The Body In Meditation

        While I was sitting in meditation today, I felt a kind of weakness in my back, as though the back could not fully support itself. I adjusted my back frequently to get it into a fairly stable condition, but still to not much avail. I was finally able to relax a little bit when I re-engaged my method of huatou. But when my body was not sufficiently relaxed, of course it felt more difficult to practice this principle. I think that the more I unconsciously tried to see the pain as a kind of enemy, the more difficult it became. The body came to be seen as a kind of mental trap, if we choose to make it so. I have a feeling that most of the time, we make these continual negotiations with the body:  “If you take me to this place, I will reward you with rest.” “I will give you a chance to relax only if you do this or that for me”. And I think this ‘transactional’ way of treating the body is perhaps not a good attitude to have toward the living creature that gets me from A to B on a daily basis.

       As a meditation facilitator, I find that it’s hard to straddle the middle space between over-attention to the body and denial of the body. When we first start the meditation practice, I typically walk the participants (or, rather, ‘sit’ the participants) through a body scan. This relaxing exercise can use a combination of body awareness and some visualization to allow the participants to be aware of the body just as it is. It’s not about forcing the body to behave in a certain way but more of a matter of allowing the awareness to embrace the body as a whole. But after that body scan is done, I gently encourage the practitioners to pick up their main method of practice (be it breath, huatou, or other) and allow the body to ‘just be’. That is, I don’t want the practitioners to feel overly attached to the concept of ‘relaxing the body’, especially if there are feelings of pain there. And I even start to feel recently that the notion of embodiment might also become an impediment to the practice, if people start to see their bodies as solid and unchanging. When I have a pain, it’s often best for me to frame the pain as something that is always changing, rather than as a single, fixed concept such as ‘pain’. In fact, the danger of labeling anything (such as ‘pain’, ‘body’, etc.) soon becomes apparent as we directly contemplate the impermanence of these states.

        From a Chan perspective, the body is ultimately illusory. This doesn’t mean that “I don’t have a body”, but it means that the experience I am having of a body is not static, and I cannot even possess that experience as an objective reality. While I can take care of my body as best as I can and exercise the body, all bodies go the same route in the end, toward illness and dis-function of some kind. There is this fine line, again, between taking care of the body, and regarding it as something precious or infallible. Bodies have ‘their moments’, and one can even say that bodies are just ‘moments’ in unfolding time. To cherish the idea of a body being a certain way is to embrace a comforting illusion, at best. And when I sit in meditation, soon enough I realize that the body state is changing at each moment. It even changes according to the other conditions in mind, such as thoughts or distractions. So I think it is helpful not to get too hung up on what the body is feeling when engaged in meditation. While relaxing the body is certainly vital, it seems important to realize that the function is to see the body’s impermanence. When I start to focus too much on whether the body is relaxed or not, I know that I have taken the concept of relaxation and made it dualistic. And that too one has to let go.

     How I dealt with pain today was simply in realizing that the mind itself is never confined by any experience of the body. And this seems to involve intense huatou, a practice of raising a question that goes beyond this taken for granted self and body. But this does not mean that I eliminated pain from my body. It only means that I know a direction where I am not my body. In that sense, no matter what judgments I might have about my bodily situation, the awareness that I am not the body is a pointer to liberation. And it might also mitigate the frustrations that come from chronic pain.