2021-01-17 Mindfulness of Breathing 11 Earth, Water, Fire and Air

Insight Meditation Center29min

Gil Fronsdal

00:02

For this Sunday morning talk a little bit what I have in mind is continuing the theme of the 7am in the morning talks on mindfulness of breathing. And we've come to that part of the series of mindfulness breathing, to emphasize being aware of the body as we breathe. And this wonderful body, challenging body, is a very important locus, place, for mindfulness practice. And the question of how to have a deep relationship with this body, or full relationship to it is very important for Vipassanā practice. Especially the tradition of Vipassanā that I trained in, and many of the Western teachers trained in – – – what's called the Mahāsī technique – was very much a body practice, in that it focuses on what's called the "four elements." It was awareness, mindfulness, of the four elements within us in our experience. The four elements can also mean the qualities, four qualities, four dimensions. I like to think of them as sensations.

Gil Fronsdal

01:30

It's a sensation, meditation. It's an element meditation we're doing. Classically in Vipassanā, one of the ways of really going deep in this practice, is to tune into the sensations of our experience. And that works as a very wonderful alternative to excessively focusing on the concepts and the ideas of our life, the stories of our life, and even the concepts and ideas of our body – to drop the stories, the ideas, the judgments that we have, and put all those aside, and be infinitely forgiving, infinitely accepting of our direct, immediate sensory experience – without any overlay of, "It should be different," or "I need to be different," or "Something's wrong with me, because I'm somehow this way or that way with my body." These are all stories and concepts.

Gil Fronsdal

02:30

To drop down into really feeling the directness and immediacy of the body in itself – or like I like to say, "the body's own experience of itself." Not the experience that's mediated through a thick layer of concepts and ideas. But the, the, the experience of the body that's comes through sensing – the felt sense of sensations, the way that sensations are experienced in the body.

Gil Fronsdal

02:59

The classic way of talking about this in Buddhism is to call it a four elements meditation. And those four elements are earth, water, fire, and air. And so it's kind of an ancient kind of idea that the basic building blocks of experience, of the world is: earth, water, fire, and air. And kind of I find it kind of delightful, and somewhat profound, this idea that the building blocks of the world are found in us. So as we tune into these qualities in ourselves, there's a resonance, or an association, that we're also tuning into the deep natural elements of this world that we live in.

Gil Fronsdal

03:53

There's a kind of a wonderful sense of mutuality, or interconnectedness, or residence, or continuity between ourselves and the world we live in – the natural world that we are part of. It doesn't take a lot of reflection to think that you know, the physical body that we have is completely made up of recycled materials. The atoms that our body is built from have come together and formed all kinds of different things over time – and shaped, dissolved, and reformed... There was a time I think all of it was just helium, back in the beginning of the universe, perhaps. As the universe was created and formed, all kinds of things started to, you know. These atoms have had a long journey through this cosmos to us, to here.

Gil Fronsdal

05:02

When we die, our atoms and elements within us don't just disappear, but they'll take new shapes after us. And so we're the recipient of all this material that the natural world has given us – that's made us possible. And then we die, we give it back in a sense, and it becomes something else in this receiving and giving of our lives.

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