The Body in Meditation

Most introductions to meditation present it as primarily a mental activity. You sit, you direct your attention, you notice when the attention wanders, you return it. The body is infrastructure, the thing you arrange in a suitable position before the real practice begins.

This framing misses something significant. The body is not infrastructure for the mental practice of meditation. It's a full participant in the practice, with its own intelligence and its own responses and its own contribution to what the practice produces. What happens in the body during meditation is as important as what happens in the mind, and attending to the body as part of the practice rather than as a precondition for it changes what the practice can do.

Why the Body Is Always Present

The body is present in meditation in a way that it isn't always present in ordinary life. This sounds paradoxical since the body is always physically present. What changes in meditation is the quality of attention to the body.

In ordinary life, most people are significantly disconnected from their physical experience much of the time. The attention is primarily in thought, in the mental activity of planning and remembering and problem-solving and narrating experience, and the body proceeds with its biological business largely outside of awareness. The hunger that builds until it becomes impossible to ignore. The tension in the shoulders that's been there since morning and only becomes noticeable when someone points it out. The breath that happens continuously without ever being felt as a physical event.

Meditation, particularly when it's body-based, asks for a quality of attention to physical experience that ordinary life rarely requires. Not just the breath but the full range of physical sensation, the areas of ease and tension, the temperature of the skin, the contact of the body with the surface it's resting on, the subtle movements of the body with each breath. This quality of attention to the body is different from thinking about the body. It's the direct sensory experience of being embodied, attended to rather than merely happening.

What the Body Contributes to the Practice

The body contributes several specific things to contemplative practice that the mental practice alone doesn't provide.

Grounding. The physical sensations of the body are present-moment experiences. They're happening now, in the current moment, not in the past that memory provides or the future that planning imagines. Attention to physical sensation is therefore attention to the present moment in a direct and immediate way that attention to thought is not. Thought happens in the present moment but its content is almost always about something other than the present moment. Physical sensation is of the present moment. This makes the body a particularly reliable anchor to now.

The body also provides a direct window to the state of the nervous system that thought doesn't always provide. The contracted chest and the held breath are nervous system activation made physical. The softened jaw and the deep exhale are nervous system regulation made physical. Attending to these physical expressions of nervous system states gives you information about what's actually happening in the system that the narrative thought stream may be contradicting or obscuring. The mind can tell itself a story about being fine while the body is expressing the opposite, and the contemplative practice that includes attention to the body provides access to the body's more honest account.

And the body provides a basis for working with emotion that purely mental approaches don't. Emotions are not only mental experiences. They're physical ones. Fear has a location in the body, a quality of physical sensation that's specific and recognizable. Grief has a physical texture. Joy has a physical expression. The contemplative practices that work with emotion through the body, attending to the physical dimension of emotional experience rather than to the narrative or conceptual dimension, tend to produce a different quality of integration than purely cognitive approaches to emotional processing.

Posture as Practice

The posture of meditation is usually presented as a logistical matter, finding a position that's comfortable enough to sustain and stable enough to maintain. This is true as far as it goes, and it doesn't go far enough.

The posture of meditation is itself a practice. The way you hold your body during meditation is both an expression of your current state and an influence on it.

The classic meditation posture, whether seated on the floor with the spine erect or seated in a chair with the feet flat, is designed to produce a specific quality of physical presence. The upright spine without rigidity, balanced between effort and ease. The open chest that allows full breath. The relaxed shoulders and jaw and hands. These are not arbitrary aesthetic choices. They're physical expressions of the quality of presence the practice is trying to cultivate, and maintaining them, gently and without forcing, is part of the practice.

The body that's collapsed or slumped tends to produce a quality of consciousness that's collapsed or slumped. The body that's held rigidly tends to produce a quality of consciousness that's held rigidly. The body that's upright and open and relaxed tends to produce, over time and with practice, a quality of consciousness that has those same qualities.

This is the logic of posture as practice. Not that the right posture is required for meditation, you can meditate in many positions, but that the relationship between body and mind is bidirectional, and the physical expression of wakefulness and ease in the body tends to support the mental expression of wakefulness and ease.

Adjusting posture during practice, when the body has collapsed or tensed, is not a failure of practice. It's part of practice. The body is a participant in what's happening, and attending to it and adjusting it as needed is attending to and adjusting a key element of the practice.

