Beyond Calmness: How Grounding the Body Transforms Meditation

We've all been there—sitting in meditation, desperately trying to quiet the mental chatter, feeling like we're failing every time a thought arises or an emotion surfaces. I used to think successful meditation meant achieving some blissful state, and when that didn't happen, I'd conclude I was doing something wrong. But what if our entire approach to finding peace is actually keeping us from the very freedom we're seeking?

I'm thinking a lot about this question lately because there's not a singular answer—it's kind of nuanced. Buddhism is full of teachings on how to attain some kind of mental quiescence, stillness, or calm abiding in our meditation. We even have teachings that really emphasize that as a preliminary, meaning if we don't have some ability to place the mind and for it to stay in the present moment, it's very difficult to make progress in more advanced meditations.

Just to get that out of the way, I'm not really challenging that idea. I think it's pretty clear we need a mind that's pliable, that's able to rest in awareness or to abide in the present moment. We need that to some degree in order to move into any other type of meditation because if our mind is just jumping around like a monkey all the time and our thoughts are everywhere, it's going to be impossible to do any kind of other meditative work. That's straightforward and clear.

I guess what I'm really aiming at here is this sort of obsession with calmness versus a practice of awareness that can allow the content of our mind, the content of our physical sensations in the body, as well as emotions to just arise and be. How do we create the space for that? How do we foster more of a practice that allows more to take place? The reason I'm speaking on this is that this perspective has really helped me, and I've seen it help quite a lot of people. Depending on where you're at and where your practice is at, this may or may not help you, but I hope it does.

Here, of course, we do need to pursue what I call a "settled body." This is really the distinction I make for people: I recommend don't seek calmness—seek a grounded body. A grounded body here means that we do some practices to remedy the speediness, the wound-up energy in the body, to allow that to settle.

One way to talk about this, especially from the Tibetan Buddhist traditions, has to do with something we call the wind energy, or "lung." Lung (pronounced: Loong) is the Tibetan word for wind energy, which is a part of our subtle body that often we can't feel, but we can feel its repercussions in the nervous system. Perhaps the nervous system is kind of on top of this subtler body, which is non-physical. The subtle body is usually described as having three different components: the wind energy, the channels, and the essential drops. These are three components of the subtle body that work together for health and well-being, as well as for the mind being pliable and workable for meditation and spiritual practice.

I like this approach because it changed my perspective from this cognitive idea of "Oh, now I need to settle my thoughts," which actually made it worse. It personally gave me more anxiety. About 15 or 16 years ago, I was really forcing myself to concentrate in meditation, which was actually giving me more of a wind energy problem—pressure in my chest, more anxiety, and a kind of speediness.

One of my main teachers, Tsoknyi Rinpoche, pointed out some breathing practices, which I'll share a little bit here, to help ground the energy, to help settle the wind energy. The upward-moving wind energy can get excessive in the chest, throat, and head, and produce various kinds of physical, mental, and emotional reactions. It's kind of like lighting rocket fuel under your reactions—whatever you're experiencing is going to be more intense, including anxiety.

Tsoknyi Rinpoche taught a breath practice of simply breathing in through the nose, breathing into the lower abdomen, and breathing out. We breathe in below the navel, just gently and slowly let the lower abdomen expand like a balloon, and breathe out. For a lot of people, just doing that for 10 minutes works well. When you get good at that, on the inhalation, once you've inhaled and the belly is extended or expanded, you've inhaled below the navel, you just hold the energy/breath there for maybe 5 or 10 seconds, and then you breathe out. When you hold, there should be no tension in the chest, no tension in shoulders if you can, just a little bit of tension in the lower abdomen—but it's still relaxed. The hold just happens on its own as the belly is expanded like a balloon. Either way, you can try both of these approaches. As I said, just breathing in and out, doing belly breathing without holding, can be really helpful in this regard. And then, of course, the hold can add some extra "oomph" to get the wind energy down.

That practice really helped me, as well as just becoming more aware of my felt experience when my body is speedy. Of course, we know what it feels like for the mind to be speedy—there are a lot of rampant thoughts, worries, fears, etc. But there's also a speediness happening in the body. We don't even have to necessarily work with thoughts—we can if we want, but I found this particular approach a little easier and more workable for me, which is just to be with the body, feel the body, and to learn to reduce feeding the speediness. This takes a little bit of time, which is why I taught the breathing practice first, because sometimes we need to do that before we can become more aware of the energy.

The analogy that always comes to mind is sort of like those plastic snow globes with confetti inside. If we're constantly shaking that, all the confetti is going to be all over the place and constantly agitated. But if we just put the snow globe down, the confetti can start to fall to the bottom of the globe, and the water becomes still. It's very similar here—if we just allow the body to be still and we don't feed the energy, we don't feed the thoughts, we just allow things to kind of play out on their own. Of course, this takes awareness, meaning we're aware, and then things play out within awareness. 

This often helps me quite a bit when I'm a little more agitated and the wind energy is more churned up. I might use the breath, but a lot of the time I just feel the feet, feel the lower body, and let things settle, just let things come down.

I think for a lot of people, this is why it's so helpful to go sit in nature, because we don't have our phone, we're not distracted. We may have a lot of thoughts running, but we're just sitting on the ground in nature. I think it's a wonderful way to do these kinds of things—go in your backyard, go sit on the grass. As they say, "go touch grass" and just be there. Work with the breath, then sit with the body, feel the feet especially touching the earth.

