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body. This is an important Stoic skill: You plod on philosophically amid the natural turmoil of life.
If all else fails, however, it is best to stop meditating alto-
gether. There is no point in struggling with the inner tar baby.
It is better to get out of your head and distract yourself with
some fully engaging activity. Exercise or a conversation or
some physical activity can be excellent diversionary options.
Most of these strategies still rely on having a primary
focus on the body. We can only escape a thought by having
somewhere else for our attention to go to. Focusing on the
body is the ultimate escape from thought, and naming the
distractions is basically a way of patrolling the borders.
You might realize that most of the strategies in this chap-
ter have little in common with nonjudgmental acceptance as
it is recommended by many psychologists. These strategies
all correctly imply that getting tangled up in thought is not a
good thing at all. Runaway thought can make us very miser-
able indeed—it is a core ingredient of anxiety—and some peo-
ple have their lives destroyed by it.
The language of traditional Buddhism describes thoughts
and behaviors as being either right or wrong, healthy or
unhealthy, “skillful” or “unskillful.” Sati, which I translate
throughout this book as “the conscious perception and eval-
uation of something,” is what makes those discriminations.
The purpose of mindfulness is to make us better at deciding
what is good or bad in any situation and to steer us toward
advantage and away from danger. The quality of our lives
depends on it. As the Buddha said, our actions follow our
thoughts “as the cart follows the ox.”
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In the long run you may still have to tackle the problem of destructive thought closer to its source. If your quality of mind
is persistently bad, then tackling individual thoughts is not go-
ing to fix that. If you are drifting into depression and your life
is starting to suffer, you might need to also work on the preced-
ing causes. In the Sutta the Buddha said, “Be mindful of what
causes good and bad states of mind to arise.” Here are some
good long-term solutions to consider:
Let the brain rest. Fatigue is a guaranteed cause of poor
thought, so try to get more sleep or downtime. An extra hour
in bed each night, even if you’re still half-awake in that time,
will vastly improve your ability to think the next day.
Don’t tax your brain unnecessarily. Cut down the informa-
tion overload and be ruthless about it. How much media junk
and gossip do you really need? The brain has to waste energy
processing it all no matter how trashy it is.
Spend more time alone, even if you’re not actually medi-
tating. It may be a little boring and antisocial, but that’s when your brain has a chance to tidy the mental desk and put out
the rubbish.
Avoid conflict whenever possible, even when you are right.
It often triggers a hurricane of thoughts. It’s sometimes better
to be a relaxed loser than a stressed-out winner.
Finally, learn organizational skills to make your life more
orderly and less cluttered. If necessary, dump activities and
people from your life. You can’t expect meditation alone to
give you a calm, well-functioning mind.
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7
Why Focus on the Body?
If one thing, O monks, is developed and cultivated,
the body is calmed, the mind is calmed, discursive
thoughts are quietened, and all wholesome states
that partake of supreme knowledge reach fullness
of development . What is that one thing? It is
mindfulness directed to the body .
—Mindfulness of the Body Sutta1
Meditation is based on paying sustained attention to the
breath or to the body. Ten-day retreats, yoga, the MBSR
program used by psychologists, and most traditional prac-
tices ask us to devote a huge percentage of practice time to
observing the body. So why is the body so important?
The answer is not at all obvious. There is little consen-
sus in either the spiritual or the scientific literature. A com-
mon argument is that the body is a refuge from thoughts.
“If you get distracted by a thought, let it go and place your
attention gently back on the breath.” This suggests that any
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other object would serve just as well, which is obviously not the case. There are in fact dozens of other meditation objects
in the literature, but most are relics or curiosities or add-ons.
The body trumps them all.
We can only focus well on something if it seems to be
worth the effort. People often struggle to focus on the
breath because it seems so pointless. In fact, the more fre-
quently they get distracted the harder it becomes to refo-
cus. Researchers call this reluctance the “inhibition of
return” and can even measure it. We can’t keep refocusing
on something that seems of little value, and why on earth
would we? We actually focus on the body for reasons that
are far more convincing than the “breath as anchor” argu-
ment, but these are quite hard to explain in words. They
often seem trivial until they are well grounded through
practice.