Sensation as Object

Body-based meditation, which uses physical sensation rather than the breath or a mantra as the primary object of attention, is a form of practice that's particularly accessible to people whose relationship to the breath is complicated and particularly useful for people who want to develop a deeper relationship to their somatic experience.

In body scan practice, the attention moves systematically through the body, attending to the sensations present in each area without trying to change them. The instruction is simply to notice what's there. The sensation in the left foot. The quality of sensation in the lower back. The area around the heart. Whatever is present, attended to with curiosity rather than judgment, without trying to produce any particular experience or eliminate any particular sensation.

What this practice develops, over time, is a more detailed and more honest map of the body's experience. Most people have areas of the body that receive very little conscious attention, areas that are effectively outside awareness most of the time. The body scan brings these areas into awareness and tends to reveal things that were happening below the threshold of ordinary attention.

The tension that's been held in a particular area for years, not noticed because it was continuous enough to become invisible. The area of the body that's numb or absent from experience in ways that may be connected to habitual emotional suppression. The areas of ease and aliveness that are present alongside the tension and that ordinary attention misses because it's focused on the problem areas.

This more detailed map of somatic experience is directly useful for creative work in the ways described in the Body and Brain section. The creative person who has developed a more precise awareness of their body's experience has better access to the somatic intelligence that registers when something in the work is right and when it isn't.

Emotion in the Body

One of the most significant dimensions of body-based contemplative practice is its relationship to emotional experience.

The traditional therapeutic approach to emotion is primarily cognitive and narrative. You talk about the emotion. You understand its history and its triggers and its patterns. You develop insight into where it comes from and what it's connected to. This approach is genuinely valuable and it tends to produce a particular kind of relationship to emotional experience, one mediated by narrative and understanding.

The body-based contemplative approach to emotion is different. Instead of narrating the emotion, you attend to its physical dimension. Where in the body is the emotion located? What are the physical sensations associated with it? What does the physical experience of this emotion actually feel like, attended to directly rather than through the layer of narrative about it?

This approach tends to produce a different and sometimes more immediate integration of emotional experience. The grief that's been held at arm's length by years of narrative about it meets its physical dimension in the body, and the meeting tends to produce movement in the emotional material in ways that the narrative alone doesn't always produce.

This is not to say that cognitive and narrative approaches to emotion are not valuable. They are. But the contemplative practices that work with emotion through the body are accessing something that purely cognitive approaches miss, and for many people the body-based approach opens dimensions of emotional processing that the cognitive approach couldn't reach.

The Body After Practice

One of the most reliable signs that a meditation practice is developing well is a change in the quality of physical experience in the hours and days after practice, not just during the practice itself.

The person who has been meditating regularly for months tends to have a different relationship to their body in ordinary life than they did before the practice. More awareness of physical sensations. More noticing of the body's signals in real time rather than after the fact. More access to the breath as a resource in moments of difficulty. More sensitivity to the physical expressions of emotional states, which tends to make those states more available for working with consciously rather than being driven by them without awareness.

This generalization of the practice's effects from the formal session into ordinary life is one of the clearest measures of whether the practice is actually developing anything. The meditation that stays contained within the formal session and produces no change in the quality of awareness in ordinary life may be producing some benefit through the formal practice itself, but the full effect of the practice tends to require that the quality of awareness developed in formal practice begin to carry over into the rest of life.

The body is where much of this carryover tends to be most noticeable, because the body is present and available and providing continuous information that awareness can now access in ways it couldn't before. The more deeply embodied the practice is, the more thoroughly it tends to carry over, because the body is always available as a vehicle for the contemplative quality of attention that the practice is developing.

Arriving in the Body

Here's what the body-based contemplative practice is ultimately pointing toward: the possibility of actually being in your body, in the full and present sense, rather than merely having a body while the attention lives primarily in thought.

Most people spend most of their lives at a significant remove from their physical experience. The body is there, below the level of ordinary attention, doing its biological work, sending its signals, expressing the nervous system's states, carrying the emotional content that thought is simultaneously narrating about. And the attention is mostly elsewhere, in the past or the future or in the narrative about experience rather than in the experience itself.

The contemplative practice that includes the body is a practice of arriving, of bringing the quality of attention that's usually in thought down into the physical experience of being alive. Not permanently, not as a rejection of thought's capacities, but as a practice of returning to the body the way the breath practice is a practice of returning to the breath.

You have a body. It's been here your whole life, doing its extraordinary work without your full attention.

It has things to tell you.