What is Embodied Awareness?

Transcript

okay so the theme for the week is embodied awareness and we're going to do two practices today that will definitely give you a nice taste of working with that in different forms so for the things i'm going to share with you just pay attention to what calls to you that in whatever way that might be something calls to your mind conceptually or maybe something registers in the body and pay attention to that anything else whether you just doesn't call your attention or maybe even your reverse to it you can let it float off you know especially with embodiment i think it's important to just pay attention to what's working in that moment what's calling your attention and that doesn't mean like avoiding your edge in practice but um no need to blast past it especially with embodiment so embodied awareness um first i want to talk a little bit about the embodiment bit and the simplest way that we describe that is inhabiting the body and that's very much the instruction that judith blackstone gives so but i want to say here i'm going to give you various points we're going to kind of weave through here uh that hopefully by the time i'm done you're set up uh well enough to go into the practice but by inhabiting the body we're not setting up some competition or opposition within ourselves we're moving from fragmentation to wholeness so for example sometimes embodiment or the body can be described like get out of your head and get into the body no your head is part of your body so don't don't be reactive get in the body no your emotions are part of your experience in your body so everything you're experiencing is happening here in and through the body as well okay so that's really important everything's included here and it's your birthright to be here in a body and to be endowed with awareness so embodiment awareness this is already you already have that but we are working with it in a conscious way just like we do with any other practice to make it a more full conscious experience so another way of describing embodiment is awareness throughout the whole body so everywhere throughout the body we feel present and aware so that's what we mean by in having the body as well there's also a simultaneity that can arise in the experience and judith describes it as this all of our senses function at the same time sensation emotion and cognition are simultaneous we experience our inner world our inner life and outer life at the same time perceiver and perceived are a single perceptual field so this is something that you don't need to remember this or think about it in practice but by doing the practice i find that even in the very beginning even if it's only this much we start noticing that simultaneity and that can be characterized in different ways but one of the ways is just a loosening on grip a dissolving of fragmentation like i am just here you are just here and we don't have to have an extra layer of vigilance or contractions like i need to be in my head but not down here i need to be down here and not have here whatever it might be there's an activity that can just relax and yet it's not a checking out everything is working everything is present and active awareness is is present our sensitivity is present nothing is muted and yet nothing is being overly driven you know overly emphasized and there's not a balance being maintained either like oh i gotta hold everything in just the right way no no there is a relaxing it's quite it can be at first difficult to find but even in small experiences small percentages it's quite a lovely experience because i feel i can relax right here as i am now i'm going to bounce back a little bit about inhabiting the body and differentiating from other potential environment practices you might have done so we're not scanning this is not a body scan when we talk about embodiment we're talking about inhabiting so we're not scanning the surface of the body the perimeter of the body that can have a use and a function especially in regulating the nervous system it's often recommended for example for experiencing a lot of anxiety this psychologist will recommend something like this for example scanning the contours of our feet in order to distract our attention let energy ground so there's usefulness in body scans but here we're actually practicing to inhabit and live within the internal space of our body now practical recommendations here is that anything that you notice in your experience is the practice so you're not trying to construct or create a perfect embodiment experience it's actually great to approach it with curiosity patience self-compassion so if you notice that ah yeah i just i'm remaining on the surface of my body great you notice that that's the practice so noticing that being with that experience because before maybe you didn't notice that and so you're just working with it slowly but surely uh so we definitely don't need to chastise ourselves and say why am i on the surface i need to be in i don't know that's the practice and all of us are going to we have a different constellation of our experience of how we feel present in the body and how we feel contracted in the body or how we feel not in the body out of the body some way it's all going to be unique to each of us even if there are qualities like awareness itself seems universal you know but our embodiment experience is going to be different so some of the other ways that there's a myriad of ways in which we can feel not present in the body a common way especially in the world of meditation but it's not universal is experiencing a body from the head down and i like to make gestures here to communicate this so it's often like okay i'm going to pay attention to the body that the mind's eye turns down and starts looking at the body i have a body here it is down here and i'm looking at it and there is a connection experience with the body but again if we notice we're doing that okay it's great be curious about that oh i tend to experience my body from up here okay what's that like i want to befriend that experience slowly but surely to to listen to what's going on um but that's a distinction so we're not just scanning the body from the top down but there are other ways like we could like i said as you do these kinds of practices you will see your own constellation of how that happens so we might find that we live in the back part of our body or the front part of our body or more up in our you know neck and head