This is Post 26 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found by clicking here.
It has been the experience of the ancient meditation traditions of India and Tibet that the internal space of the human body is filled with not one but seven different energetic, or somatic, fields – the seven auras, or ‘subtle bodies’. Many readers will already be aware that each deeper layer in the succession of auric layers is slightly larger than the last, so that the layers that are closer to the surface are enclosed within the deeper ones.
An important feature of this spiritual anatomy that readers may not be aware of however, is the way the polarity of the layers alternates between receptive and expansive – yin and yang – and in way that is opposite in the two sexes. I have outlined this phenomenon in previous posts (here and here) and will be returning to it – this understanding is essential, in my view, for the meditator, and provides wonderful insights into the very different emotional life of men and women.
An understanding of the ways in which these fields of our spiritual anatomy interpenetrate each other and interact, is very useful information for the meditator. Of the seven fields, by far the most important are the first four, which I have been calling the surface bodies – these are somatic fields through which our sense of ‘being a person’ finds a sense of energetic embodiment. While these four key subtle bodies, and the relationships between them, are most comprehensively described by the meditation mandalas of Tibetan Buddhism, the implicit description of embodied Consciousness that we find in the four brahmavihāras of early Buddhism (and in the pre-Buddhist teaching of the four brahmavihāras) gives us a much simpler ‘way in’ to this mandala wisdom.
Each of the subtle bodies is felt most keenly at the points in the body that we call the chakras. So, as previously in connection with the Mental Body and the subtle Physical Body (which I described here and here), we will find it useful in understanding our experience of the Emotional Body when we are resting as Consciousness, if we look briefly at the traditional Indian description of the Solar Plexus Chakra, which is outlined below.
The Manipūra Chakra – City of Jewels
The traditional Indian name of the third chakra, the chakra at the Solar Plexus, is maṇipūra, which is a Sanskrit word made up of the word maṇi, which means ‘jewel’, and pūra, which means city or place. Maṇipūra gives us an image of a sort of paradise – a place of extraordinary wealth and beauty – sparkling and radiant. In this context, the image of a landscape glittering with jewels is being used to symbolise not only ultimate beauty and value, but also unlimited ease, grace, contentment and happiness – a world of pleasurable and joyful feelings. Continue reading
This is Post 24 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found by clicking here.
In order to understand meditation fully, an understanding of the way our psychology manifests somatically, or energetically in the field of the body, is essential. We especially need to understand the way in which female and male spiritual character manifests somatically. These are things that are extremely poorly understood, given their great importance as key factors that govern the level of harmony and fulfilment that we experience in sexual relationships. They appear to be difficult to consciously acknowledge and talk about, even though we are all very keenly aware of them.
This is perhaps partly because these phenomena are so difficult to conceptualise. The great Carl Jung, who developed a very sophisticated understanding of the way archetypal, or transpersonal, psychic forces shape male and female psychological character, also understood that the archetypal psychology of sexual difference manifests somatically – in the subtle energies of the body. He theorised that there was an energetic patterning of the body, or somatic unconscious, that shapes our psychology in a similar way to the archetypes of the collective psychic unconscious. Whereas the archetypes of the collective unconscious show themselves in our myths, stories, dreams, and movies, the energies of the somatic unconscious can be felt in the body as energetic dynamics and states.
Our ability to know ourselves, and to function with psychological freedom and integrity, is closely related to our capacity to fully acknowledge this bodily-felt dimension of the inner world. Our engagement with the somatic dimension takes us to the core of the human mystery – and to the core of how human beings embody Consciousness, or fail to do so.
The Qualia of Embodiment
In connection with the yellow Southern Quadrant of the mandala and the brahmavihāra of muditā, or Appreciative Joy, it is helpful to acknowledge the experience of ‘Embodiment’ that we have been addressing is a ‘qualia’. The qualia are the difficult-to-define subjectively experienced phenomena that occur in connection with Consciousness. As a way of finding alignment at the beginning of a meditation session, try just taking a few moments to notice your experience of ‘Embodiment’. You are likely to find that when you look in your experience for ‘Embodiment’, you will find yourself being pointed to the experience of Consciousness. You will have a similar experience when you look for the experience of ‘Being’, which names another key qualia. Continue reading
This is Post 20 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found by clicking here.
