Awareness of the body

One of the things I keep hearing about in meditation classes and practice is "awareness of the body".  It goes along with focussing on your breathing – in, out, in, out – and with letting all of the tension in your muscles relax as you ease into a meditative state.  "Awareness of the body" is such a routine phrase that I heard one fellow suggest that the standard Buddhist ideal of mindfulness could just as well be called "body-fulness".

A lot of the time when I hear teachers talk about meditation they seem to be speaking a kind of "Buddhist-ese" ... a jargon that sounds impressive but that I'd probably find I don't understand very well if you asked me to explain any of it in my own words.  So I'm always a little surprised when I find any of it showing up spontaneously in real life.  But tonight, for example, I was planning to go to the movies.  (It's Friday night as I type this, though I don't know what day it will be when it actually posts.)  There's a theater right next door to the big four-year college a half an hour out of town, and they are showing a picture I've never heard of before (but the paper made it sound good): "The Perks of Being a Wallflower."  (If any of you has seen it, let me know what you think.)  The movie starts at 10:00 pm, meaning that it will get out just before "Rocky Horror" starts.  (I said the theater was right next to a college, didn't I?)  So I had a spot of dinner, went to the gym for a desultory swim followed by a soak in the hot tub, and then headed out towards the theater.  I figured I'd stop at a Starbucks for some coffee and an Internet connection, pound out my Friday evening post (I was mulling the topic, "What do I actually want in a romantic partner?"), and then catch the movie.

Most of the way there I realized I didn't have any money with me, so I backtracked a little until I found a bank.  And as I stood at the ATM waiting for it to spit out a couple of twenties, I suddenly realized that I felt exhausted.  Was it the week?  All the bagels I ate at work today?  The hot tub?  I have no idea, but for a moment every muscle in my body felt tired.  Obviously I was going to have to have that coffee to make it through the movie, right?  I collected my cash and my card, got back into my car, put the key in the ignition ... and just stopped.  So many times over the months since I started meditating, I've heard the phrase "awareness of the body", or "mindfulness of the body".  And it was really obvious that my body was telling me it wanted to go home and go to bed.  So was I really going to force myself to stay up for another couple hours or more?  Wouldn't that end up feeling like some kind of violence against myself?  I sat there in the dark, weighing the exhaustion in my flesh against the fun-sounding one-paragraph review I'd read in the paper.  I sat there, remembering all the times I've been told to pay attention to my body.  I sat there, remembering also that it was just yesterday I wrote about what a crock of shit the idea of iron self-discipline is, ... how in my experience (these last two or three decades, at any rate) perpetrating violence against myself by forcing myself to do something I think I want to do invariably means that my body will get its revenge by sabotaging whatever other plans I have, kicking back at the last minute to read the collected Doonesbury cartoons of the last twenty years while blowing off all the great plans I've made for myself ... how I said clearly and somewhat crossly that the only way to control yourself is to submit to yourself, much as the only way we humans have learned to control Nature is by submitting to Natural laws rather than striving somehow quixotically to defy them.

I thought for a minute or two and then I drove back home.  I'm there now, typing this up before I forget it (and so I can say that I posted something on Friday).  But I'll still be in bed by the time the movie was going to start, or at any rate by the time the trailers are done.  Instead of walking back to my car past the line of students in their Frank N. Furter costumes I'll be blissfully snoozing when midnight rolls around.  I'll miss the movie – and it did sound fun – but my body will be happier for it tomorrow.

I don't claim I'm fundamentally any more enlightened than I was yesterday, nor even that I'm going to be consistent about this.  Hell, if I really listened closely to my body I'd probably stop drinking too, and then where would I be?  But it was interesting to watch myself from the outside, and to realize – if only this once and in a small way – that maybe I'd learned something good to know.