Focusing on the body can produce some very satisfy-
ing results. In particular, it can induce fine pervasive plea-
sure throughout the body, even in the presence of residual
pain. Body scanning disarms the habitual tension and
overarousal that make many of us unconsciously misera-
ble all day long. It can make us feel good and often very
good indeed. This alone is sufficient to explain why medi-
tation is such a good antidote to anxiety. The Buddha was
adamant that deep physical pleasure is almost essential
for progress. It is the reward for good work, the proof of
success, and the motivation for further effort. Pleasure
induces the body itself to make a judgment: “Meditating is
good! Keep doing it!”
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VIPASSANA RETREATS
If you focus more deliberately than usual on the body, what
do you find? On the ten-day retreats I did between 1975 and
1992, we spent as many as ten hours a day sitting still and
focusing on the body. The retreats mostly followed the same
formula, which originated from two or three Vipassana teach-
ers in Burma and Thailand.
For the first three days we were typically asked to focus in
microscopic detail on the changing sensations of the breath at
the nostrils: pulsin
g, tingling, itching, aching, warmth, cool-
ness, and so on. In other words, we were learning the skill of
selective, sustained attention (Pali: vitakka-vicara) directed
at the breath. This strong focus simultaneously weakened our
natural mental inclination toward action or random thought.
From the fourth day onward we would repeatedly scan the
whole body with the same fine quality of attention we gave to
the breath. An hour to scan down. An hour to scan up. Two
hours to scan down. Two hours to scan up. We would notice
pleasure, pain, warmth, pulsing, flow, knots, dullness, expan-
sion, tightness and softness, darkness and light.
I always found it easy to stay focused. The work was fasci-
nating and rewarding. A general rule in meditation suggests
that “focus improves function.” If you pay good attention to
what you are doing, whether that is meditating or something
else, the activity invariably becomes more efficient and satis-
fying. This principle certainly operates when you focus your
attention on the body.
By repeatedly scanning, I could feel my body softening,
rebalancing, opening up, letting go of chronic tensions, and
discovering new sensory pleasures. I also noticed the subtle
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emotional resonances, the verbal scripts, the imagery and memories embedded within those physical sensations. By
observing my body carefully I could see in much finer detail
what was happening in my mind.
In other words, focusing on the body was not confined to
the purely physical. Detailed body awareness jumps that body-
mind divide. The Buddha said that profound training in mind-
fulness of the body inevitably flows through into mindfulness
of emotions, of states of mind, and of thought itself. When we
could feel each part of our bodies with a high degree of sensi-
tivity, we were then told to sweep up and down more rapidly,
to integrate our mental maps of our bodies. Focusing on the
body still took effort, but it certainly wasn’t boring.
At this point in the Vipassana format, we were usually
encouraged to contemplate the Buddhist theory of suffering
and its causes. I don’t know how many of us actually did that.
The arguments the teachers presented struck me as childish
and unconvincing. They were also quite incidental to the
remarkable and unexpected benefits I got from meditating.
GAINING EXPERTISE IN BODY AWARENESS
We know that the acquisition of any skill correlates closely to
hours of intelligent (that is, not mindless) practice. Most peo-
ple can’t afford to take ten-day retreats, but practicing steadily
over a year can clock up just as much time. So what distin-
guishes an experienced meditator from a novice? What is the
result of the hundred hours of practice you get from a retreat?
Meditation profoundly enhances the way we feel our
body from the inside. This data is integrated into a detailed
map, or series of maps, of the body held in the brain. This is
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the mental map we have talked about as the “body schema”
in earlier chapters, and it is extremely fluid. It constantly
adjusts to new information via feedback mechanisms. When
we reach out or smile or burp or get angry, the body schema
instantly mirrors those events.
One part of the body schema is “proprioceptive.” That is to say,
it reads the signals from our muscles, tendons, joints, and cartilage
to give us an inner picture of where our body is in space. Proprio-
ception tells us which part of the body is doing what, how tense or
relaxed we are, and how easy or hard, how effective or faulty, any
movement is. It also connects with our sense of balance.
