Reclaiming the Body: A Meditation to Integrate Body and Mind

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.

***

Want to deepen your practice? Download the Mindfulness Essentials course.

"The Longer We Practice, the Deeper We Practice": An Extended Meditation on Presence

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast.

Listen to this episode here.

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“The longer we practice, the deeper we practice." 

It’s something that one of my meditation teachers always used to say. In this spirit, I'm going to offer a longer guided meditation about being in the present moment. This is the practice of presence, of really learning to open up to the fullness that is here right now. 

Begin

Take a moment to let the body settle into the posture, gathering awareness in the physical body, letting the dust from your day or your night of sleeping and dreaming just start to settle. And remember that you don't have to try and get settled, try and rest. You can just give yourself over to the natural rhythms of your own body, of nature — as rhythmically as the tide ebbs and flows, the body expands and contracts through the breath. You can just return to this rhythm.

[extended silence]

Good. Bring your awareness to the nostrils, the sensation of breathing in and breathing out through the nose. And just practice for a moment, tightly focusing your awareness on these sensations — breathing in through the nose, breathing out through the nose, and just noticing the changing sensations as you do this, letting everything else in the entire world fade into the background.

If you get pulled away from your focus on the sensations around the nostrils or inside of the nostrils, just notice that and come back. Refocus. Redouble your efforts, really bearing down on this small area of sensation.

And for a moment, as you do this, staying with the tight focus on the sensations of breathing through the nose, I want you to notice that within your narrowed focus there's a quality of total openness, that awareness is open to whatever sensation is flowing. No matter how tightly you focus, there's a quality of awareness that remains totally open. Within your scope of focus around the nostrils, you can just be open to whatever sensation is flowing in this moment. Tingling sensation, air cooling the nostrils as you breathe in, warming the nostrils as you breathe out. 

Then go ahead and let that go. Relax your focus, opening up awareness to cover the entire physical body, all of sensation in this moment. Focusing on the physical body, being open within the scope of this focus. Allowing whatever sensation wants to arise, to arise. Whatever wants to pass, to pass.

And go ahead and relax that. Let go of that narrowing of focus on the body. And at this point you can totally ease up. Letting go of any particular focus in awareness and just allowing awareness to be completely open — not focusing on any one thing whatsoever.

As you stay open in awareness, you'll notice that however open you are, awareness will naturally and spontaneously focus. It will grip on an object such as a physical sensation, a thought in the mind, without your doing it. and you can just notice as this happens. Going from total expanse, total openness, to a spontaneous focus. And as you notice this spontaneous focusing, this spontaneous gripping, you can practice letting go. Letting go of whatever awareness notices in the moment, coming back to open awareness.

And start to notice that in a given moment, whether awareness is focused or open, in any event, you are simply aware. You are present. Whether you're present in a focused and narrowed way, or present in a relaxed and open way, awareness is simply aware. Just take a moment to enjoy this. From this perspective there are no distractions. There's only awareness. There's contractive awareness: tightly focused. There's expansive awareness: totally open. You're always aware. You're always present. You are aware presence itself.

Enjoy the freedom, the natural rhythm of awareness expanding and contracting, as naturally as the tides ebb and flow. As naturally as stars, suns, rise and set over countless planets. Awareness expands, contracts, and you are present. Aware, awake for it all.

End 

Take a moment to give your fingers and toes a wiggle. Let the visual world back into awareness if you've closed your eyes. Stay soft, stay open. Enjoy all of the fullness that is this and every moment. 

***

Want to deepen your practice? Download the Mindfulness Essentials course.

The Individual and the Collective: A Meditation on Our Porous Nature

I was teaching a retreat a few years ago when a mother shared a really moving story with me. She said that right before the retreat, she was tucking her daughter in for sleep when she had a sense that her daughter was thinking something. So she asked her what she was thinking and her daughter described a really vivid image — the exact same image, it turns out, that had just gone through her mind before she asked her daughter what she was thinking.

It was one of those moments where the common sense of separation totally dissolved. 

We usually think that our thoughts are our thoughts. And in this moment it was really clear to the mother that it wasn't entirely her thought. It was just a thought that was thinking both of them at the same time, so to speak. 