So that's the groundedness piece. That's what I recommend—seek groundedness as opposed to calmness. Now, I guess you could argue they're the same thing, and yes, they are similar, but it's a different way to approach it. Often what I'm seeing in myself and others on this topic is an obsession with calmness, which almost takes on its own identity. Sometimes that can turn into a kind of cocoon where we just want to shut everything off. What I've seen in Buddhist practice is actually that we want to do the opposite—we don't want to turn the lights off; we actually want to turn them up! Then we can start to see the nature of suffering. We can see how our thoughts, emotions, and the way we relate to our perceptions and identities are creating suffering. Then we can start to get out of that; we can start to change that relationship.

That's the deeper dive in Buddhism, and that is eventually where the path leads, of course with a motivation of compassion. We don't want to turn the lights off because if we do, we can't see anything, we can't relate to our experience, we can't actually see the machinations that are causing our deeper suffering, pain, stress, and confusion. So instead, I recommend doing these grounding exercises.

Now, the other side of this, once there's some groundedness that we can provide, then the cultivation of awareness can really take place. As I said, pretty much most teachings say we need some groundedness before we can develop more insight through awareness, but either way, we should start practicing awareness.

One teacher, Mingyur Rinpoche, says there are these kinds of experiences we can develop through stillness or in meditative awareness practice. The first one is when the mind's like a waterfall, which means we're kind of overwhelmed by our thoughts—there are a lot of thoughts bubbling up; it's unceasing. But as we meditate more, that waterfall becomes sort of a fast-moving stream down a mountain. As we meditate even more, it becomes a very slow-moving river or stream. Eventually, as someone attains more realization in meditation or a more developed practice, the thinking mind or the mind itself becomes more like a placid lake, still and abiding peacefully. That's an attainment one would seek in meditation.

But Mingyur Rinpoche said even with the waterfall-type experience, when we're having a lot of thoughts and feeling overwhelmed, it can still be a basis for deeper levels of meditation practice. I found that a really helpful instruction to take to heart because then there are two things: one is we emphasize groundedness, and then looking at the mind, looking at its nature, trying to see the nature of thoughts within awareness. So we center awareness a little bit more.

But also, for me, it sort of cut off this "what if" kind of mind—the endless FOMO, what I call "endless meditation FOMO"—of thinking, "Oh, I need to get this particular experience" or "Oh wow, it'd be wonderful if I had that."

I personally find it very practical to just include whatever I'm dealing with. “Can I bear witness to this with awareness?” Sometimes we can't, but we try. And of course, we cultivate awareness in formal meditation, which for me is a little different than concentration. Concentration can happen while being aware, but when we cultivate awareness, it's this space that's present and knowing and watchful, but anything can arise within it. It's much more flexible, and it can benefit us in that there's a much wider range to it.

And then, of course, for those of us who want to practice insight meditation and move towards liberation and awakening in Buddhism, it offers that because then it's the awareness that we use within Vipassana practice to know the nature of our thoughts, emotions, perceptions, self, etc. So it's a big deal!

When we center awareness in meditation, it becomes this space, this container where perceptions, thoughts, and emotions can arise. We also start to see we don't have to get rid of them necessarily to find some wiggle room, to dance a little bit with them. In short moments in meditation, that's been incredibly liberating for me. It increases my aspiration to grow those experiences into more reliable, sustainable ways of being.

So between the groundedness of the body and cultivating awareness as the host, we're really set up to engage with the majority of dharma teachings and practices out there. We need some kind of ability to look at the mind, to sustain a watchfulness of mind, an awareness of mind or awareness of experience, to be able to then work with it through the dharma. Once we can do that, it's just a matter of process, just a matter of practice and putting energy into that, both formally and informally.

In my experience, it's a very slow process. Sometimes it can feel kind of like a grind. That's why we need to really center a long-term, wholesome intention or motivation such as bodhicitta, because bodhicitta doesn't have a time frame. It's not like "in one year on May 12th at 5:00 PM, I'm going to attain..." It doesn't work like that for most of us. Maybe for someone who's already almost a bodhisattva, they can do that, but for most of us, it is slow, and that is okay!

Personally, I like to lean into the attitude of "no matter how long this takes, this is what I'm doing." There's really nothing else more worthwhile than this. The energy we put into awakening for the benefit of others is really the highest, most important way we can use our time, and it can help others immensely. 

To sum up, when we de-center calm (though not leave it out completely), it leaves space for deeper intentions and motivations to develop in our awakening and meditation process. But when we overemphasize calm, I've noticed that it can run the risk of becoming a limiting ego pursuit of "Oh, I need calmness because I don't want to feel all this other garbage that I don't like. I don't want to think; I don't want to be anxious anymore." To me, it gives this sense of "just turn the light off, I don't want to exist anymore."

I'm sympathetic and empathetic to anyone out there experiencing that, and if that's really what you want out of meditation, I get it. I've been there. But what I'm doing here is trying to open up a question: is that really going to help you in the end? It's sort of like having a problem with our spouse and just going into the room, shutting the light off, locking the door, and putting the covers over our head. Does that really solve it? Maybe sometimes, but not all the time, and ultimately it doesn't change the dynamics of the communication in our relationship.

Ultimately, this shift from seeking calmness to cultivating groundedness and awareness isn't about rejecting peace—it's about finding a more sustainable and transformative relationship with our inner experience. When we ground ourselves in the body and open to whatever arises in awareness, we're not just managing our minds; we're training ourselves to meet life as it actually is. This approach builds the foundation for genuine wisdom and compassion to emerge naturally. Rather than hiding from the messy, complex reality of being human, we learn to dance with it skillfully. And in that dance, we often discover that the peace we were desperately seeking was already here all along—not as an escape from our experience, but as the very awareness that can hold it all with kindness and understanding.