The Breakthrough by Ajahn Amaro
Book Extracts
While meditating we can get so wrapped up in the mind that we forget the body. Meditation master Ajahn Amaro gives us a method for reintroducing the body back into the meditation.
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As the meditation proceeds, work with bringing the attention to settle on the breath. We can become very focused on working with the mind, following the patterns of distraction and letting go, developing more and more of a focus on the breathing. But through getting wrapped up in the world of the mind, we can become oblivious to what the body is doing. The body drifts into the background, ceases to be attended to, so it’s always helpful, to let go of feeling the breath every ten or fifteen minutes during the sitting, and bring attention to the posture for a few moments. Has tension come back into our jaw? Are our teeth clenched or are the muscles around our eyes tightened up? Is our body slumped over? Are we sitting in a listless, crumpled way?
Has our stomach tightened up? How is the body? What kind of changes
have taken place while we were busy trying to focus on the mental world? By paying attention to the body and bringing that quality of reflection and investigation into it, you may notice that there’s tension once again, even though you relaxed everything at the beginning of the sitting. The habits of resisting, stressing and fretting easily
creep in and take over again. So if you find that your stomach has tightened up, let it soften and relax. If the muscles around your eyes are tense and tight, loosen them. If you bring attention to the body and discover that even though you thought you were quite attentive, you’re now hunched over, notice that.
Arouse more energy; invite the spine to straighten. Bring energy into the body, flowing up through the spinal column. Re-establish that quality of alertness, attention. Then, once you have re- established that integrated balance of energy and relaxation in the posture, bring the attention back to the breath. In this way we are bringing into focus the realms of both the rūpa and the nāma, the world of the body and the world of the mind, and respecting how they affect and influence each other.
The Breakthrough by Ajahn Amrao, 2017 Amravati Publications
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