Mindfulness Yoga
Page 15
24. Reclined Spinal Twist
10-20 BREATHS EACH SIDE
Lie on your back with your legs bent and the soles of your feet on the ground. Cross your left thigh over the right thigh snugly. Shift your hips about 4-5 inches to the left. As you exhale, drop your knees to the right. Move to being fully on your outside right hip. Your pelvis and shoulders will be at right angles to each other, and your spine is twisting fully but effortlessly along its entire length. You can weigh your legs down with your right hand and reach out to the left with your left hand. Keep your left shoulder blade flat on the floor, and let your chest be broad and expansive. As you rest here, you may take your right arm out to the right also, as you gaze either straight up or to your left.
Notice how the twist affects your breath. Can you sense your inner body as you lie here? Twisting like this slightly compresses the internal organs, allowing us to become more aware of the insides of our body. As you inhale and exhale, how do these sensations change? When you’re ready to come out of the posture, roll onto your back, uncross your legs, and repeat on the other side. Center yourself and then don’t forget to shift your hips over to the right.
25. Corpse Pose
5-10 MINUTES
Let your feet be about 12-18 inches apart and have your toes turned out to the sides. Let the flesh of your buttocks move gently down toward your heels and walk your shoulder blades in and down so that they are flat on the floor. Let the heart be open. Your arms should be at least a few inches away from the torso so that there is a real sense of spaciousness. Turn your palms upward.
Draw your attention to the breath. First notice where you most experience it, and then note its qualities. Know each breath as it comes and goes. When thoughts or feelings, fantasies, daydreams, or images arise, as soon as you become aware of them, simply and without any self-recrimination, let them go and return to your breath.
Just this. Just here. Just now. Let go and just be here.
If you become aware of tension in the body, see if you can release it on an exhalation. See if it’s possible to just experience the breath as it comes in and out. Can you really be sure you are the breather? Or is the breath simply breathing itself? Like a wave at the shore, the in-breath rushes into your body, and the out-breath withdraws itself. Where are you in this process?
26. Seated Meditation
5-40 MINUTES
Sit in any of the cross-legged asanas. Find your center and lengthen your torso, including the sides from your hips up into your armpits. This keeps you from just sticking your chest out to lengthen up. It reminds you that your torso is a “cylinder.” Make sure your shoulder blades are firmly supporting your upper back and that your lower back has its natural lumbar curve.
When the yogi breathes in or out a short breath, aware of his breath or his whole body, or aware that he is making his whole body calm and at peace, he abides peacefully in the observation of the body in the body, persevering, fully awake, clearly understanding his state, gone beyond all attachment and aversion to this life. These exercises of breathing with Full Awareness belong to the first Establishment of Mindfulness, the body.
INTERLUDE
THIS FATHOM-LONG BODY
It is the conventional wisdom that it was the tantric revolution that brought a new and central importance to the body in spiritual practice. This conventional analysis goes on to state that tantra was the movement that began to see the body not as an obstacle for spiritual practice and liberation but as the primary vehicle for practice and awakening.
While it is true that much mainstream yoga practice in both Hindu and Buddhist traditions had become world-denying and body-negative in its thinking, thus sparking the development of tantra in the sixth and seventh centuries, when we look into some of the oldest recorded teachings of the Buddha, we see that he saw the body not at all as an obstacle, but as a laboratory in which to cultivate love, compassion, and understanding.
In the Anguttara Nikaya the Buddha is quoted as saying:It isn’t possible by traveling to know or see or reach a far end of the cosmos where one doesn’t take birth, age, die, pass away, or reappear. But at the same time, I tell you that there is no making an end of suffering and stress without reaching the end of the cosmos.
Yet it is just within this fathom-long body, with its perception and intellect, that I declare that there is the cosmos, the origination of the cosmos, the cessation of the cosmos, and the path of practice leading to the cessation of the cosmos.
Thus, if we seek the real ending of the cycle of conditioned reactivity we call samsara—the cycle of pain and discomfort leading to aversion and reactivity, leading to stress and further imbalance—we need to look within, and not at what we think of as the external causes of our suffering.
The “cosmos” here is the circle of reactivity. “Birth, age, passing away, and reappearing” is what we are doing countless times a second. It is the conventional, historical, or “relative” truth of existence. We do not, and cannot, touch the “ultimate” truth of no birth and no death by attempting to transcend or leave this relative truth; we need to penetrate relative truth. This is because these two truths are two only in a conventional sense. Like right and left or up and down, they are relatively defined. They are not two, not one, but, to quote Thich Nhat Hanh once again, they “inter-are.”