Each of the four brahmavihāras is a doorway into meditation and a doorway into a key aspect of spiritual truth. Muditā, which is usually translated as Sympathetic Joy, but is perhaps better translated as Appreciative Joy, is a particularly important doorway for us however. As I have been explaining in the last two of posts, the body, because of its seeming obviousness, is easily misunderstood and overlooked, when in reality it is our entry point into the mysterious somatic dimension. Without examining this bodily-felt dimension through meditative enquiry, the universal blessing which is our experience of embodied Consciousness cannot be fully received and understood.
The Body – our Doorway to Somatic Transformation
I have talked in a previous post (here) about the importance of acknowledging and becoming deeply familiar with the seven subtle bodies (and the seven chakras) – especially the first four bodies, which correspond to the quadrants of the mandala, and which we may call the four surface bodies. The subtle bodies are important because they provide us with a way of understanding that meditation, while it takes the apparently physical body as its starting point, gives us a way of engaging directly with these ‘subtle’, or non-physical, dimensions of our experience, which are nevertheless felt in the body.
Using the map that the mandala provides, these energetic or somatic dimensions can be distinguished and discerned in meditation. When we first start to meditate we experience the way the subtle bodies have a felt quality that reflects the psychological parts that we have fallen into identification with. As we learn to rest as Consciousness however – and learn to break our identification with psychological parts, if only in brief moments of Mindfulness, or in periods of meditation – the energies of the subtle bodies can start to transform. Even if we only practice resting as Consciousness for short moments of time whenever we remember to do so, this can be very significant, because we come to recognise our choice – and our power to transform ourselves in this way. Continue reading
This is Post 19 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found by clicking here.
In the previous five posts I have been talking about the inner landscape of the blue Eastern Quadrant of the mandala – the Thinking function; the Mental Body; the Hara chakra (second chakra); the brahmavihāra of Equanimity; the qualia of Being; the attitude of objectivity; the ethical characteristics of honesty and integrity; and the mirror as a symbol of Consciousness and of non-dual wisdom. We also started to explore the polarity between, or the choice between: the peaceful, objectively observing, and embodied, style of consciousness, which is associated with Equanimity and Being; and the fragile, judgemental, mentally-constructed, and obsessively self-referencing form of identity, which psychology might speak of in terms of narcissism.
Cosmic Appreciation and Gratitude
Circumambulating clockwise round the mandala, we come next to the Southern Quadrant of the mandala and to the brahmavihāra of muditā. In Tibetan Buddhist tradition the Southern Quadrant is yellow – the colour of gold and of the earth. Muditā is often translated as Sympathetic Joy, and occasionally translated as Empathetic Joy, but Appreciative Joy is, in my view, a better translation. While I have sometimes been happy to translate muditā as Sympathetic Joy, as I was first taught, many years ago, I now prefer to use Appreciative Joy.
Traditionally muditā is understood to refer to our innate sympathetic response to the happiness and achievements of others. It is certainly this, and it is naturally present in all those types of social interactions and responses to events in the world that are in any way genuine expressions of appreciation and gratitude. It is important however, to recognise that muditā, in its archetypal and suprapersonal essence as mahamuditā, or Great Appreciative Joy, is a cosmic principle – an attitude of Consciousness itself. Continue reading
This is Post 17 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found here.
The Mental Body entirely pervades, and extends slightly beyond, the physical body, but the felt experience of the Mental Body is most keenly felt in the lower belly three or four finger widths below the naval. Throughout the cultures of the East, from India to Japan, this point or area is widely understood to have a close association with mental stability, physical vitality, and with the sort of mental focus that supports high-level feats of physical coordination.
The Swadhisthāna Chakra – a Place of Rest and Beneficial Alignment
The same understanding is found in the Western tradition of Classical Ballet, and elsewhere in the West, but in the East, with its traditions of meditation and self-inquiry, its intuitive and energetic approaches to medicine, and its deep and subtle martial arts, this understanding has gone very deep. In Indian tradition this area of the belly is called the swadhiṣṭhāna chakra, while in Japanese tradition it is called the hara, or ‘belly’. If we wanted to be culture-free we could simply call it the second chakra, but I find the Japanese word hara to have wide recognition.
The entomology of the Sanskrit word swadhiṣṭhāna is worth acknowledging. The prefix swa denotes ‘my’ and adhiṣṭhāna expresses the idea of a resting place, or seat, or base, or dwelling place, especially a place from which it is possible to have an overview. I am not a Sanskrit scholar, but there are associations with this word that convey the idea of a position of benevolent and protective authority, or an objective point of view – and an empowerment or blessing that is not personal, but comes from the Divine. All this speaks volumes about the experience of allowing the Mental Body to rest as Consciousness, and the felt experience of being centred in the swadhiṣṭhāna chakra or hara. This alignment and empowerment ultimately requires that the other bodies are also allowed to rest as Consciousness, preferably at the same time – but this is a very good place to start. Continue reading
This is Post 15 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found here.