who knows what it might be so just pay attention to these really interesting ways that these patterns emerge and another footnote here is that these patterns usually emerge because of a really intelligent response to overwhelm in our life so it could be traumatic experiences from childhood it could be stress that's happening well you know living in the middle of a pandemic can do it so we were trying to cope with overwhelm and the body starts to do different things our emotions our thoughts and body starts they start working in unison to cope so that's another reason to have some curiosity and self-love in this kind of practice because these things have arisen with some intelligence i mentioned uh percentages earlier this is a recommendation that i'll i give a lot and i usually will say in the instructions as well when we're doing embodied awareness practice think about percentages so one of the first instructions is to inhabit our feet and maybe you feel not in your feet at all okay but maybe you feel one percent present in your left foot notice that let yourself cherish that one percent a little bit don't turn it into a i need to be all or nothing you know and then cause a you know make it into a problem so another distinction that occurred me the other day that could be helpful especially in the world of meditation and buddhist meditation where we work with the mind a lot one of the first things we are usually instructed on and notice is the difference between thoughts and mind or the distinction of thoughts and mind itself or thoughts and awareness itself so wherever there is a thought there is awareness but we can have an experience of awareness without thoughts yeah at first when we sit down and we've never meditated before yeah we know we have thoughts we can say that all the time i had this thought the other day i thought this but we sat down and we noticed a stream of thoughts and at first it's like overwhelming like oh my gosh i can't believe how much i think it's like non-stop and then as the mind settles in practice we start noticing gaps in thoughts we notice that oh there's a gap without thoughts and it has certain qualities maybe stillness spaciousness and then sometimes we get focused on the gap right we say oh well what i need to do is live in the gap thoughts are a problem that the spaciousness and stillness of mind is where it's at which at first may be useful to to cultivate the capacity to attune to mind itself but thoughts are not a problem either in the end but we work with the mind and thoughts and regardless of whatever thought is arising we're not really getting involved in the content of the thoughts per se and some meditations but it is helpful to distinguish that mind and thoughts same thing with embodied awareness the body is constantly changing our emotions are changing our thoughts are changing so in that sense there's never going to be some perfect experience of the body there's imperfection where there's pain in the body some days where you know we have may have chronic pain some days wake up we're super tired we have a stomach ache or a headache we have emotions that get contracted in the body all that's happening and i'm proposing and this is what's proposing these embodiment awareness practices that we can attune to a quality that's ever present in our experience throughout our body similar to mine and really that's the awareness part that we can attune to something that feels already whole still spacious uninjurable in that embodied awareness all kinds of things can be happening that are imperfect messy and that don't feel good so by acknowledging this we want to allow ourselves the possibility of attuning to something we can rest into our experience with regardless what's happening and we acknowledge uh that there's stuff to work with and things are perfect and actually this embodied awareness can be very supportive to work with things like healing especially trauma work one more quote here for embodied awareness and so she uses the term fundamental consciousness whether that term works for you or not i think i've given you enough prep there to you can substitute you know simply with awareness too i think but once we have attuned to fundamental consciousness in the body throughout the body our realization continues to develop it pervades more of our body and becomes increasingly clear symmetrical and stable so that's something that you might notice over time as you work with an embodied awareness practice is that that experience becomes more clear there's a symmetry so as i mentioned earlier maybe it feels asymmetrical at first you know maybe you feel part of your body but not the other that's okay that's very very natural normal and over time you might notice more and more symmetry and that your experience of embodied awareness becomes more and more stable just like you would working with only awareness only mind you find that mind can become more clear more luminous more stable same thing except experience throughout our body and really in the way that we've been talking here it becomes uh what can be referred to as a non-dual experience where everything is happening all at once and we're resting as that and then last just to mention movement because in in meditation in buddhist world we can get really focused on stillness which is often really important up front we we like need to cultivate the ability to settle so that way we can then work with our experience but as you'll notice in this practice that we're going to do we're we're trying to allow stillness and movement at the same time so try to recall your most still moments in meditation maybe it was a brief moment or maybe it was a whole meditation session or maybe you're on a retreat and you were coasting and it felt just still remember also that you're breathing the entire time so there was movement the entire time during that still experience and maybe you found your way to the stillness through the movement actually but i'm putting that out there as like a proposition to in your in your practice that movement is not in opposition to stillness they both happen at the same time but we might work with one of the other separately to to make the the capacity stronger so we might work with just stillness so that feels really stable but then we want to incorporate movement so we notice stillness at the same time we notice movement that's part of embodiment too because in our embodied experience there's stillness and there's movement