Because proprioception comes from the musculoskeletal
system, we can control much of it with considerable precision.
Meditators often make countless subtle adjustments while
they sit that would be invisible to any outside observer. More
commonly, however, they simply notice external or musculo-
skeletal sensations, and this awareness alone induces fine
changes. Every one of those tiny shifts is likely to improve
the sense of comfort and ease in the body, and the effect is
cumulative over time.
The other big part of the body schema is “visceral.” This
emanates from our cardiovascular and respiratory systems
and from our digestive tract. This information tells us, in par-
ticular, about our levels of arousal (that is, blood pressure and
heart rate), which are the key indicators of stress.
The viscera also convey many of our emotions and moods to
the brain. They are the biological sources for our intuitive sense
of good and bad, right and wrong, about anything at all (see
chapter 19 for a fuller discussion about optimizing emotions).
These “gut feelings” explain why being more grounded in the
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body helps us to make better judgments. Detailed body scanning puts us in touch with the substrata of sensations and emo-
tions that support and inform our conscious mental activity.
Unlike the visible body, the body schema will change
enormously during the day. Your body as you walk into a
restaurant looks much the same as the one that walks out. But
if you ate or drank too much, your body schema would be
utterly different. Similarly, a relaxed body feels different from
an anxious one. A joyful body is different from a depressed
one, and these different states can be worlds apart.
Because body awareness is nonverbal, it is mostly outside
of consciousness. We all have a functioning body schema or
we couldn’t negotiate our way through a room, but our ability
to tap into this mental map varies enormously. A child can
move with ease, agility, and precision because of her good
sense of body and the surrounding space. An old, sick per-
son is likely to grope and fumble at least partly because of his
impaired body schema. He doesn’t “see” or “feel” himself as
clearly as he once did.
Some people have good body awareness but most don’t.
Some people barely feel their bodies except when in they’re
in pain. Other people live totally in their heads or in their
actions, and some deliberately split off from their bodies.
People who rarely notice their bodies will have rudimentary,
underdeveloped body schemas. They won’t be able to detect
signals of stress, pain, fatigue, hunger, or even their emotions,
until these become extreme. They may realize they have a
problem only when they start having panic attacks.
On the other hand, athletes, musicians, performers,
tradesmen, people who work with their bodies, and those who
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exercise consciously are bound to have more detailed and
functional body schemas. They are more “embodied,” at least
in the domain of their particular abilities. Having a good body
schema also makes it more likely that a person will be happier,
more emotionally aware, and able to make better decisions.
THE REWARDS OF BLISS ( PITI)
AND CONTENTMENT ( SUKHA)
Regular meditators inevitably develop their body schemas
over time, even if they think they are doing something alto-
gether different. Since our attention naturally orients itself to
what is problematic, when we focus on the body we first notice
the “negatives”—the stress, pain, fatigue, and imbalances. Over
time these negatives diminish, the body schema becomes bal-
anced, and the “positives” become more prominent.
The positives that we feel in meditation can be quite
splendid. The Buddha said that mindfulness of the body is
the source of the most profound bliss ( piti) and contentment
( sukha) possible in this unsatisfactory world. Personally, I
believe that there are superior pleasures, but a good medita-
tion is right up there near the top.
The historical Buddha is correctly seen as a somber,
world-renouncing ascetic, but that’s not the full story. Two of
his key texts, The Foundations of Mindfulness and its compan-
ion work, Mindfulness of the Body,2 were designed to induce
profoundly positive states of body and mind. These are called
the absorption states ( jhana), and they can help answer the
question “Why do we focus so much on the body?”
Both of these key texts start with the same 1-2-3-4 stages:
Focus on the breath. Calm the breath. Focus on the body.
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Calm the body. The relief that comes from reducing arousal and muscle tension to its minimum is followed by the subtle
pleasure of body-mind stillness ( passaddhi). The Buddha said
that this sense of tranquil embodiment was the indispensable
foundation for what follows.
At this point, the Satipatthana Sutta branches out to
explore emotions, states of mind, and thoughts (the other
three foundations of mindfulness), while Mindfulness of the
Body goes more deeply into the absorption states, or jhana.