upper body does, but the feedback signs are much less obvi-
ous. They therefore have a weaker confirmatory effect.
Counting and Affirmations
Props are often essential to keep yourself on track. You can
always count three or four breaths silently to each stage, or
repeat an affirmation while you breathe, as I described in
chapter 3.
Visualization
Focusing on the body is like illuminating it from within. It’s
just a small step further to imagine gradually filling the body
with light or a color or nectar or spiritual energy. The Japanese
Zen master Hakuin (1686–1769) suggested imagining a ball of
aromatic butter on your head gradually melting throughout
your body. (Hakuin is also famous for the saying “Meditation
in the midst of activity is a thousand times superior to medita-
tion in stillness.”)
The Central Axis
When you become very still and calm ( passaddhi), your mind
may want to go deeper inside. When scanning it will tend to
move up and down the “central axis” of the body. We usually
feel this as being slightly in front of the spine. The central axis
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is not a genuine anatomical structure; it is a mental concept.
It is how we imagine ourselves as being straight and balanced.
Chakras
Along the central axis you will find places where your mind
naturally wants to rest: the point behind the eyes; the center of
the chest; the center of the hips, for example. Let your mind go
to these places. In yoga these are called “chakras.” These are not
anatomically real locations, but the feeling of being centered
is very real. Don’t worry if your apparent chakras don’t exactly
match the five or seven chakra models of the various yogic or
Tibetan systems. The fact that these are not compatible with
each other makes it obvious that they are not an absolute spir-
itual anatomy. They are just frameworks to hang your expe-
rience off. You don’t need to force your actual experience to
conform to either of these.
Deep Point Focus
If your mind wants to go to any particular place, let it do so. It
will be attracted in particular to the “negatives”—to whatever
is painful, awkward, or out of balance. Focusing on those areas
helps to correct them.
Searching for Pain
Home in on what feels bad and let the sensations there come
to the surface. Mindfulness typically acts as a troubleshooter.
Error detection is one of its major functions. We often have to
become fully conscious of unnecessary tension or a runaway
thought or a disturbing mood, and let it emerge fully in con-
sciousness, in order to relax at all.
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Breath Body
Use your breath as a probe for scanning your body—you can
imagine “breathing through the body” or “breathing into”
areas of pain or tension. This will help you create a sense of
space and openness throughout the body, thereby inducing
the so-called “breath body” experience.
Attention to the Positives
Because the lovely states of mind are more subtle than the neg-
atives, they can easily be missed. When they do occur, make
sure you notice them: deep stillness, inner silence, bliss, vision,
sensory delight, mental clarity, and control. Don’t forget why
you’re meditating: You do want to feel better. Keep the goal in
mind and enjoy any unexpected rewards that come along.
ACCEPTING THE BODY
Body scanning can be profoundly enjoyable. It still surprises
me that physical bliss can coexist with the inevitable discom-
forts of having a human body. Some of my students even say
that severe pain and illness are no obstacle and can even help.
Because scanning is so therapeutic, however, people often try
to force the process. This can lead to frustration: “I couldn’t
make my shoulders relax no matter how hard I tried!”
The most helpful attitude is a loving and tolerant curiosity
toward the body just as it is—that is, “nonjudgmental accep-
tance” (a term we’ll return to often throughout this book).
Nonjudgmental acceptance is an excellent response toward
things that we can’t immediately change. All we can do is pay
attention to the body and gently explore. We usually can’t
force it to feel exactly the way we would like. If we can feel
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comfortably at home in our less-than-perfect bodies, we stop fighting ourselves and automatically relax.
There can be hundreds of things that we don’t like about
ourselves—sensations, thoughts, moods, and habits. In medi-
tation, we meet them one by one as the minutes go by. Each
one gives us a chance to let go a little more of our habitual
negativities, to become more tolerant of negative affect. The
minor physical discomforts are a good place to start. Learn-
ing to do this enhances our capacity for what psychologists
call “distress tolerance” or “pain tolerance.”
The results can be truly amazing. Although body scanning
illuminates our discomforts, it is also the royal road to bliss.
