When we notice we are in a particular mood of anxiety or excitement, energy, laziness, restlessness—or nameless dukkha, our old friend, where we know we are suffering but can’t quite figure out what it is we’re suffering about—rather than trying to analyze the emotion, we just bring it into our attention in the body.

This is a tremendously useful way of training the mind to de-emphasize the intellectualizing process, the attempt to solve our problems just by thinking about them. Often, even if we have solved the problem in our brain—if we were worried about something and with logic have removed the source of the worry—the body can still be filled with tension and anxiety. It is charged up to worry about something, so we just finish one worry, but since the body is all set to keep going, it causes the brain to cook up another one—it finds something else to worry about. Since the body is tense and agitated it can cause the merest thought to turn into a major problem.

If we bring attention to the body and contemplate, “What is worry like? Where does it sit in the body?”, we can feel it like a knot of tension in the solar plexus, in our gut. every time you find your mind worrying about something, bring your attention down to your stomach, your solar plexus, and notice how it feels; then just let it relax, take your attention off the thing you are worrying about, let your stomach soften and notice the effect it has upon the mind. it is a mysterious and magical thing, but suddenly it seems to be much less of a problem.

 ∞

From the Fall 2012 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 29, No. 1)

Adapted with permission from Ajahn Amaro, Silent Rain (San Francisco: Sanghapala Foundation, 1996), 209.