Okay, so first of all I'd like to say I'm very grateful for the opportunity to talk about things I'm enthusiastic about, it's really quite a gift, so I'd just like to start with something that's brilliant, I get to stand up here and enthuse about things I find valuable, I hope you'll get a chance to do the same in your lives. I'd like to say I dedicate it to my teachers, I'd like to dedicate this talk to my teachers, to those who've communicated their practice so that I might grow, so that's who I'd like to dedicate the talk to. I'm going to start with four images, the first one, a fishing rod, okay, that's all there is, a fishing rod, and in fact you don't really need to worry about the little bits to do with fishing, the little things that stick on and all that sort of business, it's the rod itself I want you to think about. Okay, it's long, it's dark in colour, and it's very hard, but you notice as you move it in your hand, it's very supple as well, this fishing rod, and I'll call that image the supple rod. Second image, it's an autopsy room, probably see them on the TV, white tiles, stainless steel tables, and on one of the tables there's a body, okay, the body's plainly dead, and it's open as well, it's been cut open, and the sides of its chest have been pulled away, and in the middle of that cavity, there is an asda shopping bag filled with lungs and lights and all that sort of business, filled with the internal organs, sitting in the middle of this body. Okay, that image is known as the carcass. Okay, third image, I need to read this one out, okay, there's a section of cold rock in the wild somewhere, a seemingly random piece of rock, which when you look closer, you realise it seems subtly shaped in some way. You feel moved to lie down on this rock, you don't know why you should choose to lie on something so seemingly uncomfortable, but there's actually something about those curves and forms that's familiar. You lie down and sure enough, it actually fits you, it's still cold and you're still exposed outside in the wilds, but as you lie in this hard rock, it somehow feels friendly too. This image is known as the icy couch, the icy couch, and lastly, a heart enclosed in a veil, a heart enclosed in a veil, and this image carries with it a feeling as well. Most images, to some extent, create feelings, though sometimes the image doesn't say the feeling, the image relies on you having the feeling when you hear it, but I want to say the feeling that goes with this image, it's a feeling of relief flooding through the body. So the heart surrounded by a veil and a feeling of relief flooding through the body, and I call that the heart as shy bride, the heart as shy bride. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to explore a traditional suitor and see how it can give us some clues about the mindfulness of the body and how it can be of any help to us. What does it actually consist of, mindfulness of the body, how do we do it, what its benefits are, these are all in this suitor. I'm also then going to look at Buddhist psychology and see if this can give us some clue as to well really deepen our practice of mindfulness of the body. I'm also going to look at some later commentators, Buddhist commentators, and see if they can fill out this practice of mindfulness of the body. And a suggestion about how to listen. Bhante has said, Sankarashtra has said that Shraddha is the ultimate in us resonating with the ultimate in the universe, the ultimate in us resonating with the ultimate in the universe. And if you listen to anything with Shraddha, which is a pretty good way to listen to anything, you need to be receptive to that resonance, so you need to be able to feel it. So I'm suggesting that you listen to this talk as you would listen to something that you're kind of, you're really receptive to in the sense of you want to see what effect it has on you. So in order to see if there's anything in this talk which resonates with your faith, listen to the resonance inside you, see if you can feel what's happening. I know that's a cheap word me saying, be really open to my talk, but that's not what I'm saying, I'm just suggesting, I'm just suggesting. If you want to listen to this talk with Shraddha, what you need to do is be aware of your resonating apparatus inside. And I don't suspect I'm going to say much that you don't already know, but I want to draw attention to the potential of something we already do, I want to draw attention to the potential of something we already do. And it's a bit of a bad cop talk, sorry, but it's just a bit of a bad cop talk, there's a good cop bit at the end. It's a bit bad cop along the way, that's how I am, actually, that's just how I am. So, and the final idea is that the gift of our bodies is that they are always present, the gift of our bodies is that they are always present. Okay, so we're going to start with the Hinayana, always best place to start with the Hinayana. So this is the Pali Canon Majumina Kaya 119, the Kaya Gati Sarti Sutra, the sutra based on the mindfulness of the body. This is, I think, just after the one on the mindfulness of breathing, so it's your basic textbook standard stuff, yeah? It's right right to the source. Now this is a fascinating sutra, like a lot of the Pali Canon, it's filled with rich stuff, it would take a lot of study. So I just want to look at some of the things it says about mindfulness of the body, and it starts with some practical techniques, it starts with some practical techniques. How can I be mindful of the body? It starts with the mindfulness of breathing, so it's breathing, breathe out. Be aware of the quality of your breath as you breathe in and breathe out, and what that will do is it will tranquilize your body, or tranquilize your body. Now it's interesting to note here straight away that there's a value judgment going on, it's saying, look, it's really good idea to be calm. If you're going to be mindful about anything, you do need to be calm, and there's no kind of pre-barricating about that. I just thought I'd make that point, yeah? If you're going to be mindful of anything, you do kind of need to be calm. We sort of live in an area a bit about the moment, and it's quite good that things loosen up, whether it's a sense of exploring other approaches to practice. But occasionally I just feel like going, anything doesn't go, anything doesn't go. There are some things that really need to be in place, and one of the things that I keep coming across in the Pali Canon is this idea of being calm. Being calm is a really good basic condition for spiritual practice. Now the reason why being calm is good, according to the sutta, is because his memories and intentions based on the household life are abandoned. With their abandoning, his mind becomes steadied internally, quieted, brought to singleness and concentration. So