2021-01-19 Mindfulness of Breathing (13) Culitivating Tranquiliity
IInsight Meditation CenterJan 19, 2021 at 6:01 pm12min
G
00:01Gil Fronsdal
So to talk a little bit about the fourth step of ānāpānasati, fourth step of mindfulness of breathing, and this is: "Breathing in, one trains oneself to relax the whole body, to calm the whole body." Well, actually, it doesn't say the whole body. It says, "Relax the bodily formations. Breathing out, one relaxes the bodily formations."
G
00:38Gil Fronsdal
And I talked a little bit about this yesterday. The bodily formations is the constructs, the activities, the tensions, in the holding patterns in the body, which are the product of what we're doing with our minds, our attitudes, our thoughts, our reactions. We might also consider the product of the emotions that we're living by – fear and anger and all kinds of emotions, joy. They all have an impact. They're all manifested in our body.
G
01:09Gil Fronsdal
And if we hold on to any of this – if we cling to anything at all, or resist, hold at bay – that that often gets translated into our body, in tensions in our muscles. And that can be micro tensions, and they can be major tensions. And as we let up, the holding the tension, the resistance, the the grasping, preoccupation with these thoughts and feelings and emotions, then the correlating tensions in the body begin to relax as well.
G
01:49Gil Fronsdal
And this generally happens on its own, the more we sit and focus. Sometimes, we can relax more deeply if we don't try to relax. Many times in meditation, I felt there's some tension in my body. And I've actively tried to relax it to no avail. And then I just give myself over to just being focused on breathing – and put aside any concern with the tension – and the concentration begins to kick in. And that part of my body, lo and behold, will relax.
G
02:23Gil Fronsdal
And that's partly because, with concentration on breathing, the mental energy is no longer going into clinging to something, holding on to something. It's just going into breathing, which is more neutral, or doesn't have so much clinging involved. And so the energy goes away from the clinging, the grasping, in the mind. Then as the grasping in the mind quiets down, then the body relaxes as well.
G
02:51Gil Fronsdal
And so that tends to happen. But in this so wonderful step four of ānāpānasati. The instructions from the Buddha are to spend some time relaxing the bodily formations – tranquilizing, making tranquil, bringing tranquility into their system. It took me a while to appreciate this, because I started in Zen practice, and also the way that I was taught vipassanā practice. Both of them had a similarity, in that we were not supposed to be too actively involved in changing or doing something to our experience. We were mostly just supposed to be present for experience as it is.
Processing audio...