If I come across a few ideas in a book about meditation or mindfulness that make me go "Wow, that's really good advice," I'm a happy reader.
It only took me 17 pages of reading Martin Aylward's book, Awake Where You Are: The Art of Embodied Awareness, to find a statement that had a pleasing wow factor.
Ajahn Mun, another famous Thai meditation master, used to give the instruction, "Never let your mind leave your body." If that seems too much to ask, then how about this: every time you notice that your mind has left your body really notice that.
Notice that feeling of being "up and out" of yourself, of being caught in some abstraction. Sense into the inevitable tensions that have arisen through your attention having been hijacked… and let it all go. You return by coming "in and down," by re-embodying your experience.
Now, everybody has their own unique take on what meditation is all about. There are countless (roughly) approaches to meditation. Even within a single approach, every practitioner will have a somewhat different manner of meditating.
So I realize that the adage, "Never let your mind leave your body," will be interpreted in various ways. Buddhists will look upon that saying through the prism of their faith's teachings. Non-Buddhists like me will view the saying in our own fashion.
One reason I like the adage is that it turns the notion of an out-of-body experience upside down. Instead of seeking to release the mind from the body, Aylward says that we should try to keep the mind connected to the body — advice that I heartily agree with.
Where is your attention now? It might well be "up and out" on the page you are reading. That's what we do. We feel that to connect to something, we need to go "out there" to it. But fundamentally, there is no "out there." The book, the page, the reading, the understanding (hopefully) — it's all here. Here in awareness. Here in experience.
So again (and don't worry about the repetition, you'll need to do this several billion times), how about coming in and down? Is it counterintuitive to a mind (your mind, my mind, everyone's mind) that has been conditioned to go out to meet experience, but actually, you don't need to go anywhere. Ever.
Come in and down. Feel your arms and legs. The weight of your legs on your seat. Stay where you are. Settle into your direct, visceral experience. And notice that you can still see "the world around you." That you can still read these words. You can let the world come to you instead of going after it. You can let experience rise up to meet you where you are, instead of losing yourself in its pursuit.
…But if every time you notice that your attention has gone off somewhere, you sense what is happening in your body, you'll start to notice the subtle tensions of leaning out of yourself.
You'll feel how being lost in thought is inherently stressful as you recognize the inevitable physical tension of fabricating, feeding, and then reacting to whatever stimuli you've gotten involved with. And then you'll see that you return to presence not by an act of will, not by forcing your attention back to some elusive "present moment," but by recognizing and releasing those tensions.
Returning to presence, in other words, is mostly and most simply about relaxing…You don't do awareness. Instead of the effort to be present, there is effortless presence every time you relax your contracted, fixated attention.
Unlike the mind, the body is always right here, right now. There's no other place or time it could be. Such is the beauty of doing our best to never let the mind leave the body. The more we can do this, the more we will be present with what is actually happening with our body/mind, as opposed to the mental time travel we so often engage in.
Today, in my Tai Chi class, we were doing the Yang 37 Form, a.k.a. the Cheng Man Ching form. After three kicks, there's a planting punch. The 37 Form then continues in the same basic direction as the planting punch. In the Yang Long Form, there's also a planting punch after three kicks. But then the form reverses direction to a Throw the Fist move.
I know both forms well. When I'm paying attention to them.
Today, though, my mind wandered off to what I was going to have for dinner. I was leaning toward an Amy's Kitchen frozen meal, spinach ravioli with ricotta cheese. So after the planting punch, with my mind having left my body to travel forward in time a few hours and sideways in space about ten miles to our kitchen, I launched into the Long Form movement rather than the 37 Form movement.
It just took an instant to realize that I was doing something different than everyone else in the Tai Chi class. Oops. I reversed course and got back on track with the 37 Form.
This is what happens when the body is doing one thing and the mind is doing something else. It's the opposite of a flow state where body and mind are seamlessly involved in the same activity. As Aylward said, there's a tension, a disconnect, when the mind has left the body and is floating off in some mental realm of concepts, imaginings, fantasies, worries, memories, and such.