his memories and tensions on the household life are abandoned, so memories of the past, intentions of the future, it's all about being present, that's the idea. So the memories and intentions are abandoned. Now, he then goes on to, or the sutta, goes on to talk about three other techniques. I better make a point here before I go on about the context in which the Pali Canon is taught. A lot of it's taught to monks, a lot of it's the Buddha talking to monks, or the monks repeating back to the Buddha something he's already taught them. And it's well to say that that means there's a particular context in which this has been put across. So these people have been living together in a sanga, I think there are assumptions of positivity, I think it was probably a pretty positive environment, and there was a dharmic perspective floating around already, that was already there. So when the sutta goes on to talk about contemplating the foulness of the constituent parts of our body, breaking our body down into its elements, and then contemplating the decomposition of a corpse gradually, stage by stage, there is a bit of an assumption that you're already in pretty good frame of mind before you go on. It's a pretty good frame of mind before you do this, okay? And we need to say that, we need to say that, because if you're depressed or nihilistic and you go and look at corpses decaying, it's probably going to have a detrimental effect on you, quite possibly. You can't link to insight, there do need to be some basis here, so another assumption would be a positive point of view, particularly a positive sanga, or emotional context in which to contemplate these things. Okay, given you've got that, then very interesting, hey, the body is made up of things which if you examine them singly, you probably want to be particularly close to a lot of the time, maybe. It's also made up of elements, that's not so obviously disgusting, it's just kind of interesting, anybody's done the six element practice, and then it's going to be a corpse, it's going to be a carcass. Now, I really wanted to see a decaying corpse when I first read about this, I really thought this sounds fascinating, I want to try it, because we are hidden from death, I think we're hidden from death quite a lot in this culture. In comparison, say to India, where the corpses are paraded through the streets or something like that, it's much more common in the West to try and hide death, maybe it's a legacy of Christianity, I don't know, I've got time to go into that now. I wanted to get a feeling when I first read about the corpse meditation that I wasn't getting a chance to do this. So, I mean, we see them on TV and we see them in films, but it's not the same, it's not the same as actually genuinely reflecting upon the reality that we're going to become corpses and we're going to decompose. So a friend of mine in Manchester, who works as a criminal lawyer, said that I often go to autopsies, it's part of my job, I have to go and supervise a second autopsy. Because I must check my clients being fairly represented, would you like to come along? I'll pay you, because I need an assistant to write down notes. Well, it's true, he does, you know, and he said to me, everybody keeps fainting, all the people from my office, they keep fainting, so I'd be quite grateful, actually, if you'd come along. So, about a year ago or so, I went along and I witnessed an autopsy in Manchester Royal Infirmary. And that's where the image of the carcass comes from, that's where the image of the carcass comes from. And it took a long time, before I could connect to it emotionally, I realized I was so full of images of the dead from TV, so kind of used to them in a cartoony-like way. And it took a long time for me to ask, this is actually a real dead body on the slab, there it is. And the thing about the Azda shopping bag, well, at one point I remember saying to one of the assistants, he looked very fit, young man, they went, "Oh no, it's really overweight." He said, "Well, that's because most of his insides are over in a shopping bag over there." Because what they do is they store them separately, because they decompose quicker. But when it comes to the second autopsy, they bring them out again and they store them in whatever's to hand, which might well be announced. So there's not a lot of, these people aren't particularly interested in the dignity of what's going on here, they're scientists, they've got a job to do, they're trying to find out what's going on. So I'm looking at this corpse, this carcass, and there's lots of funny things going on in the room, dynamics between prosecution and the police and stuff like that, and that's all very interesting in its own, right? And I find myself going, I'm meant to be contemplating this corpse, but these are life people, they're a lot more interesting, actually. Anyway, sorry, I'm contemplating a corpse, right, okay? And what's that the closest thing on there? Actually, it was really very hard to concentrate on it. What was going on between the alive people was much more compelling. And I kept looking at it thinking, "Well, yeah, and, and, what, so, yeah, okay." And then suddenly I realized at the end of, you know, it was about half an hour or so, I was looking inside the cavity of this man's chest and body. And there's nothing there, because it was all in plastic bags, and I realized I was looking for a self. I know that sounds bizarre, but I was actually looking for a self. I realized I'd suddenly clicked, I was kind of looking for something that would show me this was not a piece of meat, this was a human being. And I suddenly realized that that's what I was looking for, and I was never going to find it, you know? I don't know, I mean, that's, that's as near as I've got to a corpse meditation, you know, and the best I can do with it is just tell you what it was like. But I do remember finding it almost impossible as well not to want to find out about the man too. I couldn't, I had to find out about him. I thought it'd be easy to be terribly objective, it wasn't. I needed to know who he was, I needed context, I needed some humanity. So that's the nearest I've got to a corpse meditation. Now, what I then did after that is, is we're told that one of the reasons you engage in a corpse meditation, one of the, the antidotes it's for, is being attracted to, to people in a sexual way. The reason being, what you're trying to do, is not identify too strongly with the scandal of form. The idea is that you don't want to just turn somebody into their form and go, well, I don't care who they are, I just really like the cut of their gearball, you know? And the idea of reflecting upon the decomposition of the corpse is you kind of, you realize that there's more to them than that. And that sounds a bit bizarre. So I tried it, I tried it with my current