Right Mindfulness

This is the direct path for the purification of beings, for the surmounting of sorrow and lamentation, for the disappearance of pain and grief, for the attainment of the true way, for the realization of Nibbāna: namely, the four dwellings of mindfulness.

DN22

When we follow the Gradual Training, which includes Renunciation, developing remorse-free Sila, skillfully guarding the sense doors, practicing moderation in eating, and dedicating ourselves to wakefulness and alertness, unskillful qualities of mind and behavior are greatly diminished. This sets the stage for the practice of Right Mindfulness.

To reach this stage, the coarse afflictions of body, speech, actions, and livelihood have greatly decreased. By being constantly alert and mindful of our thoughts and actions in daily life, disturbances have been significantly reduced. We have now gained enough tranquility and can address more subtle forms of desire and aversion, specifically clinging to the Five Aggregates.

Right Mindfulness: Introduction

Here a disciple dwells contemplating the body as body, ardent, fully aware, and mindful, having put away covetousness and grief for the world; he dwells contemplating feelings as feelings, ardent, fully aware, and mindful, having put away covetousness and grief for the world; he dwells contemplating mind as mind, ardent, fully aware, and mindful, having put away covetousness and grief for the world; he dwells contemplating dhammas as dhammas, ardent, fully aware, and mindful, having put away covetousness and grief for the world.

DN22

Right Mindfulness is the practice of dwelling and contemplating within one of the Four Dwellings of Mindfulness: contemplating the body in the body, feelings as feelings, mind as mind, and phenomena in phenomena, having subdued desire and aversion for the “world.”

By fully dwelling and contemplating in the Four Dwellings of Mindfulness, the Tathāgata declares that one can attain complete liberation within a maximum of seven years.

For whoever develops these four dwellings of mindfulness in such a way for seven years, one of two fruits can be expected: either final knowing here and now, or if there is a trace of clinging left, non-returning...

DN22

Although the instructions for Right Mindfulness appear simple, the Tathāgata declares that he could expound on the topic of mindfulness continuously for one hundred years and never repeat himself.

So how is Right Mindfulness different from the mindfulness of practicing Sila, Guarding the Sense Doors, Mindfulness in Eating, and the practice of Wakefulness?

In the previous stages of the Gradual Training, we practiced mindfulness in reference to the objects of the "world." That is, we are mindful and directing attention to our movements, actions, speech, thoughts, and how the mind makes contact with the "world." With regular mindfulness, experiences are perceived as events happening "out there" in the world, and we are using mindfulness not to get lost in desire, aversion, and delusion.

In contrast, with Right Mindfulness, experiences are no longer seen as the result of external occurrences but as creations or formations of the mind, unfolding within the mind itself.

However, for Right Mindfulness to be present, whether walking, sitting, standing, or lying down, one must contemplate the nature of the Five Aggregates, seeing them as impermanent, subject to suffering, and without self. Through contemplation, desire and aversion toward what is called the “world” are subdued. As attachment fades, the mind inclines toward dispassion, and from dispassion arises liberation.

Right Mindfulness: Overview of the Practice

The purpose of Right Mindfulness is to establish the causes and conditions for directly knowing, with clarity and steadiness, the true nature of experience. We need to see, again and again, that the Five Aggregates are neither lasting nor truly satisfying, nor something that can rightly be regarded as a self.

This knowing develops gradually. It begins with what is most concrete, the body, then moves toward feeling, mind, and dhammas.

The practice begins with keeping mindfulness steady in daily life, grounding attention in the body, feelings, mind states, and the nature of phenomena. Through sustained attention, one begins to discern the links between contact, feeling, craving, and the creation of self.

As mindfulness deepens, it turns into investigation. Instead of reacting, we observe sensations and emotions as conditioned and impersonal. When pleasure appears, we notice how craving tries to extend it, and when pain appears, how craving tries to avoid it.

The practice then matures into insight. Seeing the aggregates as processes rather than possessions exposes the futility of clinging to them. Awareness becomes balanced, neither craving nor rejecting, and the mind naturally settles into stillness. This calm and clarity allow the deeper understanding of impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and not-self to take root.

Each step supports the others: mindfulness steadies, investigation uncovers, concentration strengthens, and wisdom sees through it all. When clinging is fully understood, the chain of becoming ends, leaving freedom from the drive to create or defend a self and bringing an end to suffering.

Right Mindfulness: Right View

Before we begin the practice of Right Mindfulness, it is essential to establish a clear foundation. There needs to be Right View of several key principles from the start, because they shape how mindfulness is applied and how the practice unfolds. These include:

• The Importance of Wise Attention

• Using dependent arising to guide our practice

• How to dwell in one of the Four Dwellings of Mindfulness

• How to contemplate

• What it means to subdue desire and aversion for the "world"

• Right Mindfulness, or Sati, is dwelling in memory.

• That the nature of all mind phenomena is to rise and pass away

• How the sense of self is fabricated and how this obscures clear seeing

At its core, Right Mindfulness is about establishing the causes and conditions for clear seeing. It is not about gaining anything new but about gradually letting go, relinquishing wrong views, and releasing the unwholesome tendencies that distort perception and fuel unwise attention. When these are released, clarity and wisdom appear naturally.

While an initial understanding of these concepts is important, there is no need to hold on to them tightly, analyze them endlessly, or treat them as something heavy to remember and bring into each moment of practice. A simple familiarity is enough at the start. As practice deepens, and as insight makes these points clearer and more relevant, we can revisit them at the appropriate time to ensure our practice stays aligned with the teachings.

Thus, contemplation, the subduing of desire and aversion, abiding “body as body,” and every aspect of mindfulness practice are not ends in themselves. They arise naturally as the result of the causes and conditions created by practicing Right Mindfulness correctly.

Let us now look at each of these key concepts.

Right Mindfulness: Wise Attention

Disciples, I do not see even a single thing that so contributes to the arising of unarisen wholesome qualities and the decline of arisen unwholesome qualities as wise attention (yoniso manasikāra). When one attends wisely, unarisen wholesome qualities arise, and arisen unwholesome qualities decline.

AN1.16

The Tathagata teaches that there is nothing with greater bearing on success in the practice than wise attention; it is the “forerunner,” the turning of the mind toward truth.

The Meaning of Wise Attention

The Pāli term yoniso manasikāra literally means attention that goes to the origin or source. Yoni means "womb," "source," or origin; manasikāra means attention or mental engagement. Thus, wise attention is attending to things in terms of their causes and conditions, not merely in terms of their superficial appearance.

When the Tathagata said that wise attention attends to the origin of suffering, he was pointing to a radical way of seeing. Rather than clinging to phenomena as “mine” or “me,” one attends directly to the arising and ceasing of experiences, feelings, perceptions, and thoughts to discern how suffering is born and how it ends.

How Wise Attention Works

Wise attention is not passive observation; it is directed attention that discerns how suffering arises and ceases. When mindfulness is guided by wise attention, it naturally sees:

• There is suffering.

• The cause is craving.

• There is the cessation of craving.

• This is the path.

When one attends unwisely, unarisen taints arise, and arisen taints increase. When one attends wisely, unarisen taints do not arise, and arisen taints are abandoned.

MN2

This means that attention must be directed in a way that reduces suffering, not in a way that feeds it. Unwise attention feeds craving, conceit, and wrong views. Wise attention, on the other hand, sees impermanence, suffering, and non-self, leading to dispassion and peace.

Wise Attention and the Nature of Experience

To develop wise attention, we attend to experience at the source, at the level of the bare aggregates, without adding interpretations, stories, or judgments. When we stay with the aggregates at this simple level, we see feelings, perceptions, and mental states as they arise and pass away. Their conditioned nature becomes clear: each depends on causes and conditions, and each passes on its own when not clung to.

This seeing allows the mind to discern the chain of causation. Through such knowing, the mind learns not to cling but to let go, seeing that suffering is not caused by the world but by our attention and attachment to it.

The Three Qualities of Perception in Wise Attention

True, wise attention is imbued with insight into the nature of experience:

• Impermanence: All phenomena arise and pass away.

• Suffering: What is impermanent and clung to brings unease.

• Non-self: There is no permanent self in these changing processes.

When the mind attends in this way, craving and delusion weaken. The result is wisdom, knowing things as they really are.

Guided by Right View and Right Intention

Wise attention does not stand alone. It is supported by Right View, Right Intention, and Right Effort. Without these, attention may still be sharp, but it will not lead to liberation.

Right View guides attention to recognize the Four Noble Truths in all experience:

1. There is clinging.
2. Craving is the cause of clinging.
3. The end of clinging is the relinquishment of craving.
4. This is the path that leads to the end of clinging.

Right Intention inclines the mind to the cessation of craving, to letting go. Right Effort is not getting entangled in suffering and instead using the path to realize its cessation.

Wise attention is the mother of all wholesome qualities. It is how mindfulness becomes insight, how ordinary perception becomes wisdom. By training attention to turn toward the origin of suffering, which is craving, and by seeing the rise and fall of all conditioned things, we begin to truly progress on the Gradual Training.

When a noble disciple attends wisely, they abandon what is unwholesome and develop what is wholesome. They abandon what is blameworthy and develop what is blameless. In this way, their mind inclines toward Nibbāna.

AN4.37

Right Mindfulness: Developing Wise Attention

Developing Wise Attention begins with a simple but powerful insight: it’s not just what we attend to that matters, it’s how we attend to it. When attention is shaped by craving, aversion, or distorted views, even the most ordinary experience becomes a source of stress. But when attention is directed wisely, toward the root of dissatisfaction, it begins to dissolve it.

The root of suffering lies in our desire and clinging to the Five Aggregates: form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. We cling to them, hoping they will provide lasting satisfaction. Yet the more tightly we cling, the more suffering we create.

To develop Wise Attention, we must first learn to recognize craving and clinging, not with judgment, but with clarity. We begin to see that it is the very act of clinging to expectations that sustains dissatisfaction.

Once we are able to clearly recognize craving and clinging, we begin to contemplate its nature. To break the habitual tendency of regarding the Five Aggregates as having substance or permanence, we must examine them from many perspectives, again and again, until it is seen that what the mind craves and clings to is impermanent, unstable, and insubstantial.

We need to see directly that these objects of attachment are mind-made phenomena, bodily, verbal, and mental formations. They do not endure, they are not reliable, and they are not under our control. Through repeated contemplation, the truth of impermanence becomes unmistakable: everything in experience arises and passes away; there is nothing continuous, nothing that lasts.

With this recognition, the mind begins to understand suffering more deeply: what is impermanent and unstable cannot provide lasting satisfaction. What is unreliable should not be taken as “me, myself, or mine.”

Gradually, the mind begins to perceive phenomena as not-self. At first, it sees the Five Aggregates as “me,” “myself,” or “mine.” Over time, however, the mind recognizes that when it stops seeing them this way, the stress tied to clinging fades. It becomes increasingly skilled at perceiving things as not-self.

As insight deepens, we begin to recognize how the mind fabricates countless delusional behaviors and creating a self where none exists.

As mindfulness becomes subtle, we see that no act of will is required for wise attention, for discernment and memory are natural qualities of consciousness itself. When awareness abides fully in the body, free from desire and aversion, it naturally knows the arising and passing of feelings, perceptions, intentions, and thoughts.

And, friend, wisdom and consciousness: Are these states conjoined or disjoined? And is it possible to distinguish between them to describe them separately?

Wisdom and consciousness, friend: These states are conjoined, not disjoined. And it is not possible to distinguish between them to describe them separately.

What one understands, that one knows; what one knows, that one understands. Therefore, these states are conjoined, not disjoined. And it is not possible to distinguish between them to describe them separately.

MN43

Wise Attention: Distinguishing Old and New Karma

Wise attention depends on a simple but important ability: knowing the difference between old karma and new karma. When we do not see this clearly, we react to what has already appeared, and those reactions become new karma.

