The Balanced Body and the Middle Way

For the most part, Buddhism has never placed much emphasis on the body. The vast majority of Buddhist schools concentrate on the mind as the primary arena of practice, treating the body as something secondary, like a side street worth exploring.

The problem with this attitude is that bodily experience provides the grounding sensation the mind needs. When this is lost, the mind can easily drift into rarefied realms that, however elevated they may seem, are only a shadow of the consciousness that meditation practices are designed to reveal. The mind ultimately wants to anchor itself in the present sensation of the body, not escape from it. If you want a balanced mind, you need to create a balanced body to support it.

Alignment, Relaxation, and Resilience

When the body is out of balance, it must create constant tension to compensate for gravity's pull. This tension will show up as mental chatter. A truly balanced body, by contrast, generates a relaxation that naturally and spontaneously supports an awake mind. In the words of Sasaki Roshi, “The Buddha is the center of gravity.” Finding your own center of gravity means aligning your body's energy field with the Earth's gravitational field.

This balance emerges through the conscious embodiment of three basic principles: alignment, relaxation, and resilience.

Alignment: We usually think of gravity as a force we must fight against to stay upright. But gravity actually works as a source of support for structures properly aligned around a predominantly vertical axis.

Relaxation: A human body that becomes aligned in this way can then begin to relax. It doesn't need to tense its muscles to compensate for gravity's force, because its aligned structure provides all the support necessary. By releasing its tensions, the body can literally surrender its weight, and the mind can yield to gravity without collapsing.

Resilience: To maintain an upright and relaxed posture, a balanced body begins making subtle, spontaneous adjustments and movements. If the body resists this natural impulse to move and tries to stay rigid, it generates tension and loses its relaxation.

Of these three principles, resilience may be most challenging for Buddhist practitioners taught to sit completely still so the mind becomes still too. Yet stillness implies quietness, not rigidity. The Zen poet Ikkyu reminds us: “Hardening into a Buddha is wrong.” If you hold your body rigid, your mind becomes quite agitated and active. If you allow subtle movements of resilience to flow through your body, the mind naturally becomes calmer and you remain relaxed and alert. The real point of playing with balance is that it lifts the curtain of muscular tension that normally hides bodily sensations. In the Buddha's words, “Everything that arises in the mind begins flowing with a sensation in the body.” If we remain unconscious of these sensations because of constant imbalance and muscular tension, we remain unconscious of the mind's depths and lose access to the full mental states the Buddha describes. But when the body is vibrantly present, the mind is naturally clear and profound. Trying to manifest a clear mind without engaging with your body's experience is like trying to drive your car away without turning the key in the ignition.

Though the principles of alignment, relaxation, and resilience can guide you in exploring your body's relationship with gravity, balance cannot be imposed from outside; it must be felt from within. This discovery of sensation is the practice. Balance never arrives as a final static state or an achieved goal. It's something to play with constantly, a dance and a practice that never end.

An Exercise in Balance

Stand for a moment, barefoot on the ground, with your feet touching.

Visualize the major segments of your body, your feet, lower and upper legs, pelvis, abdomen, chest, neck, and head, as building blocks a child has stacked one on top of another. If these blocks are stacked carefully, one precisely on top of the other, the stack stands. But if they aren't, the column will probably collapse to the ground. With the least possible effort, feel these major segments of your body aligning, one on top of the other, just like a child's building blocks.

Alignment has a distinct sensation of comfort and effortlessness, so be careful not to create tension while seeking a more vertical relationship between these body segments. Then, with your feet firmly planted on the ground, begin to sway your body slowly as a unit, side to side, front to back.

Start making these movements quite large, almost to the point of falling. Feel what it's like to be out of alignment, then feel the contrast as your body returns to its vertical structure. When the body moves away from alignment, you can feel the tension and the need to brace yourself; when it returns to a more aligned structure, this tension and bracing disappear. Keep swaying and oscillating randomly, gradually making movements more and more subtle. Eventually you'll reach a place where the body barely sways at all.

Though this place may feel strange, it will also bring a sense of rightness. The body simply holds itself, supported by gravity. This is your place of alignment. Now begin to relax. Relaxation is nothing more than surrendering your body's weight to gravity. Because your body is aligned, you can do this without falling. Starting from your head, feel the tension in your body literally releasing. As long as the tension releases directly through the building block below, you'll remain standing easily.

Now, can you release your mind the same way? Spiritual teachers tell us to let go of the mind. Can you feel what it would be like to take this instruction literally?

This new place of balance will likely feel flexible and uncertain. Wonderful. True balance is never stable and motionless. A balanced body is constantly, resiliently moving. Feel how natural it is to allow these subtle, spontaneous movements to happen. Keep surrendering and letting go. Play with your alignment. Release your tensions. Follow whatever movement needs to happen to keep you standing and relaxed.

