Guided Meditations

Your Body is Emptiness, Emptiness is Your Body

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• Get into a comfortable position, then relax and let the body fall still.
• Focus your breath for a minute or so, simply watching the air as it flows out and in.
• Now, we are going to attack our misconceptions about things—we are going to challenge our belief that the objects around us are static and unchanging.
• Picture in your mind the door to the room you are sitting in. Observe how you think it exists—as a solid, fixed thing out there, a certain distance away from you.
• Now picture yourself getting up and walking towards the door. Go all the way to the point when you open it.
• Play this picture back again in your mind, like a movie. What is happening to the door? It is getting bigger and bigger with every step you take.
• Now simplify the picture for a moment—take away some of the overlays and interpretations of the mind, and try to focus on just what the eye is seeing, moment by moment. The eye sees a small rectangle, then a slightly bigger one, then an even bigger one, and so on—flashes of still images in a rapid sequence, just like the frames of a movie.
• How many different doors does the eye see?
• Then what does the mind do with all these different images? The mind comes glues all these separate pictures together, and calls them a “door”.
• Picture yourself walking to the door again, only this time, shift your perception: see it as if it were passing frames of a movie—a projection of a sequence of images within your own virtual reality.
• You can never walk to the door, because there is no door as you are seeing it—no static, fixed single thing, because that could never change. Try to get to a feeling of absence about the door you thought was there.
• Now try this same mediation on any other object in the room.
• Often when people try this meditation for the first time, waves of objections often surface in their mind. The first one is: “But the door isn’t getting any bigger, that’s just my perception of the door as I get closer and closer.” We have such a strong habit of looking at the world a certain way that it is hard at first to even see another way of viewing. But get this: there is no door other than your perception of a door. What other kind of door could there be?
• Another objection that inevitable comes up is: “But the door has to be the solid thing it is, because I can feel it.” Let’s look into this one a little bit.
• We establish the existence of things through touch as well as sight, but what exactly are we feeling? What can the hand feel?
• The hand cannot feel door any more than the eye could see a door. The hand feels hardness, a bit of roughness here, some smooth curvy spot there, and then—just as the mind does with the data it gets from the eye—the mind pieces all these different tactile sensations together and calls them “door.”
• The mind is so good at all of this interpretation process that it seamlessly links the information you are getting from your eye together with the data you are receiving from your sense of touch.
• Close your eyes and touch the door. The hand feels something hard, something smooth. Now open your eyes and look—the eye sees something brown that’s shaped like a big rectangle. Do these two sets of things have anything in common?
• In itself, there is no connection at all between “rectangular, brown” and “hard, smooth.” It is all the mind, taking random bits of input and creating one whole solid thing, which it then calls a “door.”
• We’ll try another, deeper version of this meditation, using the sense of feeling instead of sight, and our own body as the outer object.