girlfriend. I imagine my current girlfriend was the person on the slab, and it was, it was quite an experience actually, it was quite an experience. And what did happen, apart from sort of a weird beginning, well, well, no, no, she's not like that, is I did have to accept that she was more than the image I carried around of her. She was more than that, that's where it took me. I know that sounds a bizarre way to get there, but that's definitely where it took me. So, I'm just trying what the Pali Canon said. Okay, so I know we're also remember talking to a friend of mine who became a, who was a chairman, and he was told when he became chairman of a Buddhist center, be careful who you go out with, all right? Because people are going to look at you, okay? Be careful who you go out with. And this is a man, he was quite prone to falling in love quite quickly, and he was talking to me about this, and he said, I've done an awful lot of corpse meditations, yeah, because he's kept falling in love with people thinking it would not be a good idea for me to go out with that person, right? I'm just going to imagine what they're like when they're dead, and yeah, so that's how he worked with him. Okay, so what about, okay, these are the techniques of getting immersed in the body. What are the dangers of not being immersed in the body? Now, it's interesting, at this point, the suitors start giving us lots of images, lots of images. It's like a piece of wet clay being hit by a stone. Throw a piece of stone, throw a stone, a piece of wet clay, and you hit it. It's like a piece of dry tinder, and you come along with a stick, a stick for creating a fire, and the dry tinder lights like that. It's like an empty jug with water being poured into it. You're like all these things without mindfulness of the body. So what I read into that is that the piece of wet clay, it's like you're so susceptible to slights, pettiness. The other day I was on the train. There was a guy pushing one of those trolleys that go down the aisle, and I was sitting at the end of one of those in the vestibule, and he came around to get out of there, mate. I've got to put the trolley here. I was like, how dare you? You know, I was looking to completely pettie prideful fellow response, but it was so hard to put it away. The reason was I was in a hurry. I was anxious. I'd lost my self possession. I'd lost my mindfulness, my body. I wasn't grounded. So I was really susceptible to slights. Dry tinder, easily wound up, just like that. A light with rage or a front. And the empty jug gullible easily swayed. There's that character in the fast show in the pub who just believes anything anybody tells him. Yeah, yeah, right. Complete the opposite argument. Yeah, yeah, right. That's right too. That's possibly an example of gullibility. So what's it like to be mindful? What's it actually like to be mindful? Well, wet wood. Wet wood. You come along with a certificate. Somebody tries to wind you up. They're trying really hard. You're a wet piece of sappy filled wood. Nobody can wind you up. You're full of life. Wet life. Yeah, nobody can wind you up. Or, and I mentioned this yesterday, you like a cup that's brim full of water. You can't get anything else in. And I love this image of people being brim full of mindfulness as, you know, I describe Padma Badra, brim full. And there's this wonderful sense of aliveness, quivering, quivering with life, the brim. And this last one, this is to do with the rod. You're like a piece of heart wood. A door made of heart wood. And somebody's thrown a ball of string at it. Yeah, that's really going to make a lot of difference. Yeah, you know, I mean, the ball of string is. And that's what you're like if you're immersed in mindfulness of body, like a piece of heart wood. Now, I also came in about this as it was came and worked with wood. And he said, well, heart wood's interesting. Because it's really hard, but it's also very subtle as well. That's what's great about heart wood. So that's why they make fishing rods out of it and things like that. So that's what it's like. It's not like mindfulness of body means that you're kind of sort of sappy. You're hard, but you're also supple at the same time. So it's interesting, isn't it, how the use of images to explain to us a practice experience. And this goes on all the time in the polycan. And I think it's because images are a way of helping us feel things, to be kinesthetic is the word, as opposed to visual auditory. They also, they're a good way of communicating a feeling for something. You sort of pop an image into your imagination and then just sort of see what it feels like. I think that's why images are used a lot. For example, the Dionys. The Dionys are explained in terms of image. Those images of the soap and the water and the lake and the guy drawing himself. Okay, so why do we bother to do this? Why do we bother to be mindful? Well, because it conquers discontent and delight. It conquers discontent and delight. The discontent in a way is obvious. If you're self-possessed, then that's ability to, or that's a propensity to get upset by people and so forth. You don't have that so much. You're not so easily wound up. So in a way, it's kind of obvious how being mindful of the body can help you with discontent. It's an interesting one about delight as well. I think what it's saying is that you don't get carried away by delight. You don't get intoxicated by your experiences to delight. The experiences of delight flow through you as easily as other ones. I know, for example, when I'm doing the metabarvna that when it works and I start to get a positive feeling of delight, I get completely intoxicated. I spin off with the fairies because it's a bit like I can't, I'm not self-possessed enough sometimes in my metabarvna to just sit with the delight as much as everything else. I struggle with that practice and so whenever I get a bit of delight, I'm so over excited. It just, you know, goes like that. But I think there's an interesting reflection there was we're not after a particular form of delight. Remember that thing about the gods and the human being is not overwhelmed by their emotions, bad or good. I'll go on to that later, the place of positive emotion, but at a certain level, it's about we're not all trying to get giddy with happiness here. That's not the idea. Okay, so you also conquer fear and dread and also weather, hunger, irritations, harsh words, all the stuff that winds you up. Mindfulness, a body, conquer it. It's also a fantastic antidote if you're in a particularly undermining state. So, for example, being involved in the movement for a couple of years, about 99 or so, doing lots of meditation, slightly more together than I was before, feeling pretty pleased with myself, quite confident, quite content. Decide to fall in love, go for it, big time, go for refuge to