This experience really stuck with me because this particular retreat started off really moody. We had a big group of people at the retreat center, and the weather was dark and the energy of the group felt a little bit sluggish, a little bit weighed down. I felt it just as much as anybody. 

We're all working through this content. We're all feeling so much. And there are moments in life where we recognize that we're actually porous, that we're deeply affected by others, by the environment, and by the entire world. 

Just feel that for a moment. Notice these boundaries that we call the self — maybe the physical borders of our body, or the more subtle borders of our minds. We imagine that we're totally unique and autonomous and even isolated in these boundaries. And yet there are moments in life where it's clear that there's something else going on.

This has some interesting implications. On the one hand, it's amazing that we don't have to be alone — that because we're porous we're not just living our own individual life, but we're living out a life in a collective. We're participating in the life of the world's soul, you might say. But what can be a little scary about that is there's a lot of vulnerability involved. To be porous is to be touchable, reachable, and influenced. 

Notice that for a moment as you breathe. As you feel, you can just notice in this moment what side of the spectrum you seem to be favoring. Do you feel more individual in your experience? Independent? Or do you feel more communal, more merged? 

It's not that feeling independent is undesirable and that feeling communal is desirable. If anything, what's powerful is to just notice this spectrum that's playing out moment to moment. There are times when we feel incredibly self-conscious and closed in on ourselves. And in those moments we can feel very isolated. And there are other moments where we feel totally relaxed and at ease, and our sense of self just expands out, seemingly forever.

The invitation, then, is to bring more attention to your porous nature, so you can notice both of these features. You very much are a unique self with unique gifts to offer those people in your lives, to offer to the entire world. And you're also very porous. You're always a self in relationship to other, in relationship to the whole. And on that level, you're very porous. You're very permeable, you're vulnerable, and yet the vulnerability is what makes possible intimacy and the deepest love. When we return we're going to do a little bit of an awareness practice around these qualities of our experience.

Here’s a meditation you can follow to experience this for yourself.

Start 

Take a moment to allow yourself to just settle in, to arrive more fully in this moment. Notice the shape, the posture of the physical body in this moment, whether in stillness or in motion. Just notice the impact the posture has on this moment, the way the posture of the body colors your experience. 

And you can bring awareness to the emotions. Just notice how you're feeling emotionally in this moment. The quality of emotion in the body. How intense emotion is — maybe very intense, maybe very felt. Maybe very dim. Imperceptible. And you can notice where in the body you're sensing emotion. What volume of space the emotional energy takes up. How it's moving, how it's shifting moment to moment. How do you feel? Just allow yourself to investigate this directly through your awareness.

You can also notice thoughts in the mind. You don't have to get lost in the content of the thoughts, but you can just notice the flow of thought. Whether there are many thoughts, few thoughts, no thoughts. and notice how this colors your experience in this moment as well. Feel the body. Feel the mind. Sense in to the personality the unique person that you are. Just notice what it feels like to be you in this moment.

And then allow awareness to expand, to become more permeable, more porous. Starting with your surroundings. Notice where you are in this moment. And notice the energy, the quality, the essence of the room where you are, or if you're outside somewhere, just allow yourself to soften and be aware of the influence that your immediate environment has on you. Notice the influence you're receiving from your environment.

Now bring awareness to your closest relationships: family, friends. And notice if any of those people are struggling right now. Notice if those struggles weigh on you. You're concerned for them. You're hoping they'll prevail in these challenges. And notice if any of them are on a roll, so to speak. Things are amazing in their lives and you feel a contact high from their success — a vicarious joy.

Open up your awareness to the mood of your nation. Whatever country you come from, whatever country you currently reside in, just see if you can sense into the mood of the nation as a whole. Feel the way you participate in that mood. You affect it and you are affected by it. You give and you receive influence. 

At the most basic level you can sense into your own aliveness in this moment. Just feel that you're alive: breathing, sensing, awake. And you're not the one doing this. In a sense, life is being done to us. It's this gift we continue to receive with each in-breath, with each out-breath. You can open up your awareness to all of life. the vitality in us and through us all that quickens us, that animates us.

