Body sensations meditation

This meditation is intended to support us in having multiple sensations of different qualities in the body at the same time. Often our attention attaches meaning to our experiences because we are not keeping our awareness open to the multiplicity of experience. In these cases, often we'll exclude experiences that are unpleasant because having something unpleasant is given a meaning mostly because we don't notice that other things are happening at the same time. Just because there is an unpleasant sensation does not necessarily mean that anything is wrong. This becomes clear when we can simultaneously notice that there are other kinds of sensations occurring at the same time. By putting the attention on the bodily sensations rather than an emotion or a mood or a thought helps us see how these sensations aren't personal and not necessarily meaningful at all. We then develop the greater capacity to include multiplicity and diversity in such a way that frees the mind from assumptions about what a simple sensation means.

Once this practice is applied to the body, then emotions and moods and eventually thoughts, too, can be treated in the same way: Simply the momentary appearance of an experience that does not have to be seen as the only one we are having and therefore also not identified with who we are in any deep way. Training the attention to open to the multiplicity of experience helps to free us from jumping to conclusions and all kinds of thought spirals that happen just because we forget that many things are happening, not just this one thing that I'm preoccupied by at the moment.