Impermanence - the body as a flow

So to begin, we often say something like, come into your body or become aware of your body, bring attention to your body and you can do this. We can also just see this as a kind of shifting of emphasis. It’s like the map of our awareness already includes the body and we just kind of zoom to that region of the map. Thinking of it in this way can take a little bit of the tension and the effort out of being in your body. Your body is already lit up by awareness. It’s already there. We just need to kind of go there. You can allow this awareness of your body to reveal more as we just begin to check in with ourselves. So when we’re first instructed to bring awareness to the body, sometimes the body feels like a kind of unit, like a lump, it’s a thing. But as we linger, before too long, a lot of richness and nuance can emerge from this. It we can find words to describe our experience of the body. This morning, maybe the body feels sluggish, tight, agitated, relaxed, tired. And if a word resonates, just kind of let it be a pointer to your experience rather than an answer. So we can always ask, how do we know the body is this or the body is it? This awareness of the body includes and lights up very many sensations as individual little tingles and areas of pressure, many, many, many micro sensations that make up the body. There’s also the kind of felt sense or the atmosphere of the body, the background of the body, whatever way of describing it works for you. We can notice this too, and in particular how it reflects our emotional state. We can feel emotions in the body as sensation, as a tightness in the throat or a heat in the chest or whatever else. And on a more subtle level, the very fabric of the body in our experience is flavoured, textured, tinged, tinted with our emotional state. We can spend a couple of minutes just welcoming, allowing and listening ever more deeply to the body in this way as movement of sensation, as well as this kind of background fabric it. And when we practise with something like impermanence, sometimes the heart can sort of not so much be involved. We can feel like it’s something that the mind has to do or something. Something more technical. Just spend a little moment or two checking our orientation. We want to be wholehearted. This exploration into impermanence, can it come from a place of interest, curiosity? Can we feel a spark of inspiration, can bring our hearts on board so the practise doesn’t become dry. We’re gonna start to tune into impermanence. First, through the sense of hearing, the way that sounds arise and pass, moving through our consciousness. It’s easier for us to have the sense of sounds just kind of happening without our control. So this is a good place to start. Just open and receive the shifting soundscape around you might not be many sounds. And our normal way of experiencing sounds is as kind of units. A sound arrives and then it leaves. This sound comes into our mind, into our consciousness, and then it fades into silence. We can spend a moment hearing sounds in this way, just being very clear that sounds are arriving all by themselves. Noticing exactly when they start and when they end it really noticing that you don’t do sounds, you don’t make them happen. They just come. And then we can kind of tune into the soundscape as a whole. Rather than noticing the passage of individual sounds through our consciousness, just tune into sound as a kind of flow. And if there aren’t many obvious sounds in your environment, it may be a flow with a lot of silence in it. It’s a subtle shift of the way that we’re aware of hear, relaxing the tendency to isolate this sound from that sound. Just letting sound be a constant flow, constant stream. You might sense it as a stream that’s kind of made of silence. And the silence somehow forms sounds. Like the silence is the fabric, the background, the medium. So we’re really noticing two main things. We’re noticing that this stream of sound is impersonal. We don’t do anything to make it happen. It just does its thing. And the habit of constructing a kind of single sound, a unitary sound from this flow of sensation is something that the mind does and that we can actually relax and not do it. And now we’re going to apply this same kind of awareness to the body. Taking a moment to really tune in to the whole of your body. And to begin with, we can experience the body as many sensations. You can identify so many sensations, flickering, coming and going as the ones that we notice quite obviously, like the breath, which is itself made up of many, many sensations. There’s the way that patterns of tension come and go, intensify and relax. There’s the pressure of the cushion or the the chair underneath us. That may initially appear to be one thing. But when we look closely, it’s its own shifting array of sensation. And then there are the more subtle micro sensations, the tingles in the fingers, a very subtle sense of presence and space in the cheeks or the earlobes, places with not much going on. And be clear, all this is happening by itself. There’s more tendency to identify with the body than with hearing and with sounds, so it can be more difficult to see. So spend a moment convincing yourself, I’m not making this happen. I didn’t choose these tingles in my finger. I’m not doing this. Body sensations arise in consciousness and they pass away. It when we really notice this moment to moment change in body sensations, sometimes it can feel a little bit turbulent, like the body is this washing machine of experience and we’re caught in it. If that’s your experience, just really emphasise this sense that it’s all just happening by itself and we have this subconscious sense that we need to be involved. This is my body and I need to somehow chase certain sensations away, manage others, somehow be tangled up in it and just take a step back from there, from that hands on attitude and just let the body churn away. We want to also be aware of how the emotional flavours manifesting in the body shift and change. And by emotion I don’t just mean obvious things like sadness, joy, anger, there’s subtle emotionality things like subtle disinterested peace, agitation, subtle happiness, subtle joy. Normally if we look carefully this subtle dance of different emotional flavours moving through the body, it so we can try to begin to move towards experiencing the whole body. Scape body and heartscape just like we did with sounds. Just receiving this flow of sensation, can we experience the body and the heart as a flow of experience? You will probably notice that the mind has a very, very deeply ingrained habit to construct objects from this flow, to construct body parts, emotions, more complex sens. So we can notice this and just see if we can relax back into this ever changing rich flow of life. We can ask a question. Is this flow, this flow of embodied experience, is it made up of many, many, many sens or are these many, many, many sensations actually carved out of this flow which is primary? Not something to think about, it’s actually not something to answer. It’s just something to bring us more into a sense of mystery. We don’t really understand how any of this works. See it in each of these ways as a procession of sensation or as one kind of indivisible flow that the mind then turns into particular objects. It we can just spend the last couple of minutes just resting, dropping any sense of effort and just noticing if any sense of space or mystery has opened up in our experience. Not see if we made a bit more room, a bit more room for things to be as they are and not as we might expect them to be.