love, beautiful woman, absolutely gorgeous, loves me back. I remember the day she said that to me on the phone, I could have jumped tall buildings, you know, I was really, I was so full of it, yeah, fantastic. And then it didn't work. All things are impermanent, all things are unsubstantial and boy, are they unsatisfactory, right? And I was really, really annoyed, actually, I was really pissed off, and not particularly gracious about her, anything like that, really resentful. How dare she leave me? And I knew at the same time that I had absolutely no justification for this at all, nobody hurt me, but I was blown the dummy out of the pram sort of thing. It was that sort of level of upset, very, very strong, and extremely hard to work with. I was already halfway through the resentment fantasy before I realized what I was doing, it was that strong, it was a very, very strong response. And the only way I found I could deal with it, the only way I could adequately deal with it, is just by coming back to the body, keep coming back to the body, keep coming back to the body all the time, very simple, extremely useful, because those movies in my head were compelling. And boy were they good movies, I mean the human mind is brilliant and creative when it comes to fueling its emotions and giving you justification for the things you're feeling. So what I had to do is bypass the whole lot and just keep coming back to my body, coming back to my body, really helpful practice, particularly if you've got some sort of overwhelming emotion, just feel your feet, feel your feet. Okay, so other benefits, there's about ten benefits in all by the way, you experience the Deanna's if you become mindful of the body, you have super normal powers, you hear divine sounds, you understand the minds of others and you recollect past lives. Now, okay, no, there may well be something in there, it's just I haven't got time to unpack those particular metaphors, there may well be something in there, but there is a very mysterious one at the end, a very mysterious promise. And you get this in the party cities, you get these little phrases which you go what? But it sounds so enticing, you spend a bit of time trying to unpack it. So I've gone to three translations just to try and get to this, I've got to three translations, always useful if you look at the party canon, there's lots of stuff on the web you can pick up for free. Okay, here we go. In the same way, when anyone has developed and pursued mindfulness immersed in the body, then whichever of the six higher knowledges he turns his mind to know and realize he can witness them for himself, whenever there is an opening. Or mindfulness of the body in the body developed and made much, when directed for the realization of whatever higher knowledge, it becomes the eyewitness in that and that sphere. That was pretty hard, I must admit, but there's a third one, which is a bit more straightforward. When you develop mindfulness of the body, when he inclines his mind towards realizing any state that may be realized by direct knowledge, he attains the ability to witness any aspect therein, there being a suitable basis. Okay, I think what this is going on about is that if you put yourself into a certain state, a certain positive mindful state, you're much more susceptible to seeing things as they really are. I think that's what it's saying. You've got a much better chance of seeing with insight. So that means seeing things as insubstantial, impermanent, and unsatisfying. And I believe that the sutra is saying that if you immerse yourself in mindfulness of the body, it's much more likely you will see the world that way. So, you set up the conditions by being mindful of the body to alter your perception in a certain way. Now, I don't know if any of you experienced it this weekend, by playing around with your body, by doing body work, have you altered your perception of the world? Don't ask me yet, just think about it. I mean, has that happened? Have you altered your perception of the world? And I think what the sutra is saying is that this will happen, and you'll alter it in a way that you'll be much more likely to see the things as they really are. Now, I know that when I'm in touch with my body, when my sense of myself as an embodied being, I feel the world differently. I can't claim insight with a big eye, but I feel like I'm on the right track. I'm not making any big claims, but I feel like when I become more and more mindful, I'm on the right track to seeing the world as it really is. I do feel the fluidity of things much more. The world seems much less fixed when I'm immersed in mindfulness of my body. Also, I think you noticed this when your body's had a trauma when it's been under threat. There's been a few times in my life when I felt like near to death, when my body's been under threat. And after it, my body's flooded with a sense of relief, and the world seems to shine. Actually, it seems to shine, and I think that's got some to do with seeing the world as it really is. Conjecture, but I think that's got some to do with being much more in touch with the awareness of the body, with the wisdom of the body. So, generally speaking, what the sutras said to us is that calmness, concentration leads to an objectivity about the body, an objectivity in the sense of seeing it as a body, not being over-identified with it. It's given us some techniques of how to do that. There are some other ones as well, by the way. We don't have to just do stuff to do with its revoltingness. You can be mindful of its pleasant sensations, and also there's a traditional one of being mindful when you're standing, mindful when you're sitting, mindful when you're walking, mindful when you're lying. Basically, just being mindful of your movements. That's another way. We're trying not to identify with the scanner of form. That's the idea. Try not to identify the scanner form. I've got a good quote from Bante on this. "The point of cultivating revulsion towards the physical body of someone whom we find attractive is, in fact, to give room to the imagination so that we can see that person as an emergent individual rather than just as someone who arouses our sexual interest." What's interesting about that quote is he says, "It's the imagination that's important. I do know that when I get particularly attracted to somebody, my ability to see them as a whole being gets reduced a bit." What he's saying is some of these techniques that you imagine them in their fullness and not narrow them down too much. I'm not saying that you can't have a relationship with somebody which has that element in it. I'm certainly not saying that. I certainly hope not. But the whole point being that we want to be seeing each other as fully as possible, and that needs the imagination to be involved. I think that's, again, we've got this theme