Meditating with the Body – Dyana Wells

In the modern world there is a tendency for us to live exclusively through our conceptual minds. We live in bubble worlds of thoughts and emotions, rather than in the world of direct experience. 

The body however experiences itself and the world directly. It is shaped – moment to moment – by its direct interaction with life.

The conceptual mind sees the world through the filter of its own beliefs and expectations. It experiences a second-hand world that tends to play back all the prejudices and preferences developed during a lifetime.

If life has become empty and repetitive, and if it seems banal and meaningless, this is because we have lost the ability to experience the ever-changing miraculous flow directly. Life itself is like a never-ending Aladdin’s cave, offering infinite possibilities of experience. This is one reason meditating with the body is important. It brings us back to the numinous richness of direct experience. 

Thoughts are just thoughts, nothing much at all. To be defined by the thoughts we have about who we are is a shaky place to be. Thoughts have no reality – they change, they aren’t stable, they tend to depend on others to verify them. They can pop just like that. 

By contrast the world of direct experience is all connected up. What we experience directly through the senses, we are connected to. We discover that we have never been separate from the world we experience. 

Through direct experience our world becomes whole again and we are healed. We recognise ourselves in the rustling leaves and the warmth of the sun.

Remember being a child, dancing life into being, at one with the purring cat and the cool sea. The child still lives through the senses, in a wondrous shining universe.

Through meditating with the body our sensing of the world outside opens out again, but significantly our inner sensing also opens up. We rediscover what is it to feel.

– Dyana Wells