Body, Mind and Practice
We have the opportunity when in sitting meditation to use the experience to cultivate a mind that becomes ever more still. But we also have the opportunity to wake up to the whole process of how we create attachment and suffering, by being alive to our ongoing relationship to the very posture itself. By just being alive to this relationship on its own can reveal so much of the path to freedom and liberation.
Comments:
This seems to be such a key talk for our group because we spend so much time in sitting meditation. Āloka describes how to use the relationship we have with our body and posture to help uncover and understand the relationship that we have with life. We are asked to question the basic assumptions of “my body” and “my pain”, and to observe how we increase our suffering by feeding, reinforcing, and embellishing the experience. I find it a challenge to look at the mind and body in this new way, particularly the idea that we are trapped by our own attachment to it. Āloka encourages us to bear with restlessness and discover the truth of impermanence as the experience will always naturally go into change. I like the conclusion which is to treat posture as our best friend, and use the opportunity to open to that which is not part of the body or self identity.