Opening to the experience of the whole body

However the body has settled into a shape—however you find yourself sitting or lying down—just see if you can keep that shape, but relax your body just a little bit more. This can be like a relaxing of the very inner sense of the body. It doesn’t necessarily mean this or that muscle changes or relaxes or shifts. It’s more like the very way that we inhabit our body just softens—without collapsing, without losing the shape. Then just beginning to become more intimate with this body—sensing the shape that your body makes, sensing it from within. Finding where your body meets the ground beneath you, and spending a few moments allowing the ground to hold you up. Opening more and more to your body as an experience, so you can drop the need to identify body parts, to call this discomfort in the body, to call that something else—and just open to the immediate, indisputable sense of the body. Not the body as a thing in the world—not our objective body—but the subjective body, the only body that we can know in this intimate way. This body is a world of experience, of sensation of different kinds. Some are obvious, like the felt sense of the skin, the clothes, the air against your skin, the ground beneath you. Others are more subtle: subtle tension held in the body—maybe in the calves, the thighs, the neck—you can feel it as a kind of tightness or pulling. The subtly different temperatures of the body, and the many unnameable sensations—the tingles, the currents, the sense of movement in the space of the body—that we can’t give a name or obvious cause to. In and amongst this whole galaxy of experience, our emotional state shows up—maybe as particular sensations in the chest, the belly, the throat. A flutteriness corresponding to restlessness or anxiety, or a warm spaciousness corresponding to joy. Or we might just notice our emotional state as the kind of colouring or flavouring of the very space of experience of the body—like tinted glasses. And so, as we continue to become more intimate with all of this—closer, more interested—we can use the breath to kind of tie this experience of the body together, to bring a kind of unity and harmony. So just begin to sense the breath. It’s very easy to say that—to “sense the breath”—but we don’t want to just pay lip service to the idea. We want to recognise how all of the body is moved, touched, lifted by the breath. So we’re not narrowing down or forcing attention onto a small point. Instead, we’re receiving the breath in a very open way, a very receptive way. And the breath may respond to this way of meeting—it may soften, it may lengthen. If it does so, that’s absolutely fine. So inhabiting the whole space of your body and receiving the inhale—feeling how this moves your body, feeling how this brightens the space of the body in a subtle way. Sensing the texture of the breath, how smooth it is. Sensing how much effort there is to breathe. Noticing exactly when the in-breath turns into the out-breath. Then witnessing the whole of the exhale—staying with it, walking it all the way home. Sensing how the whole body releases with the exhale, and then resting in that short pause at the end of the exhale before the next cycle of breath. It really helps to be genuinely interested—to know this experience of breathing. Maybe we can be curious what the breath can be, what it can reveal, what it can unfold into, if we bring the right kind of presence. The way we want to receive the breath—the way we want to witness and feel the breath—doesn’t require us to clamp it down or hold on to it tightly. It’s not like we’re trying to catch it in a net and study it under a microscope. It’s more like how we watch nature—how we watch the woodland, or the sea, or the river. Just taking it in, welcoming it, enjoying it. And noticing if any excess effort arises—showing up as tension in the body. And just recognising that actually it takes no effort at all to sit and watch the sea, to sit and watch the woodland, to sit and receive the breath. So we receive the breath with this sensitivity to the whole experience of the body. We receive the breath in this whole body—not as one sensation to focus on. And as we do so, there’s a way that the experience of the body—these many sensations, all these different layers of the body: the temperatures, tension and relaxation, the tingles, the contact with the ground or the clothes—there’s a way we can allow the breath to bring some sort of harmony, to provide a centre around which all of this can flow and dance. We certainly don’t need to block anything out. We don’t need to neglect any other part of our experience. It’s like we breathe with everything else, through everything else—everything gets carried by the current and the pulse and the tide of the breath. As we practise like this, we may notice the edges of things begin to soften. It becomes harder to distinguish this sensation from that sensation—they become less separate. The sense of the body as a kind of unified field of sensation deepens. So we bring this bright and spacious presence to the body, receiving the breath. We notice when effort creates tension, and we rest into a more receptive mode. We notice when we’re not so engaged—we’re starting to space out a little bit—and the remedy for that is not necessarily more effort, but more interest, more curiosity. I want to feel what my body, what my breath can be like. I want to know my experience at a deeper level. I want to see how this all can unfold if I stay steady with it—with this presence. This attitude brings us more intimately into connection with experience. So we just keep ourselves on the right path with this—checking for the two extremes of trying too hard and floating away. And if we notice a softening in the body, a blurring of the edges between things—a blurring of the felt boundary of the self, where “I” ends becomes a little less clear—if we notice this, we stay with that sense, including that in the practice. We’ll just carry on like this in silence for the last few minutes.