of images, imagination, propping up. All right, then finally, the thing we looked at just now, oh, and then hang on, we're susceptible. If we do it, if we do it, we'll get self-possession. If we don't do it, we're susceptible to things. And then finally, we get this funny promise, this interesting promise that it might lead to insight, true mindfulness is awareness of the impermanence and insubstantiality and unsatisfactorness of the body. It's a bit like, "If I start to become mindful of my body, I can't help but see certain facts about it. I can't help it. It will become obvious." So mindfulness of the body isn't simply awareness. It contains a dynamic perspective. We're not just aware of ourselves as being sort of walking lumps of flesh. We're aware of ourselves being insubstantial, unsatisfactory, impermanent beings. So why should this work? Why should this happen? Why should we be aware this way? Why aren't we just aware that we're kind of this flesh moving around? All right, well, I'm going to mention a little bit about Rupa, the idea of Rupa in Buddhist psychology or Buddhist philosophy. This is one of the five scandas. Now, the five scandas are a way that Buddhism has of talking about what it is to be a lie. Take your experience, everything involved in your experience, and Buddhist philosophy separates it out and says, "Look, there's a whole lot of stuff that's to do with wanting things, with volitions. We'll make a heap there." There's a whole lot of experiences that are to do with you sort of being conscious and we'll just keep them there. There's a whole lot of experiences to do with how you perceive things and label them. We'll just keep them there. It takes all this stuff. It's all pretty disparate, but it roughly falls into five heaps, roughly, and those five heaps are the five scandas. And one of those heaps is Rupa. This is either Rupa or Form. Now, what's important about this is that Form doesn't mean that we're surrounded by a kind of a world of solid objects. That's not what it's saying. What it's saying is that we have a series of experiences which we usefully abbreviate into calling them objects and calling them Form. So, for example, I think that this is a form because when I touch it, I feel things. I'm going to see feeling here like this, and I see something as well. I see something too. But Buddhist philosophy says, "Look, but you don't actually know that beyond those sensations, there is something there. What you've got is a series of sensations which you're usefully clumping into this idea that there's a form out there. You are approximating it for practical purposes." Nobody's saying everybody give up and just walk around as if you're staring and going, "Wow, man, whatever." But it is saying, "But just because you operate like that practically doesn't mean that you can't be attendant upon the reality of your experience." So, for example, if anybody meditates with their thumbs like that, it's fascinating to spend a meditation actually working out where touch begins and ends. Because it's like, "What? Two thumbs touching? What's the problem with that? They're both solid? You just spend a bit of time with it. I don't find it quite so obvious." Now, this isn't a philosophical parlor trick. There are implications for this, and they're very interesting implications about how do we perceive the world. And what I think mindfulness of the body does is it makes us much more aware the reality of those sensations, and therefore we perceive the world more accurately according to Buddhism. So instead of imposing this rather crude idea, according to the Dharma, that there's a world of objects there and us here, we start to realize that our whole experience of the world is actually, we're kind of taking... We're grouping together a whole lot of experiences and just imposing labels on them because it's useful, practically speaking. Now, so attentiveness reveals that having a body is shorthand for a lot of distinctly different, wiggly little experiences which we lump together and call form. Now, in the Abhidharma, there's a way of talking about this. Rupa or form is the objective content of the perceptual experience. The objective content of the perceptual situation, in fact, let's call it that, the objective content of the perceptual situation. That is by Dr. Gunther, and it was interested. That's a man who translated a lot of them to better philosophy. The idea being that all we've actually got to go on is the perceptual experience. That's all we've really got to go on, if we're honest. And part of that perceptual experience, we call objects, and that's Rupa. But actually, it's not nearly as solid as we think it is. Now, if you start to look at things like that, there's no out there anymore. We inhabit our bodies. It's not like we're a little kind of a driver inside them. We're in our bodies, we see our bodies, we feel them, but we also are them at the same time. If you just start to play around with that a little bit, the body really becomes quite mysterious. It really becomes much less obviously just a thing, an object, a lump, and something that we both kind of are. We see, we experience. It becomes quite hard to pin it down quite so strongly. It's a process. Being part of our body, it's much easier to see it as a process than a thing. Okay, so, let's run with that for a bit, this whole idea of process. Now, a lot of these ideas, I suddenly came across, when I was preparing this talk, I came across them in this dummelike, sadly, last copy. But there's a lot of stuff in this about the mind and the body and how the mind exists in the body. And a fascinating article by Reginald Ray, the writer, the American writer, has written a lot about Tibetan Buddhism. And there was an article about chakras. I won't talk about chakras, but what came out of the article was a lot of assumptions in Tibetan Buddhism about what the body is. And he said some fascinating things. I would say, after many years of exploring the body and meditation, that the body isn't real as a substantial solid entity. That's the quote. And he went on to say that the body is solid, is a conceptual imposition reflecting a lower level of realization. And that the more you practice, the more you see that the body just isn't this kind of solid object. Now, it's not bad to look at it as a solid object. Practically speaking, we have to get through the day, it's important. But it's a bit like, imagine that you propped up a window with a book one day for practical purposes. And then from then on, you insisted nobody could read that book because all it was was a window proper open. That's what it is. No, don't read it. No, that's what it does. It props up windows. It's the same idea. There's a practical thing that we do with our lives to get through the day. But if we insist that's all we are, then we're just going to cut