How to Wake Up by Toni Bernhard

Author:Toni Bernhard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781614290674
Publisher: Wisdom Publications

11

Awakening to the Body through Mindfulness

If one thing is developed and cultivated, the body is calmed, the mind is calmed, discursive thoughts are quieted, and all wholesome states that partake of supreme knowledge reach fullness of development. What is that one thing? It is mindfulness directed to the body …

—THE BUDDHA

FROM THIS QUOTATION, we see that the Buddha considered mindfulness of the body to be a path of awakening in itself. For many years, I attended an annual Buddhist meditation retreat at which Gil Fronsdal was one of the teachers. Several times, he shared with us what the Thai Buddhist monk and teacher Bhikkhu Buddhadasa had said to him on a retreat: “Never do anything that takes you out of your body.” I could tell that people found this to be very meaningful, but it never resonated with me. As an academic, I lived in my mind, not my body. I depended on my body for survival, but I had very little felt-sense of it.

Then I became chronically ill and the interconnectedness of the body and the mind became startlingly clear. My physical symptoms could affect my mental state. Indeed, at times, it seemed as if there were a direct link between my physical discomfort and the mental suffering of storytelling dukkha, because when I was at my worst physically, the stressful stories I spun and believed without question were always worst-case scenario themed.

In turn, my thoughts and emotions could affect my physical symptoms—easing or worsening them, depending on what was going on in my mind. I realized that by living in my mind all those years, I’d been ignoring half of the experience of being alive. If I were to recover my health, mindfulness of the body would remain an integral part of my life, inside and outside of meditation.

Mindfulness of the body refers to the cultivation of awareness at the sense door of bodily sensations. (We practiced this briefly in five-minute mindfulness.) The instruction is to become consciously aware of the physical sensations that arise in the body. This mindfulness practice is still the principal meditation technique taught at many Buddhist centers in Southeast Asia.

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