Inner Work

For the week of July 9, 2007

Out of Our Mind, Into Our Body

We live our life primarily in our thoughts, a world apart from reality. In moments that place little or no demand on our attention, we immediately fall into an inner reverie, passively following various associative streams of thought bouncing through our mind. We take this as normal and do not even notice that we are lost in thought. We even believe we are our thoughts. We mistakenly believe that this private inner voice of our thoughts is who we are. This tendency to identify with thoughts severely diminishes our experience of life, narrowing it down to long-held attitudes and mental patterns.

To extricate ourselves from our self-generating thoughts, we can repeatedly shift our focus to our body, to being aware of the sensations of our living body, to be in the sensitive energy of our inner body. Through practice we can train our perceptions to open to vivid body awareness. By actively attending to our body sensations, we move out of the automated flow of thinking and into contact with life.

Our thoughts, however, do not stop, nor do they relinquish their powerful attraction on us. Thoughts exert an almost irresistible pull on us. So if we practice sensing, we find ourselves at the center of a competition in which we waiver between our intention be in direct body awareness and our attraction to the familiar terrain of our thoughts.

One way out of this dilemma is to relax into awareness both of our body and of our thoughts. We reside in a broad, encompassing awareness, vigilant not to collapse into our thoughts alone. The sensitive energy of the inner body serves as a relatively stable base for awareness to expand to include noticing thoughts as thoughts. From a position of being grounded in awareness of our body, we can much more readily see each automatically-arising thought come and go, see each thought reaching to have itself labeled as “me,” as what “I” think. This seeing relieves our thoughts of some of their stickiness, leaving us freer to notice thoughts as well as other sensory perceptions, freer to be, to breathe, and to live.

For this week, notice how you are in moments that place little or no demand on your attention. Notice your thoughts as just thoughts. Move out of your mind and into sensing your body.

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