Old karma is whatever has already ripened, showing itself through the body, feelings, perceptions, mental habits, and consciousness. These are the results of past intentions coming up as pleasant or unpleasant experiences. Once something has appeared in experience, it cannot be changed.

New karma forms through our present reactions to what is already there. When the mind clings, rejects, judges, or identifies with an experience, new karma is created.

Wise attention does not try to reshape what has already appeared in experience. It attends directly to the conditions that allowed it to arise in the first place. By clearly seeing the causes and conditions that supported its appearance, the mind learns not to participate or add fuel to those causes and instead lets them fade on their own.

In other words, effort is not spent on changing old karma but on attending directly to the roots, which are craving and clinging to the aggregates. As mindfulness strengthens, old karma still appears, yet we stop feeding it. The mind grows more at ease, more spacious, and less caught up. In this way, wise attention gradually quiets the entire karmic process.

Wise Attention: Using Dependent Arising to Guide Practice

In the supra-mundane path, instead of creating more karmic activity, Right Intention is inclining the mind to let the machinery of fabrication settle down. This requires understanding how dependent arising functions and how we can use it to guide our practice.

Once a mental process has already taken birth, it must run its course. Formations that have appeared in experience will age and fade. Nothing can reverse that momentum. Because of this, the Tathagata teaches us to direct attention to that part of experience in dependent arising before birth, to the links that give rise to experience, where change can take place.

For example, if there is tension or an emotion in the body, if you take tension itself as the object, the mind slips toward the physical side. Even though the roots of that tension are entirely mental, the focus moves to the felt tightness, which is already the formed product. That keeps attention where birth and death have already expressed themselves and where the cycle has already taken shape.

The problem is not that tension should not be noticed, but that working directly on the tension makes the mind believe that the physical sensation is the thing to fix. The mind then tends to press, adjust, or manipulate. Even when trying to stay equanimous, there is the subtle holding of the object. That pulls the practice into the area where nothing fundamental can be changed.

When Conditions Cease, Objects Do Not Arise

In the teaching on dependent arising, when one of the conditions needed for something to appear in experience is absent, that thing simply does not arise.

If we shift attention back to the causes, instead of dealing with the tension, we notice the feeling tone that led to it, the perception that framed the area, and the way attention held that frame. These are the activities that created the tightening. When they calm, the tension softens on its own without any direct work on the physical side.

An essential point in practice is that we do not work on what has already appeared as an object in experience. Once something has taken shape there, it belongs to the birth and death side of dependent arising, and working on it only keeps the cycle going. Instead, we work within the mental side of experience, attending to the causes and conditions that gave rise to the object in the first place.

All Objects in Experience are Old Karma

Everything that appears as a cognized object in experience is the result of past causes. It is old Karma, already on the side of birth and death. The moment something is perceived as a thing, it has already formed through contact, feeling, perception, and attention. It is already a constructed result that will arise, change, and fade.

This includes thoughts that have already appeared, emotions that have already come forward, tension in the body that is already present, and any perception or mood that has unfolded before we even notice it. These are simply the residues of past conditions. Working inside what has already taken shape cannot free the mind. It only builds more involvement, more clinging, and more becoming. For this reason, we do not chase results in experience. Instead, we direct our attention to the root conditions that shape the whole cycle.

This is also why the practice is not aimed at obtaining tangible results. Anything that can be pointed to as a result is already something in experience. Clinging to a state, a mood, or a meditative quality only strengthens the sense of being established in something. Instead, practice requires checking again and again that we are working with the cycle before life and death, at the root causes and conditions.

Using Dependent Arising in Practice

Rather than becoming involved with what has already appeared, we use dependent arising as a guide to see where practice is effective. Each link shows how experience is constructed and where release becomes possible.

• Developing Right View weakens ignorance at the very root.

• Understanding karma gives us clarity about volitional formations and how intention sets the whole process in motion.

• We contemplate seeing how consciousness shapes the sense of a "me" living in a world.

• Through direct seeing, we come to see that this sense of existence is dependent on nama-rupa, the mind binding itself to form. The mind (nama) recreates a mental version of the body (rupa) and clings to it as something owned.

• By contemplating, we see how the six bases are taken up as my eyes, my ears, my body, and my mind. This is how contact with the world becomes possible.

• Contact then sets the tone of each moment.

• We discern how feeling arises in dependence on that tone and how craving follows, moving toward the pleasant and away from the painful.

• With wise attention, the aggregates show themselves as fabricated. Yet the mind still clings to these fabrications as me, myself, or mine.

• From here, becoming gains momentum. We become aware of the drive or energy that tries to settle into the aggregates, trying to take birth as a particular identity or state of existence.

• Once birth has taken place, what appears is old karma. If attention is placed there, the cycle is simply fed and the pattern of birth and death continues.

For this reason, training on the supra-mundane path rests on the links that arise before any moment of experience has taken shape. With attention placed there, the mind no longer feeds becoming. It no longer fuels craving, clinging, or the movements that keep the cycle turning.

It is by knowing and seeing the conditions that the destruction of the taints is achieved.

SN12.51

Therefore, the emphasis of the practice is not on what has already appeared, but on what is giving rise to the appearance. This is why the training rests on clear seeing of intention, attention, contact, feeling, and craving as they arise. This is how the chain is weakened before it can produce new Karma.

With the fading away of ignorance, volitional formations fade; with the fading away of volitional formations, consciousness fades, and so on, until this whole mass of suffering fades.

SN12.23

The crucial point in dependent arising is that fading takes place because the conditions upstream are no longer being supplied. When the causes are not fed, nothing new forms. Nothing is pushed forward. This is the heart of not fabricating.

This is how we can use dependent arising as a practical framework. The links reveal clearly where change is possible and where it is not. When attention stays with cause rather than result, the cycle slows, weakens, and eventually stops. This is wise attention and the core of the supra-mundane path.

Right Mindfulness: The Four Dwellings of Mindfulness

Now let us look at why there are Four Dwellings of Mindfulness and why the Tathāgata taught them in that specific progressive order.

The four dwellings—body, feelings, mind, and mental phenomena—are how insight into suffering naturally unfolds. The Tathāgata chose these four because they encompass the entire field of human experience in relation to suffering: the physical body, the propagation of feeling, mental states, and the underlying patterns and structures that condition suffering.

There is a purpose in how these four dwellings are to be developed. The Four Dwellings of Mindfulness do not function like four separate techniques that you switch between. They are how experience reveals itself when the mind grows steady and simple and stays at the root of what is happening. Each dwelling opens into the next, and the training is about learning how to stay at the root of each layer without drifting into reaction or fabrication.

Let's look at how the progression actually unfolds in practice, one dwelling preparing the ground for the next.

Dwelling Body as Body

Training starts with the body because the physical side of experience is the simplest and most stable. At this stage you learn to stay with the direct sensory field, the shifting textures and pressures and movements that make up the form aggregate. You are not examining the anatomical body. You are staying with the raw feel of form without letting the mind rush in to add labels, identity, or meaning.

With this stability, we begin to see that what we once assumed to be a purely physical body is actually constructed in the mind, conditioned by contact, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness.

When the mind stops running away into thoughts, memories, or projections, the raw sensory ground holds together long enough for subtler layers to become clear.

Dwelling feelings as feelings

Once the raw sensory field is familiar and calm, a more subtle layer of experience naturally starts to become visible. Each sensation arrives with its own feeling tone. Pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. This tone is not a physical sensation; it is the mind’s immediate response to sensation.

We do not need to search for feeling tones. They show themselves when the mind is not busy chasing or resisting what it feels. Staying at the level of form without being pulled into objectification makes tone unmistakable.

This is the opening of the second dwelling. The work here is simple: know feeling tone as feeling tone without falling into craving or aversion.

Dwelling mind as mind

When feeling tone is known clearly, the mind’s reactions and moods become obvious. You see how the mind leans forward toward pleasant, pulls away from unpleasant, and drifts or dulls with neutral. You start to notice the quality of the mind itself. Is it bright, heavy, contracted, restless, open, or steady?

These states were always there, but they were hidden under reactions. With the feeling tone known, the third dwelling opens. Now the work is to dwell in the mind as mind, without getting mixed up in the state that appears.

Dwelling Phenomena in Phenomena

Finally, as the process of experience becomes clearer, our attention turns to understanding the deeper causes and conditions, the underlying structures that give rise to suffering. Here we begin to contemplate dhammas: abandoning the Five Hindrances through the cultivation of the Seven Factors of Enlightenment and contemplating the Five Aggregates, the Six Sense Bases, and the Four Noble Truths. These mental phenomena are not theoretical abstractions, but truths to be directly known and penetrated.

The Path as One Movement

The Tathagata teaches Four Dwellings of Mindfulness, but in practice they are one continuous path. We begin with the simplest part of experience, stay close to it, and let the rest unfold. Nothing is skipped, nothing is forced. When each layer is seen precisely, the construction of experience becomes transparent, and release becomes possible.

This is why the training starts with the body and moves inward toward the structure of the mind. It is a movement from the obvious to the subtle, each step grounded in clear knowing and steady presence. If we attempt to skip ahead, say, contemplating dhammas without establishing mindfulness of the body, we will lack the stability and clarity needed for genuine insight.

Disciples, what is the purpose of developing the four dwellings of mindfulness? Their development leads to revulsion, to dispassion, to cessation, to peace, to direct knowledge, to enlightenment, to Nibbāna.

SN47.40

What Does It Mean to Dwell: Body as Body?

When the Tathāgata says, “One dwells contemplating the body as the body, ardent, fully aware, and mindful, having put away covetousness and grief for the world,” what does this mean?

It means that awareness is gathered fully within the body, not held as an image or idea in the mind, but known directly as the body itself. We remain present with the living experience of the body, aware in real time of the arising and passing of phenomena. In this dwelling, the body is no longer something being observed; it knows and experiences itself. Awareness rests in awareness, a natural clarity that appears only when covetousness and grief for the world are continuously released.

This requires direct contact with raw bodily sensation, not fabricated by the mind, not overlaid with concepts, labels, identification, or spatial reference. It is simply awareness, steady and undistracted, free from mental interference.

To dwell in the body as body also means letting go of clinging to anything in experience. We neither become lost in bodily experience nor try to fight it nor resist it. We abide unattached, with clear knowing, and in steady presence.

When one truly abides “body as body,” having relinquished desire and aversion for the world, the body becomes deeply at ease. The mind settles, centered, bright, and content. With few or no bodily, verbal, or mental fabrications remaining, awareness is naturally clear, and wisdom arises.

This is not a fabricated state but a natural unfolding, the simple fruit of letting go of desire and aversion for the "world".

Right Mindfulness: What is Contemplation?

When we dwell continuously in the present, with sustained attention and full awareness within one of the Four Dwellings of Mindfulness, we begin to see things as they really are, free from the fabrications born of desire, aversion, and delusion. We can now contemplate with Right Mindfulness.

Contemplation on the supra-mundane path is the development of wisdom, not intellectual understanding, but direct knowing through directly seeing the arising and passing away of phenomena and discerning how they depend upon causes and conditions.

In an ordinary person, the mind does not clearly see causes and conditions. From contact comes feeling; from feeling, craving; from craving, clinging; and from clinging, becoming, leading to a whole world of existence and ultimately to suffering. Because of ignorance, this process remains unseen, and there is clinging to the Five Aggregates, mistaking what happens in experience as “me” and “mine.”

The purpose of contemplation is to see directly, with wise attention, how the mind fabricates the world through craving and clinging, how it personalizes experience, giving it false substance and permanence, and thus creating stress and suffering.

Through direct seeing, not through conceptual thought, the mind must see that all conditioned phenomena are impermanent, arising and ceasing according to causes. It must see that attachment to what is impermanent brings dissatisfaction and that since all phenomena depend on conditions, none can rightly be held on to as “me” or “mine.”

Contemplation requires remaining with the bare aggregates before the mind adds meaning or interpretation. Only then can we see how fabrications arise through causes and conditions and how they naturally pass away without suffering when we do not cling to them.