We can feel every part of the body, and all the systems within
it, orienting toward a state of health and balance. Beneath the
discomforts, the body can feel tranquil, radiant, and alive.
IS IT WORKING?
Some psychologists say that we should practice meditation
without aiming for any particular outcome. “Just accept what-
ever happens, good or bad.” Such universal acceptance is a goal
in itself, but I’m not sure that it’s a good one. This approach
certainly wouldn’t make us any better at golf or mathematics.
Learning any skill is rewarding, but it does take effort. We will
only stick with it if it seems to be worthwhile. We know that
most students of any subject need frequent positive feedback
on their progress or they’re likely to get discouraged. This is
exactly what happens to most people who attempt meditation.
They fail to look for the benefits.
Meditation is about learning to relax rapidly, to focus bet-
ter, and to manage thoughts and emotions more intelligently.
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These are skills that we can readily improve if we know how to assess our progress. Let’s look at just the first of these: relaxing
consciously. Beginners often doubt that focusing on their bod-
ies will relax them. We usually get sleepy and less conscious as
we relax, so we are rarely alert enough to notice how pleasant it
feels. So how can we tell if we are succeeding or not?
The shift from the stress response to the relaxation
> response, from sympathetic arousal to parasympathetic
recover, creates dramatic effects throughout the body. Sev-
eral signs will indicate that this process is at work:
Muscle tension releases. We can easily feel the little muscles
around the eyes, lips, and jaw soften. The shoulders drop. The
loss of tone throughout the large muscles of the body induces
a feeling of heaviness. As tension fades, the body loses its
jumpy, ready-to-move quality. It starts to feel genuinely still.
Tingling, warmth, and pulsing arises. The relaxation
response diverts the blood flow from the large fight-or-flight
muscles to the skin and the digestive system. The skin often
feels tingly and warm, and the pulse may become more
prominent. Stress shuts down the digestive system, but
relaxation wakes it up, sometimes with gurgling and mild
nausea.
Physical discomforts emerge. Stress and cortisol mask our
aches, pains, and fatigue. Relaxation brings them to the
surface. Their presence can be regarded as good signs of
progress. Focusing on the body naturally amplifies sensations,
and the brain will always give priority to unpleasant signals
over pleasant ones.
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Arousal drops. We sense this most clearly in our breathing.
We shift from tense, holding, rapid, upper-body breathing
to soft, releasing, slower, lower-body breathing. When this
happens we know that heart rate and blood pressure will also
be returning to balance. We also get our first taste of stillness
and silence in the gap between out-breath and in-breath.
You know you’re on the right track during any meditation
if you feel heavy or light, soft, tingling, warm, tired, sore, still,
or any combination of these sensations. In being “mindful
of the body,” you may also feel your breathing soften, notice
more saliva in your mouth, watering in the eyes, a gurgling
stomach, a sense of inner space or flow.
Mentally you may still be a bit distracted or sleepy, or you
may feel fully calm and controlled. Your bad mood may have
utterly changed, or it may just have weakened. You are likely
to feel more grounded and in tune with your emotional state.
Ideally you feel a stronger sense of agency after a meditation.
You are more able to choose where to direct your attention
rather than being at the mercy of whatever arises.
When we meditate, our quality of focus naturally fluctu-
ates according to inner and outer forces that we usually can’t
see or control (biology, weather, stress, fatigue, cognitive
overload, sickness, emotional cross-contamination, and so
on). But still, we’re not helpless.
None of us can focus perfectly for long, but we can cer-
tainly get better with practice. It is simply a matter of being
“mindful of your state of mind” and repeatedly checking.
It starts with a simple question: “Am I focused or not? Am
I paying attention to the body as I intended to do, or am I
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distracted by some thought?” If we become mindful that
we’re not focused, it is easy to correct it. If we don’t recognize
it, we’re as lost as a tennis player who endlessly repeats an
error.
If we notice when our attention is good, we can amplify
it. Just to recognize that “this is good focus” and to embed
that feeling in memory is sufficient. It lays down a positive
template for the future. As the Buddha said in the Sutta, “Rec-
ognize when a good state of mind is present and learn how to
amplify it.”
