The Hand Beyond the Image
La mano más allá de la imagen
A student describes how a simple shift in attention during meditation led to an unexpectedly vivid, direct encounter with bodily sensation, prompting a discussion about what it means to truly experience the body rather than its mental image.
The Hand Beyond the Image
A student describes how a simple shift in attention during meditation led to an unexpectedly vivid, direct encounter with bodily sensation, prompting a discussion about what it means to truly experience the body rather than its mental image.
I want to mention two things. First, you said something similar once before, not in the same vein, but it had the same effect on me. Toward the beginning of the session, you said to put the attention on the hand, and then you said something to the effect of, "But the point is that you don't have to keep it there." That one remark lifted the whole mode of me doing the task. It raised some awareness, and I shifted into more of a watching mode. It's amazing how just a few words at the right time can produce that shift. You caught me trying to be the good student.
After that, something happened that rarely happens to me in meditation. I really, truly felt my hands, with no effort, to the point where they were super heavy. It would have been an effort to take my attention off the hands. It was as though they were weighted down with heavy gloves. Usually I stay in the head, and if I feel something physical it's very subtle. But this time it was as if that's all I was: two big hands. And then something fascinating happened. All of a sudden there was pain in my fingers and joints. I don't experience any pain like that in daily life, and it was almost a shooting pain, just from attention. I found the sheer power of paying attention fascinating.
On your first point, that is exactly what I was pointing to in the guidance. It is not about the right thing. It is not about keeping your attention on the hand in a focused, effortful way. It is not a task of right and wrong where the more you achieve, the better. It is more about seeing what happens. When you put your attention on the hand, what happens? When the intention is to keep your attention there, what happens? What is pulling you, and what is taking you away?
Effortless noticing
To see that whole process, and to have no effort in the noticing, is the key. When that seeing occurs, things are processed naturally. As a side effect, it could happen that the attention on the hand becomes more easeful. And then, which is what you are describing, you suddenly find yourself with a direct connection to the sensation of the hand: this sense of heaviness, of largeness. When you talk about big hands, heavy hands, that sounds to me like a raw, unfiltered encounter with raw sensation.
Shifts in the body
That kind of encounter could create quite a lot of changes, because it is also shifting the way your physical body functions. It affects the way your neurons process information, the way energy moves around. I have no idea what that pain could have been specifically, but it could be that there were simply shifts in energy. Or maybe there is a numbness in the hand and now you were feeling it more directly. I don't really know. Obviously, if you keep doing these exercises and feel more and more pain, that is something to be looked into. But to me it just seems like shifts of the kind we were hoping to produce at that level.
Out of the virtual world
What you described as being "out of the head" is what I call being outside the pull of that virtual world of "me," which is constantly pulling you inward. You get drawn into it, and there is this repetitive processing of information, looping over and over. We rarely have the actual direct experience of sensation. There is a saying attributed to Jesus, something like: "When you make a hand out of the image of a hand, you will enter the kingdom." It is a bit longer, with a few more examples, but the essence has to do with this. We rarely actually connect with and experience the hand as a hand. Instead, we experience the image of the hand, and it is a mental image.
The rabbit hole of direct experience
It really can be a bit like going down a rabbit hole, because that is a metaphor for entering an unknown world where there is magic and mystery. It is like the land of Narnia: a place where things could be terrible and wonderful at the same time.