Seeing thus, the instructed noble disciple becomes disenchanted with form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness. Being disenchanted, he becomes dispassionate. Through dispassion, the mind is liberated.

SN22.59

When seeing is direct, unobstructed, and complete, disenchantment naturally arises. The mind grows weary of clinging to what is impermanent; it no longer delights, having seen the futility and suffering involved.

As the mind sees the relief from not clinging, dispassion arises. This is not indifference but serenity, the cooling of the fires of desire and the release from the fever of craving. When craving fades, the mind becomes bright, balanced, and temporarily liberated.

Contemplation is the combination of several skills

• The ability to recall the Tathāgata’s teachings, even from a long time ago, and apply them correctly, which also includes remembering our experiences of having practiced and contemplated these teachings.

• Contemplation requires the sustained, real-time, all-encompassing attention of Right Mindfulness to be able to see from start to finish the arising, changing, and passing away of phenomena without labeling, judging, or getting entangled.

• The mind needs to directly see that any feelings, perceptions, desires, clinging, and intentions that arise in the mind lack substance, are unreliable, and are the result of causes and conditions. They are not "me, myself, or mine". That clinging to them causes suffering.

• The mind must see directly that phenomena never remain still; they are constantly changing. It is craving that makes them seem lasting. Through clinging, the mind tries to hold experience in place, driven by the desire or expectation that things should be reliable, predictable, substantial, or satisfying.

• Contemplation requires seeing the full arising, changing, and passing away of each phenomenon. The mind must recognize the entire causal sequence and see directly that stress fades when no clinging takes hold, when we do not follow the desires or expectations tied to the Five Aggregates.

Contemplation Requires Discernment

We use the Four Noble Truths to guide insight and develop wisdom into the nature of stress and dissatisfaction by contemplating suffering, its cause, and the way to its cessation.

Contemplation requires the ability to probe: to direct attention to a particular area of experience where there is stress or dissatisfaction, to investigate it thoroughly without getting entangled, and at the same time keep a wide awareness so that all experience is included and attachment does not arise.

For example, when tension or stress arises in the body, or when unpleasant sensations are noticed, we need to investigate the root cause: craving and clinging to the Form Aggregate. Clinging creates a tightening or narrowing of awareness and tension.

To investigate properly, it's important to expand awareness and see the whole picture in a detached way. If we focus or stare at the tension or unpleasant sensations that arise, this becomes unwise attention; we are paying attention to the fabrication of formations and not the origin or source of these formations. Which is desire, aversion, and clinging to the Five Aggregates.

To release clinging, the mind must see the entire causal process, from the initial rise of stress to the letting go of craving, to the relief that follows, and the practice that made that release possible. When this is seen repeatedly, the mind develops confidence and wisdom. It begins to let go on its own whenever mindfulness is present. 

This clarity can only be cultivated when we abide with a mind free from covetousness and grief for the world, steady enough to observe the whole sequence without being pulled into it.

So while the above instructions may seem complicated, they can be summarized as simply “abiding in awareness, with wise attention, not clinging to anything.”

Right Mindfulness: How to Contemplate?

To understand contemplation, let’s look at how the Four Noble Truths can be applied to aversion.

Aversion often appears as tension or agitation in the body and mind. Instead of resisting it, we begin by recognizing suffering as it is, a felt sense of unease. Then we see its cause: craving. In the case of aversion, it is the craving for the discomfort to end or the craving for a more pleasant state to replace it. This push and pull intensifies the suffering.

As practice deepens, we look further and see that the real craving is the clinging to the Five Aggregates—the body, feelings, perceptions, intentions, or consciousness—as “me” or “mine.” This is where aversion takes hold.

We see that when we no longer feed this craving, suffering ceases. We see that letting go of craving softens the mind’s resistance, and as a result, the body and mind naturally settle.

Furthermore, we rely on the path, Right View, Right Intention, Right Effort, and Right Mindfulness, to stay present without clinging or reacting. We release the urge to fix or escape and observe each experience arise and pass with wisdom.

Contemplation is seeing causes and conditions, recognizing how craving shows itself in experience through the links of dependent arising. It requires discerning how ignorance, formations, consciousness, contact, feeling, craving, and the other links function together as a single unfolding process that shapes experience.

Wise attention is observing this process, understanding it, and allowing the whole stream to gradually calm. It is not about suppressing reactions on the surface but about seeing the conditions that make those reactions arise in the first place.

Contemplating Without Getting Entangled

When we contemplate, the task is simple: stay at the bare aggregates and remain aware of phenomena as they arise, change, and pass away, without getting entangled with anything in experience. We attend carefully so as not to be captured or swept away by craving or aversion, the mind’s pull and push that wishes for things to be otherwise.

We don't hold objects in experience to get rid of greed or aversion toward them; doing so is just another form of clinging, and it only creates more entanglement.

If clinging appears, there’s no need to fight it or suppress it. Rather, we notice the craving behind it and gently loosen our grip and let it pass away.

We need to see that interacting with objects in experience only fuels more greed and aversion by giving them additional weight. Instead of engaging with what has already appeared, contemplation turns toward the underlying craving and the causal chain it sets in motion, the chain that leads to clinging to the body formation, to feelings and perceptions, to intentions, and even to consciousness itself.

We begin to see how craving and clinging bind the mind to suffering. Each moment of awareness is an opportunity not just to let go, but to investigate deeply: What is this feeling? How does it arise? What conditions sustain it? How does it change? And what remains when it passes away? Not by holding on to things or through logical conclusions, but through directly seeing them arise and pass away on their own.

Thus, every moment of non-entanglement becomes a training ground. We learn not only to release but also to know, and through knowing, the mind grows disenchanted, detached, and free.

We must see that when the mind is free of greed and aversion, it doesn't interfere with experience; all phenomena arise and pass away on their own. Thoughts are like waves in the ocean; they arise and dissolve back into it. If we don’t resist or stir up a storm, phenomena will naturally subside as we let them go and let them be.

But if we start thinking, “Oh, tension has arisen; I must not react,” that itself becomes more getting lost in phenomena. Practicing in this way only increases suffering, as the mind chases after objects. Instead, we look for the root cause, clinging to the aggregates.

Instead of labeling our experience, we use the Four Noble Truths to guide our practice and see things directly and simply as a single process:

This is suffering. There is craving. There is the passing away of craving. Everything is impermanent, not-self, only the unfolding of conditions.

When we abide in one of the Four Dwellings of Mindfulness without holding on to thoughts or phenomena, it diffuses their power. This allows the body to remain relaxed and the mind centered, stable, peaceful, and luminous.

Examining Our Expectations

To contemplate with Right View, we also need to examine the mind's assumptions and expectations for experiences to be a certain way. Is there an expectation for experiences to be reliable, substantial, and satisfying when all phenomena experienced are fabricated by nature? The mind must clearly see that if it takes anything in experience as "mine," it can only lead to stress and dissatisfaction.

So, for example, if we take tension to be “mine,” entanglement has already begun. When we hold on to that tension, the entanglement deepens. Trying to deal with greed or aversion at this surface level does not touch the real cause, which is the underlying clinging to the aggregates, taking them to be me or mine.

Investigation is not conceptual; it is the uncovering of deep-rooted assumptions that exist in how we perceive experience. These assumptions shape our perceptions with desire or aversion.

Contemplation involves observing the desire, aversion, and delusion that sustain them. It is recognizing the mistaken view that there is something enduring and personal within experience. With insight, the impermanent, unsatisfactory, and not-self nature of experiences gradually becomes apparent.

There may also be aversion, a fear of what the investigation might reveal. For example, if we experience something emotionally or physically unpleasant, the ingrained reaction is to want to change it, to make it pleasant. But this is not true investigation; we have not investigated the nature of this unpleasantness, which is desire and aversion.

Finally, if there is the absence of thought, a dark, dull, and drowsy state without any awareness. For example, when we are not quite asleep, but there’s a blank dullness. If we remain in such dullness, our contemplation will be ineffective and will not evolve. This experience of absence of thought is not contemplation or Right Mindfulness and must be cleared away whenever it occurs.

Right Mindfulness: Understanding Craving

And what, disciples, is the noble truth of the origin of suffering?

It is that craving which leads to renewed existence, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there, namely sensual craving, craving for existence, craving for nonexistence. This is called, disciples, the noble truth of the origin of suffering.

And what, disciples, is the noble truth of the cessation of suffering?

It is the remainderless fading away and cessation of that very craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom from it, non-reliance on it; this is called, disciples, the noble truth of the cessation of suffering.

SN56.11

Recognizing craving is of the utmost importance because it is both the cause and the cessation of suffering; therefore, we must recognize craving not just conceptually, but by actually seeing how it manifests within our experience.

Craving is often mistakenly portrayed as a surface emotion, a desire for pleasure, comfort, or escape. However, the teachings point to something far deeper: craving is the force that animates the entire structure of experience.

It is not a faint current beneath the senses; rather, it is the very energy that keeps the aggregates active, that builds and sustains a world, and that repeatedly pulls the mind toward becoming.

When the Second Noble Truth states that suffering is rooted in craving, it is describing the whole of the practice: to know craving and realize its cessation through the Noble Eightfold Path.

Craving is hidden under the surface

Just like suffering, craving is usually concealed. As long as the senses are active, objects continue to appear in experience, and attention is absorbed in sights, sounds, thoughts, and moods. With attention directed outward, craving stays hidden. It drives each moment, but its momentum is masked by the constant stream of sensory activity.

Only when attention turns toward experience itself—toward the Five Aggregates—does the depth of craving begin to show. When the senses are not being fed, this restless energy starts to become visible. It is constantly searching for something to grasp. Without external objects to land on, it appears as tension, emotions, and bodily, verbal, and mental formations.

If we don’t look deeper, all we notice are these internal manifestations. But when we learn to recognize craving, we see that it is behind all constructed experience. All tension, emotions, and formations arise, shaped by it.

By working with craving directly, rather than getting lost in its manifestations, our practice becomes much more effective.

To understand craving and penetrate the teachings, we can use the teachings on dependent arising as a guide. Dependent arising not only shows how suffering arises but also how craving infuses each link as the underlying momentum of experience.

At the same time, dependent arising points to the path of cessation. Each link contains the potential for release when craving is no longer fed. Seen in this way, craving is not a momentary desire but the underlying force that drives the unfolding of experience and the sense of a solid world.

Let us now turn to how, based on ignorance of suffering, the whole chain is set in motion by craving.

Volitional energy as craving in motion

Volitional energy, the second link in dependent arising, is craving in motion. It is the accumulated momentum of unfulfilled desires seeking an outlet through intention. Each moment of craving leaves an imprint. Each imprint adds a slight tilt toward seeking, grasping, resisting, or becoming.

Over countless moments in this life and across countless lifetimes, these tilts have gathered into a powerful current that drives intention in the present.This is not a collection of mild desires waiting quietly in the background.

Every craving, even the faintest one, generates a push or pull. It produces a leaning, an inclination, a movement toward something or away from something. These movements accumulate. They form a momentum strong enough to shape the ongoing construction of experience, moment after moment.

Volitional energy is the total weight of craving for sense pleasure, craving for existence, and craving for escape from existence. Because these cravings remain unresolved, there is built-up pressure for an outlet. That pressure expresses itself as intention, as the impulse to act, to choose, to think, to feel, and to become. This is why intention arises even before thought appears and why the mind is never truly still on its own.

This momentum is what keeps the entire chain of dependent arising moving. It fuels the unfolding of the aggregates, it recreates the sense bases, and it drives consciousness to seek a place to land. It is craving in motion, the energy from the past expressing itself in the present, dependent on present circumstances, into the next moment of becoming.

Consciousness, the craving to establish itself into a world

Dependent arising describes consciousness as circling, landing, and establishing itself on experience. This settling is not passive. Beneath it is a powerful drive, the craving to secure a place to stand, to build the sense of a self living in a world.

