From buying groceries to falling in love, there's barely an aspect of behavior that hasn't been attributed to some type of function of the brain. Across cultures, the brain's role in human existence has been idealized and romanticized. And many of us have come to believe that it's an isolated and all-powerful command center. But this idealization, something that Alan Jasanoff, a biological engineer at MIT calls the cerebral mystique, creates a false dichotomy between the brain and the body. And causes us to ignore both bodily and environmental influences on our mental states, moods and personal disposition. Of course, this dichotomy isn't new. You may remember the famous the famous quote from Rene Descartes, I think therefore I am. But it is perhaps more insidious now as technological advances have created work and home lives that are largely organized around mental tasks. I don't think it's hyperbole to say that the obsession we have with the brain, this cerebral mystique has resulted in millions of people across the globe living primarily from the neck up, cut off from an out of touch with the body. And the result of this has been a cascade of both physical and mental health challenges, from diabetes to depression, and a kind of mild dissatisfaction with life as we know it. While it might often feel as though we primarily experience life in and through the eyes and head, it's important to remember that our brains don't work in a vacuum. The brain is interdependent with both our body and our surrounding environment, and signals from each of those areas serve as powerful influencers over both our moods and our behaviors. In fact, some of the same cells and neurotransmitters that are found in our brains are also found throughout the body, particularly in our center, our gut. So if we can let go of the idea that the brain is self-contained and autonomous, we can see that our attention to the body and our ability to fully inhabit it, actually provides us with deeper forms of knowing and intuiting. And reminds us that this vessel that contains us during our time on Earth deserves our appreciation and care, no matter its abilities or limitations. From the previous module, I offered you a definition of mindfulness and asked you to begin to explore what it feels like to pay attention to certain sensory elements while you are engaged in activity that you do on an everyday basis. Our next step is to turn that attention inward, towards our own bodies and begin to establish the body as a reference point for our awareness. When we focus on the body in our practice, all we have to do is just be with the sensations of the body by itself. Without reference to how your body might function in the external world or in the world of your imagination. We do our best not to judge the experience or to decide that we like or dislike the various sensations that present themselves to us. In this stage of our practice, we're attempting to cultivate something called bare attention. And bare attention is the clear and single-minded awareness of what's happening to us and in us, at the exact time of its occurrence. It's called bare because it asks us to attend to just the bare facts of a perception, as presented either through the five physical senses, our touch, sight, hearing smell and taste. Or through the mind as our thoughts arise. The purpose of cultivating bare attention is to assist the mind in ending mental proliferation and fabrication. Mental proliferation is a process where the presence and experience of one sensation sets off a volley of subsequent processes which in turn sets off a new set of processes, and on and on we go. So I'll give you an example. Imagine for a second that you're sitting quietly outside taking a break at work, and you notice the sound of some far-off construction. This event, the noticing of sound, triggers a variety of contingent processes. So first process might be labeling where you're attempting to categorize the sound in some way. Is it a bulldozer or a power saw? What piece of equipment is it that's producing the noise? A second process is judgement. Is the sound pleasant or unpleasant? A third might be a memory. So you might recall a different time when you heard a similar noise. And the last process could be an intention. For example, you might think well, remember not to sit here on your lunch break tomorrow. This is mental proliferation. Bare attention, on the other hand, teaches us how to remain undistracted as we focus our attention on a particular object, and it helps to eliminate the extraneous data interfering in the process of recognizing things as they are. Does this make sense? Let me say it another way. Bare attention teaches us to see the difference between fiction and reality. And what we gain from that is the ability to utilize what's objectively true as a guide for our behavior rather than the stories that we construct in our own mind, which may not be grounded in truth at all. So close your eyes right now and see if you can allow your attention to drop down into the body. What do you notice as you close your eyes? If you were able to tune in to the sensations of the body, if you could feel the breath move through you, or the beating of your own heart. If you could feel your stomach grumble or notice tightness in your shoulders, your body was a frame of reference for your attention. Now, if we were doing this as a practice, what you do is try to stick with this bare attention on the body. You'd focus on the sensations of the body, and if your attention moved away from it you'd simply bring it back to the sense of the body. In the beginning, you'll find that your mind will leave your body over and over again. And your job is just to notice, actively release attachment to whatever has grabbed your attention and return your focus to the body, and just try and hold on there. At first, you're going to find it difficult for your mind to settle, and lots of things will cause you to lose focus of the body. But eventually with practice, you'll find that paying bare attention to the body becomes easier. If something other than the body comes into awareness, it'll feel like something coming up and brushing the back of your hand. You notice it but it doesn't derail your focus. This is helpful because when the body can serve as the consistent frame of reference, we can eventually begin to observe the mind, our feelings and various other mental phenomena without getting sucked in by them. Our body provides us with a home base. Another valuable aspect of directing our attention to the body is that it allows us to cultivate something called interoceptive awareness. And interoception is the perception of sensations from inside the body, and includes the perception of physical sensations related to internal organ functions such as heartbeat, respiration, satiety. As well as the autonomic nervous system activity related to certain emotions like fear and anxiety. And much of these perceptions remain unconscious. And what becomes conscious, in other words interoceptive awareness, involves the cognitive processing of inner sensations so that they become available to us at the conscious level. Bringing these sensations into awareness and then observing them for some time helps us understand a couple of really interesting truths. One, when we pay prolonged attention and bring curiosity to physical sensations, we see how dynamic they are. They shift and change and eventually disappear all without any effort on our part. These sensations like everything that exists, are impermanent. And noticing this is a useful lesson to us. It teaches us that our felt sense experience of anything, physical pain, sadness, anxiety, doesn't arrive, settle in and become our singular experience forever in all time. Even if we did nothing with, it would eventually transform and pass. It's kind of a relief, right? A second interesting truth that we noticed when we pay attention to sensations of the body is how our interpretation and judgment of them impact our experience. So have you ever noticed what happens when you label something as pleasant or unpleasant? Or how sensations tend to intensify when you tell yourself you can't stand the way they feel? These judgments determine your experience. And when we might not be able to control the presence of certain sensations in the body, certainly we can learn to relate to them differently by bringing more open, spacious awareness to their presence. One last benefit that comes as a result of practicing mindfulness of the body is that it helps us to hone in on the subtle sensory cues that occur when we pay attention. So we know what it feels like to pay attention and the subtle cues that occur when our mind has wandered so that we know what it feels like when our minds wander. The more we practice, the more adept we become at using interoceptive feedback to help us focus our attention. We're better able to tune in to the sensory cues associated with paying attention, and we have greater capability in tuning out irrelevant stimuli. Said another way, mindfulness of the body teaches us to feel how to control our attention. That's pretty cool, right? If you'd like to know more about how this happens in the body and what structures of the brain are involved, there's some really interesting work on the topic that we have linked to the resource section in this module. So hopefully at this point you're beginning to see why and how the body might play an instrumental role in all kinds of information processing. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and insights as you begin to explore the mind-body connection more deeply, and learn to tune your senses with both an open mind and an open heart.
