It’s as if someone is pouring warm, golden, blissful oil over your head. That oil is flowing down over your skull, through your skull, over your face, down the back of your neck, shoulders, through the body, gradually working its way down to your buttocks, your knees, and your feet. Take some time with this process, perhaps ten minutes or so, letting the oil flow over and through you.
Just do this, feeling the release of tension, and particularly tension in the shoulders. Let all the energy of the body, all the tension, flow down to the places where you’re touching the earth, into the earth. Relaxing completely, completely letting go.
Stay in your body, keep finding places where you’re holding, and relax them. Let the energy flow down. There’s a constant sort of wash downward, through your buttocks, through your perineum, through the knees if they’re touching the floor, through your feet. It’s a steady flow down; you’re relaxing, relaxing, letting go, melting, releasing, energy flowing down into the earth. It’s almost as if your buttocks are melting into the earth.
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