Consciousness is like a constant fire spreading from one little world to the next. It reaches outward because it depends on an object to create the feeling of existence.

When the mind becomes quiet, even for a moment, notice how quickly consciousness moves toward a thought, a memory, an image, or a sensation. This movement is not subtle. It is a strong pull seeking something solid to rest on, something that confirms, even briefly, the continuity of being. The mind searches for a world to inhabit and for a self to be within that world. This is craving at work, generating the very platform of experience and repeatedly rebuilding the sense of existence from moment to moment.

Name and form: the recreation of form in the mind

Name and form give structure, shape, and meaning to the flow of experience. They create the sense of solidity, a body, and a world—something consciousness can inhabit and form a self around.

This process is not passive. The body and the world are continually recreated based on craving. When craving is light, the body feels light. When craving is strong, the body becomes dense and heavy, filled with tension or emotion, unable to settle.

Craving shapes how sensations are formed into the sense of a body. Mental impressions are arranged into labels, interpretations, and patterns. All of this is driven by craving—the push to form a livable world and a self that can occupy it.

For example, when the mind feels a vague uneasiness, notice how quickly it produces explanations, memories, or imagined scenarios. It does not tolerate uncertainty. It creates shape from the unformed. That fabricating force is the same craving that moves through every link of the chain.

The six sense bases as the field of craving

The internal and external sense bases are the channels through which craving engages with the world. Without the senses, craving has no ground to stand on and no avenue through which to seek satisfaction. The senses exist as fields of possibility, shaped and sustained by the drive to meet objects, to feel, to know, and to confirm the sense of being.

Craving shows itself as an eagerness for contact. There is a pull toward stimulation, a need to touch, hear, taste, smell, see, or think something. This eagerness is not a surface habit. It is the force that keeps the senses active, alert, and reaching outward. Without this pressure, the senses would not rush toward their objects in the way they do. They would not prepare themselves in advance. They would simply rest.

A clear example is how the eyes move; even when the mind intends to be still, the eyes shift from object to object, attention leaps outward on its own, and it searches for shape, color, movement, and meaning. This reaching is not random; it is craving expressing itself through the sense bases, rebuilding the world in each moment, and looking for something that can satisfy the underlying desire to exist and to experience.

Contact and feeling carry the momentum forward.

When contact arises between sense base, object, and consciousness, feeling inevitably follows. Pleasant feeling invites holding, unpleasant feeling invites resistance, and neutral feeling invites drifting or dullness. These are not simple reactions; they are the stage on which craving becomes visible. Feeling acts as the spark that ignites the next movement of the cycle. What seems like an emotional response is actually the life of craving continuing to build the world.

For example, a faint feeling of unease can blossom into a full emotional world. Thoughts appear, narratives form, images arise, and the sense of self becomes entangled. None of this happens passively. It is a fabrication driven by craving seeking existence.

The same happens with joy. A pleasant sensation blooms into desire, imagining, anticipation, and attachment. Craving expands the moment. It builds layers upon layers of meaning and identity.

Craving as clinging, becoming, and the birth of tension

When craving finds something to hold, it hardens into clinging. From clinging, becoming arises. The sense of a self trying to maintain itself appears. This is where craving becomes most recognizable through tension, emotion, stress, anticipation, and the restless activity of trying to secure something that will not stay still. What most people call craving is only this final stage, where the underlying current breaks the surface.

The world is maintained by craving moment by moment

What we ordinarily call the world is not static. It is reconstructed continuously. The sense of a stable environment, the sense of a stable self, and the sense of continuity—all of these arise through craving’s pressure.

Without craving, the world would lose its solidity. It would appear as a fluid field of sensations without ownership or center.

This is why seeing craving directly is transformative. When attention shifts from the objects of experience to the processes of experience, especially bodily, verbal, and mental fabrication, the real magnitude of craving becomes clear. It is not a minor impulse. It is the force that builds everything.

Seeing craving as the root of experience

The path requires learning to see craving not as a particular desire but as a force that animates the whole system. This recognition shifts our practice from trying to manage the objects that appear in our experience to understanding the engine that drives them.

Craving is not simply wanting the pleasant or resisting the unpleasant. It is the underlying current that creates the sense of a world, the sense of a self, and the entire structure of experience that unfolds moment by moment.

When this current is clearly seen, enchantment loses strength, and the mind no longer feeds the cycle in the same way. Dependent arising becomes a living map that shows both how suffering builds itself and how the cycle can weaken and cease.

This is the path to freedom.

Right Mindfulness: Subduing Desire and Aversion

The Gradual Training is, at its core, the systematic practice of addressing desire and aversion, seeing craving from its coarse manifestation to its most subtle traces. At this stage of the practice, addressing desire and aversion is essential, because without calming desire and aversion, Right Mindfulness cannot take root.

Craving is the energy generated whenever the mind leans toward what it wants or pulls away from what it fears or dislikes. It is the momentum behind seeking, resisting, and shaping experience according to desire or aversion.

A mind constantly pulled toward what is pleasing or recoiling from what is painful remains clouded and fragmented, unable to see things as they really are.

In the practice of Right Mindfulness, we train to recognize this craving energy and how it manifests as clinging to the Five Aggregates: form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness, the structures of experience.

By subduing this deeply embedded craving, both toward the "external" world and our internal processes, the body and mind begin to settle. This settling is not only stillness; it is a clarity free from distortion, a condition necessary for insight to arise.

Only when desire and aversion are subdued can mindfulness become steady, and only then can we begin to see with wisdom the impermanent, unsatisfactory, and selfless nature of all phenomena.

What is Subduing Desire and Aversion?

The mind of an ordinary person is afflicted by craving based on desire or aversion; it is agitated, restless, and clouded by craving, which distorts perception and prevents clear insight. Only when these obstacles are temporarily subdued can we dwell in an unobstructed awareness, enabling us to see things as they really are.

When the Tathāgata says, "having subdued desire and aversion for the world," he is referring to the mental purification needed to see clearly and to contemplate body, feelings, mind, and dhammas without distortion.

Desire is the mind's longing for satisfactory experiences. Aversion is resistance or irritation toward experiences that are unsatisfactory. These two are the twin roots of craving that prevent the mind from seeing things as they really are. When these are present, the mind shapes experience based on preferences and on making things personal.

At the surface, craving is the reaction to feelings. It arises when a pleasant feeling is met with desire, an unpleasant feeling with aversion, and a neutral feeling with delusion.

Craving is an impulse: "I want," "I don’t want," "I want to become," "I want this to end." It has mental energy associated with it. Dependent on craving, there is clinging. Clinging is when the mind doesn’t just reach out but holds on to something, identifying with it and binding to it.

On a deeper level, craving is embedded throughout the entire cycle of dependent arising, shaped and sustained by past karmic volition.

To subdue desire and aversion, we must recognize and address the root cause of the mind’s reactive tendency to chase after pleasant feelings or reject unpleasant ones, not by trying to control what is already present in our experience, but by examining and working with the causes and conditions that give rise to the experience in the first place: craving for sense satisfaction, craving for existence, and craving for escape from existence.

Addressing Greed and Aversion at the Level of the Self

Modern practice often treats greed and aversion as something a self must learn to resist, as if there is a separate agent standing outside the process who must remain steady. This misses the real purpose of the training. The aim is not to strengthen a self but to understand and calm the flow of conditioned energy that appears as craving, clinging, and becoming throughout the chain of dependent arising.

Simply trying not to react to individual feelings or impulses leaves this deeper energy untouched. The momentum of old habits, volitional formations, and latent tendencies continues to feed the process. True practice means seeing and subduing this energy at its source, understanding ignorance, formations, consciousness, contact, feeling, craving, and the whole of dependent arising as an interconnected stream of craving. The practice is using wise attention to see and gradually calm the whole movement, not suppressing surface reactions.

If we work only at the level of sensations or thoughts that have already appeared, we address only the tip of the iceberg. The deeper layers, the formations and conditioning that arise before the “birth” of conscious experience, remain unseen and continue to drive the cycle. The training is not about building a self who resists greed or aversion, but about penetrating the dynamic process itself, seeing how craving moves, and letting it fade naturally by removing the conditions that sustain it.

But how is this done? What does “subduing” really mean? Is it suppression, non-participation, or something else entirely?

The Three Levels of Letting Go

In the Tathagata's discourses, abandoning unwholesome states happens in three levels:

1. Temporary subduing. This involves not eliminating desire or aversion but refraining from giving them fuel. For example, by simply letting go of craving or not clinging in the first place.

2. Cumulative abandoning. Through wise reflection, we investigate the drawbacks or dangers of these states and see through their illusions, not by thoughts but through direct experience. Instead of fueling the reactivity of craving, we redirect our attention to its root causes: the views we hold, the perceptions we cling to, the feeling-tones that ignite craving, the underlying energy of craving for delight, the intentions shaped by this craving, and the becoming that seeks to exist. This is the work of wise attention.

3. Final uprooting. This involves complete destruction of the defilements, achievable only through liberating insight (Arahantship).

At this stage of the practice, to subdue desire and aversion means:

• We recognize the craving energy already present beneath experience, which appears as bodily, verbal, and mental formations, and we release it instead of following it.

• When tension, emotion, or any movement arises, we do not work with the surface expression. We look directly at the clinging beneath it and the craving that fuels that clinging, and we soften our hold and release the craving energy behind clinging.

• We notice the craving behind desire and aversion, especially the tendency to cling to the body and to the feelings and perceptions tied to the body. We gently loosen this attachment.

• When craving tries to grasp an object, we refrain from staying with the object and turn toward its cause, which is craving and clinging.

• When phenomena appear, we neither grab them nor push them away. We acknowledge them as the unfolding of past conditions and allow them to fade naturally.

• We avoid building stories, judgments, or identities around what arises. Such proliferation is simply craving shifting into a different form.

Thus, subduing does not mean suppression or force; it means non-participation.

If we attempt to subdue greed or aversion at the surface level, we end up wrestling with old karma. We engage with the very fabrications that craving created, and by doing so, we give them strength.

Instead, we use wise attention to see the craving beneath those fabrications. It is craving that keeps them alive. When craving is released, the fabrications lose support and settle on their own.

So when the pull or push of desire or aversion appears, we do not hold it, feed it, or fight it. We let it pass through the mind like a cloud crossing open space, present yet not owned. We do this by releasing the craving that keeps the cloud from moving on.

We are learning to see the entire causal flow, how each phenomenon arises, shifts, and fades. From this clarity comes the ability to refrain from participating in it. As participation drops away, the force of desire and aversion loses its strength.

Subduing also involves investigating craving

To subdue craving, we need to contemplate the views that fuel it. For example:

• “Why do I want this tranquility to last indefinitely?”
• “Why am I averse to this discomfort?”

We are not trying to cultivate equanimity toward the discomfort itself; we are looking into the root causes of why the discomfort arises in the first place.

Often, this inquiry reveals an underlying belief: “I cannot be happy unless things align exactly with my desires.” This belief is rooted in ignorance, and it gives rise to craving and clinging.

This leads to a crucial insight: the very act of wanting things to be different from their current state is itself a cause of stress and dissatisfaction. When the mind seeks predictability, control, or permanence in experience, it sets itself up for suffering.

Recognizing this is liberating. We begin to see that the impulse to shape experience to our liking is futile. Through direct observation, we realize, “Wanting this to be otherwise is the root of my unease.” Seeing this clearly, we release desire, not for the objects in our experience, but for wanting anything from experience itself.

That release is subduing.

We realize that Right Effort isn't about controlling outcomes but about nurturing the conditions that prevent desire or aversion from arising.

Contemplating Desire and Aversion: Some Practical Examples

To help discern desire or aversion, consider the following examples:

• Subtle craving for progress: wanting to "feel something happening" in practice. Notice the dissatisfaction when nothing happens, and release the view that something must happen.