One of the most common misconceptions about meditation is the idea that it is a merely mental activity. Anyone who would characterise meditation in this way has been taught incorrectly. Meditation is more akin to dance than ordinary egoic thinking. We meditate with the body.
But we need a much larger and more sophisticated conception of what the body is, than scientific materialism has afforded us. We need an understanding of the subtle bodies, especially the first four subtle bodies: the Physical body; the Mental body; the Emotional body; and the Volitional body – which may be called the surface bodies. This seeming digression from my thread of discussion about the brahmavihāras is necessary if we are to fully understand the actual experience of the brahmavihāras and embrace them as transformational processes in our felt experience of resting as Consciousness.
We need ways of thinking about the body that are experientially true – conceptualisations that fit our actual experience. Prior to modern medicine and the domination of our thinking by the Newtonian / Cartesian dualism of a physical body and a mind that is entirely separate, various ancient cultures had very rich and complex ways of imagining the soul or mind/body system.
Psycho-Physical Anatomy – The Seven Bodies
For me, the most experientially true account of our psycho-physical anatomy is given to us by the great meditation traditions of India and Tibet, which identify seven subtle bodies, or ‘energy bodies’, or auras. While we can say that the first of these is most obviously connected with the physical body (which we now know from Science to be much more subtle than we had thought – pure energy and empty space in fact), and the other six are certainly not separate from the physical body. To be true to our experience we need to speak of the whole integrated system not as body and mind but as a body-mind – an integrated body-mind that is described both by the mandala and by the hierarchy of subtle bodies.
As Carl Jung recognised, the depth of human psychological experience cannot be understood unless we conceptualise it as being simultaneously individual and universal – ultimately characterised by a mysterious internal relationship between these two poles, which leads to an integration of these two poles. He gave us a vision of soul that includes a spectrum of experience – the personal, physical and instinctual at one end of that spectrum, and the universal, spiritual and archetypal at the other. This is how we experience ourselves in meditation. Far from leaving the body behind, we find ourselves greatly expanding our sense of what the body is, and opening to more and more subtle dimensions of bodily experience.
The Tibetan Buddhist Body-Mind Model as a Middle Way
The seven layers of our psycho-physical anatomy are a way of objectifying and conceptualising the paradoxical nature of our range of felt experience when we turn our attention inwards in meditative-inquiry. The range of our experience in meditation is vast – we have the experience of being a person in a physical body, but we may also recognise that the core of our experience of self is Consciousness – a non-locatable field phenomenon, that appears as a unity, and seems to pervades the universe.
The universal Consciousness in which we rest is generally ignored because it is non-personal and felt to be incongruous with our concrete experience of a separate physical body. By seeing the body as not single but seven-fold, and predominately energetic and subtle, we are able to overcome that fundamental incongruity and give ourselves a way of making the universal Consciousness central to our experience, while also emphasising the energetic dimensions in the way we think about our inner life.
Many modern Western students of Buddhism, not finding a clearly articulated body-mind model in the early Buddhist texts, tend to shy away from the challenge of giving conceptual form to our experience of the body-mind. There is some value in this attitude of avoiding conceptualisation – just letting our experience be as it is. This approach can however, paradoxically lead to extremely crude and un-thought-through conceptualisations – and at worst leads to an unconscious embrace of a scientific materialist view that is far from that proposed by the Buddha.
It is important to remember that the Buddha rejected the anti-body view that he had initially embraced when he embarked on his spiritual search. The insights gained at the time of his Enlightenment found expression in a ‘Middle Way’. This was an extremely subtle view of the path to realisation, in which the body was embraced, and seen as the vehicle of, and venue for, realisation – and valued both as the crucible in which spiritual transformation takes place, and as the vehicle for the compassionate activity of Enlightenment.
The venue for the practice of samadhi, or meditation, is the body; and the states of dhyana, or meditative absorption, are bodily-felt experiences. It is however, with a keen awareness of the reservations that some may have about this, that I have I am going to be taking the body-mind model that is found in Tibetan Buddhist tradition as the starting point for some ideas that I have found helpful. In my experience the model works. We can think of it as a somatic ‘anatomy’ – but hopefully not in a literalistic way. The main thing is that we release the literalism, and the extreme constraint that unconscious scientific materialism places on our ability to fully receive the rich, complex, and multi-layered experience of embodied Consciousness.
