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2021-01-15 Mindfulness of Breathing (10) At Home with the Body: Otter Voice Meeting Notes

2021-01-15 Mindfulness of Breathing (10) At Home with the Body

Insight Meditation Center13min

Gil Fronsdal

00:02

The third step of ānāpānasati is to train oneself, when breathing in, to experience the whole body, when breathing out experiencing the whole body. And in this idea of experiencing the body, experiencing means really sensing, feeling with our sensations, all the sense doors we in have this body of ours.

Gil Fronsdal

00:33

One of the ways in which I have felt encouraged and inspired to really tune in to the sensations in my body, is the idea that when I die, and then this body becomes a corpse. The nerves in this body no longer firing. There's no more electricity. There's no more activity in the nervous system of this body. And if someone touches a corpse, with their finger, there's nothing in that corpse, which will register, pick up, sense, feel, and send nerve signals to the brain. So everything that I sense, every sensation in my body, whether it's pleasant or unpleasant, is a symptom or a sign of being alive. It's not always going to be here. That sense that this is what living is. This is what aliveness is.

Gil Fronsdal

01:34

This precious experience of being conscious of being alive encourages me, supports me, to really be present. And I felt delight to feel, to know that I'm alive when I feel all this. To feel the body, to experience the body is so important in Buddhism.

Gil Fronsdal

01:56

There's a wonderful story that, after the Buddha died – soon after he died – someone went to one of the Buddha's leading disciples, his cousin, Ānanda, who had spent, I think they say 20 years as the Buddh's attendant. And they asked Ānanda, "Now that your teacher is dead, who is going to be your teacher? Who is going to be your good spiritual friend?" And Ānanda said, "Now that our teacher is dead, our teacher will be mindfulness of the body." He didn't say, our teacher will be our body. What he said was the teacher will be mindfulness of the body.

Gil Fronsdal

02:47

So that's a remarkable statement that this wonderful, amazing founder of Buddhism, who had so much wisdom and realization – that his disciple, who knew him directly, would point to your capacity to be mindful of your body as having some equivalence to the Buddha himself. So that's quite a statement about the potential of, of your body to really be your teacher – to be your Buddha in a sense.

Gil Fronsdal

03:23

But again, it's important to realize it's not the body by itself. It's the mindfulness of the body – the ability to have awareness coursing through the body – awareness sensing and feeling the body. As we practice meditation, ideally, the body becomes more and more alive, more and more conscious – there's more awareness of the body.

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