• Comparing today’s practice to an ideal: recognize the aversion toward the present moment, and release the view that there is such a thing as ideal practice.

• Feeling discouraged by wandering thoughts: the expectation that the mind "should" be still.

• Wanting abiding to be peaceful all the time: recognize the subtle clinging to tranquility and aversion toward disturbance.

• Pushing away boredom or neutrality: how the mind subtly rejects the absence of stimulation.

• Tightening up to hold concentration: notice the aversion to the natural fluctuation of awareness.

• Noticing a pleasant breath and wanting to hold it: perceive that as desire and gently release the desire.

• Noticing tension and wanting it to cease: view that as aversion, and remain curious about its nature. The nature of all phenomena is to pass away, ownerless.

• Seeing restlessness and the urge to move: see that as a craving for escape.

In other words, it's not the contents of experience that are the problem; it is our expectations of it and wanting to change it. We need to become aware of this reaction and release our expectations for things to be a certain way or not.

Since desire and aversion are in the expectations, not in their manifestations, when we practice without expectations, this brings lasting relief.

It’s important to understand that subduing greed and aversion must be done at the level of the bare aggregates, not at the level of full-blown experience. Working directly on “experience” after it has already been shaped by perception, meaning, and reaction only creates more entanglement. We end up chasing after individual leaves rather than tending to the trunk.

As we release the insight, "This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self," is the wisdom that dismantles the illusion of ownership and control. When this insight is clearly known, the compulsion to cling or push away loses its power.

Subduing is the Ongoing Process of Letting Go

Subduing isn’t a one-time act; it’s a continuous process of softening and letting go with wisdom. Instead of forcefully removing desire or aversion, we repeatedly release the mind’s tendency to cling to experience.

Right Mindfulness is the work of purifying the mind not through suppression, but through clear seeing, gentle disengagement, and inner stability.

With practice, as we let go of craving, we see bodily, mental, and verbal formations gradually calming and fading away. The fires that fuel desire and aversion begin to extinguish, giving rise to a state of coolness, ease, and peace, free from agitation and dissatisfaction.

When we refrain from getting entangled in experience, desire and aversion are naturally subdued. The body softens and relaxes, and the mind settles and becomes stable, centered, and peaceful. With no bodily, verbal, or mental fabrications obscuring awareness, pure knowing emerges, and true wisdom can arise.

Effort and Desire in Practice

To subdue desire and aversion, we apply Right Effort, not as forceful striving, but by developing the right causes and conditions. Wrong effort, by contrast, is effort driven by anticipation, wanting things to be a certain way, rooted in the craving for results.

It is natural to want to see the fruits of our practice: to witness a reduction in desire and aversion, to see the calming of bodily and mental formations. But the very act of seeking these outcomes is itself a subtle form of desire.

Desire for results divides the mind. We become split, caught between the present moment and the imagined future. This division gives rise to new bodily and mental formations, influenced again by craving and resistance. As a result, awareness is clouded, clarity diminishes, and stress and dissatisfaction increase.

Instead, with Right Intention, we relinquish all craving for outcomes. We trust in the Tathāgata’s instruction and practice accordingly, without clinging, without waiting. When the causes are fully established, the results will naturally be known. No extra effort, no additional act of will is needed.

Right Effort is also understanding that everything in experience is old karma. Trying to address what has already arisen is wrong effort. Instead of trying to alter experience, we use wise attention in order not to create any new karma and simply observe results as they unfold in memory without getting entangled, letting them pass away.

Seeing a form with mindfulness lost, attending to the pleasing sign, one experiences it with a covetous mind and remains holding to it. Such feelings grow there. From manifold forms arising, there is desire and discontent, and the mind is overwhelmed by them. Thus one accumulates suffering. This is called the cessation of nibbāna.

SN35.95

Wise Attention: The Role of Memory

Why Memory Is Crucial for Developing Wisdom

In the Pāli language, the word "sati," often translated as "mindfulness," literally means memory or recollection. This is an important detail, as it points directly to the true function of mindfulness in the Tathāgata’s teachings. Rather than merely observing or focusing on the present moment, sati is the inherent capacity of the mind, when seeing things as they really are, not to lose track of what is happening.

Memory is crucial for developing wisdom. Why is that? Because liberation comes from seeing causes and conditions clearly. We must be able to see how things arise, how they change, and how they cease. We must see how contact leads to feeling, how feeling can lead to craving, and how craving becomes clinging. Without memory, without the ability to recognize patterns, we cannot see the unfolding of dependent arising, the chain that binds beings to suffering.

So a skillful way to understand and use sati is to see it not as focusing on the present moment, but as remembering experience as already arisen, as past karma. In other words, we need to be backward-looking instead of looking forward. This subtle shift in perception avoids getting entangled in past karma to more clearly see our reaction in the present.

When we try to observe the present moment and an observer is fabricated, this sense of “self” interferes with what is perceived. Because of this, we unknowingly begin to cling to, analyze, or try to change what is happening. In doing so, we are really attempting to alter past karma, which cannot be changed.

If instead we treat each experience as something that has already occurred, already fading, the urge to manipulate it disappears. We simply watch it pass through awareness, like sitting in the back seat of a car, facing backwards, seeing where the car has just traveled, seeing past karma.

This way of seeing keeps the mind from clinging and brings calm and balance. Even though all experience is conditioned and fabricated, when we see it as already fading, we no longer react to it or build upon it. This is how we stop creating new fabrications and stop producing new karma.

Misconceptions about Memory

To have Right Mindfulness, we need to be aware of some common misunderstandings about memory. Many think memory means storing information and recalling it on demand, as if it were kept somewhere in the mind like files in a cabinet. But the Tathāgata did not describe memory this way. Instead, he taught that, like all phenomena, memory arises due to conditions, and then it fades away. It is not a permanent thing but a mental process, shaped by intention, attention, and past experiences.

Also, the Tathāgata described experience not as a fixed moment in time but as a dynamic, conditioned stream, shaped by karma, perception, and mental formation. In this stream, memory is not a storehouse; it is the knowing of what has just happened.

Thus, sati is not passive presence, nor is it effortful remembering of content. It is the quality of non-forgetfulness, not forgetting the body, the feelings, the states of mind, and the proper attention that guides our seeing. It is the ability to stay with the field of practice, to remember what leads to liberation, and to see clearly without interference.

To understand how memory is used in mindfulness, it's important to understand that there are two kinds of memory. The first is what we might call short-term memory, or more accurately, ongoing awareness of what has just happened, which we have just covered. This is the basis of insight. We're not reaching into the past but simply keeping in mind what just arose, tracking experience moment-to-moment as it flows.

This short-term memory is not effortful; it’s simply what happens when the mind does not interfere. When we’re not clinging, whatever arises is automatically seen until it fades away. This is the natural function of sati.

The second is long-term memory, which involves the reconstruction of past events. This kind of memory arises not because content is stored, but because certain karmic patterns reappear when the right causes come together. In this sense, long-term memory is a mental object that arises in awareness, just like any other thought or image. It is constructed in the present and should, like all other objects, be seen as impermanent, conditioned, and not-self.

Right mindfulness requires both types of memory. We use short-term memory to follow the unfolding stream of experience. And we use long-term memory to recall the teachings, to reflect on our past practice, and to orient ourselves toward the goal of liberation. But in both cases, the key is that we do not cling. We do not take memory as "truth" or "mine," but as a conditioned phenomenon, something to be known, not possessed.

Continually Remembering to Return to the Object of Contemplation?

In the practice of Right Mindfulness, mindfulness is often misunderstood as an act of repeatedly pulling the mind back to a chosen object. Practitioners may believe that successful mindfulness means constantly reminding themselves to "stay on the breath" or "come back to the present moment." Yet this very effort, the inner command to remember the object, is a subtle form of delusion, adding an unnecessary mental fabrication to experience.

This mental effort becomes an additional process that overlays direct knowing with subtle craving or aversion toward the experience itself. In truth, when mindfulness is established correctly, there is simply the clear, present knowing of what is occurring. The mind knows, "Breathing in long, I know I breathe in long" (MN 118). No internal commentary or forcing is necessary.

Therefore, Right Mindfulness does not involve a separate act of "bringing the mind back." Rather, it rests upon continuous clear knowing, sustained by wise attention and supported by right effort. This allows awareness to remain open, receptive, and free from agitation, providing the stable basis for the deepening of insight.

Let's now cover how the mind hijacks awareness by inserting recalled memory into our experience, resulting in distorted seeing.

Wise Attention: How the Mind Hijacks Awareness

Wise Attention also requires seeing how the mind "hijacks" awareness. Just as clinging to the body constrains our awareness through ingrained perceptions created about the body, clinging to the mind causes awareness to be constrained or "hijacked" by the mind's volitional processes.

Modern individuals are often "stuck" or "trapped" in their thoughts. For example, if you ask someone to focus on the sensations in their feet, they'll likely resort to mental analysis or thoughts instead of directly accessing the raw sensations. Most people aren't aware that awareness doesn't depend on the mind and can be accessed directly.

It's important to understand that the six senses only provide raw data in the form of contact and feelings. It is the mind, because of craving, that takes these feelings and propagates them into a whole world of existence and suffering.

Since craving always arises within the mind, we must learn to discern whether awareness is abiding in the six senses, in its natural, direct mode, or whether it has been subtly hijacked by the mind’s insertion of ingrained memories, interpretations, or projections.

This is how the mind hijacks awareness by overlaying direct experience from the six senses with memory, concept, or projection. What we take to be 'here-and-now' experience is more likely to be the mind’s recollection of prior contact, overlaid with volitional formations. What the Tathagata calls bodily, mental, and verbal formations that are formed because of craving for sense satisfaction, craving for experience, or nonexistence.

Why is this crucial? To accurately discern contact, feelings, perceptions, and other phenomena, we need to experience them at their source, at the six senses, before they're altered by the mind's volitional formations.

When we direct attention to the objectifications created by the mind while ignoring the underlying sensations present in awareness, we're clinging. This is unwise attention. For example, feeling a pleasant bodily sensation and only noticing its pleasantness (the objectification) obstructs clear seeing. To see clearly, we must discern the difference between the sensory contact itself and the feeling tones and perceptions that label it as pleasant by the mind.

This distinction is vital because many practices require seclusion from the five senses and direct engagement with feelings and perceptions. Practices like Mindfulness of Breathing, Mindfulness of Feelings, developing the Seven Factors of Enlightenment, abiding in Jhana, and the Ten Perceptions all require abandoning clinging to the Five Sense Faculties and working directly with feelings and perceptions.

Working directly with feelings and perceptions, without the mind's interference, becomes easier as we practice mindfulness of the body and Mindfulness of Feelings, as these practices will reduce our attachment to the physical body and the five sense faculties.

The Mind Is Not the Source of Wisdom.

Furthermore, due to our clinging to the mind, we mistakenly equate the process of cognition or objectification with knowing itself. We wrongly believe the mind is the source of wisdom and intelligence.

However, true wisdom and intelligence don't come from cognition; they arise from insight when the mind is free from objectification, what the Tathāgata calls "knowing." This "knowing," along with memory, is inherent in awareness.

"Knowing" doesn't arise because of will; it appears when the right causes and conditions are present, meaning when we see things as they truly are, along with their causes and conditions.

What most people mistake for wisdom or intelligence is an after-the-fact process, where the mind takes an insight and then summarizes it with labels, value judgments, logical deductions, reasoning, verbal summaries, and propagation into thoughts.

Because of this clinging to our feelings, perceptions, and thoughts, most people aren't aware of this inner wisdom and intelligence, paying attention only to the resulting objectification created by the mind.

The problem is that the very process of objectification or cognition inherently involves reducing or ignoring information and relies on logical induction, which is susceptible to corruption and faulty conclusions.

In essence, we wrongly believe we must use the mind to comprehend the world, when in fact, it's our clinging to the mind that obscures clear seeing.