While this understanding became of paramount importance in the Mahayana teachings (specifically those of the ancient Indian master Nagarjuna) as well as in tantra, and is seen in the Zen teaching that “samsara is nirvana,” this flower of understanding and insight can only have arisen from the seed and root planted by the Buddha, namely, his teaching as stated in the above quotation.
Besides the meditations on the breath and on the positions and movements of the body, the Buddha taught the following three practices in the Satipatthana Sutta.
THE PARTS OF THE BODY
The practitioner meditates on her very own body from the soles of the feet upward and then from the top of the head downward.
Included in this meditation is the awareness of all the parts of the body—external and internal. As you lie in CORPSE POSTURE, with your breath as your anchor, let your awareness move up the body. Really move your awareness into your toes, up through the foot into your shin. Be mindful of the skin, the flesh, the sinew, the muscles and tendons. Be aware of the bone and the bone marrow, the blood, the lymph.
As you move up through the thigh, your awareness enters into the pelvis. Practice awareness of the reproductive organs, the sexual fluids, the anus, the feces, the bowels, the bladder and urine. As you progress up through the torso, maintain awareness and contact with the internal organs, including the stomach, the intestines, the kidneys, and the liver. Include in your awareness the fatty tissue and the mucus, the bile, the digestive juices, the heart, lungs, and the nerves.
As your awareness moves through your arms, don’t forget to include your nails, the hairs on your arms as well as the veins and arteries. When your awareness moves through the head, you are aware of your tongue, your teeth, saliva, the nose, and the sinuses, including the mucus, the ears and the earwax, your eyes and tears, your brain, and the hairs on your head.
Just reading through the above inventory, you may have noticed feelings of unpleasantness and even revulsion at certain aspects of the body. This practice, contrary to how some teach it, is not intended to create disgust or revulsion with the body, but rather to become clearer about the full nature of the body. To look at a photo of a beautiful model and reflect on his or her liver, or the digestive juices running in his or her stomach and intestines, is to apply an antidote to our attachment and painful lusting after this ephemeral phenomena, which are after all only the surface reality.
Part of this practice is to see our preferences as conditioned. We may feel some revulsion contemplating our earwax and prefer to contemplate our hair. But even our own hair caught in the bathtub drain can become a source of mild revulsion. The lovely hair of the man or woman we see
in a restaurant will repulse us when we discover it in our soup! One benefit of practicing mindfulness of parts of the body is to lessen the pull of the conditioning and learn to see what remains when we free ourselves of that strong distaste or strong grasping.
The other, most simple reason we practice is to simply make contact with the body. Despite, or maybe even because of the materialist thrust of our culture, we are surprisingly alienated from our body. Many people seem to hate their body. Some spiritual traditions even seem to treat the body as a prison or a shackle—a place of punishment. By letting our awareness move through the body and become intimate with it, we become familiar with the body just as it is.
A more subtle realization that can arise as the result of observing the parts of the body is that each part has the potential to become a door of liberation and awakening. You may begin by seeing just the presence of a single part of the body such as your hand. But as you grow in your practice, you will begin to see the interdependent nature of your hand. It isn’t just that the hand depends on the rest of your body; it interdepends on the entire universe. I once heard a scientist say that a single grain of sand on a beach implies the universe. This recalls William Blake’s “To see the world in a grain of sand.” At this level of understanding, the vision of the poet and the knowledge of the scientist are made clear in the wisdom and understanding of awakening.
INTERDEPENDENCE OF BODY AND UNIVERSE
Further, in whichever position his body happens to be, the practitioner passes in review the elements which constitute the body.
This contemplation specifically works with developing the insight that there is no real separation between us and all else. The Buddha specifies that we should be aware that the elements of earth, water, fire, and air are present in us. Earth represents the principle of solidity, substance, and form; water represents the liquid aspects of matter and the principle of cohesion; fire represents heat, radiant energy, and transformation; and air represents movement. Other sutras echo the ancient Vedic teachings of the five great elements and include the element of space, which represents the “etheric” aspects of nature and the principle of vibration and creation.
When the practitioner looks deeply into his body and contemplates the water element in himself, he sees the specifics of blood, sweat, saliva, the fluid around the joints (synovial fluid), tears, urine, and the fluid that flows around and through every cell in his body. We know that our body is indeed over 70 percent water. This water is not separate from the water that falls from the clouds formed by the many bodies of water throughout the earth. And the elements that form the water are known to be the same elements that permeate space.
