Direct experience of the body in the present moment provides a mooring in the midst of thoughts and emotions.

Use standing posture to acknowledge the springing rhythmic nature of the body. When the body relaxes, the mind relaxes – the two synchronize. What the body does, the mind picks up.

Activation is followed by feeling and action (kamma). The general advice is to give attention to “how I’m feeling” rather than “what I’m going to do about it”. This is a relational approach: not to try to feel a certain kind of feeling, but just know how I’m feeling, how I’m being affected. Empathy is being with the feeling without being triggered, and reactive. This is the practice of kindness, compassion and equanimity – at the most long-term level.

We fall for the tyranny of institutionalized systems and fixed structures because they promise stability and certainty. But there is no empathy in such tyranny. Embodied presence enables empathy. Our own bodies provide the stability we need to be with our mental stuff without reacting. Thus our capacity to be human increases.

In walking meditation, mental patterns are bound to well up. If you don’t go into decisive action around them, they will fade. Give attention instead to the fluidity of the body while walking. Let things work themselves out; it’s not up to us to claim or reject. Come back to the here of breathing and body; realizations occur in that process.

Seeking comfort, both physical and psychological, we’ve developed programs to avoid and deflect the experience of irritation. But these are tyrant programs. They can be cleared through the willingness to open and feel without compulsive actions and reactions.

When we experience hostility and ill will, rather than simply acknowledging it, we stick it into ourselves, and begin to assume we’re unwelcome or unworthy. We can use meditation to change the flavor of the heart, steeping it in the qualities of the brahmavihara (goodwill, compassion, gladness, equanimity).

Meditation offers the opportunity to encourage the body to open into a more steady state of pleasure than is normally attainable through sense contact. This internal happiness has to do with the body’s subtle energy. Guidance is given to sense the subtle body and experience this internal happiness.

On attention and awareness. Attention locates an object, and what we give attention to gets energized. Awareness, when exercised brings opening and cooling. Unhook from attention and let awareness widen and soften. Take in the feel and energy of the subtler qualities of what arises. Not excluding anything, just not hooking onto anything.

One feature of programs is they cause contraction. When standing, then, it’s helpful to acknowledge space as an experience. In front of you, behind and above you, let the body experience the lack of intrusion and obstruction – space is open and free. There are no tyrannies in space.