Keep monitoring the feelings and sensations in your body. They are the guides that help you maintain balance effortlessly. These sensations and feeling tones will constantly shift. You cannot hold onto any of them; you simply need to keep letting them go, moment by moment. What is your mind doing? Notice how your body immediately loses its balance when you get lost in thought. Let the tension release again, allow your body to move like a prayer flag in a gentle breeze, and watch the thoughts disappear without effort.

Breath

Let's look at one of Buddhism's favorite objects of contemplation: the breath. In most schools, the breath is presented as an object of observation and concentration for the mind. We count it. We watch it moving in and out of the nostrils. We observe how it makes our belly rise and fall.

Though this is very useful as an object of concentration, the Buddha never wanted us to observe it as if we were watching a parade from a safe distance. He wanted us to go into its core so that the act of being aware of ourselves merges with the act of breathing, so that we become the breath itself and can experience how breathing, body, and being are one thing, inseparably.

As the Buddha tells us in the Satipatthana Sutra, when you inhale, do so with your whole body. Then, when you exhale, make sure your whole body participates in this act the same way.

To breathe with your whole body, you must feel the whole thing completely, every cell and sensation, vibrantly and palpably alive. You cannot simply retreat into your mental observation post, passively analyzing as the breath moves in and out, and expect to feel this fundamental unity between your breath and your body.

Let your entire body become the organ of breathing. The act of breathing doesn't need to be confined to the mouth, windpipe, lungs, ribs, and diaphragm. It can be felt moving through your whole body like a wave moving through water, causing subtle movements in every joint. Such breathing will massage your entire body and stimulate even more sensations to arise.

This unrestricted pattern of breathing, however, only becomes truly accessible when the body is balanced. The tension and bracing necessary to keep an unbalanced body upright will act as barriers to the breath's free movement, so it remains shallow, with sensations obscured. Bring balance to the body and breathing can become an extraordinary event that breaks open the internal knots of an obscured mind and dulled sensations.

Surrender to your next inhalation, let the breath breathe you, and at the same time relax your body as much as you can. Feel all your energies, all your sensations, from head to feet, leaving none out. Go deeply into a place where you can feel your whole body at once as a unified, relaxed field of sensation. Find this place and then surrender to the full power of inhalation and exhalation, in and out, again and again.

Don't force the breath, but at the same time don't settle or restrict yourself. Simply surrender to its innate power. It will open by itself, organic and natural, sometimes gently, sometimes explosively. If you can surrender to the breath this way, it will take you on an ever-deeper journey into still-unmapped regions of your body, where held and unfelt sensations are simply waiting to be poked awake. Over time, as the breath melts and heals the restrictions toward their freest expressions, it will purify you from head to feet.

This Body, Precisely

Remember the declaration of Zen Master Hakuin: “This body, precisely, is the Buddha.” When consciousness and the felt presence of the body combine as a single, fused phenomenon, awakening occurs naturally. Consider this instruction from one of the most famous texts of Vajrayana Buddhism, “The Songs of Mahamudra,” by Tilopa:

Do nothing with the body except relax.

Let the mind rest in its natural, unformed state.

Become like a hollow bamboo.

The only thing you will ever need to do with the body is relax. But again, this happens only if you play with your balance. Without aligning the body, there is no way to relax completely, and without surrendering to the spontaneous, resilient movements that naturally want to happen through the body, relaxation cannot be sustained over time.

The ultimate aim of balance is that it allows the stream of vital force, felt as an endless flow of sensations, to pass freely and continuously through the entire channel of the body, like wind passing through the empty center of a hollow piece of bamboo.

U Ba Khin, a twentieth-century Burmese meditation master and proponent of one of the few Buddhist practices oriented toward a body-based approach, called this bodily force nibbana dhatu, literally, “the force that generates the illuminated mind.” Once this force is activated, it works like a fire running through and burning away old debris and brush, preparing the soil for new growth. When nibbana dhatu becomes operational, it runs through body and mind and burns away the residue and accumulation that keep the illuminated mind contained and hidden. Because any blockage of the free flow of energy in the body will hinder the passage of this force, only when your body becomes like hollow bamboo will you become able to experience and benefit from its purifying action.

If you play with balance, whether sitting in formal practice or moving through life, the mental conditioning you aspire to will gradually arise as a natural consequence. But don't think there is a perfect endpoint to this balance, that you will reach some definitive state of equilibrium. Such a condition doesn't exist, and it would be a great imprisonment if it did. From breath to breath, sensation to sensation, everything moves and changes. Balance is constantly adjusting itself. Simply keep yourself open to this movement, this continuous dance of balance.

Originally published at lionsroar.com