Let Go, With Only A Question

  During the meditation tonight, I had been struggling in the first part to fully relax. It was almost as if I had a whole bunch of ideas in my mind about how I should relax, where to start, and where to settle the mind and body. When I finally engaged in huatou practice, I had to fully focus on the question by first of all realizing that the body is illusion. There is no compromising about this, because any concept I attach to the body ends up becoming a self. "Whose body is it anyway?" This is the most basic question. Then the question of 'what self feels pain' is the next? These questions are very important, because by going deeply into them, I shortcut an attachment to the body sensation. I am no longer trying to get the body to feel a certain way, once I determine that the body is empty of a sense of self. The third aspect is posing the question sincerely and waiting for the answer in a space of doubt.
     Really, the main part of my practice was consisting of these three parts: a) not attaching to the body (whose body); b) not attaching to the self ; c) posing the question/waiting for an answer. I recall that when I was doing this practice today, there came a point where the pains arising in the body did not have any distinct 'character' to them. There was no sense of burden, no sense of heaviness or 'this is terrible'. There was simply a felt facticity about the pain: it's just there, among all the other phenomena. And the more I asked the question "who has this pain?" the more spacious I felt in accommodating the pain experience.
     In the second part of the meditation, I started to generate a slight doubt about what I was experiencing in the phenomena itself. If I can't see any 'self' in this experience, or bounded personality that I can point to as 'me', then who is having this experience anyway? This is where the huatou really comes into play. All huatous are questions that point to an unnameable mind. They pose questions that simply cannot be resolved using discursive thinking. And what's interesting is that I am able to apply this doubt to all the phenomena. Normally, in daily life, my observation of something comes with a sense of a name, a definition, and a sense of solidity. We identify what we see with solid labels, as if to say that they have a substantial and firm reality independent of our observations and interactions with them.  But if I go into huatou, it no longer seems clear how these objects really come about in awareness. It's like watching a movie and suddenly beginning to think that what we see is part of a moving montage of images. In daily life, we 'think' we know what is bounded and seemingly solid around us, and that's where the problems arise. These bounded and solid things soon become habitual ways of being in the world, and reinforce the sense that we can play out life in automatic, without having to examine the sources of our impressions.
    In the last part of the meditation, I did have this sense of stopping and waiting for the answer to the huatou to naturally arise. Did the answer arise? If it did arise, it was certainly not the way I had expected or imagined. But by giving myself the space to behold the possible answer without grasping on a language answer, I became naturally calmer and clearer. I realized that the 'full' mind (full of its own sense of solidity and habits) is often the real source of anxiety.