Even acknowledging that your mind is hopelessly scat-
tered is better than not recognizing it at all. To notice that
something is wrong is the essential first step toward improve-
ment, even if nothing happens immediately. The Buddha said
that if you repeatedly recognize bad states of mind and store
them in memory, you will eventually come to see what trig-
gers them and what helps them fade.
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6
Controlling Thought
It is easy to relax the body. It takes no great skill or effort.
We only have to sit or lie down and close our eyes for long
enough. This sends a potent message to the body that we have
disengaged from the world. Our muscles no longer need to
be primed for action. Just closing our eyes gives the muscles
permission to relax, and they do. Everyone lowers their muscle
tension and arousal to some degree when they meditate, even
the most unskilled practitioner.
Unfortunately, our minds don’t relax so easily. We don’t
stop thinking just because our bodies have stopped moving.
The freed-up mental capacity gets redirected into the “virtual
action” of thought. Whenever we have nothing to do, we don’t
switch off the mind and rest. Our default behavior is to think
over what we’ve just done and to plan for future actions. While
this is an essential mental activity, we frequently overdo it to
our detriment. Sitting down and closing our eyes certainly
doesn’t switch off that default habit. The brain is hardwired to
revert to thought in the absence of immediate action.
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AUTOMATIC THINKING
Cognitive psychologists have various names for this perpet-
ual mental activity. They call it the “automatic processing sys-
tem” or the “default network” or the “narrative network” or the
“interior dialogue” or the “stream of consciousness.” We can
regard this mental activity as the stream of automatic cogni-
tion that underpins our conscious thought. Whether we are
aware of it or not, automatic thinking never stops, not even
when we periodically shift into conscious, goal-directed think-
ing. We can think both automatically and consciously at the
same time. (Cognitive psychologists explain this according to
what is called the “dual process theory.”)
Automatic thinking is complex and powerful. It processes
many issues simultaneously, operating on parallel tracks
continuously day and night. It is the mental equivalent of the
digestive system. It thinks over, digests, sifts through, files
away, and organizes all the information we take in each day.
It discards the junk, clears the decks, and primes us for com-
ing activities.
This is the huge substrata of automatic and unconscious
cognition that keeps our lives on track. We would be in a
lunatic asylum or dead without it. While conscious, directed
thought does certain things much better than automatic
thought, it is just the luxury top end of the vast factory of
cognition. Thinking is thus a continuous, automat
ic, and
mostly beneficial process. Nor do we have to decide to think.
It happens by itself just like breathing does. It would be futile
to try to shut it down, or switch it off, or blank it out as many
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people would like to do. By meditating, we just learn to interact with the process of thinking more effectively.
We control automatic thought in several ways when we
meditate. As we calm our bodies down, the mental noise and
busyness diminish. As we slow our minds down, we become
more able to choose which thoughts to follow. By getting
sleepy we dull our thoughts out—not a ideal strategy. By
becoming mindful—by seeing what actually happens in the
mind—we understand how it all works.
Meditating calms automatic thought through the way we
direct our attention. In particular, we focus toward the body
and away from our habitual thoughts. We give more atten-
tion than usual to the flux of bodily sensations and less atten-
tion to our thoughts. We feed X by starving Y. This results in
our automatic thoughts becoming weaker, less emotionally
charged, and easier to ignore or tolerate.
Where attention goes, energy follows. Because energy is a
limited resource, giving more to our mental representations
of the body (the body schema) means less is available for
runaway thought. When starved of oxygen and glucose, our
background thoughts, and the neural networks that support
them, become weaker. Their emotional charge declines, and
the chains of thought break apart more quickly.
FOCUSING AND MONITORING
Focusing on the body disarms most intrusive thoughts, but
they never completely disappear. Nor would that be a useful
goal. We don’t want to go mentally blank. It is much better to
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lightly monitor that peripheral stream of cognition and data. It could contain something we need to respond to (for instance,
the house is burning down).
This means that “paying attention” is not as single-minded
as it might seem. It consists of two mutually supporting skills.
We can call them “focusing” and “monitoring.” We focus on
the body while monitoring the peripheral activity. Nor do
we have to toggle between them. We both focus and monitor
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