The elements in our body are the same elements found throughout the cosmos. We are literally star dust. This is why in the Five Mindfulness Trainings, we vow to protect the “life” of the elements. In protecting the elements from degradation, we protect ourselves. When we think we are “throwing away” our garbage, we can ask, Where is “away”?
All the many activities of our life generate heat, and we take in food to release energy in order to maintain our life. And all of this depends on the air around us and within us, in a constant process of exchange. All is in constant movement, and yet, when we observe this movement, do we really ever see or experience a “breather”? Or is it more accurate to say that breathing is happening?
When the practitioner practices in this way, and sees for herself the interdependent nature of her body, she begins to understand that life is not isolated in her own body. With this insight she can transcend the notion that she is just her body. The life that flows within his body is no different from the life that flows outside his body. With this understanding, the erroneous view of a boundary between self and nonself is transcended. This isn’t the transcendence of leaving this body or realm behind for a higher reality. This is the transcendence of an erroneous view, which allows us to go beyond the limiting concepts of birth and death. We enter into the realm of “no birth, no death” without ever going anywhere. Maybe this understanding is part of what lies behind the ambiguity found in the title claimed by the Buddha himself, “Tathagata,” which can mean both “Thus come” and “Thus gone.”
BODY AS IMPERMANENT: THE NINE CONTEMPLATIONS ON THE DECOMPOSITION OF A CORPSE
At first glance, a meditation on the decay of the body after death may seem to be totally at odds with the understanding of “no birth, no death.” But in fact, because of the interdependence of the two truths, the relative and the ultimate, the existential truth that this body is of the nature to die is not in contradiction to the deeper truth that there is neither birth nor death, neither increasing nor decreasing. We just have to remain clear from what perspective we are talking.
The first time you read through this meditation you may find it unpleasant. Its intention is not to make us depressed or weary of life. Rather, its purpose is to make us aware of how precious indeed is this wonderful life we have received. Seeing impermanence, we can be motivated not to waste life in distraction and dispersion. Seeing impermanence, we take nothing for granted, and so honor the absoluteness of each moment. This now is all there is. And it is changing even now.
Ironically, when practiced by those who are ready for it—and that means those who have freed themselves from much of their aversion and craving—the effect of this meditation can be liberating. This makes sense when you realize how much pain and suffering, how much tension and strain, we create by our attempts to deny the only thing we know for certain—that we will die.
This meditation, when practiced appropriately, leads us to living freely, unbound by attachments and aversions. If you choose this practice, be sure you are ready, and discontinue it if you find yourself growing heavy, depressed, or excessively uncomfortable. Essential to mindfulness practice is being mindful of our capacities and honoring them. They, like all things, are impermanent and change over time.
The following meditation instructions offered by the Buddha reflect the way people disposed of bodies at his time. Monks and nuns would go to the charnel house and contemplate the corpses there in the various stages of decomposition. Thich Nhat Hanh has suggested that those of us in the West may want to use images from our tradition, so that as you lie in CORPSE POSTURE, you can imagine the body lying in a coffin.
The fact that many of us may never have seen a corpse—and if we have, chances are it was dressed and made up as if it were going to a dinner party—and that it may indeed be difficult to imagine the very natural process of decomposition, is just further evidence of how resistant as a culture we are to facing this most obvious truth of nature. When ready, in the proper time and dosage, this is just the medicine we need.
1. The corpse (my corpse) is bloated, blue, and festering.
2. The corpse (my corpse) is crawling with insects and worms. Crows, hawks, vultures and wolves are tearing it apart to eat.
3. All that is left is a skeleton with some flesh clinging to it and some blood remaining.
4. All that is left is a skeleton with some blood stains, but no more flesh.
5. All that is left is a skeleton with no more blood stains.
6. All that is left is a collection of scattered bones—here an arm, here a shin, here a skull, and so forth.
7. All that is left is a collection of bleached bones.
8. All that is left is a collection of dried bones.
9. The bones have decomposed, and only dust is left.
CHAPTER EIGHT
FEELINGS AS FEELINGS
Breathing in, I am aware of feeling joy.
Breathing out, I am aware of feeling joy.
Breathing in, I am aware of feeling happiness.
Breathing out, I am aware of feeling happiness.
Breathing in, I am aware of my mental formations.
Breathing out, I am aware of my mental formations.
Breathing in, I calm my mental formations.
Breathing out, I calm my mental formations.