In other words, no matter how much knowledge we have, how precisely we can explain experience, or how many insights we can express, none of these lead to wisdom. Wisdom arises only when the mind clearly sees causes, conditions, and their effects, clearly enough to let go of clinging.

Right Mindfulness and proper attention require us to access awareness directly, preventing our attention from getting trapped or "hijacked" by the mind's volitional objectification processes that "enhance" cognition but ultimately cloud clear seeing.

Practically speaking, this means developing a seeing and knowing that is always aware of the underlying, non-objectified experience. We achieve this by dwelling in one of the Four Dwellings of Mindfulness, fully aware, contemplating, and not clinging to anything.

Since the volitional mental processes that cling to feelings, perceptions, and memories can be very subtle, increasingly subtle levels of Wise Attention and contemplation are needed to ensure we see free of clinging to objectification.

Finally, just as ignorance causes the mind to be constrained within the body and awareness to be hijacked by the mind's volitional processes, awareness itself can be trapped in the "cave" of consciousness. This profound aspect will be explored in a later stage of the Gradual Training.

Wise Attention: The Impermanent and Unsubstantial

The Tathāgata teaches that to see not-self deeply, we must first train in perceiving impermanence. This is not about holding the idea of impermanence but seeing it directly, noticing that everything in experience, whether feeling, perception, thought, bodily sensation, or even consciousness, arises and passes away. Nothing remains permanent.

The purpose of perceiving impermanence is not simply to conclude that everything changes. It is to uncover how the self-making process clings to what is impermanent and tries to make it enduring and controllable, constructing an entire world of existence. Wherever permanence is perceived, the fabrication of self has taken root.

We dismantle this self-making process not with ideas, but by attending to experience exactly as it is: directly seeing that what is impermanent, subject to suffering, and beyond our control should not be taken as me or mine.

The challenge is that although feelings, perceptions, intentions, and consciousness naturally arise, change, pass away, and cease, the mind is constantly clinging to things existing or not existing, driven by the desire for experiences to be substantial, reliable, and satisfying.

'Everything exists': That is one extreme. 'Everything doesn’t exist': That is a second extreme. Avoiding these two extremes, the Tathāgata teaches the Dhamma via the middle.

SN 12:15

To understand this clinging, let's examine the cognitive process.

In nature, even though cognition is shaped by ingrained memory and karma, it is less prone to objectification. The mind cannot cling to what is constantly changing and infinitely variable. Alone in nature, one must remain fully mindful, present, and alert, attentive to whatever emerges from the environment.

In contrast, modern humans surround themselves with semi-permanent structures, durable goods, ingrained habits, and fixed ways of thinking, all attempts to control nature and obtain lasting satisfaction. Because we no longer need to remain constantly aware of our surroundings, there is unawareness, and gaps in mindfulness appear. The mind fills these gaps with impressions drawn from memory, conditioned by the desire to exist, to cling to pleasant experiences, and to avoid pain.

If pain arises and full awareness is absent, it may appear as constant pain. If sensual desire is present, meeting someone with appealing attributes, the mind fills in the blanks with imagined desirability. This blinds us, giving rise to unwholesome thoughts, intentions, and actions.

Without wise attention or mindfulness, the mind fabricates bodily, verbal, and mental formations not grounded in reality but based on craving and aversion. Clinging to these formations fosters the illusion of permanence, making the body, feelings, perceptions, intentions, and consciousness appear substantial and controllable.

Dissatisfaction arises because we pay attention only to the arising of sensations and thoughts, clinging to their details, while ignoring their passing away and cessation. The mind holds on to feelings and perceptions even though they have already ceased.

To overcome the tendency to make things permanent, we rely on Wise Attention. We learn to see the arising, the change, and—most importantly—the passing away of all phenomena without getting entangled. In this way, we recognize their impermanence and stop taking what appears in experience as me, myself, or mine.

When we interact with and become entangled in formations, we generate new ones. So instead of seeing things as they really are, the natural arising and ceasing, we perpetuate the cycle of fabrication and delusion.

Wherever attention becomes fixed, past intention or karma finds a foothold, and with it the construction of self through craving, aversion, and ignorance. This fuels the creation of new feelings, perceptions, intentions, and consciousness, blocking clear seeing.

Instead, we need to use Wise Attention. By not clinging, we allow phenomena to fade on their own, and the whole process of fabrication begins to calm.

Wise Attention: Seeing Beyond Existence and Nonexistence

This world follows after two views. It either settles on existence or settles on nonexistence. But when one sees the arising of the world as it actually is with correct wisdom, nonexistence does not occur. When one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with correct wisdom, existence does not occur.

SN12.15

In his teaching to Kaccana, the Tathagata explains that the mind clings to experience in terms of existence and nonexistence. The mind tries to settle in what seems solid and substantial, even though experience is only a stream of changing causes and conditions, arising and passing on their own.

This pull toward existence and nonexistence appears in the smallest movements of mind. A simple judgment of good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, is already a shift into taking sides. The moment the mind labels, it enters the domain of birth and death, the field shaped by clinging. By fixing any part of experience as real or unreal, as self or not self, as existing or not existing, the mind continues turning the wheel of becoming.

From clinging to things being or not being, an entire world of becoming is created, along with the suffering that comes from holding it.

When we use dependent arising to guide our practice, the pull toward these two standpoints weakens. Instead of getting lost in the need to force things into “is” or “is not,” there is the simple recognition that what appears is a process, and when the process ends, the appearance ends as well.

When things exist or don’t exist in the mind, they take on a false sense of permanence, and the mind remains caught in the cycle of birth, death, and suffering.

The training is not about taking on another view or position. It is about attending to experience before it hardens into something that seems to exist. When contact, feeling, perception, and intention are still fluid, they have not yet been claimed as mine or turned into a personal story. Here one can see the cycle before birth, before anything takes shape as an object of attachment.

Instead of clinging to what has already appeared in experience, we attend to the conditions that give rise to experience, the sense of body, to thoughts, to reactions, to the world as it shows itself. Each of these holds together only as long as its causes hold. When those causes settle, the experience settles.

Seen in this way, impermanence is no longer an idea. It becomes direct knowing. Whatever the mind picks up through clinging is already caught in the cycle of birth and death. And it is through seeing impermanence directly that the way out of this cycle becomes visible.

The Perception of Impermanence: Seeing Through Stillness

When there is unwise attention, when we do not see the arising and passing away of phenomena, the mind is clinging to whatever is presently held in awareness.

The mind clings to what is experienced because it fails to see the nature of phenomena as arising and passing away. Instead of wisdom, the mind turns toward permanence, pleasure, or self, which fuels craving and clinging.

It doesn’t matter what the object is. If we’re not seeing its impermanence, the mind starts to cling. A pleasant sensation, a strong emotion, a clear thought, or even a deeply concentrated state—any of these can quietly be taken as “self” if their changing nature isn’t fully known. Without that insight, what’s merely passing through becomes something we identify with.

Sometimes awareness feels still. If our experience appears unmoving, or if we fail to notice its constant change, then, subtly, we may be taking something in experience as permanent, and therefore as self. This is a danger point in practice.

If awareness settles on something that seems unchanging, a stillness, a background, a knower, this too must be carefully examined. When seen clearly as conditioned and impermanent, the practice moves toward release. But if it is not seen in this way, that subtle formation becomes a new place where “I-making” and “mine-making” take root.

Perceiving Impermanence

Training in the perception of impermanence begins with wise attention. This is not a matter of forming theories or arriving at conclusions. It is the direct knowing of change as it unfolds in real time.

We need to see clearly the rising and the fading, the appearing and the vanishing, and the beginning and the complete cessation of phenomena. Wherever the mind lingers and assumes stability, there lies a blind spot, a quiet place where self-making takes root.

To truly see impermanence is to recognize that all phenomena arise dependent on contact and feeling, and it is the clinging to these feelings as if they could last that gives rise to the illusion of permanence.

When this is observed again and again with Right Mindfulness, something shifts. The grip of clinging loosens on its own. The sense of a controller, an owner, an experiencer gently dissolves, not through force of will, but through the natural wisdom that comes from seeing things as they are. This is how perception becomes liberation.

Here, a disciple, gone to the forest, or to the root of a tree, or to an empty hut, reflects thus: Form is inconstant, feeling is inconstant, perception is inconstant, mental formations are inconstant, and consciousness is inconstant. He dwells contemplating inconstancy in these five clinging-aggregates. This is called inconstancy perception...

And what is Ānanda, the perception of inconstancy in all conditioned phenomena? Here, Ānanda, a disciple detaches, lets go, and abandons all conditioned phenomena. This is called Ānanda, the perception of inconstancy in all conditioned phenomena.

AN10.60

When the Tathāgata speaks of form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness as inconstant, he is not pointing to a hazy notion that ‘things change.’ He is pointing to something exact: their arising and ceasing dependently, conditioned by causes. Impermanence is not random; it is the natural result of conditionality.

The Perception of Impermanence: Seeing Impermanence Through Causes

Why must we see causes and conditions to truly see impermanence?

To contemplate impermanence is not just to notice that things change. It is to see something deeper, that all experiences arise from causes. Form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness are not random events. They do not simply happen on their own. Each arises when conditions support it, and each fades when those conditions end.

What is conditioned cannot be permanent.

When this is seen, we recognize that these processes are not an independent “me,” not a lasting self. This is why the Tathāgata does not simply say, “See change.” He says, “See arising and passing, dependent on conditions.” To see in this way cuts at the very root of the conceit, “I am.”

Why direct seeing is enough

In this practice, we do not need to construct arguments or reach conclusions. We do not need to analyze or define what is happening. What is required is simple and direct: to see clearly.

• First, notice arising. A sight, a sound, a body sensation, a thought, an emotion—see how each appears, always dependent on conditions such as contact, feeling, attention, or intention.

• Then, notice passing away. Watch how it fades, shifts, or disappears, beyond control, without substance or core.

• Observe causes and conditions. Recognize how every experience depends on conditions and how, when those conditions change, the experience is no more.

• And finally, let go. Not by force, but by wisdom. When something is seen as unstable, not lasting, not self, and not ours, clinging is naturally let go.

Contemplating Impermanence from Every Angle

The Tathāgata taught that to truly understand impermanence, it is not enough to glance at it once or to see it from a single perspective. Impermanence must be contemplated again and again, seen from many perspectives, until its truth is realized beyond doubt.

At first, we usually observe in a simple way: ‘I am here, the one who is looking, and the phenomenon is there, the thing being observed.’ This is natural at first, but it still carries a hidden assumption of a fixed observer and a fixed object. To deepen wisdom, this frame itself must be loosened.

We begin to experiment. Just as we can walk around a mountain to see it from every side, we can shift how we view experience. For example, we can see a sensation from the outside in, as if observing from beyond the body. We can picture seeing it from above or from the side. Each of these perspectives is fabricated, yet helps to dissolve the illusion that there is only one solid vantage point, only one unchanging self at the center.

With every shift in perspective, new feelings and new perceptions arise, only to pass away again. This repeated shifting reveals how even the standpoint of the observer is conditioned and impermanent.

As awareness matures through this practice, the boundaries of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ soften. The sense of ‘me here’ and ‘things out there’ loses its hold. What remains is direct knowing: bare experience unfolding without a center, without a self, free from the stress of maintaining the illusion of separation between things out there and me in here.

The Perception of Impermanence: The Process of Becoming

When developing the perception of impermanence, besides seeing it as a process of clinging, it's also useful to see it as a process of becoming.

The self-making process is not a passive byproduct of clinging; it is an active, volitional process. It is the very act of trying to be something, to fix one’s presence in experience, to inhabit and sustain a chosen state. This process is described by the Tathāgata as "becoming," a drive that arises from craving and clinging but has its own distinct momentum: the urge to establish identity and continuity in experience.

It is the effort to assert “I am this” or “I must maintain this state,” whether that state is a mood, a mental quality, a view, or an identity. It is the very creation of permanence.

