​When I first began doing equanimity practice, an image spontaneously arose. I saw a person standing on the bow of a ship, but it was more like the transparent outline of a person. And then a large wave would rise above the bow – and pass right through as it washed onto the deck.
 
Over time, I have come to understand this image more fully. It is not about not feeling the wave – the transparency of the person does not indicate that they are insensate. Rather, the aim is to experience the wave fully by allowing all of it to penetrate awareness. Any solidity in the person blocks or distorts the complete experience.
 
This is basically the relationship we cultivate to experience. Waves can arise and move as needed without obstruction or distortion. Can you sense the peace in this stance? Even if the ocean is violently stormy, it does no damage because that energy passes right through. We might say it passes through the mind, but more accurately, the storm is also the mind.
 
I hear many questions beginning with the phrase, “What do I do about…” or, more subtly, “How can I work with….” Usually the thing to be “worked with” is some unpleasant emotion or mental state. Often what people mean is, “How can I get this to go away? How can I stop having this mindstate?”
 
Try shifting your viewpoint to the image of the wave passing through a transparent figure. In the end, you will be doing nothing, not trying to “work with” the wave. The very “working with” presents an obstacle in its path – resulting in a partial, manipulated experience of the wave. Mostly, the obstacles are stories, ideas, views, and interpretations that we impose without noticing. We may want to work with anger because we believe its story, because we fear it, or because we think meditation is the place to solve problems in our life. In meditation, anger is just anger – or more precisely, it is a cluster of sensations and mental states that we are invited to experience without resistance.
 
Now, non-resistance is the result. (First check if you are convinced that this is a worthy end; some parts of your mind may not be). But what are practices that help bring it about? There are indeed certain ways of working with difficult mindstates so that they are not overwhelming, such as applying metta/goodwill as an “antidote” to strong feelings of anger or fear. Or, in the case of physical states, diverting attention to a non-painful part of the body if pain becomes too intense. You may not be able to take in the fullness of the experience right now, in which case it is skillful to turn away. There are also methods that concurrently invoke investigation, such as the “RAIN” process devised by Michele McDonald and further developed by Tara Brach. These can be helpful methods.
 
In this article, I am highlighting the fundamental mental cultivation shared by all these methods: Developing enough capacity of attention, or strength of mindfulness, to simply allow the full experience of whatever is arising, whether it is a ripple or a tidal wave. Developing capacity is about stabilizing attention – the basic, unexotic practice of nondistraction. Not allowing the mind to get sucked into discursive thought, entranced by its own commentary, or overwhelmed by physical/mental feelings because of applying meaning or story to them. Don’t worry about perfection in this; that is just another idea.
 
Not that this is easy.
 
From Loreena McKennitt’s song Skellig:
Many a year was I
Perched out upon the sea
The waves would wash my tears,
The wind, my memory
 
I'd hear the ocean breathe
Exhale upon the shore
I knew the tempest's blood
Its wrath I would endure
 
Grounding in the body is the best method I have found to gain strength in attention. Just sit and sense the body – all the pulsing, vibrations, heat, thrumming, solidity, softness, sharpness, all of it. Forget the story or even the emotion. [There are also techniques from other traditions that use devotional energy to increase the capacity of attention].
 
Equanimity is considered a great blessing of practice. A mind that is stable and transparent even amidst the waves is a mind that is poised to know deeply how this life works, and to let go.

I am reading a book called The Invention of Wings -- the partly historical story of Sarah Grimke, a Southern woman who dared to find her voice as an abolitionist. Against her wishes, Sarah owns a slave named Handful, and their complex relationship forms the basis for the book.

As Sarah is struggling to gain the courage to leave her social and familial position, travel north, and discover more about life without slaves, Handful aptly says to her, "My body is a slave, but my mind is not. Seems like for you it's the other way around."

It's important to understand where we are enslaved and where the freedom can be found. Now, in conventional human society, some people can be considered "free" in body through ease of movement, acceptability, and other conventional measures, while other people do not enjoy such freedoms of body.

But from a spiritual perspective, the body is never quite free. It is part of nature, following its own laws, and will one day cease to support life. It is a magnificent process, a vehicle for practice, and a tool for exploring the world and encountering other beings... but it is not the place to find the deepest freedom. That can only happen through the mind, or heart.