There's nothing wrong with mind-wandering. It can be both useful and pleasurable. However, we should be aware when we've allowed our mind to leave our body and go wandering about on its own. If we're doing something physically risky — downhill skiing, rock climbing, going up or down steep stairs, driving on a busy freeway — it can be dangerous if the mind disconnects from what the body is doing.
And as everybody who meditates knows, if we're paying attention to following the breath as we inhale and exhale, having the mind depart our body for some other time and place that our thoughts and imagination have conjured up leaves us distracted rather than focused on what is actually happening bodily here and now.
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“If I come across a few ideas in a book about meditation or mindfulness that make me go “Wow, that’s really good advice,” I’m a happy reader. (…) It only took me 17 pages of reading Martin Aylward’s book, Awake Where You Are: The Art of Embodied Awareness, to find a statement that had a pleasing wow factor.”
Agreed 100%! Pure gold, this one.
I’m loving these nuts-and-bolts discussions on the spit-on-your-hands, practical aspects of meditation! Some of them about subtle nuances not always evident, not always understood. And in any case, while stuff like this does tend to come up in discussions and lectures during retreats and such, but in our usual daily mundane lives, it is a treat to be able to have these discussions here, and thereby strengthen our own practice.
And, to repeat what I’ve said more than once: while certainly these things one might find in books; and indeed it’s from books that you do source these discussions, most times; but to have them all in one place like this, in easily digestible bits, and most importantly in this wonderfully interactive format: that’s what makes this here Churchless the wonderful place you’ve built it up to be, Brian. My wholehearted appreciation — heh, for the umpteenth time!
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“Ajahn Mun, another famous Thai meditation master, used to give the instruction, “Never let your mind leave your body.” If that seems too much to ask, then how about this: every time you notice that your mind has left your body really notice that.”
That’s certainly a marvelous ideal to hold before us: mindfulness, always. Which is what you’d discussed in your last post.
And, haha, yes, that is indeed much too much to ask, of most of us! Absolutely, that second bit of advice/exhortation, about noticing clearly every time our mind has floated away from mindfulness, and gently bringing it back: that’s a wonderful bit of advice, and what most of us can actually do, and what many of us indeed do.
But, again, heh, it’s what we do during retreats and such. In our daily lives, even this much may be a bit much, for most of us!
But absolutely, doesn’t hurt to keep that ideal in front of us, this second bit I mean to say, and strive to abide by it at least one time, twice, maybe four times, or as many times as we comfortably can, without making it seem like an onerous pain in the neck. Great advice, absolutely!
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“Instead of seeking to release the mind from the body, Aylward says that we should try to keep the mind connected to the body — advice that I heartily agree with”
Sure, absolutely: but isn’t that, like, Vipassana 101?
Sure, other traditions, including tantric traditions I’ve worked with, as well as RSSB-like Shabdic ones, might indeed go for the releasing mind from body thing: but Vipassana is squarely about keeping the mind connected to the here and now, and indeed often directly via the body.
Maybe he’s discussing this for the benefit of those familiar with other traditions of meditation, but not so much Vipassana per se? Fair enough, if so.
And in any case, even for those who do know what Vipassana’s about, it never hurts to have even obvious points repeated. Better repetition than, maybe, inadvertently missing something important. …Heh, as Aylward says himself, about repetition I mean to say, a couple paragraphs down from there!
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“You’ll feel how being lost in thought is inherently stressful as you recognize the inevitable physical tension of fabricating, feeding, and then reacting to whatever stimuli you’ve gotten involved with.”
Bingo! Aylward puts in concise words a wealth of wisdom, and of lived experience, in this one sentence.
Over long retreats, initially it is actually torture, this unending nature of the effort at meditation and mindfulness — specifically the unending part of it, as opposed to what happens every day, when after your meditation you go back to your everyday life. …And yet, soon enough, things become exactly the opposite of “torture”. It is meditation, and mindfulness, and specifically the continuous unending immersion/abiding in it, that becomes one’s place of rest, as it were: and, at that point, it is engagement with thought that ends up being what one recoils from. (Which is why, basis personal experience, I always keep a buffer of a day or two between end of retreat and return to full-on hurly burly of life.)
