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Mindfulness of the body: postures
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Try focusing on how your body feels while you're walking.
Buddhists love lists and categories, and the four foundations of mindfulness have plenty of both. Mindfulness of the body is the first of the four, and it has six practices attached to it, so it's clearly important.
Beginning meditators sometimes think that the initial emphasis on breathing and mindfulness of the body is just a way station until they can get to the juicy stuff, which surely is more mental and esoteric. Nothing could be further from the truth. Mindfulness of the body is emphasized because it bring us into the present moment. The mind often isn't present, but the mind can't help but be.
Coming back to the body is a kind of coming home. When you do that, you can see the choices that are available so you don't have to act out familiar patterns without thinking about them.
The six mindfulness practices of the body are mindfulness of breathing, postures, activities, anatomical parts, elements (earth, air, fire, and water), and the corpse in decay. Breathing was covered in a previous article. Mindfulness of postures refers to the four main meditation postures: sitting, walking, standing, and lying down. In each case, the point is the awareness, to know that you are doing them as you're doing them. You start to see better how the body affects the mind and vice versa.
You can try it in everyday life: When you're sitting, either in meditation or just at your desk, pay attention to how you're sitting and how your posture affects your mind and your mind affects your posture. Feel free to post comments or e-mail me with what you find.
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