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2021-01-18 Mindfulness of Breathing (12) Relaxation and the Fourth Step | Otter.ai

2021-01-18 Mindfulness of Breathing (12) Relaxation and the Fourth Step

Insight Meditation Center13min

Gil Fronsdal

00:02

So as we continue through the Buddha's teachings on mindfulness of breathing, today, I want to introduce the fourth step of the first tetrad of this, this 16 steps of ānāpānasati – 16 steps of breathing in mindfully and breathing out mindfully. And this fourth step is that one trains oneself experiencing the whole body. One relaxes the whole body. One trains oneself to relax the whole body.

Gil Fronsdal

00:42

And so a few things about this – to relax or to calm. Many translations have the word tranquilize, "One tranquilizes the body." And, and now it's a little bit maybe unfortunate connotations in English of the word tranquilize. But calming, relaxing. And, and when it talks about relaxing the whole body, it doesn't really say it that way. It says, "One relaxes the bodily formations" – the bodily constructions, the ways in which the body has come into play, based on the activities of the mind.

Gil Fronsdal

01:25

So one relaxes the physical manifestations of our mental state, of mental activities. And certainly, we can feel that in breathing. We get excited, and the breathing gets maybe more shallow – or more chest breathing, rather than belly breathing – or faster. And then we relax more. We're not so excited. We calm down, and the breathing shifts and changes. The excitement that we feel in the breathing, that's expressed in the breathing, is called in Buddhism, "bodily formation." The word formation or construction, is what's been created, and what's come into play, by the state of the mind that we have.

Gil Fronsdal

02:10

And much of what we experience, day to day in our bodies, is surprisingly, a manifestation of something about how the mind is. That the state of the mind, the quality of the mind, activities of the mind, the preferences of the mind, the selection process of the mind – whatever the mind is involved in – has a big impact on how we experience our body, and how the body is activated.

Gil Fronsdal

02:42

So this activation of the body is what we then relax. So. So this is a very nice part of this mindfulness of breathing practice, where we have some agency. We have some involvement in where we relax, soften, or actively, you know, tranquilize – calm the body down. And, as you know, I often teach that at the beginning of a meditation: to feel the breathing. And then with the exhale, relax the body. And this is kind of an expression of this aspect of these instructions of the Buddha.

Gil Fronsdal

03:21

But in his classic instructions, this relaxing the body is step four. And I interpret that to mean, "Don't be in a hurry to get too actively involved in relaxing the tensions, the activities of the body. Take your time with it."

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