If you have ever almost died, or pushed yourself very hard physically, you know what I’m talking about when I say “body”.
If you’ve ever lost the use of a limb or a sense organ - maybe you had Covid and couldn’t taste, or an ear infection and couldn’t hear - you know what I’m talking about when I say “body”.
Through the course of aging we have all experienced the loss of physical ability. I used to be able to jump off the back of a pickup truck. Now I climb gingerly down.
I’ve spent a lot of time outside in the wilderness. One time, floating down the Green River, I stepped on a twig. No big deal. Except that two days after I got home I had a raging fever, coming in and out of consciousness on my living room couch. The emergency room couldn’t find the right antibiotic, so for a few days I was in the hospital on the edge of life. My legs and arms, which had been so competent only a week before, were useless. I can still recall the feeling of the antibiotic flowing into my vein from the IV bag. It was golden life being poured into me through a tube in my arm.
During the recovery period, they took me to the basement of the hospital and did an ultrasound of my heart to see if the infection had damaged it. I watched on the screen, this grey green image of a muscle pumping away once a second while in my chest I felt the same contractions.
When I was a kid there was a punk band I liked called “The Meat Puppets”. One way to think about the body is the meat puppet “we” move around this world in. Feet, legs, hips and genitals. Belly, chest, arms, neck and head. The blood, nerves, muscles and organs. The tendons and ligaments that hold the pieces together.
But the meat isn’t all there is to the body. There’s the consciousness too. There’s the eye, and the eye consciousness, the ear, and the ear consciousness. We know these things are different because we have all lost something, looked all over for it, but couldn’t see it. My phone was right on the table the whole time! Depending on who is talking and if we want to listen, sound can travel in our ears, but still we don’t actually hear it.
There’s touch, the skin and the nerves stimulated, and then the touch consciousness. We miss so much of this in our daily life. We rarely see our world. We drive right by the red of the leaves in the fall. We miss the smell our morning coffee. We’re so busy with our thoughts, our plans, our regrets. It feels special to come back in contact with the physical things around us.
So for this meditation, I’m asking you to get down and dirty with the experience of your physical presence on this planet. While you can.
At some point our body will stop working. The blood will cease to flow. The energy pulsing through the nerves will dissipate. We will not be able to lift our head off the pillow, or rearrange our posture into an upright position. Our heart will stop, our breathing will stop. Our ears will stop hearing… I don’t need to go on do I? You get the point.
Before that happens, let’s put our attention on the body and the body consciousnesses, the senses, the sense gates, the feeling. The actual feeling of being alive.
This sensation, these sensations, are what we are going to meditate on for this hour.
Give yourself complete permission to experience your actual body, your sight, your hearing, your smell, even your sense of taste.
Thoughts about these things will of course come up. We will get to the thoughts in a few weeks. But for this evening, we are just going to stay with the body, the senses, the consciousness of the eyes, the ears, etc.
Where is this all going? Well, our life is made up of four rings - body, speech, mind and “the other ring”. One way to think of our path is to imagine each of these rings aligning with each other. Body connected to speech, connected to mind, connected to everything else. In harmony. Inseparable. Unified.
But we have to start somewhere, and body is the best place to start since it’s so familiar. We all have one. We experience it any time we aren’t lost on our phones or in our computers. So we’ll start by bringing mindfulness to our body, then in a couple of weeks, we’ll move to our speech. Then our mind. I won’t have time to talk about “the other ring” this year, but maybe in subsequent classes.
Ok, let’s begin. [posture, body scan, resting with the feeling of the body breathing…]