Growing up, I was immersed in an environment that worshipped feats of mind, to the almost total exclusion of the body. Apart from compulsory school sports on Thursday after school, I spent 5½ days each week studying, studying, studying. Perhaps that’s why I eventually gravitated toward practicing mindfulness in my 50s. But recently, my mediation teachers have been suggesting a slightly different approach, one they call cultivating embodied awareness.
“Embodied awareness” evokes for me what meditation is about.
Here’s why.
Mindfulness and embodied awareness
The word mindfulness nudges us to focus on our mind’s experience. Being unattached to those pesky thoughts that come and go when we meditate.
In contrast, the description embodied awareness reframes meditation as encompassing both mind and body. It encourages us to extend our awareness to include moment-to-moment bodily sensations. Aware of a muscle ache, the tick of a clock, and a breeze on our skin without getting snagged by these impressions. Being aware that we are living embodied.
Yet we are not just our mind and our body. To me, meditation is experiencing the mystery of who we are and being this mystery. My meditation practice is to notice but avoid attachment to my thoughts and sensations.
Have your heart be where your feet are
For some time, I have been working on developing a daily practice for living more in gratitude. Accepting loving kindness and feeling gratitude are additional dimensions of my meditative and living experience, rooted in both my mind and my body. While cultivating embodied awareness, my teachers have prompted me to “have my heart where my feet are”, a teaching of Muhammad, the founder of Islam.
To me, this is a helpful suggestion that highlights another facet of meditation that connects my mind and body.
Meditation as embodied awareness
There is no universal definition of meditation. And that’s OK. But I now practice to experience embodied awareness when I meditate—and as I live my life.
Hi Adrian, I always enjoy your articles when I run across them, this one included. And I have a thought, more a musing on an issue I don’t believe anybody really knows the answer to. Which is that *we* must be something more than simple flesh and bio/electric reactions. Most thoughtful people have run across this issue. We simply must have some other “spark” or soul.
And in fact, people are of insulted by the idea of their mind, their self-awareness, being solely contained within their physical being. But why is this insulting? Is instead our “self” contained within the physical universe around us? That would still be physical existence, just a difference in scale. But we crave existing as some magical invisible force — why? Even though it is the most obvious and crude of explanations, simple fear of death still fits this most motivation best to me.
Anyway, I was looking for no answer here. Just an innocent victim to ramble to, inspired by your article there. And because my whole life I’ve taken the idea for granted, because it is SO popular, that there must be some extra ‘spark’ of some kind that makes us “us”. Why is it somehow insulting to people to think we could really “just” be what we can see and detect? I think it’s stunning in its complexity and beauty!
You know the classic: ‘Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?’ Douglas Adams ——
Hi Todd,
Thank you for sharing your musings! As a recovering physicist, I think and feel that the universe we know (and know we don’t know) is such an incredible place that trying to be more specific about whether we are “just” our minds and bodies or something more is ultimately irrelevant. In-the-moment enjoyment and gratitude while knowing I will die someday is enough for me.