ourselves off from what we could be from our potential. Now, when you look at the tantra, and the original Ray goes on to talk a bit about the relationship between the body and the tantra. He says, "Enlightenment is fundamentally and originally present in the body." It's there. "Enlightenment is found in the body." Okay, this is one of the views of the tantra. But there's a bit more, and this is an interesting combination of Tibetan and modern points of view. According to the Tibetan tradition, our body incarnates our unconsciousness. It's how we can get back in touch with the whole of ourselves is by becoming more aware of our body. It's like everything we've ever done is stored in the body. Okay, this is not a new idea. You get it all over the place, but I happen to come across it in the original Ray's article. So, if we really want to become more aware of who we are, the depths of our being, the true self. There's a bunch of talks about it in the white lotus sutra lectures, drama of cosmetic enlightenment. Then somehow we need to get in touch with that unconsciousness that's embodied in the body. Okay, so how are we going to do that? This is where the icy couch comes in. Remember the icy couch? That's subtly shaped rock among the wilds. This is where it comes in. This is an idea from a Zen writer called Charlotte Joko Beck. This is all personal stuff first. When I try and spend more time with my body, I basically find it uncomfortable. I find it just uncomfortable to do it. At first I thought it was simply boring, but then with honesty I realized I wasn't really exploring my experience because at base it wasn't reassuring. Every time I kept going back to reality of my body, I wasn't getting reassured the way I wanted to get reassured. It was simply an uncomfortable experience. Words start to fall down a bit here. Faced with the sea bottom of my practical experience, it was uncomfortable, strained and slightly painful. Just not the place I wanted and felt that I deserved or had a right to be. So when I really started to practice mindfulness to the body or mindfulness in general, I got this kind of, well this is a bit uncomfortable being here. Now what was interesting about Charlotte Joko Beck, she explains why. She has a series of essays and how we change in practice and she presents a useful little summary of our psychological development, how we fall into a dualistic way of thinking and away from a sense of connectedness with the world. From a Zen perspective, the big thing is this just experiencing, not an experiencer or something that's experienced, just experiencing. It's all just process, it's all connected. It says, well we don't do that. A lot of the time we're like that out there, this here. Why do we fall into that? Well this is her idea, it's a short summary. Growing consciousness adopts a strategy to cope with the opposition of the not-self. So your consciousness comes into being, it's basically ego coming to being in a way. That's not me, what am I going to do, how am I going to cope with that, not me thing. So it has three possibilities. It either conforms to please, it attacks before it gets attacked or it withdraws altogether. So you've either got conforming, attacking, withdrawing as coping strategies. And apparently we all do this in some way. The therapist, psychologist, among you will probably go, oh yeah, gains people playing, all sorts of other references, but yeah, this is this one. Now this strategy we take becomes habitual. It influences the barely conscious questions we ask of every situation until it becomes programmed into our body. So for example, you're a pleaser, you're a pleaser. I notice this particularly when I work with actors. You notice how people start to kind of morph into the same physical behavior of the people they're with. Lawrence Olivier was like this apparently. For ten minutes he'd not know what to do because he was sussing the person out. And then once he realized how he was meant to be with them, he'd be fine. And I see this with people, I see this, they'd sort of spend a few minutes just kind of working out how they're meant to be with somebody. And then once they got it, they could relax. Their body would form the shape, would make them feel comfortable with that person. The withdrawal, the withdrawal is just going to keep trying to find ways to make themselves smaller. Just so that they just don't look at me, I'm not really here. And you can see this stuff going on in people all the time. Okay, so now our bodies are dutiful servants which even if we end up insisting on completely deluded interpretations of the world, for example the world's out to attack me, that could be completely deluded. You might not want to attack you at all. It will still absorb those attitudes and build them into your physical makeup. So you end up sort of bracing yourself against the world in a way. The problem is because these strategies are based on delusion, they don't really work. And particularly if you're doing what you lot are doing, which is trying to understand life better, they'll feel dissatisfied. You've got this kind of built-in way that you unconsciously face the world, but it doesn't work. It doesn't work. Reality keeps being disappointed. Charlotte Jacobic puts it quite nicely. Phenomenal life is by definition a promise that is never kept. Phenomenal life is by definition a promise that is never kept. That's a great definition for Dukkha, basic suffering. If we practice sit still and become aware of our thoughts, we can start to see our strategies because they are at the root of our buzzing thoughts. The thing that creates all the thoughts is our strategies on life. There is another part of us that is free of all this swirling illusion. It is the physical, organic life of the body. But to get to this untainted place, we need to get through the defensive layers we've been setting up for so long. So when we start to just sit with the truth of our bodily experience on the icy couch that I mentioned at the start, it's uncomfortable because it's the last place I want to be. It's not pleasant and our whole strategic drive is for pleasantness. We simply don't want to be in the reality of what we are. That's human, neither good or bad. It takes years of patient practice to begin to touch this reality more and more. To become comfortable and resting there until finally it's just a hard and friendly rock. It's moulded to us and we can finally be at peace. So I found this idea of the hard and friendly rock really compelling. It matches my experience of being mindful of my body, a hard but friendly rock because it's more real. It's friendly because it's more real, but it's hard because it isn't the pleasantness that I think I deserve and want. That my ego wants. Alright, okay, so that's the overview. That's the idea. What do we do when we get there? We get to the