Thankfully, mindful practices get very specific in giving us both the why and how we do it.
---
Meditation practice often begins with techniques for bringing us to an awareness of our bodies. This is especially important in a culture such as ours, which has neglected physical and instinctual life.
With awareness, we can cultivate a willingness to open to physical experiences without struggling against them, to actually live in our bodies. As we do so, we feel more clearly its pleasures and its pains. Because our culture teaches us to avoid or run from pain, we do not know much about it. To heal the body we must study pain.
However, most often the kind of pains we encounter in meditative attention or not indications of physical problems. They are the painful, physical manifestations of our emotional, psychological, and spiritual holdings and contractions. The Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich called these pains our muscular armor, the areas of our body that we have tightened over and over in painful situations as a way to protect ourselves from life's inevitable difficulties. As we sit still, our shoulders, our backs, our jaws, or our necks may hurt. Accumulated knots in the fabric of our body, previously undetected, begin to reveal themselves as we open. As we become conscious of the pain they have held, we may also noticed feelings, memories, or images connected specifically to each area of tension.
As we gradually include in our awareness all that we have previously shut out and neglected, our body heals. Learning to work with this opening is part of the art of meditation. We can bring an open and respectful attention to the sensations that make up our bodily experience. In this process, we must work to develop a feeling awareness of what is actually going on in the body.
When you meditate, try to allow whatever arises to move through you as it will. Let your attention be very kind. Layers of tensions will gradually release, and energy will begin to move. Places in your body where you have held the patterns of old illness and trauma will open.
