Evenly Shared Attention

I remember a woman telling me that it was hard for her to come into her body. As we spoke, I noticed that she was sitting in a way that was collapsed just below the ribs and that her shoulders were hunched forward. All her energy was in her head, thinking about how she couldn’t be in her body. I invited her to lie down on the floor and breathe deeply into her belly.

I encouraged her to let her chest and shoulders open, so that her body could receive the whole of the breath. “Okay,” I said. “Can you breathe down into your chest? Can you breathe down into your solar plexus? Can you breathe down into your belly?”

Her breath was starting to go into places that normally were closed down. Whereas before, her breath had been shallow and mainly confined to her throat and upper chest, now it was filling out her whole body down into her belly. It was quite a revelation for her. Previously, her mind had been trying to figure out how to be embodied. But, actually, she needed the breath to bring that sense of embodiment, not the thinking mind.

We can retrain our body to relax and come into its fullness, then bring that fullness into our formal sitting practice. If you can breathe down into your chest and belly just a few times and let the breath stretch you, there’s already more awareness in the body. The farther down the breath goes, the less of a boundary there will be between the head and the body.

There will gradually be a shift from the head getting all the attention to your attention being more evenly shared throughout the body.

This reflection by Ayya Ānandabodhī is from the book, Leaving It All Behind, (pdf) pp. 25-26.