The Mental Body – the Somatic Reflection of the Thinking function
The somatic dimension that we can call the Mental Body is the second of the seven that are spoken of in esoteric literature. All these subtle bodies are ‘mental bodies’ of a sort, but have different felt-qualities and associations, so I will try to distinguish what we might mean by this term. This subtle body is experienced as, and ‘seen’ by some, as very slightly larger than physical body. This means that the first subtle body – the complex psycho-physical reality that we can call the Physical Body – rests inside the Mental Body. Thus it is entirely enclosed and interpenetrated by it, and subject to its contents – a fact that all healers, acupuncturists, shiatsu practitioners and applied kinesiologists would attest to. While we cannot know the mechanisms involved, it seems clear that all the subtle bodies interpenetrate and resonate with each other to some degree – and that the Physical Body and the Mental Body are a particularly closely related pair.
Artwork by Doreen Kinistino. This image will post to social media when you click the share buttons below.
The Physical Body and the Mental Body exist in polarity with each other in that one is yin, or feminine, or receptive, while the other is yang, or masculine, or expansive. Understanding these polarities is of great assistance in meditation. I shall be returning to this phenomena in future posts, and shall be addressing the little known fact that the Mental Body is experienced as yin, or receptive, in men, and yang, or expansive, in women.
The Thinking Mind is Both Energetic and Neurological
Even if the mechanisms of this are not knowable, it is helpful for meditators to think of the egoic mind as an energetic and somatic phenomena – one in which thinking has an energetic reality, not just a neurological one. It seems that even though thoughts take place in the neuronal networks of the brain, there is an energetic reflection of thought in this somatic phenomenon that I am calling the Mental Body.
So, in addition to the more concrete and well-understood neurological and hormonal connections between the subjective experience of the thinking mind and physiological processes of the body, there is also a profound energetic one. And whereas the neurological re-wiring of our brains, and the calming of our endocrine systems that has been traumatised by fear-based thinking can take a little time, the energetic realignment of our Mental Body, can be achieved relatively quickly if we allow the Mental Body to rest receptively in relationship with the primordial stillness of Consciousness.
The Buddha’s Equanimity practice – Healing the Thinking Mind
This is the power of the Buddha’s Equanimity practice. It allows the Mental Body, and hence the personal thinking mind, to be held in the healing field of Consciousness itself. The transformation that takes place is a purification of the Thinking function, which starts with the Mental Body, and then via its profound effect on the Mental Body, initiates a process in which the dysfunctional wiring of the brain is progressively undone.
When we rest as Consciousness and acknowledge that from the point of view of meditation practice, the Thinking function of the mind is primarily energetic and only secondarily neurological, we open ourselves to a powerful new path of psychological transformation. By choosing to allow the Mental Body to rest as Consciousness and be informed by the field of Consciousness, we do not immediately wash it clean of all its egoic habits of punishment, judgement, justification and projection of shadow, but we do very concretely initiate that profound process.
Purifying the Mind and Integrating Mental Clarity
When we rest in a receptive relationship to Consciousness, we may not suddenly experience the perfect peace of the Great Equanimity immediately, but we can open ourselves to it, and we can readily experience a deep sense of Being, and a sense of alignment with a transpersonal healing power. It is as if we can rest under an inner waterfall of white healing light that is running through our body purifying us and washing us clean of the mental negativities that are inherent in egoic thinking. The more we rest in the mental silence and the mental stillness of the field of Consciousness, the more our mind is cleansed by it, and the more we integrate its qualities of objectivity and mental clarity.
The Buddhist tradition speaks of the purification process within our meditation practice as one in which egoic kleshas are released. These kleshas can be thought of as the energies of the egoic mind – somatic energies that accumulate in the subtle bodies. To the extent that life in self-identification we will accumulate kleshas, and those kleshas have a momentum – they will keep us in habitual egoic identification until we release them though meditation. The category of kleshas that Buddhist tradition associates with the Thinking aspect of the mind is called dvesha, or ‘hatred’ – but this includes the egoic habits of punishment, judgement, justification and projection of shadow, which I mentioned above. The more extreme kleshas that accumulate in the Mental Body show the characteristic quality of ‘hatred’, but they all fall into the category of dvesha. I shall be returning to this important theme in future articles.
