Dharma talk on mindfulness of the body….John O’Donahue the wild Irish poet wrote, “We need to come home to the temple of our senses. Our bodies know they belong…it is our minds that make us homeless.”

When we say “just sit” ….we are engaging in a radically simple way to organize ourselves in order to see what is here.
By careful attending to the body we know it directly…we come into immediate contact with it’s aliveness ….not with our concept of the body or our scientific or medical knowledge of the body or our historical relationship with the body …but through immediate contact…we contact it’s most elemental form.

My friend Tara Brach tells a sweet story

A teacher says to a first-grade class, “If you need to go to the bathroom raise your hand with two fingers.” A young 6 year old in the back of the room wisely asked, ”How will that help?”

A common misunderstanding of meditation practice is that we are leaving the body …detaching and hovering above all suffering in some transcendent place.

In actuality, the way we come to know presence is by being awake in this body. Mind & heart are often swept away in past or future….but the body is always here.