The mind has the potential to keep developing, gaining insight, and opening to the mystery right up to the moment of death. It can go beyond itself in ways that the body cannot.

It is important to notice in our behavior and practice if we are acting from the perspective of freeing the mind, rather than the body.

The Buddha offered three broad domains of practice: Body, speech, and mind. Of course these are not entirely separate, but it is useful to distinguish them in order to talk about specific practices. Ultimately we are training the mind, but body and speech are excellent tools for doing so, in addition to working on the mind explicitly. (For a deeper exploration of this topic, here is a talk I gave at IMC).



From Hafiz:
What is the key
To untie the knot of the mind’s suffering?
Benevolent thought, sound
And movement.
​
In each domain, we can imagine two modes of practice: Intentional actions that help us train the mind, and observation of how experience unfolds in order to learn and have insight. Both modes are valuable and necessary.

Using the Body
In the case of the body, the first mode of practice involves undertaking deliberate actions with the body. What we do with our body is consequential – how we hold it, how we use it, how we take care of it. The body is the key vehicle in ethical conduct: Not killing, stealing, or committing sexual misconduct. 

The body is also used to take the meditation posture. The sitting posture itself is designed to be a stable, relaxed posture, which helps the mind to calm down and relax too. If it's difficult for you to establish the practice of sitting every day, it helps to just take the posture daily for any amount of time, even 1 minute. As Munindra-ji said, "Just put your body there." (again and again).

This area of “using the body” includes both restraint and positive actions: Stopping yourself from having the third piece of cake, and also deliberately offering that person at work (whom you dislike) the use of your stapler when you see them looking for one. You will notice that you need to use your mind to do this – it’s an example of the body-mind link: Training your body has an effect on your mind. Positive actions like volunteering or otherwise being generous also assist in mental development.

Another example is sitting with pain, as all of us do at some point (even the Buddha). One option is to “breathe through” the pain – taking deliberate action with the breath to help ease the mind’s tendency to fixate on the pain and make it worse. 

Observing the Body
The second mode of practice is to observe the body. Many body awareness practices are recommended in the suttas: breath, postures, activities, elements, body parts. Some are external and some are internal. One function of these is to develop mindfulness. It is to make sure that we can have a continuity of mindfulness in all activities, which is very important for insight. 

But another function of observing is to learn about the body, and also the mind. We actually carry a lot of false ideas and assumptions about both body and mind that have never been checked, and only very careful, unbiased observation is going to expose their falseness. 

Joseph Goldstein said: “See what you do.” This means just letting the body act while observing carefully. We don’t always want to control our body so tightly – we can start to get caught up in how we look, or how we think we “should” be, missing what is actually there. We may have taken on a spiritual identity about how good Buddhists look and act, and be subtly controlling our experience to match this.

Try just acting, and observe what is going on. It takes some practice to find this balance - being able to act naturally while also be keenly aware.

When we combine the quiet sitting posture with the internal observation of the body – letting it express itself as it is – things get very powerful. Recall the idea of working with pain by “breathing through” the pain. If we combine that action with observing the result of this, we’ll notice that the pain no longer feels so solid. What used to be a solid wall of “pain” (an abstract concept) is seen to be a series of flashes, often in a very small region. Maybe heat, stabbing, tingling, burning, aching, all coming and going very fast. Once you see this, the mind stops believing the pain in quite the same way – the relationship changes, and there will tend to be less suffering. (But you have to see it directly – reading it right now is not enough).
 
This kind of open observation of the body is great in general. We may experience energy, tightness, openness, areas of heaviness or lightness, a sense of no boundaries, even different shapes or sizes of the body.
 
These are not necessarily significant in and of themselves, although they seem dramatic at the beginning. After a while, they get more commonplace. What is important is that the mind’s perception of the body is becoming more variable. You are getting less subject to fixed, habitual ways of seeing and feeling your body.

Observing the body carefully enough leads naturally to seeing into the mind, and then things really get interesting. But don't think of the body as "beginner's stuff" that you'll move past at some point. The body is an incredibly important realm of practice that will serve along the whole path.