Being as the Basis of Identity – Not Thought
Our experience of the Mental Body when we rest as Consciousness, is not primarily one of thought, but of Being. We are still aware of the momentum of our thought processes and of our reflections on our experience, but these are felt to be secondary to the experience of Being. Consciousness and Being are in the foreground of our experience, and thought is arising secondarily, and in that context.
The effect of resting as Consciousness is to fill the Mental Body with the experience of Being. What we experience over time is a new basis for our identity. Our identity is no longer predominantly a mental construction as the Cartesian error (“I think, therefore I am”) would suggest, but instead is rooted in Being, and in the field of Consciousness. It is as if Consciousness stands behind us like a constantly affirming friend, except that we are that Consciousness – we are that friend.
William Parker 2017
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For more on the themes addressed in this post consider reading these previous articles:
This is Post 11 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found here.
It is understandable that mettā, or Loving-Kindness, would be the best understood of the four brahmavihāras. It is the one which has its own short recorded discourse in the Pali Cannon of early Buddhist tradition, but more importantly, it is the one which most resonates with our experience in ordinary life. Mettā extends our ordinary notions of love to express an attitude of unconditionally valuing everything in our experience, and unconditionally valuing all of the people in our world. People who practice the mettābhāvanā meditation practice, would generally describe mettā as being characterised by a feeling or attitude of warmth, kindness, care, and of love – in the sense of a deep valuing and well-wishing. The most common translation of mettā is Loving Kindness, but it includes qualities of ‘unconditional love’, ‘unconditional valuing’, and ‘unconditional acceptance’.
The mettābhāvanā practice is often felt by practitioners to be powerfully transformative – a powerful support to psychological integration, and to social interaction. Because mettā is that attitude of Consciousness, which unconditionally values and accepts our experience, it powerfully transforms the evaluative, or ‘Feeling’ function of the human mind. In ordinary egoic consciousness, the evaluative, or ‘Feeling’, function discerns that which is of value to us by attending to the internal flow of pleasant and unpleasant feeling states that are our emotional guidance system throughout life.
This discernment between that which is of value to us and that which is not, may be conscious or unconscious, and plays a very important role in the egoic construction of identity, and in the establishment of the defensive threshold between egoic feeling, which we are happy to identify with, and the feeling aspect of the unconscious – emotional content of the mind that we would rather not feel, or that which we would rather not remember, or that which we would rather not recognise as an aspect of ourselves.
Mettā – Healing and Evolving the Emotional Body
In regard to how this Feeling aspect of the personal unconscious is experienced, there is a useful notion in esoteric Buddhism and other spiritual traditions – the Emotional Body. In my view, the idea that we have a psycho-spiritual anatomy made up of subtle energy bodies and ‘chakra’ points or areas, where the energetic state of the subtle bodies is most keenly felt, is a very useful one – and is one that fits the experience of myself and other meditators. I am in general very critical of the way this ‘somatic’ anatomy is described, and shall be attempting to bring some clarity to this area ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Continue reading
This is Post 9 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found here.
Having reflected on the insubstantiality of the egoic parts, I need, in this meditation blog series, to balance that understanding by at least touching on some other helpful concepts in regard to the tricky and paradoxical question of what it is to have, or be, or become, a ‘self’ – one that is perhaps more affirmative. The nature of the human self and the processes by which it develops, or fails to develop, have challenged Psychology since its inception, and challenged our philosophers and spiritual thinkers for very much longer. Donald Winnicott, an innovative British psychoanalyst and writer, who had a passionate interest in the subtle role that parents, and especially mothers, play in the evolution of a child’s sense of self, put it this way:
“Every man or woman who is sane, every man or woman who has the feeling of being a person in the world, and for whom the world means something, every happy person, is in infinite debt to a woman.”
Donald Winnicott, Psychoanalyst and Writer
The largely unrecognised value, of the complex and powerful way in which a mother provides a mirror for her child’s emerging self, and provides a ‘facilitating environment’ through the mother-child bond, was the subject of Winnicott’s life’s work. He was not alone among the psychoanalytic thinkers in this. Jung, as always in my view, went further, recognising that the mother is ultimately an archetypal figure, and that the personal mother constellates the archetypal power of the Mother archetype in her relationship with the child. Characteristically, Jung also recognised that the mother archetype has two sides – that it includes a dark side that may stand in the way of spiritual maturity.
This is Post 26 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found by clicking here.
This is Post 24 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found by clicking 
This is Post 20 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found by clicking 
This is Post 19 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found by clicking 
This is Post 17 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found 
This is Post 15 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found 
This is Post 11 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found 
This is Post 9 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found
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