hard and friendly rock. Well, this is really the kind of the meat of the discovery I made in practice when I was preparing this talk. And it comes from a couple of areas. Another interview with a woman called Catherine Thanas who's the abbot of Santa Cruz N Centre. And she's written an article about working with the body and I won't go into too much detail. But she speaks a lot about deep listening which requires stillness and patience and attending to the body without expectation. And why will this awareness transform experience? Because all phenomenal existence will transform and change. But if we don't stay still long enough, we don't give it the chance to change. Now, I was reading through this article thinking, "Yeah, it's pretty good." And she describes about three experiences she has. And what's interesting is the actual description she makes. It's that her language of talking with her body. Because to go on the certain, the sort of journeys that Catherine has gone on, you need to learn a way of travelling. And I think this language is the way of travelling. The language of talking with the body. It uses words and concepts, but these are in service to our feelings and intuitions. Images are particularly helpful. And it's very interesting how full of imagery the Pali Canon is. So, somehow, we've got to learn to talk with our body. Now, I was thinking about it, thinking, "But our body's talking to us all the time." Very obviously. You get it in things like fear, butterflies in the stomach, the dread that sits in the stomach, the uneasy conversation you've got to have tomorrow with somebody. You can feel it in your body, you know, body's getting ready for it. At the moment in Manchester, we've just had one of our twice yearly ordination report meetings. So we're talking to lots of people about where they're at in their ordination process. It's very old-fashioned of this, but we still do it that way in Manchester. And I've noticed there's a few conversations I've had, not just with people who've asked for ordination, but with my fellow water members, because people care very strongly about this. They really care about this whole process. I've noticed that there's some difficult conversations I've had to have with people, disagreements. And I can feel them coming up, a few days in advance. I can feel them inside me. Anger, you know, you feel that. Your body tells you when you're angry, that's kind of obvious. It's not like it's shouting at you that you're angry. I do some anger management work with disturbed boys. I've done some of the past. And you use that a lot. You basically talk to them about mindfulness of the body, body awareness. Notice when you start doing this. Yeah, I mean, it kind of seems obvious to you, but there's some people who don't realize they're going like this. And you say, "John, John, John, you're first, you're first, you're first." Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, right, yeah. And once you do that, it's kind of, it's released slightly. You've stopped the circuitry that's giving rise to the emotion. You all miss yourself, body is really taught us. And desire. We know when we desire things, don't we? Our body tells us that. That's that girlfriend I mentioned earlier on the talk. I still know when she comes to the Buddhist center. Even if she's on another floor, I still know she's there. And I feel it in my guts. Yeah, I was really attached to her. You don't get rid of that overnight with a few chats with your mates. Yeah. This or what? I was going to talk about sex, but someone after said dangerous. Don't go there. It's so, oh, should I say something like that? Well, all right, I'll say a little bit because I'm fairly. Obviously, all sexual desire is not all genital. Obviously, it's not all genital. There's a lot of elation and joy and intimacy that comes with sexual desire. It's true. I was thinking about how my practice had affected my sex life. Actually, it's made it better. I think I've just got to be honest. You do lots of mindfulness and lots of matter. You get better at it, actually. I think I've got to be honest about that. But, you know, I, you know. So, okay, if I've got to be honest about it, the other day, the other day. My partner said to me, in not so many words, "Woe tiger slow down." So, you know, I've got to admit I'm certainly not a stud anymore. My Buddhist practice hasn't turned me into a great sex girl. But what it has done is it's made me more appreciative of the activity I'm engaged in. And also, what's interesting, it's made me more aware of the ethical resonances of my actions. I've been much more aware of the ethical resonances. I'm much less carried away by, don't think about that. Just get it while you can, which I was a bit like before. I mean, I certainly have not stopped doing it. And to be honest with you, it would be much easier, and I'm going to quote someone out of here, much less messy, if we could just abstain from it altogether. In a way, in a way, if I look at my spiritual life and what I'd like to do, level playing field, it'd be very easy to just not do it in a way. I know that might be unpopular, but I don't live in that world. I don't live in that world. I live in a different context, and so I need to work with where I live and how I am and what I want, with ethical, with a sense of ethics. No, that's the best I can do. I have to do, mate. It wasn't two days. It wasn't two days. No, no kind of worms in that. So, our bodies also have moments of joy and bliss. And it's interesting that the original Ray mentioned in the Tibetan stuff, that apparently the body's natural state is blissful. The body's natural state is blissful. So, that's an interesting one as well. Okay, so there are strong examples here, and the implications are, that we're subject to these things. A lot of the time, these things overtake us. You know, like, "Oh, my God, I've got this feeling of dread." "Oh, my God." But actually, what I've been discovering and working with the body is that we can have a conversation with these responses. They don't have to overtake us. We can get into dialogue with them. And the more we can get into dialogue with the strong ones, the more we can get into dialogue with the more subtle ones as well. And so, these responses are potential friends to self-awareness, signals that you can really get into communication with. I was trying to think of another example in life of, of when you take words and images and feelings, and you try and kind of use them to reach a deeper understanding of something, "Hey, poetry. Poetry does the same sort of thing." You take words and images and feelings and things like that, you try and use them to make sense of something. Now, I was trying to think of poems off top of my head, which is due with this internal conversation with the body. I couldn't find one in time a set for the