Settle the Body to Settle the Mind

There's a story a lot of us tell ourselves when meditation isn't going well. I can't do this. I'm not good at meditation. There are too many thoughts. The mind won't stay put, and at some point the difficulty stops being a difficulty and starts being evidence about us.

I want to offer a different reading of the same situation. Maybe the body just needs to be attended to — the speediness in particular, the overactivation that's fueling all that thinking. For me that shift was the whole thing. It moved the problem from something is wrong with me to there's an imbalance here, and those are very different places to sit down from.

What follows is one approach among many. There are a lot of ways to work with distraction in meditation, and if this one doesn't resonate, others are easy to find. This is the one I tend to reach for when someone describes not just a busy mind but a lot of anxiety and overwhelm living in the body.

Where this comes from

I didn't invent this. You can find it across most Indic traditions, where there's an understanding of an underlying energy body sitting between the physical body and the mind. I won't go far into that here, because I know it turns some people off. In the West we tend to translate it into the language of the nervous system, and that's fine if you'd rather take that route. Either way, the basic observation holds: there are stirred-up energies in the body fueling a stirred-up, distracted mind.

We can certainly work with thoughts directly. We can work with awareness of them — that's mainly what I teach. But we can also work at settling the speedy energy of the body.

A lot of the modern remedies for stress are aimed at exactly this. Some are more wholesome than others, but through my own experimenting they all seem more or less pointed at reducing speediness, at finding a body that's more settled. Some people call it a calm body. I tend to think of it as a settled one.

Working with the breath

So: if the sitting is full of distraction and rumination and you're at your wits' end with it, one option is to stop pushing harder inside the meditation and instead work with the breath before you get to your main mindfulness or calm abiding practice.

There are many breath techniques, and any of them that work below the chest — anything involving abdominal breathing — will help. Even the simplest version does something. Breathe in and out through the nose, down into the abdomen, expanding it like a balloon on the inhalation and letting it settle on the exhalation. Five to ten minutes of that before practice makes a real difference.

There's an additional one called vase breathing, where the breath is retained — held for a few seconds on the inhalation, once the lower abdomen is full. That one really helped me.

These days, though, what I mostly work with is attention to the body. It can be as simple as connecting with the feet, with the sensation of the feet on the ground, or the hands resting on the knees if you're in a chair. Anywhere below the chest tends to be neutral ground for most of us, and more grounding. Give it enough attention and things start to settle, depending on how much speediness there is to begin with.

For me personally, I needed the breath practice — vase breathing especially — and I needed other remedies alongside it. Better sleep belongs on that list. So does less caffeine. These things matter more than they sound like they should.

Movement, and where yoga came from

Movement helps a great deal too, sometimes vigorous exercise. This is the reason people do asana yoga in the first place. Asana, or hatha yoga, came from yogis who were trying to work out how to tame the mind for meditation and liberation. What they found was that moving the body in certain ways and holding certain postures changes how energy moves through it, and the body settles as a result. It's why even a modern yoga class puts the movement first and the sitting at the end — by then the prana is moving more smoothly, the channels have been stretched open a little, and the speediness has somewhere to go.

Beyond the specific technique, a lot of this comes down to intention when we show up to the cushion. Going straight into mindfulness of breath or open awareness — whatever form of shamatha or calm abiding we practice — may need augmenting. There may be a case for spending five or ten minutes first on some preliminary body work: breath, movement, a few asana or hatha postures.

Support, not self-blame

The comparison I keep coming back to is going to the doctor. If we come down with a bad flu and need medicine for it, we don't blame ourselves. It's a flu. Everybody gets one. The doctor names it and offers something to support the body in healing, and that's the end of the moral dimension of it.

It works much the same way here. Sometimes the mind needs support in order to see itself — to have more clarity, more openness, to cultivate awareness and insight, and in Buddhist terms insight into the nature of existence and how things actually are, so that more freedom can be uncovered. And sometimes that support has to come through the body, through working with its energies.

Something to try

So I'll leave this with you to experiment with. If the mind is speedy, see what happens when you give five or ten minutes to the body first, before ever arriving at the practice itself.

Then notice whether the story changes — from I can't do this to there's just something here that needs attending to. That's a very different place to sit down from.