Orientation In The Body

Last night, I was leading meditation online at the Natural Dharma Fellowship in VT. I teach there about twice a year. As usual, we did some somatic meditation. I thought I would share what they seemed to value most.

At some point during meditation guidance, I almost always mention our orientation in the body. I ask people to bring their awareness a little backward in the body, toward the front of the spine.

The front of the body can feel very frenetic and busy. This is because the front of the body is oriented toward the future. It’s full of speculation and anxiety. The true center is not busy but very spacious. This is because the center is in the ever-expanding present moment.

There is an energetic channel that runs along the front of the spine. After a bit of practice, the body almost effortlessly arranges itself around that channel instead of trying to sit up straight using muscles and effort. The nature of the space in that channel is known as unborn awareness. This awareness is not conditioned or influenced by anything. It is beyond the reach of the three poisons of grasping, rejecting, and ignoring.

When we back up a little in the body, we taste this unborn awareness, our original face, as it’s known in Zen. It is our nature, before it is occluded by concepts and emotional reactions.

There is a mind training slogan (lojong 3) that says, “Examine the nature of unborn awareness.” One way to examine is to experience, and one way to experience is to simply sit quietly and play with shifting the orientation of the awareness in your body backward and forward until you find a place that feels spacious and open. You can ask, “does this have any attributes?” Is it afflicted in any way by existential suffering?

Try it and see what you find. See how long you can dwell in that space.