With clinging as condition, there is becoming. Becoming conditions birth. Birth conditions aging and death.

SN12.2

This is why identity is not just formed from clinging to impermanent things. It is the strategy of trying to become stable in the midst of impermanence. The self-making process doesn’t appear because things arise. It appears because we want to hold a position in them. This is being, and it’s active, effortful, and constant.

The sense of self is a performance: it is constructed and reinforced through every act of trying to land somewhere solid.

This is the reason why simply watching experience isn’t enough. If we do not see the urge to become in each moment, even our practice becomes another self-making project.

The path to freedom requires seeing not only that things change, but that we are actively trying to be something in the midst of change, and that this very effort is suffering.

The Tathāgata didn’t just teach us to watch impermanence. He taught us to see through the strategies of being: establishing in what is impermanent and making it permanent.

Seeing this is not the end of a self, but the end of needing to be someone at all. That’s why nibbāna is not annihilation. It is the cessation of the activity of becoming.

The Perception of Impermanence: Undermines the Entire Cycle

The Tathāgata described dependent arising not as a metaphysical chain but as a psychological process. It is driven by a simple misperception: that what is experienced can be held, can be controlled, and is worth identifying with.

But when impermanence is seen:

• Feeling is not taken as a reliable signal of what’s worth seeking or avoiding.

• Craving loses its footing because there’s nothing solid to chase.

• Clinging weakens, because what’s clung to cannot last.

• Becoming dissolves, because the drive to “be someone” has no ground.

• Birth of identity doesn’t occur, because there’s no platform for it to arise from.

In short, impermanence is the antidote to every link in the chain.

If a disciple sees impermanence in feeling, perception, and consciousness, they’ll be disillusioned. Being disillusioned, they’ll grow dispassionate. Being dispassionate, they’ll be freed.

SN12.20

The Illusion of Continuity: Fuel for Self

The danger lies not in the arising of experience but in the assumption that it continues. This illusion of continuity, the idea that something stays, is the seed of identity. It leads us to think, "I felt that," or "I was like this before," and thus, "I am this."

Because of not seeing the arising and ceasing of these aggregates, ordinary people have not become disillusioned with them, have not grown dispassionate toward them, and have not been freed.

SN22.81

So long as this illusion persists, the mind keeps investing in stories, plans, and identities, trying to make what is moving into something still. But this effort is painful. The more we try to fix the flux, the more tension and disappointment we create.

Freedom Arises When Change is Known

Liberation is not to stop phenomena from arising; it is to stop fabricating continuity where there is none.

This is why the Tathāgata pointed again and again to the perception of impermanence as the foundation of the path.

Disciples, develop the perception of impermanence. When the perception of impermanence is developed and cultivated, it eliminates the conceit 'I am,' it leads to the uprooting of the underlying tendencies, and to full release.

AN7.46

The path is not to fight experience but to see it clearly. And the clearest truth is all things arise and pass away.

When this is truly seen, in sensation, in thought, in mood, and in identity, the mind begins to let go, not out of force, but because there is nothing worth holding. That is the wisdom of impermanence. It is the beginning and the end of the path.

Whatever is impermanent is suffering. And whatever is suffering is not fit to be regarded as ‘This is mine, this I am, this is my self.’

SN22.59

Wise Attention: I-making and Mine-making

Now we turn our attention to another aspect of Wise Attention: seeing how the mind creates the ideas of “I” and “mine,” taking what appears in experience as me, myself, or mine. This I-making and mine-making—the mind’s habit of building stories and behaviors to create the sense of someone behind experience—clouds clear seeing.

It builds vantage points, overlays, and added interpretations that cover up what is actually happening, and this leads to unwise attention.

For this reason, the teaching on not-self is not a claim that there is no self. It is an instruction not to take what appears in experience as me, myself, or mine, because doing so brings suffering. Instead, we learn to recognize I-making and mine-making as a process that, driven by craving, produces suffering.

When we notice these habits as they appear, their illusion and effect fade, and we are less likely to take every feeling or thought personally. This allows the mind to stay calm and clear, so it can look at what is happening without adding extra stories.

The Tathāgata teaches that liberation comes not through annihilating a self, but through the direct insight that what we take to be self—clinging to the aggregates—are impermanent, suffering, and not-self. What arises and passes away is not me, not mine, not myself. Liberation is seeing through this illusion, not by asserting that there is or isn’t a self in any absolute sense.

When this view is uprooted, the illusion collapses, and so too does the compulsion to cling. It is the cessation of the illusion, the cessation of identification, the dropping of the view that says, "I am this body, I am this thought, I am this awareness." When this false sense of “I-making” and “mine-making” is seen through completely, no more becoming arises.

At this stage of the Gradual Training, to develop Wise Attention, we must learn to recognize the subtle ways the self-making process creates a sense of self in consciousness by how we see the world. We must see that the mind is constantly creating bodily, mental, and verbal formations that create the appearance of ourselves as a person existing in the world.

The fabrication of “I-making” and “mine-making” and continually maintaining it is very stressful.

Contemplating I-making and mine-making

To contemplate “I-making” and “mine-making,” we must first recognize the many ways it can manifest. For example:

• We see ourselves as being part of the body, inside the body, or belonging to the body, without noticing the constant effort and stress required to maintain that perception.

• We take the phenomena we experience as “my experience” or “this is happening to me,” unaware of the stress that arises from trying to preserve this sense of ownership.

• We crave for experiences to be clear, substantial, and firmly owned, only to be disappointed when they are not.

• We judge or check personal progress, asking, “How am I doing? Am I practicing correctly?” not realizing that this very self-referencing becomes an obstacle and a source of stress.

• We continually create subject–object relationships, forming an “out there” and an “I in here,” without seeing that the “out there” is mind-made. Without an “I in here” and an “out there,” suffering cannot arise.

• We conceive of ourselves as existing in the world, in this body, sustaining the notion “I am,” not realizing that letting go of this conceiving brings complete liberation.

To let go of the illusion of “self,” we must directly investigate and see that the five aggregates—form, feeling, perception, volitional formations, and consciousness—are impermanent, and that clinging to them causes suffering, and thus they are not fit to be regarded as “me” or “mine.”

This assumption, taking on of a "self" is the result of craving: the desire for sensory pleasures, the longing for continued existence, and the craving for non-existence.

When craving grows stronger, it becomes clinging, a deeper attachment to the objects of desire or aversion. This clinging creates strong patterns of identification. There is the assumption: "This is me," "This is what I am," or "This is my experience." The mind tightens around these ideas, fixating on them and reinforcing the illusion of a solid, enduring self.

This clinging gives rise to a powerful momentum, the intention, and the drive to exist and to satisfy our desires. Because craving and clinging keep arising again and again, they keep reinforcing the illusion of a person or self in the background making decisions. We end up mistaking the results of craving and clinging as who we are, not seeing that what we call “self” is actually a chain of reactive processes.

Contemplation is seeing through this self-making process. It is the direct observation of how the mind continually fabricates a sense of "I" and "mine" by clinging to the Five Aggregates as if they were self. This assumption is a fundamental delusion, sustained by ignorance and craving.

Through sustained contemplation, we recognize that this identification is baseless and that craving lies at the root of “I-making” and “mine-making,” and it is this craving that gives rise to suffering.

Right Mindfulness is the continuous and careful contemplation of the Five Aggregates, discerning them as impermanent, unsatisfactory, and not-self. Through this clear seeing, dispassion arises, and through dispassion, liberation is gradually realized.

The cessation of personality, the cessation of personality, it is said, lady. What, lady, is the cessation of personality as declared by the Blessed One?

It is the remainder-less fading and cessation of that same craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom from it, and non-reliance on it. This, friend Visakha, is the cessation of personality as declared by the Blessed One.

MN44

Wise Attention: Penetrating I-making and Mine-making

And how, Ānanda, does one reflect upon oneself? One reflects upon oneself as feeling: Feeling is my self. Or one reflects: Feeling is not my self; my self is not feeling. Or one reflects, Feeling is not my self, nor is non-feeling my self; my self feels, for feeling is the nature of my self.

DN15

When penetrating “I-making” and “mine-making,” one of the subtlest challenges is that the self-making process is not simply an object to be observed; it hides in plain sight within the very act of observing.

We are so accustomed to seeing through the self-making process that we fail to notice the sense of “I” is embedded in the observer itself.

Wherever attention is directed searching for self-making, the root can never be found, because the selfing process remains in the background, assuming the role of seer, knower, and owner of experience.

When trying to see through “I-making” and “mine-making,” it's more helpful to shift attention away from the question "Is there a self?" and instead see how the appearance of self arises based on causes and conditions. The sense of self isn't one fixed thing; it's a construction that depends on many momentary processes.

Every time there's contact with a sense object, a feeling arises, and almost immediately there can be craving, a subtle reflex of "I want this" or "I am experiencing this." This craving is one of the key conditions that makes things personal and creates the illusion of a self.

For example, when hunger arises, the usual sense is, "I am hungry."

But when we look carefully, what's actually happening?

• There is a bodily sensation: emptiness, tension, or slight discomfort in the abdomen.

• There is a perception: "This is hunger."

• There is a feeling: unpleasant.

• There is craving: "I want food."

• There is the arising of I-making: "I am the one who is hungry."

Now, instead of taking "I am hungry" at face value, we investigate: "This bodily sensation has arisen dependent on conditions, for example, the lack of food or the smelling of a delicious odor.

The perception of hunger is a mental label applied to these sensations. The feeling tone is unpleasant. The craving arises based on the unpleasantness. The thought 'I am hungry' is an additional construction, not the hunger itself."

By breaking it down like this, we see there's no fixed self behind the hunger, only conditions unfolding. The sense of "I" has been stitched together out of these elements.

With contact as condition, feeling arises. With feeling as condition, craving arises. With craving as condition, clinging arises. With clinging as condition, becoming arises.

MN148

The Five Aggregates as "Self"

On an even more subtle level, we take the Five Aggregates as self. Instead of just thinking "I am hungry," the identification occurs at the level of the aggregates themselves:

• "I feel this experience."

• "I am the perceiver."

• "I am the knower of this experience."

• "I am awareness itself."

The Tathāgata asks us to contemplate the Five Aggregates as not-self. However, even in the attempt to abandon self-making, it's easy to fall into refined forms of identification. For example, contemplating "Feeling is not self" may still carry the implicit assumption of a self standing apart from feeling, observing, or disowning it. This is unwise attention, which subtly sustains the notion of self.

This is precisely what he warned against when systematically analyzing the Five Aggregates in relation to self. Instead, we must see the causes and conditions that give rise to the aggregates.

For example, in regard to the Perception Aggregate, start noticing that perception itself arises dependently:

• You see a form: perception arises (shape, color, recognition).

• You hear a sound: perception arises (tone, language, meaning).

• You feel an emotion: perception labels it as "fear," "joy," etc.

Each time we notice perception arising, we are no longer standing inside perception as the owner. We are seeing it as part of the stream of dependently arisen events. This starts to erode the identification with "the perceiver." When we see that perception depends on contact, we begin to weaken the illusion that perception is a stable self.

In other words, when perception arises, it depends on contact and conditions. Do not take the perceiving as "I am the one who perceives." Instead, see it as another arising and passing phenomenon, not owned, not controlled. Let the sense of being the perceiver be included in the field of investigation.

In the seen, there will be just the seen; in the heard, just the heard; in the sensed, just the sensed; in the cognized, just the cognized. When, Bāhiya, there is for you in the seen just the seen … then, Bāhiya, you will not be 'with that.' When you are not 'with that,' you will not be 'in that.' When you are not 'in that,' then you are neither here nor there nor in between the two. Just this is the end of suffering.

UD1.10

In other words, when the mind no longer constructs the subject–object divide, no longer experiencing things as “out there” or as belonging to “me,” proliferation ceases.