Feel the way, in this moment, that you deeply participate in the life of the whole — all life on the planet and all life beyond. Feel how deeply connected you are, and how profoundly unique you are, all at once.

Mantra Meditation — With Audio and Script

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast.

Get the audio version of this mantra meditation.

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As we get started, I'll invite you to find a place where you can get comfortable, settle in, not be interrupted, and we will begin.

Beginning Bell

Take a moment to just ground in the physical body. Really allow your awareness to totally fill the entire physical body. Like a sponge that's totally soaked through with water, your awareness soaks through the entire body.

As you do this, you can notice any hot spots, any places with tension in the body where you're tight or holding on. And you can just keep breathing. Letting yourself soften. Letting go.

Feel the support of the ground beneath you. Whether you're standing, lying, sitting, just feel your relationship to the ground and as you do that, you can trust your weight even more to the ground. Letting go, softening.

And for a moment I want you to just bring your awareness to the expansion and contraction of the torso. As you breathe in and out. And as we do this today, we're going to work with a mantra — a syllable or word that we repeat to help us pay attention, to help us concentrate.

I'll recommend you use a word that's simple and meaningful to you. You can use "peace," "love," maybe "patience." Just pick a simple word that has a positive meaning and feeling for you. Don't stress over it, any word will do.

Once you've settled on a word, I want you to say it to yourself in your mind as you breathe in and repeat it each time you breathe out.

Just stay with it. If you get distracted that's okay. Just come back to your syllable, your word, repeat it as you breathe in. Repeat it as you breathe out. You don't have to speak it out loud, you can just think it, softly as you breathe — as the breath breathes you.

For any given period of meditation, it can take a little while to settle in. So as you notice discomfort in the body and thoughts in the mind, just recognize that that's content that the body and mind are in the process of letting go of. They're not problems. You're just releasing.

[silence]

Stay with the breath. On the in-breath saying this word in your mind. And on the out-breath, repeating the same word. Just allowing your attention to be rapt. Allowing yourself to become curious, fascinated by this experience.

As thoughts come up in awareness you can just let them come up in the background of awareness. Not making a problem of them, just staying with your focus. Letting the breath breathe you. Letting the syllable, letting the mantra just flow. 

The longer we practice, the deeper we practice. Just give yourself time to settle in.

[silence]

Good. Stay with it. Go ahead and let that go and just allow yourself to do nothing. If awareness wants to expand you can let it expand. If awareness becomes focused on this or that, you can just allow it to focus. Awareness opens and focuses is natural as the movement of the in-breath and the out-breath. You don't have to exert any control or any effort. Just do nothing for another moment. Whatever happens happens. If you catch yourself trying to do something you can just let it go. 

Ending Bell

Give yourself a moment to start to open your eyes. You can give your fingers and toes a little wiggle, opening up your awareness to the space around you and enjoying this moment of plainness, of ordinariness — immersing yourself in this awareness, the light of mind that is always available.

***

Want to deepen your practice? Download the Mindfulness Essentials course.

Photo by Petr Sevcovic on Unsplash

How Mindfulness Can Counteract Negativity Bias

Imagine you’re living millions of years ago out on the plains of Africa. It's a dangerous place. The weather is hazardous. There are predators lurking about, slinking through the grass, waiting to pounce on you. Your nervous system needs to be on high alert to warn you of danger so you’re constantly attuned to the possibility of negative outcomes.

By contrast, let's say somebody from your band, your tribe flashes a smile at you. You smile back, and that's it. 

Why is that? Why would something positive not be as powerful in the body as something negative? 

Well, if somebody smiles at you and you smile back, it's nice for a moment. But if there’s a little rustle in the grass and your nervous system doesn't register it as a predator that's stalking you, you're dead. You're a lion’s next meal.

How does this relate to mindfulness?

There's a neuropsychologist by the name of Rick Hanson whose work I really enjoy because he explores how practicing mindfulness can shape our brains in a way that counteracts this negativity bias. And we should counteract it. After all, we’re no longer living in situations that constantly put us in mortal danger like our ancestors did. 

And yet it's been shown that negative experiences still tend to have a more profound impact on our nervous system than positive experiences. What’s worse, it’s been shown that we transfer negative experiences to our long-term memory more readily than positive experiences. 