beginning of a poem by Sylvia Platt called Ariel. Now, I'm just going to give you the first few lines, but it's a good example of this kind of dialogue between the body. It's about a woman waking up, opening her eyes and seeing a mountain, and then stretching, okay? Stasis in darkness, then the substanceless blue, poor of tall and distances. God's lioness, how one we grow, pivot of heel and knees. That's it. That's six lines, and boy, she's captured something there. She's really kept something. What I wanted to show you is that when I started working with this, trying to listen to my body more, I realized that I was going to need some tools to do it. Now, I like words, and I like images. I'm a kind of literal chap, but you don't need to do that. You could use music. You could use color. I'm not saying it has to be like that. What these medium do is they serve you. They help you get into conversation with yourself. Now, one of the reasons we did some bodywork workshops is to introduce you to some potential ways to get into, to learn a new language of your body. That's why we did it. I really wanted to do one of focusing. I don't know if anybody's come across a focusing. It's a thing of a form of bodywork, which the Vadroloka teachers are quite keen to encourage people to explore. It's a way of getting into dialogue with your body. It's a way of getting into dialogue with your body. And I just wanted to read you a quote about this. The truth is that our bodies are wise in many ways, hardly ever acknowledged in our culture. Our bodies carry knowledge about how we are living our lives, about what we need to be more fully ourselves, about what we value and believe, about what has hurt us emotionally, and how to heal it. Our bodies know which people around us are the ones to bring out the best in us, and which people deplete and diminish us. Our bodies know what is the right next step to bring us more fulfilling and rewarding lives. Quite big claims, but I was quite taken by it when I read that. And that's from a book on focusing technique. Now, I'm not saying all go and learn focusing because it'll make you better buddies, not at all. I'm just telling you something I've worked on. And why don't, why am I enthusiastic about it? Why is this not another fad? Because it's deepening my awareness of my body. That's why, because it augments my existing practice. And for a long time, I was quite a cerebral guy, kind of lived up here. I'm really finding it very exciting, getting more in touch with the breadth of my awareness. And so, I tried to focus in the other day, and I came across this image of my heart in a veil, this image of my heart in a veil. And it's entirely personal. It's probably not going to mean that much to you. But it meant so much to me. My body was flooded with relief. I'd found something. That's my inner poetry of, this, the poetry of me talking with my body. I have to learn it. Every time I do it, I have to learn it afresh. I'm suggesting that if you're interested in exploring mindfulness of body, you kind of go on a wonderful journey where you work out what is your way of talking to yourself, of listening to yourself. Okay, so I'll just finish up. We've looked at attitudes to the body throughout the Buddhist tradition, and seen some basic requirements for practising the mindfulness of the body, from the Hinayana Sutta, the Kaya Gati Sata Sutta. We've heard some promises of how far this could take us, all the way to a kind of insight. There was the challenge to our ways of seeing the body that it was more a process than a fixed form. So I did talk a bit about Rupa, and I said maybe one of the reasons we find it hard to see things as they really are, is because we don't actually see our body as it really is, in substantial impermanence and unsatisfactory. It's because we're not operating, we're not seeing things from a dharmic perspective. So I talked a bit about Rupa, and what Rupa means, that actually these are rather fluid processes. They're not fixed things. There's a further challenge to go and lie on the icy couch of our basic experience, and to learn the language needed to stay there on that couch, to actually stay there. I said it was uncomfortable to stay there, when I started to practise focussing a bit, and to some extent working with Bodhi Dhaka as well, which I'll mention in a minute, helped me stay on the couch and stop it just being uncomfortable, was getting into dialogue with it, listening to it. What's it saying to me? So, enjoying the new type of language, where words, concepts and images serve something less substantial, but definitely there, this stuff is really subtle to when you start with, the intimate poetry of our inner experience. Because finally the great gift of the body is that it's always present, and we can face up to the brutality of fact that we may eventually realise that the body's natural state is blissful. So, I have to, I feel, duty-bound to say one last thing, which is, what's all this got to do with other people, Lalatavira? This is very much an introvert talk, wasn't it? Yeah, not much leaping around, being a Bodhi Satva here. Well, I think that the deeper you know yourself, the more potentially you can know others. I'm not saying it's automatic, I think the more potentially you can know others. And the reason I say this, is that, well, actually, maybe a good way to introduce this, is just as the Kaya Gati Sutra exhorts us to become more aware of our own bodies, unsatisfactoriness and permanence and substantiality, as a path to seeing it around us. So, maybe our own inner poetry, our own inner dialogue, can help us to see the poetry and others. And I learnt this of the friend of my heart, Bodhi Dhaka. So, I'll just embarrass you for a minute, my dear friend, who works a lot with subtle Bodhi energies. And what's very interesting about being with him, is that I find him very, very empathic with people. He'll really surprise me sometimes by going, "You're feeling a bit..." I go, "Yeah, I am, how do you know?" And I think that's because he works a lot with talking with his, he's aware of himself, he's aware of what's going inside himself, and it makes him much more sympathetic to what's going on with other people. Sometimes surprises me, I say, "You had a good retreat." And he went, "Well, no, no, I was sitting with some very, very difficult emotions for quite a long time." He doesn't impose it on people. He sits there and listens to them and learns from them. It makes him very sympathetic to others. So, I'm hoping that's what's going to happen to me. So, I'll leave you with a final quote, "Change happens in the present. The gift of the Bodhi is that it is always in present time, always here. To move into the part of you that has the power to transform your life, all you need to do is to bring your awareness to your body." Thank you. [applause]
