Grounded in the Elements

When I first translated Ajaan Lee’s Keeping the Breath in Mind, I added a little introduction in which I talked about the properties or the elements—the six properties of earth, water, wind, fire, space, and consciousness. I explained to Ajaan Fuang why I did that—that these concepts would be very foreign to Westerners. He gave me a quizzical look, “Why would they be foreign? They’re immediately experienced.”

It’s good to stop and think—because the concepts are foreign for those of us with a Western background. But the fact that he saw it as unusual indicates something important: They’re related to our immediate experience of our body. You don’t have to be an exotic person to sense them. It’s simply a matter of learning how to use your perceptions in a different way.

For a lot of us, the body is the solid part, the earth part. The breath is something we have to force into the body. But from the Eastern point of view—the point of view of, say, Thai medicine or Indian medicine—the breath is the first thing you sense. The shape of your breath body is not the same as the shape of your flesh body. It tends to extend outside a little bit, has fuzzier edges.

As for water, it’s the coolness you may feel—that’s one way of defining it. Another, they say, is cohesion—I don’t know how you would directly experience cohesion, but coolness is something you can feel. Then fire is the warmth. Space would be the empty spaces in the body. In the Canon, they list the spaces inside your nose, inside your throat, inside your mouth. But I find it more useful to think about the space between your atoms—there’s a lot of that. That helps to loosen up the sense we have of the body as being a solid lump with a clearly defined edge.

And finally, consciousness is what’s aware of all these things. You might ask, “Where is your consciousness?” It’s in all of the body. It’s just that there’s part of your awareness that tends to be the focal part, the part where you’re paying closest attention. That tends to be in one spot or you can make it in several spots at once or you can train it to be fully throughout the body—which is one of the things we’re trying to do here as we’re trying to get the mind into a really solid state of concentration, in a way that breath permeates everything.

Think of breath as the first thing you experience. What is the first thing you experience in your body, how you feel from within? It’s kind of liquid, it’s kind of moving, and it’s kind of vague. It’s only when we tense it up that the body becomes very clearly defined. You have to do that to some extent, say, when you’re walking or doing any other physical task. But when you’re sitting still, you can allow things to be a little bit more relaxed and loosely defined. That takes a lot of the tension away.

When you take a good, long breath in, where do you feel the movement? And how does the long breathing feel? Try to sensitize yourself to how you feel the body from within—because a lot of our Western background desensitizes us to just that. We have to pay more attention to concepts, things that are far away, which means we tend to blot out large parts of our awareness of the body.

Or different parts of our awareness of the body get converted into thoughts about this, that, or the other thought world. When we go into a thought world, it’s like a control key on a computer. You press the control key, and “c” doesn’t mean “c” anymore—it means “copy”; “x” doesn’t mean “x”—it means “cut”; “s” doesn’t mean “s”—it means “save.” In the same way, certain sensations in the body come to mean certain things to you, because you associate them with different thoughts.

Here, we’re trying to get back to the pre-association state of your body—just the body as a body, in and of itself. This is our frame of reference. Thinking about it in terms of these elements is a very useful way of getting in touch with that.

Think of being aware of your hands and that the awareness is in the hands. It’s not up in your head, looking down at the hands. The awareness is there in the hands. The same with your feet, your legs, every part of the body. You want to fully inhabit this space you have here. It is your space. Nobody else can experience it the way you do. Someone else could open you up with a knife, stick their hand inside your body—but they still wouldn’t experience it in the same way that you experience your body from within.

So use this as your grounding, because this is where you’re fully in the present. For the mind to go off into the past or the future, it has to shrink down. It’s almost as if going to the past or the future requires going into a little tube. If your awareness is large in the present moment, it’s not going to fit down the tube. So expand, spread out into the body right here. Then the question is, “Which of the elements is going to be most prominent?” For the time being, stick with the breath.

There’ll be times when you have a fever and you’re warm, or you have a chill and you feel cold, or the body feels heavy. Here’s where you can play with your perceptions. If things are too hot outside, you don’t want to focus on the heat inside the body. Ask yourself: Where in the body is the coolest spot? Or when things are cold outside, where is the warmest spot in the body? Focus there. And then think of that warmth spreading through the body. If you’re feeling lightheaded, think about earth and the fact that this body has its solid aspect. Or if you’re feeling dull and down, think of the breath to lift you up again.

The breath, of the different elements, is the one that you can adjust the most quickly and the most easily. That’s one of the reasons why we focus on it. It’s most responsive to the mind. It’s through the breath that the mind can exert control over the body, make it move. And it’s through the breath that the mind experiences the body. Without the breath, you’d be going separate ways. So think of the breath as primary. And it’s everywhere. It’s all around your body. Wherever you are in the body, think of the breath surrounding you. That puts you *in *the present—not hovering around the present someplace else.

So these are useful ways of perceiving the body. We may not buy into the medicine that goes along the theory—saying that when you have a fever, you need to have something cooling or when you have certain kinds of pains that are associated with the breath energy, you need a breath medicine or an earth medicine. But you can take the elements as your way of experiencing the body directly. That’s when the exotic nature of the analysis goes away and you realize this is how you directly experience the body. It’s a perfectly legitimate way of doing it. There’s nothing esoteric about it.

I remember reading someone’s criticism of the book, *The Mind like Fire Unbound. *The book talks about the theory of fire in the Buddha’s time: The fire element penetrates everything, and starting a fire means to aggravate the fire element; the fire clings to its fuel and when it goes out, it lets go and goes back to its latent state. Someone objected to that, “That’s a very exotic way of looking at it,” “The people back in those days, they didn’t look at it that way” and “Anyway, it was the just brahmans who looked at it that way, not anybody else.” The criticism was very incoherent, but it was obviously based on the idea that the way we in the West perceive things is the way things really are, while everybody else is strange.

It’s good to get out of that mindset and to realize that a lot of our Western notions are pretty strange. We’ve been divorced from our bodies, alienated from our bodies, by our education.

What we need is a re-education to get back to way things are experienced directly. And use this vocabulary because it’s a useful vocabulary. It’s not the only one you can use to describe how you experience the body, but it has its uses. And it’s not some exotic screen that’s getting in the way, getting between you and the body.

It’s a way of talking about sensations in the body that, if you didn’t have this vocabulary, you wouldn’t be able to talk about. It’s the same as being a professional taster, a professional scent expert. These people have to learn very, very precise vocabularies to describe subtle differences in tastes and smells. In the same way, this vocabulary of the six elements or the six properties helps make you sensitive to things that you just might have just brushed past otherwise.

So see what happens when you hold the perception in mind that the breath is the first thing you experience in your body. You’re not forcing the breath into the solid parts of the body. You’re opening up all the different breath energies in the body so that they can be interconnected.

As you bring in the air from outside, in one way you could say that you bring in energy from outside. But you could also say that it’s because of the energy you already have inside that the air comes in and out.

When you think of the energy originating in here, then you find yourself less hungry for a breath. You realize that when you’re feeling starved of breath energy, you might want to focus on just loosening things up inside so that the breath has more freedom to flow.

So learn how to use these concepts, because they give you handles on things inside your body that you wouldn’t have otherwise. Learn to be at home with them.