This is where I think Rick Hanson’s work is so useful to us as mindfulness practitioners. Hanson says the brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones. Think about that. You have a negative experience — perhaps you wake up in the morning and you were really hoping to have a couple eggs for breakfast, but there's only one egg in the fridge. (That actually happened to me this morning. It was devastating! I'm still recovering.) Or maybe you recall a bully on the playground when you were five years old. Whatever it is, your nervous system records these experiences. Something bad happens, and the amygdala in our brain fires. It transfers the negative experience to the memory center, and we remember that moment maybe the rest of our lives. 

Rick Hanson's antidote is to work with this bias. He suggests that you let positive experiences soak in to the mind — let it soak into your neural circuitry for at least 12 seconds.

Do that for a moment now. 

Think of one nice thing that has happened today — ideally something trivial. And just sit with it for at least 12 seconds.

…

We can use our mindfulness practice to amplify the countless positive things that happen in a day. We might have an amazing day, and then a single phone call completely dominates our awareness since it came in with the bad news. We run it through our minds again, and again, and again, in hopes that we might avoid something like this happening in the future. 

So instead of letting this negativity bias run away with our lives and rob us of the inherent happiness that we have as human beings who are alive and awake, we can soak in the positive no matter the circumstances. That's one of the takeaways of a mindfulness practice. If you are aware in this moment and breathing, you are more wealthy than the wealthiest of kings and queens.

So let’s do a little bit of neuro-sculpting. We're going to focus in on a positive experience that easily could have slipped right off of our teflon brains. We're going to take a moment to just allow some positivity to fill our awareness. 

Over time as we make a practice of this, as we hold an intention to do this in our mindfulness practice, we have quicker, more ready access to positive experience. It makes us happier.

Begin Practice

Whatever you're doing at the moment, just notice that you're doing it. Bring your awareness to sensation. Just the feeling of feeling. The feeling of physical embodiment, of sensation. 

And as you do this, you can breathe. Just allow yourself to breathe and imagine that the breath is like a billows, fanning the flames of a fire. Only now it's the breath fanning the flames of sensation. Just allow yourself to enjoy in embodiment. And if you have chronic pain or significant pain in your experience in this moment that's totally okay. You can bring awareness fully to any part of your embodied experience that isn't painful. So, if you have a splitting headache, you can focus on the quality of having relaxed muscles throughout the body. If you have back pain, you can notice how good it feels as the lungs expand and contract and the breath nourishes the body with oxygen. Do this for a few moments.

And now I want you to look back on your day. Or if you just barely rolled out of bed you can look back to yesterday. I want you to just call up one thing that happened that was nice. It doesn't have to be amazing. It can be very subtle. But subtle is significant. Call up just one thing and really let it soak in. You can even allow a subtle smile to spread across your face as you do this.

And after looking back now at something pleasant that happened, I want you to look forward. Let your awareness be drawn to one thing you're looking forward to, today or tomorrow.  Something you're excited about. Doesn't have to be big. Might just be going home and reading the paper because you enjoy reading the news after work. Might be going on a little walk after dinner. Just let your awareness be drawn to one thing. And just tune into the feeling of anticipation. Forget how things turn out, forget how things you're looking forward to actually unfold. But just feel the feeling of anticipation, and enjoy that. Let that be its own reward. 

Where do you feel positive sensations associated with anticipation in your body? Just let it soak. What a gift.

Conclude

You can relax, let go of any effort, and just pulling back. 

I would invite you to make this a part of your mindfulness practice. You can do this anywhere. You can do it on the fly. You can do it in sixty seconds. And if you soak a little bit longer you can do it in two minutes. 

Just noticing all the good things happening that we tend to look past because positive experience slips off us like teflon; negative experience sticks to us like Velcro. As you bring you mindful awareness to positive experience, you realize there is so much positive experience happening in reality moment to moment that we fail to see. You realize that life is much more blessed than we have previously imagined. 

As we do this practice, attending to positivity with intention, we come to do what the Taoists instructed us to do thousands of years ago, which is to learn to dwell in reality.