So far we have talked about the karmic body, the joy body, and the tranquil body. Today, I want to talk about the insight body. That is the way that the body is experienced under the gaze of mindfulness, when we start having deep insight, and a real ability to be very quiet with very little mental projection or discussion going on in the mind.
We can settle back and just observe the body in a deep way. Observe the body unencumbered by our ideas of the body, our preoccupations, our fears, our judgments of the body. Clear the inner sight, the mind's eye, to perceive and sense the body, in and of itself. It is a careful sensitivity to the changing, fluid quality of the body's experience of itself.
Our senses, the nerve endings that pick up all the different sensations we feel in our body, are operating all the time. But certain things come into prominence. They are there for a while and then fade, and something else comes into prominence and then fades. There is a constant shifting of what comes into experience in our body.
On top of that, the body shifts and changes. In the course of a single meditation practice, maybe the body has gotten relaxed. Maybe it has gotten more tense. It shifted and changed. Over the course of a year or two, your body has gotten older. Certain things have shifted and changed in how you are, and you can feel the changes going on.
Part of the insight body is to have a relatively quiet and focused mind, settled here in the present moment, that observes the changing nature of the body. At some point we realize, as we sit down and relax, that, in fact, all of our so-called experiences of the body, all the ways in which we can know and feel the body directly, are constantly shifting and changing. It is a kaleidoscope. It is a constant flow. It is a stream of sensations, a stream of experience, that is shifting, changing, and moving.
When this first happens in meditation, it usually comes when the mind is somewhat concentrated. It often happens in the wake of something like the joy body. There can be a lot of joy and settledness, maybe even some peace, that comes first. And that allows the mind – the thinking mind – to quiet more and more. The advantage of that is the thinking mind is not projecting its ideas onto the body.
The mind has a lot of ideas, some of them not so accurate. Ideas of permanence like, "This is always going to be this way. I'll always be this way and the body won't be changing." Then, the body changes. Sometimes suddenly in an accident, an injury. Sometimes it is slow and gradual.
I have been blessed with being able to sit cross legged into my old age. But I have wonderful colleagues, deep meditators, wonderful meditation teachers, who started this way when they were young – sitting cross legged, and now they sit in chairs. It is fine to sit in a chair. This is just an example of how the body changes.
We are there to feel, sense, and adapt ourselves to the changes. But the changing stream of experience, when it is an insight body, is not the change we see over an extended period of time. Rather, it is like looking at a river and seeing that the surface of the river – the current – is constantly shifting, changing, and flowing.
At some point, this body of ours, without our overlaid projection of thoughts and ideas, begins to reveal itself in its native capacity and expression as a changing, fluid, moving field of sensations which our nerve endings take in and process. Each nerve ending takes in a particular data point. And you feel the individual data points coming and going as a sound. There is an itch. There is a certain feeling of warmth. There is a tightness. We feel into these more and more deeply. And we find that, within each one, there is something that is constantly in flux and moving.
A fascinating place for vipassana practicioners is to do this with pain. I have done it with a variety of pains. Knee pain is the most classic for me. To bring my attention very carefully, non-reactive attention, attention that is not afraid, angry, or reactive to the pain. There is no projecting of ideas that, "Oh. I'm going to hurt forever," or "I can't do this," or "This is terrible, I'm probably going to have to have my leg amputated." Self pity was one reaction I used to have when I was younger, "Oh, poor me who's in pain."
But, somehow, to have a mind that is able to put aside the projection or veil between us and the pain and just experience the pain in and of itself – finding exactly where it is in the knee – is fascinating. As we get closer to it, maybe it is a little square centimeter. It may not always be in the same place. It is moving around. It is pulsing, sparking, shifting, and dancing around. As we get closer and closer, we see that it is not the solid pain we might have thought it was from a distance when we were reactive to it and concerned about it. It is not a solid, unchanging pain.
In fact, maybe we should not even call it pain, because pain is an abstraction – an abstract umbrella term, because underneath that label, there is pulling, stabbing, burning, pressure, tightness, and all of these more particular intense sensations. Because of the intensity of it, we call it pain. But pain is made up of many different kinds of sensations. Not every pain, but the different kinds of pains we have are made up of different sensations that are intense.
To bring our attention to just that particular sensation, see the dance of it, the spark of it, the movement of it, and see that it is not so solid. It is very difficult to be present for something when we are kind of apart from it. We see, "Oh. The pain." It is much easier to feel it on a deeper level that is underneath the idea "pain." There are pulsing, searing, burning, sparking, stabbing, intense feelings. These words sound terrible, but sometimes this is a lot easier than just relating to it as the pain.
Even more difficult is when we relate to the pain as "my pain." "I'm having pain." When we add the baggage, the association of me, myself, and mine to the pain, we are adding another layer of abstraction, which is accurate enough, but it is not really needed. It involves a different order of the mind – mental activity, which keeps us removed, reactive, and actually increases the level of pain sometimes.
You might experiment with feeling the shifting, changing, pulsing nature of pain, and see the difference between viewing it as "my pain" or viewing it as "the pain." But it is not just with pain that we see this shifting nature, although that is an interesting exercise to do with it, but even with pleasure. You can feel meditative pleasure. If you really tune in to what it is like, it is a stream, it is a flow, it is a glow. It is a shifting and changing phenomenon.
The insight body is when we experience the body, but everything is flowing. Some people would describe the body as being like sand, rain, or snow flowing down, all these little particulates, a flow of particulate sensations that are flowing and moving.
When the insight body gets really deep, the boundaries of the body, the shape of the body, have no meaning anymore. Oftentimes the body feels kind of boundaryless. The sense of boundaries of the body and the shape of the body become irrelevant. All kinds of ideas of the body fall away, just settling into the raw data of the senses which are constantly shifting and moving.
In that raw data, in the insight body, there is a particularly unique flavor to the insight into not-self. You see in this way that the whole body experience is just a flow of these sensations. Any one sensation, it is clear, is not yourself. If that were the case, when that sensation disappeared, you would disappear, in a sense. But you realize that is not the self, that is not the self. This freeing up of the movement of the mind to "this is me, this is myself, this is mine," is very freeing for the mind, very relaxing and peaceful. To begin recognizing not-self of this whole field, of the body sensations as they flow, is part of the insight body.
Part of that insight body also is then to realize that any clinging to it is pointless, or is painful. It is not really necessary. It is like if you put your hand in a waterfall to grab some water, you might get a little bit on your hand, but when you are done, it all gets squeezed out. You cannot really grab a handful of water. So you realize this movement of grabbing does not work.
The insight body, when we see the radical nature of change, is a powerful way of learning not to identify with our experience and to begin to experience life without the filter or the burden of identification. And it is a powerful lesson in the possibility of non-clinging. We see that the things we cling to are unreliable, unsatisfactory, and that it just brings more suffering to cling. To see that for oneself, when we are sitting in the insight body, then it is obvious. It is not logic. It is not rational. It is not because you have reasoned it out, not because you read it in a book. It is just so clear and obvious, this is how it is.
That is the direction that insight meditation is going. Someday, really beginning to taste or feel the insight body that is, again, a very different way of experiencing the body than the karmic body, which tends to be the one that solidifies and carries the burden of all the projections, reactions, and identifications we have.
So, the insight body. I hope you come to appreciate, value, and care respectfully for these bodies we have. While not identifying with the body as being mine, it is also your part of this universe to care for. Care for your body. Care for yourself. Thank you.
