A practice map
Exploring the body–heart–mind.
This is a map, not a method. It describes the body, heart and mind as places to rest attention, so that you can find your own way.
Nothing here asks you to believe anything. Every claim is written to be tested against your own experience and let go of if it doesn't land.
No experience needed. Nothing to believe.
The map is not the territory.
An invitation
Begin where something is available.
You could pause here, or keep reading.
Attention might rest with contact beneath you, the movement of breath, a feeling in the heart, a thought, or sound around you. Where attention goes is yours to choose.
Attention can be guided while experience is also allowed to come to you. You can adjust, move elsewhere or stop.
Body, heart and mind are not separate compartments. Distinguishing them can make certain qualities of experience easier to recognise.
Ground and presence
Contact, breath and sensation can make ground and presence discoverable.
Care and courage
Feeling, goodness and relationship can make care and courage discoverable.
Spaciousness and possibility
Thought and awareness can make spaciousness and possibility discoverable.
These are affinities, not promises or fixed boundaries. Ground, presence, care, courage, spaciousness and possibility may pervade the whole of experience.
When safety is not available
The sensations of contact with the ground or the movement of breath may offer support. The breath can slow or deepen when that is helpful. Remembering goodness with the heart is another place attention can rest. Nothing here needs to be forced.
The movement
Effort and rest.
These are not opposite choices. Practice can include guiding attention and letting experience arrive at the same time. Their balance changes from moment to moment.
Gentleness and precision can be present in both effort and rest.
Guide without aggression
Gentleness in effort reduces the self-aggression that can turn practice into another demand.
Attend with clarity
Precision in effort lets experience be seen and attended to clearly.
Let the system move
Gentleness in rest allows the system to move through what it needs to. Rest is not forced.
See what remains
Precision in rest sees clearly what can be let go of and what may still need to be met.
A sense of rigidity may suggest too much effort. Dullness, or being unpresent to the whole experience, may suggest too little. These are not failures; they are part of what can be noticed.
What may follow
Letting go.
Not a technique to perform, but something that may happen when experience is met without aggression and with enough clarity.
The body
The body is always in contact with the present. It is a field of changing sensation with its own non-conceptual intelligence: grounded, immediate, already here.
But we rarely stay with it. We fix our attention elsewhere, often to avoid what feels uncomfortable, and lose awareness of that which is never anywhere but now.
Turn toward sensation
Body scans and walking meditation. Allow your attention to fill the body, deepening your capacity to be with the pleasant, the unpleasant and the neutral alike.
Let awareness diffuse
Rest your attention. Let the body's natural sensitivity become a ground you relax into, and trust its intelligence to hold your life.
What may be discovered
Ground and presence.
Through the body, ground and presence may be recognised as available. They are not produced by the body, and they need not remain confined to it.
The heart
The heart is an organ of attunement. It resonates with our own experience, with others and with the wider world. It carries its own knowing: a reservoir of care, compassion and courage.
Its capacity to feel is endlessly deep, and because it is so deep, we often find our hearts closing to protect us from the fullness of it. Opening the heart is not done by force.
Wish well, on purpose
Loving-kindness. Deliberate warmth, turned toward yourself and then outward, until gentleness begins to feel natural rather than performed.
Let the heart resonate
Begin in the body, then bring awareness to the heart and let its qualities respond on their own.
What may be discovered
Care and courage.
Through the heart, care and courage may be recognised as available. The heart can cohere practice, tempering harshness and the urge to turn it into a goal.
The mind
The mind thinks. That is what it does. Usually we don't notice we're thinking; we're simply lost to it.
Our culture teaches us to meet a complex world through concept and abstraction, and that never quite satisfies, because the world is not a concept. It is an unfathomable, changing reality.
Note thinking as thinking
When you notice you've been thinking, note it, and return. Thought becomes one phenomenon among many, not reality itself.
Open into space
Through body, then heart, then a recognition of the mind as naturally spacious. Let phenomena arise and pass by themselves.
What may be discovered
Spaciousness and possibility.
Through the mind, spaciousness and possibility may be recognised as available. Thought is part of experience, not a problem to overcome, and awareness need not be confined by it.
On the posture
Some suggestions on form
Find the same balance in physical form: precision with gentleness.
Wakeful and at ease, at the same time.
- Place
- Indoors is good. Outdoors can be better: a garden, a doorway, a park bench, or simply the window open. Weather, birdsong and traffic can be part of practice.
- Seat
- Chair, cushion, bench or floor all work. Aim to have your hips a little higher than your knees, so the lower back keeps its natural curve.
- Spine
- Upright without strain. Think of lengthening from the crown of the head. Uprightness here is dignity, not rigidity.
- Hands
- Resting palms down on the thighs or cradled in the lap.
- Face
- Relaxed muscles of the face, mouth closed or lips just separated, tongue soft. Breathe through the nose if you can.
- Eyes
- Open with a soft, wide gaze ~6ft in front of you, or closed. Try both over a stretch of days; they produce noticeably different practices.
- Pain
- Move. Look after your body. Enduring real pain teaches nothing except that practice hurts. Lie down, stand, walk. Do what you have to do.
The point of a map
Making it your own
A map is no use if you only ever read it. Body, heart and mind are yours to distinguish and let become porous again, in whatever order and rhythm experience asks for. Let your practice become a friend.
Ten to thirty minutes is plenty, and sitting regularly matters far more than sitting long. On a hard day, five minutes counts. When you lapse, as everyone does, simply begin again. Beginning again is not a failure. It is the practice.
Practice can help us discover what it does not manufacture.
Ground and presence, care and courage, spaciousness and possibility can be explored as discoverable qualities of experience.
Practising with someone
Want company on the map?
Begin with a conversationPractising in a group is its own thing. That happens over at Beings Club.