Eight-Week Course
Week Two: Mindfulness of the Body
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Whether you have been joining us for the course via Zoom or are simply checking our online resources, welcome to Week Two.
To check our Intro page or Week 1, please click the relevant link in the box to the right.
To jump to this week's Home Practices click this button.
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Our theme this week is the breath and awareness of the body breathing.
Astonishingly, we each breathe many more than 20,000 times each day. And this means that each day we breathe in enough air to fill an average size swimming pool.
If you'd like to check out the raisin practice (which we did at the start of the
live session), use this link to access the version at Palouse Mindfulness.
'Because of a false "spiritualism" which rejects or ignores the body and views the human being solely in terms of the reasoning mind, contemporary Christians have often lost touch with that understanding of the human being which sees the human person as an integrated unity of the visible and the invisible, so that they overlook or neglect the positive role played by the body in spiritual life.' Bishop Kallistos Ware.
Bishop Kalistos went on to suggest one result of this outlook is that 'they fail to appreciate Saint Paul’s affirmation: "Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit … glorify God with your body."' (See 1 Corinthians 6:19-20).
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Apparently, Pope John Paul II said much the same thing, stressing that we are unified being of body, soul and spirit. 'We don't just have a body, we are a body. And things that happen to our body happen to us.'
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So, our body is not, as is sometimes imagined, 'like a rental car that we use for a while and then hand back.' Rather our body is to be valued as an extravagant gift. For it is in and through our body that we live and move and have our being, and also have opportunities to grow in faith, and hope and love — and so become all that we are called to be.
And as I discuss in a side-bar note, according to the Scriptures and Christian tradition, the body has an eternal destiny (see here). Of course, we don't know quite what that will mean; indeed, even St Paul (convinced though he was of the resurrection) claimed to know that! (See 1 Corinthians 15, especially from verse 12 onwards.) But it is something not to discount.
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Practices which look to nurture body-awareness are foundational in all mindfulness course, even those with a purely secular outlook. And the following few paragraphs have relevant to all mindfulness course.
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The value of the body-scan
Body, mind, emotions
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A key thing in mindfulness practice is the recognition of the constant interaction between our body, our mind and our emotions. What is happening in any one of these will effect (in some sense) what is happening with the other two. For example, we might think of sadness or anxiety as principally something to do with the emotions, but sadness is felt in the body (and shows in the body) and it also affect the thinking.
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For example, when we are anxious our thoughts race, our body tenses, our feelings and mood go all over the place. But this interplay, this interaction goes two ways. We can calm our emotions by such things as breathing more slowly or by visualising a calm scene or a happy time in our lives. On the other hand, by breathing with short, quick, shallow breaths we can soon make ourselves feel anxious.
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Practices like the body-scan can help us in a number of ways.
First, the body-scan can simply help us get to know ourselves better. We can being to experience in a new way something both of the wonder of the body and of its complexity. We can learn to appreciate it more and be be more grateful for it, even though (let's face it) for most of us at one level, our bodies aren't perhaps exactly what we'd like them to be.
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Secondly, Each time we practice the body-scan will are invited to focus on various areas of the body. One benefit of that is that gives us opportunities to learn to focus, and an ability to focus is valuable in all areas of our life.
Coincidentally, trying to focus will also give us opportunities to see how hard we find it and how wayward and keen to wander our minds really are. (That is another valuable — if humbling — piece of self-awareness too.) For most of us, seeing just how chaotic our minds can be comes as a bit of a shock. Learning how wayward they are is often said to be the first lesson of mindfulness. Yet seeing how wayward our mind is also an opportunity to practise self-compassion.
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Thirdly, the body-scan can help show us how body, mind, and emotions continuously interact. And this can be an extraordinarily valuable lesson.
In very general terms, they help us learn more about ourselves and about some of those habits, often deeply ingrained, which keep us tied to the past.
I'm thinking both of unhelpful patterns of thought and emotion, and also of unhelpful habits of such things as bodily posture. If we are gloomy we tend to slump; if we habitually slump we can find it difficult, both figuratively and literally, to look up. All manner of physical illnesses can cause changes to our emotional state or to our thinking and in how we see, interpret or understand things.
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A fourth upside the body-scan is simply this: it can be enjoyable. Mindfulness teachers say that the body-scan is not simply a relaxation practice. And that is quite right: sometimes the main outcome will be a greater awareness of how tense or uncomfortable our body is. And yet, a body-scan session will often lead to us feeling more at ease and at home in our bodies.
