Hello embodied friends,
We will meet again this Wednesday, Sept 23, 5:30 at the Quilt Museum.
We are practicing with some of the techniques the Buddha recommended for developing mindfulness of the body. These techniques are part of a series of practices described in the Satipatthana sutta – a very comprehensive text that the Buddha asserted was “the direct path for the purification of beings, for the surmounting of sorrow and lamentation, for the disappearance of suffering and discontent, for walking on the path of truth [reality*], for the realization of Nibbana ….”
Sounds worth a try. But how would mindfulness of the body lead to these benefits? We live in the world of what Joseph Goldstein calls “relative truth [reality**].” This is the world of everyday people, objects, plans and labels. We know this is MY body. We know these are MY people. We know who we are. All that is “true.” Ultimate truth [reality] is not something different – it’s just the same reality viewed from a different perspective. It reveals deeper truths about reality, such as its impermanence and its impersonal nature. If we are not acquainted with this reality, it will eventually ambush us, and suffering will follow. Knowing it, we are at peace.
For example, from the perspective of ultimate reality, I notice that these political identities we put on to fight with each other seem somewhat ridiculous. That is a helpful grounding for me when dealing with my own fear and anxiety, feelings of being in conflict with others, etc. I still have to deal with and respond to these things in the (relative) world, but these practices give me a glimpse of the ultimate reality of profound, embodied interconnections with all other animate and inanimate expressions of nature in our world. In this way, mindfulness of the body is a refuge for me.
May we find the beauty in our connections to all things and be free from the deformity of hatred.
** I prefer the word reality because truth, here, doesn’t mean something you need to believe. There’s nothing abstract about it. It’s referring to your direct experience of the world through your sense doors: seeing, smelling, tasting, hearing, body sensations… and mind. Mind is considered a sense door in this system.”