…Beautiful! Aylward has put in words what I’ve felt in my bones myself, but never actually had occasion to myself verbalize, or seen described in quite this direct manner.
…Of course, I realize that the point is to not keep this isolated to some hours of meditation, or indeed some days of focused retreats, but to actually incorporate this into our daily lives. Which was one of the points discussed in your last post. …Ehh, I’m not quite there yet. …And also, what I’d said, before, about my “problem” over otherwise perfectly agreeable engagement with the hundred-and-one things of daily life, both professional and professional? And my “epiphany”, over what the solution might amount to? …A great deal of what we actually spend our hours and days and lives doing, is simply …fluff, froth, empty, pointless —- even when it’s “enjoyable”, even when it’s “fun”, even when it’s greatly sought after and admired. It’s difficult to be “mindful” over something you find it makes no sense at all to keep on doing. …But, ah, let’s not go down that rabbit hole all over again now, that last: we’ve already done that, and solved the problem as well, kind of.
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“you’ll see that you return to presence not by an act of will, not by forcing your attention back to some elusive “present moment,” but by recognizing and releasing those tensions. (…) Returning to presence, in other words, is mostly and most simply about relaxing…You don’t do awareness. Instead of the effort to be present, there is effortless presence every time you relax your contracted, fixated attention.”
Bingo, yet again! …Yep, it can sound esoteric, the whole “Be in the present moment” thing. But it’s not. When you’re arrived at it, you do see that it’s something …spontaneous, the most natural thing in the world.
Love it, how Aylward keeps spelling out these …insights, that one does feel in one’s bones as it were, but that you find yourself appreciating all the more when you’ve seen him articulate it so clearly.
Looked up Aylward just now. He’s got a cool website, https://martinaylward.com/, that I enjoyed browsing through. He does look like the real deal —- someone that knows what he’s talking about, and who is not, as far as I can see basis a quick brows, given to either woo or charlatanry, those two things one would be well advised to always always *always* look out for, when treading things spiritual.
There’s a promising looking brief online course incorporating guided meditations, that he offers there completely free. I didn’t go for it, because I simply don’t have the bandwidth to engage with something like this at this time, and I think it would be disrespectful to grab it just because it’s free unless I have the intention to use it fully. But I’ve bookmarked the site, and hopefully will return to it when I’m free, later.
It’s a dicotomy that you need the mind to be able to meditate but then when you conquer the mind you leave it behind and advance to the soul. They’re two different things. Soul and mind. So at the time of death you will leave the body alone and then that’s the end of ego( until next time).The surat shabd meditation technique is preparation for that . Die daily , die while living. With enough detachment in this life you might not have to come back!
Christ says, “I die daily”😉
(I couldn’t resist, it’s a domino effect from the previous comment.)
@Tej,..Christ didn’t say that. The Apostle Paul said it.
😇
“Never let your mind leave your body” – just about encapsulates much of the practices of Buddhism and the non-duality teachings. Buddhists in particular are always emphasising ‘being here now’ and ‘this is it’ and statements like ‘Buddhism is not what you think’.
It can be seen that we are more often than not seeing the world through our opinions, concepts and beliefs rather than seeing it through our senses, through our bodies. I often wonder if much of our conflicts and troubles are due to our having lost contact with the reality of ourselves; with the natural world. Small wonder then that we can feel isolated and alone, divorced from what is real as we over-lay the real world with the projections from our minds that basically consist of the accumulations of the past.
I’d reckon that our disconnection from the natural world – of which we are an integral part – is perhaps why we treat our world as a throw away commodity. Donald Trump for example epitomises this in his disdain for the environment and clean energy in his pursuit for wealth and power symbolised recently in his plans to dig up the ‘Rose Garden’ (as the grass can be wet!), in favour of slabbing it over!
The watchword could be; go for a walk (or just sit); leave the mind projections (and the cell phones) at home and sense the world as it is.
Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely! I still go to meeting sometimes often but I’ve never been asked to say anything at satsang. So maybe they’ll read this and grow a pair. Maybe it’s true what they say it’s dangerous to become personally acquainted with a perfect master. The humility it took to accept that in the beginning is still present.