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So, the advice remains: try to begin body-awareness practices with no particular expectations about the outcome or about how we 'should feel'. And whatever the outcome of a session, we can have at the back of our minds the conviction that God's ultimate aim is that we should know 'ease and peace and fulness of life, life flowing freely.' and if that is his ultimate aim, it is very appropriate that our body-scan session will often give us a taste of that free-flowing life.'
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Learning to be with feelings as we experience them now, in the body opens the way for a more creative response and a richer life — and for many of us that will also be a less fearful and less fear-driven life.
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Week Two Home Practice
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Remember: Go gently. Do what you can, as you can, when you can. No need to be idealistic about what you should do, but perhaps be optimistic about what you might do.
The suggestion is to do two ten-minute practices on six days out of seven and to allow yourself one day off.
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​1) Once each day, do a body scan. Guided sessions of various length are available here. Perhaps at least once in the week try one of the longer versions. Access guided practices are available on the Resources Page.
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2) Once each day, do a simple 'Loving-kindness practice'. For a simple version (about 14 minutes) click here. (If ever you want to skip the introduction and jump straight through to the guided practice, start at 3 minutes 40 seconds.)
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3) Also, maybe, if or when you think of it, pause and simply take three deeper, slower, longer, unhurried breaths. Then simply, for a moment or two, check-in with body, mind, and feelings. Then simply move on into whatever in your day comes next. Keep it simple. For guided practices, click here.
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Always with all our practices, it's probably best not to be over-ambitious,
but it's also a good thing to be optimistic.
For example, on days when you don't feel you can't be bothered or are tempted to cut things short, well, no great problem. But perhaps give it a try, even a little one; you might find things turn out better than you'd imagined. You could always try a three-breath pause. We can usually find time for one or two of those!
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Feeling resistance to practising? One possibility when we feel resistance or reluctance — and this can be very useful — is simply notice our resistance. No need to fight it or struggle to change it. Just notice it, without criticism or judgment, and without trying to analyse or explain where the resistance comes from. Oddly enough, our resistance often changes when we meet it with kindness.
Some final thoughts ...
A dramatic and wonderful transformations can come about as we learn to relate to our emotions and habitual patterns of thought, not just through our heads and our thinking, but rather through feeling these emotions and thought patterns in our bodies. And as we learn to relate to feelings and emotions though how they affect us physically, bodily so we can find that we get less 'entangled' in them, less caught up in them, less often run-around by them. It's often our thinking about what's happening that entangles or ensnares us in unhelpful patterns.
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Where do these patterns come from? They are patterns established in the past, patterns that have their origin in our efforts either to keep ourselves safe or help us thrive and 'get on'. The way these patterns have arisen and become established is something like this ...
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Some emotion or strong feeling comes upon us and either we don't like it and try to flee it or fight it, or if we do like it, we try to cling to it. We needn't judge ourselves for these decisions. We were doing, at the time, the best we knew how. And to some extent, these reactions worked for us; that's how they became established in us.
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Now, when similar thoughts or feelings arise, ones we spontaneously perceive as either pleasant or unpleasant we tend to fall back on one of our pre-established patterns. This happens so quickly we don't realize what's happening. We don't have the time or 'space' to make a different choice. We're programmed and operating on autopilot. We are in familiar territory. Life is 'relatively' safe. (Of course it is: we've been here before, perhaps many times!) But because these reactions are grounded in experiences in the past and decisions we made in the past, these reactions limit (almost smother) our experience of life as it is now. On autopilot, life is safe (more or less), but it is stale.
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And if we try to break these patterns, all too often we find ourselves seemingly powerless. We're caught up in a flood of thoughts and feelings, all in the realm of hopes and fears, pleasures and pains. Entangled like this, we lose our freedom.
Don't forget that there's no need here for self-criticism or self-judgement. At one time, the decisions that came to be 'programmed' into us did indeed work for us, more or less. That's why they came to be programmed; we were doing the best we knew how. Today, in some fashion, these patterns still work, and up to a point, they still serve us. But now we have the possibility of doing better.
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Core Beliefs: Key Ideas
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Whenever something difficult or 'tricky' comes up for us (perhaps during the
body scan, but in fact, anywhere in life), if we can look to meet that difficulty
not with complaint or criticism but with compassion and kindness, that can
begin to change us deep within: Healing comes through kindness.
As a counterpart to this, whenever any sense of well-being arises, if we can give ourselves time to appreciate the sense of well-being, dwell with it (maybe even just ten seconds), and offer gratitude, that can have a transformative effect on us: Growth comes through gratitude.
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Undergirding all this, faith, true trust in God, comes as we open to the possibility that, however life seems to us just now, perhaps there is more going on than we can immediately see, and that it is perhaps better than we can see,
or even imagine.
