By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast.
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In a famous (and hilarious) TED talk, Sir Ken Robinson talks about how our education system hampers creativity. He says that for many university professors the body is reduced to a vehicle that shuttles their heads around from meeting to meeting. It's his funny way of saying that university professors are so in their head, so involved in the intellectual side of life, that they forget that they have bodies.
What Sir Ken Robinson points to isn’t just a phenomenon with university professors. He may as well have been describing adulthood itself. There's a shift in the locus of our identity when we become adults. Just think about childhood and the roly-poly, rough-and-tumble, playing-out-in-the-sun kind of kids we were — coming home with grass stains on our clothes and a big ring of grape jelly and peanut butter around our mouths after lunch.
The world is so physical when we're young. We're physically embodied for a long time in life, and it's around adolescence where we start to get what is sometimes referred to as a mind-body split. And this is not all bad news.
When the mind and body split, our cognitive function is starting to develop. It's starting to come more into the foreground of our experience as adults. And we do amazing things with cognition. For instance, you can imagine what your life could be like if you really dedicated yourself to your values and your principles. To imagine who it is we want to be, what we want to do with this precious life, and to actually apply ourselves to realizing that vision — that all requires cognition.
The trouble we get into with the thinking mind is that there's a tendency to leave the body behind. And when we have less awareness in our physical bodies, the body becomes less sensitive. It becomes less vibrant. It can even get sick and start to break down when we're not, for example, eating healthy and exercising or just paying attention to our physical state.
So, the opportunity of adulthood is to develop our minds and bodies. And this is where a mindfulness practice comes in.
Mindfulness is a practice that can help us grow and develop in a more healthy way into adulthood. And reclaiming the body is a perfect example of this. What we see in our research in adult development is that this mind-body split is a real thing and it becomes a challenge for many adults in their lifetime. You could say it's a developmental threshold of sorts. We reach adulthood, and we start to lose touch with the body, and a lot of problems can come up from there. So how do we cross this threshold? How do we reach back down into the physical body — into embodiment — and integrate the body with the mind? To me, that's the question. How do we really take this challenge as an opportunity? This challenge of disembodiment — of the body being a vehicle that just shuttles the head around from meeting to meeting. How do we actually invite the physical body to become more sensitive again, to play more of a central role in the sensuous delights of human life? How do we bring the body back online and start to integrate it more fully with the adult mind?
Rather than talk about the answer to that, which would just be more cognition, we're going to practice this. We're going to practice bringing more awareness into the physical body and feel the way it can start to integrate, cooperate with, and flow with the activity of the mind.
I'll invite you to settle in wherever you are and we'll begin.
[bell to commence practice]
You can start by just taking a couple of deep breaths and if you're comfortable doing so, just allow yourself an audible sigh. Just letting it all go.
You can just start to settle in. whatever you're doing, whether you're in stillness or motion, you can just start to gather awareness in the physical body - all of the physical body. And as you breathe you can imagine that you're breathing in through every pour of your skin. Lighting up and nourishing the entire body. And moment to moment you can notice the flux of sensation through the body. Even if you're sitting perfectly still with eyes closed, just the expansion and contraction of the breath is a cascade of physical sensation.
As you notice thoughts pulling for your attention, or sounds in the world, sights, just notice that and practice letting go and just allowing your awareness to flow as the sensations of the physical body. Notice that this flow is like a mighty river. Sometimes white-watered. Sometimes silently flowing. But it's unbroken. Moment to moment there is just a stream of sensation through the body.
And as you let awareness really deeply flow and merge with the stream of physical sensations, you can see if that changes the quality of sensation. Noticing if it becomes more clear, more vivid. Often times just bringing attention to the body lights up the experience. Makes it more deeply felt.
From here, you can open up the scope of your focus a little bit wider to include not just physical sensation, but also the thinking mind. So not trying to get rid of thoughts, but not indulging in thoughts or elaborating on them, either. Just allowing thought to flow through awareness the same way that physical sensation flows through awareness. And you can just let it be one in the same flow. It's not that physical sensations are good and thoughts bad, it's all just one unbroken flow. And you can relax your awareness, relax right into this flow.
Let your awareness remain soft and open. Physical sensations flowing, thoughts flowing through the mind, all flowing through awareness. Just take another moment to give yourself back to this flow of nature. And as you practice this more and more, you come to directly experience that you're not a thinking mind separated from a physical body so much as a body-mind. One unbroken flow always flowing through the open expanse of awareness itself.
[bell to conclude practice]
No need to stop, here. You can just stay with this, continuing as one unbroken flow of body, mind, and spirit. Return to this practice again and again as you see fit.
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