St Paul write of the one 'who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine ...
according to his power that is at work within us ... (Ephesians 3:20 NIV)
God is love, and his divine 'power' is perfused with compassion, kindness, love. (See 1 John 4:7-8)
Click the titles and links below to jump to the other pages from this course.
Week 2 Practice Journal
​Click the icons to access or download the practice journal in PDF and Word formats.
The PDF version should download on any system. Print it off then write on it by hand. The Word version can be typed into using MS Word or something similar. (After opening the Word version you may have to 'enable editing' before you can type into the documety.)
Important Reminder
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God is good, and on our side, and wants the best for us.
He is always at work for our good —
In all things and at all times, God is at work to help us come to that fulness of life he want us to know, share and enjoy.
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It is out of love that God creates us.
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His desire is that we should come to fulness of life in him.
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To that end he enabled everything in creation to serve his purposes.
Bishop Kallistos Ware (1934-2022) Bp Kallistos was no anti-intellectual. For almost forty years he taught History and Theology at Oxford University. He published many books and academic articles.
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Among his profound insights this:
'It is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question. It's task, rather, is to make us progressively aware of a mystery; for
God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder.'
​For more on Bishop Kallistos try this link.
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Psalm 139: A psalm of David
Verses 1-18
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Lord, you have searched me,
and you know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out
and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
Before a word is on my tongue
you, Lord, know it completely.
You hem me in behind and before,
and you lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.
Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths,
you are there also.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
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For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together
in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together
in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were
written in your book.
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The Value of the Body:
Some Christian Perspectives
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(By the way, you don't have to believe any of the the things outlined here just because I or the Church say so. See this link for suggestions about how to manage such things as doubt and uncertainty.)
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Our body is a gift of God, though that simple fact has not always been appreciated by the Church. And yet at the very heart of Christian tradition lie two extraordinary claims.
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The first is that 2000 years ago, the eternal Son of God took flesh ('incarnate' means literally, 'in-fleshed') and he lived, died and rose again in his physical body and in this physical world. Thereby he demonstrated that the human body has inestimable value. If a human body is good enough for God, it will be good enough for us too!
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The first is that 2000 years ago, the eternal Son of God took flesh ('incarnate' means literally, 'in-fleshed') and he lived, died and rose again in his physical body and in this physical world. Thereby he demonstrated that the human body has inestimable value. If a human body is good enough for God, it will be good enough for us too!
(In fact, the early generations of Christians fought very hard to defend this belief. For the very idea can sound like nonsense and wasn't something that any of the surrounding cultures easily accepted. It's not just the cross, but the very idea of incarnation that was 'Folly to the Greeks and a scandal to the Jews.' (See 1 Cor. 1:23)
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The second 'challenging idea', is similar. On the cross Jesus offered himself to the Father, and died a physical death; and then three days later, he rose again to new life—and central to the belief in the resurrection is the conviction that this new resurrection life is indeed a physical and embodied life. The mainstream Christian Church has never taught merely the survival of the soul; it has always taught the resurrection of the body.
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Importantly for us, we ourselves are created as a unified whole: body, mind, spirit. We are both physical beings and spiritual beings; beings of beings of body, mind and emotion. We live and move and have our being in and through our bodies, and in and through our minds and our emotions. And in fascinating ways the various aspects of our make-up interact or interplay; what we are thinking and feeling has their effect on our bodies, and vice versa. Body, mind, and emotions are intimately connected, and at best, they support one another and together enable our growth towards fullness of life, fulness of being.
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it is our life in this physical word of space and time, our life in our physical bodies and with ordinary, minds and emotions, that give us opportunities to grow in faith and hope and love — and come in due course to share in fulness of eternal, resurrection life.
Transferable skills ...
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One valuable 'spin-off' from practicing body-awareness is that the various skills we learn are, so to speak, transferable. For example, the ability to focus on areas of the body 'transfers' to other aspects of life. We find we can focus better while reading or watching TV, More importantly, we can focus better when listening to a friend unload their worries.
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Another spin-off comes as we learn to experience sensations in the body without judgment. This can transfer to every other aspect of our life. We become less judgmental of others and less judgmental of ourselves too. Non-judgement can come to characterize our relationship to other people generally and even to life as a whole. (See Matt 7:1-2.)
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Most importantly, the kindliness we learn to practise towards our wandering minds can come to characterize our disposition towards other people and also change our whole outlook on life.
God is light
and in him is no
darkness at all
1 John 1:5
Always be kindly towards yourself. You are doing the best you know how ...
though you also have the possibility of doing better.
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And don't forget the same applies to everyone else too.
Believe it or not, like it or not, they're also doing the best they know how ...
though they too will always have the possibility of doing better.