Awareness abides naturally in awareness itself; no “I” can be found anywhere, and suffering falls away, at first for a moment. When all I-making and Mine-making come to an end, this is the complete ending of suffering.

Wise Attention: The Self-referencing Process

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“I-making” and “mine-making” are the ongoing mental process, the constant assembling of thoughts, perceptions, feelings, and reactions that form the sense of "I am."

Each time we see a sight, hear a sound, feel a sensation, or think a thought, the experience itself is just an object arising. But quickly, the mind turns inward and adds an extra layer: "How does this affect me? Is this good or bad for me? What should I do about it?" This quick mental turning is called self-referencing. It happens almost automatically and inserts a sense of “I” or “mine” into every experience.

For example, when a sound arises, the ear simply hears. But immediately after, the mind may react, "I don’t like that sound." The sound itself doesn’t say anything about you, but the mind adds self-reference. This creates stress because everything becomes personal.

By learning to see this continual process, we start to loosen it. Instead of letting the mind automatically ask, "What about me?" we train it to simply see, "This is just sound, just feeling, just thought."

And what, Ānanda, is not-self perception? Here, a disciple, gone to the forest, or to the root of a tree, or to an empty hut, reflects thus: The eye is not-self, forms are not-self, the ear is not-self, sounds are not-self, the nose is not-self, odors are not-self, the tongue is not-self, tastes are not-self, the body is not-self, tactile sensations are not-self, the mind is not-self, and mental phenomena are not-self. He dwells contemplating not-self in these six internal and external sense bases. This is called not-self perception.

AN10.60

Wise Attention: Applying the Perception of Not-self

We can lessen “I-making” and “mine-making” and completely let go of conceit by applying the perception of not-self, which simply means seeing that everything is impersonal and seeing everything in experience as "not me," "not mine," or "not myself."

The perception of not-self isn't about forcing ourselves to believe "there is no self" as an absolute truth. Instead, it's a tool to directly undermine our deeply ingrained habit of seeing everything through the lens of "I," "me," and "mine." For example, "I want this to be me", "I want this to be mine" or "I don't want that to happen".

This habit isn't just an idea; it's built into how we experience each moment. We automatically claim sights, sounds, feelings, thoughts, and even our own awareness as belonging to or making up a self simply by perceiving them in that way. This act of claiming is the beginning of clinging, and clinging is the root of suffering.

By deliberately applying the perception of not-self, we interrupt this automatic identification. We're training our mind to know, "This is a feeling, but it's not mine; this is a thought, but it's not me; this is a perception, but it's not myself."

The goal is to gradually wear away the automatic reflex that craves, personalizes, and clings to experiences. As this reflex weakens, the subtle ways our mind claims things become clearer, showing how the mind tends to create a "self" even from the tiniest sensations.

So, we use the perception of not-self not to create a new belief, but to erode the underlying way our perception distorts things, turning temporary, conditioned experiences into something we own and identify with. By using the perception of not-self, our mind moves towards disenchantment, dispassion, and ultimately, liberation.

How to Use the Perception of Not-Self

For an ordinary person, the habit of “self-making” is so quick and deeply ingrained that it happens automatically, especially with the body, feelings, perceptions, and thoughts. As soon as there is contact—a sight, a sound, a bodily sensation, or a thought—the mind automatically stamps it with “this is me” or “this is mine.”

This identification does not happen in isolation; it’s tied to clinging. We cling to the perception of the thing, the mental label and story around it, and we cling to the feeling it brings, whether pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. This clinging often appears as a subtle tension in the mind and body, as if gripping something fragile that could slip away at any moment.

At the beginning of the practice, applying the perception of not-self starts with learning to spot the self-making process as it unfolds: from contact to feeling to perception to “mine” to clinging.

At first, we simply recognize, “The mind has taken this sensation, sight, sound, touch, or thought as me or mine, and there is tightening or tension that comes with it.” Seeing this clearly is already the beginning of release, because it reveals that the stress is not just from the object, but from the act of claiming and holding. When you see the clinging, you are also seeing the self-making.

The Perception of Not-Self: Seeing What Is Not Fit to Be ‘Mine’

When the Tathāgata spoke about not-self, he described it not as a metaphysical truth to be accepted, but as a perception to be cultivated. The perception of not-self changes the way we relate to every experience of body and mind, gradually loosening the ingrained habit to claim them as “mine” or “me.”

The perception of not-self is developing the habit of seeing things as “not fit to be regarded as mine” because they are impermanent, beyond ultimate control, and lead to suffering when clung to.

This is not a philosophical statement about reality’s essence. It is a skillful way of seeing, returned to again and again, until the mind no longer clings.

How to Cultivate the Perception of Not-Self

To cultivate the perception of not-self, we contemplate an object or phenomenon with sustained, direct observation, but without clinging, and examine it from multiple perspectives until the truth becomes self-evident in experience. This is not a matter of logic but of direct knowing.

For a bodily or mental phenomenon:

1. Notice it clearly: for example, “warmth in the hands” or “tightness in the chest.” Observe it fully from different perspectives until it is completely known.

2. See its impermanence: it shifts, grows, and fades.

3. Recognize its unsatisfactoriness: it cannot be made to remain pleasant, nor can pain be entirely avoided.

4. See how subtly attention has already taken hold of the object as “me” or “mine.”

5. Apply the perception of not-self: simply see the phenomenon as “this is not me, not mine, not my self; not fit to be clung to.” Again, this is not a logical conclusion, but the natural release that comes from directly and completely seeing that it is not-self.

The perception of not-self is not a thought or an abstract conclusion; it is the fruit of direct seeing from all angles. It is the letting go of holding phenomena in attention as “me” or “mine.”

The Wisdom in ‘Not Fit to Be Mine’

The perception of not-self does not push experiences away. Instead, it lets them be, but without weaving them into the fabric of “me” and “mine.”

They are not fit to be held as mine because they are:

• Impermanent, beyond lasting control.

• Unsatisfactory, subject to loss and distress.

• Subject to change, taking them as “mine” ties you to instability.

Ask yourself, why am I clinging to something that’s beyond my control, prone to loss and distress, subject to change, and that only brings instability and suffering?

Therefore, it is not fit to be regarded as “mine,” “I,” or “self.” This is the perception of not-self: a deliberate, repeated way of seeing that gradually erodes the tendency to cling.

Remember that the perception of not-self is not something to force as a belief nor to recite as a mantra without observation. It is simply clear seeing, cultivated by turning the mind again and again toward the reality of impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and non-self, until the letting go happens naturally.

Linmu: True Right Mindfulness

Author: Linmu

For most people, the concept of "right mindfulness" and "right discernment" is very vague. Here, I'll use a popular saying from the internet that might help everyone grasp what "right mindfulness" and "right discernment" mean more clearly.

Resaerch has shown that teh order of English characters does not necessarily affect reading comperhension.

After reading this sentence, I believe many people didn't notice that the characters in the sentence are actually jumbled. Strictly speaking, this sentence doesn't convey any meaning, but our brains overlook this fact.

In this example, ignoring the position of each character while reading the sentence is an example of "not having right mindfulness." Because of "not having right mindfulness," various understandings and concepts generated in the mind are also not accurate, which is "not having right discernment." If we had initially paid attention to each character and its position as they are, that would be "right mindfulness," and the various accurate understandings and concepts arising from "right mindfulness" would be "right discernment."

The correct understanding of a sentence is based on having accurate knowledge of the words, just as the correct understanding of the world is based on having accurate knowledge of consciousness.

It's important to note that there is nothing within the body and mind that can observe or be aware of other things. All cognition is the result of interactions between the senses and objects. So, to have right knowledge of consciousness itself, nothing else is needed to know or observe consciousness. It's like a self-illuminating light source; it doesn't need another light to shine upon it.

There's also no need to actively observe; consciousness is always arising, various forms of awareness are also always arising. This world doesn't cease to exist because we don't make an effort to observe it, and our sense of existence and various emotions and feelings don't disappear because we don't make an effort to observe them.

Just as I wrote in "My Meditation Experience":

One day during meditation, I thought, If I don't make an effort to observe, does that mean I won't know what's happening in the present moment? Will I become completely unaware, like a piece of wood?' The answer was very clear, no one turns into a piece of wood just because they're not trying to observe.

So, at that moment, I completely renounced, gave up all active and passive observations and all acts of will. I simply allowed phenomena of body and mind to arise and pass away on their own. The restless me suddenly became calm, and the phenomena of body and mind became even clearer than before, but I was no longer involved in them. My mind remained stable in a state beyond all phenomena.

A form of knowing, one that I had never experienced or seen before, arose: when phenomena of body and mind occurred, there was already knowing within them. There was no need for extra, redundant observation. This knowing was the inherent function of the phenomena themselves. What people call 'observation' is nothing more than another phenomenon arising afterward.

It reminded me of an insight I had years ago when I first started practicing meditation. At that time, I simply paid attention to what arose on a small patch of water's surface. Following a similar feeling now, I no longer actively observed the phenomena of body and mind; I only pay attention to what knowing arises within the scope of body and mind.

Nowadays, my concentration is completely different from what it used to be. When I use this method again, the knowing generated by the phenomena of body and mind is timely, complete, and clear, while I remain relaxed, as if I had just taken a heavy burden off my shoulders.

Just like between a worker and a boss, previously, I kept observing the phenomena of body and mind, like a worker continually doing a job, exhausted but earning meager wages. Now, I've discovered that knowing is the inherent function of the phenomena of body and mind themselves, so I no longer need to do this job. I only need to collect the results of labor from these workers (inherent knowing in consciousness), which is not only effortless but also highly profitable."

If you can understand this point, you won't waste time on incorrect methods of so-called observation. Instead, you'll simply pay attention to what consciousness arises and what knowing arises in every moment, everywhere. You won't miss it, won't overlook it, and won't misunderstand it. Through this, ignorance is eliminated, and right knowing arises. When right knowing arises, the inner logical induction, analysis, summarization, and reflection will remove past misunderstandings, eliminate wrong thoughts, and produce right mindfulness.

Right Mindfulness of the Body: Overview

When the Tathāgata instructs us to “know the body completely,” he is guiding us to see the body clearly and directly, not as it appears on the surface, but as a fabricated perception.

Like a lump of foam, the body may seem solid and enduring, yet it is insubstantial and fleeting. The Tathāgata wants us to see that much of what we call “the body” is an appearance formed by the mind. Through seeing this directly, we gain profound insight into the nature of experience itself: what we take to be a self inside a body, living in the world, is in truth a flow of mental processes shaped by craving, processes that take on the form of a body to exist within the world.

Through ignorance, not seeing this process and the suffering inherent in it, the mind clings to form by way of intention, attention, contact, feeling, and perception. From this clinging, a fabricated perception arises, creating the illusion of a self abiding within the body, and through craving, this imagined self continually seeks fulfillment through existence in the world.

By contemplating and seeing clearly and directly the insubstantial, conditioned, and not-self nature of the body, this fabricated perception becomes evident. This knowing gives rise to dispassion and clarity, leading to the release of clinging to the body, seeing it with wisdom rather than delusion, thereby opening the way to liberation.

Seeing the Body as a Lump of Foam

Just as a lump of foam on the Ganges, whirled about, quickly vanishes, so too, disciples, whatever kind of form there is… should be seen as it really is with correct wisdom thus: ‘This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.’

SN22.95

First, we must understand that when the Tathagata speaks of form, he is speaking of what is known through the eye, ear, nose, tongue, and body. In other words, the colors you see, the shapes you distinguish, the hardness or softness you feel, the warmth, the coolness, and the pressure. That is form. It is always form as experienced, never form as the physical objects themselves.

The Tathāgata teaches that form, the physical aspect as it appears in experience, should be regarded as insubstantial, like a lump of foam that offers no solidity when examined.

When we contemplate the body directly, we observe:

• The body’s sensations shift constantly. They show no stable pattern, arising, changing, and fading without control, like bubbles forming and bursting on the surface of water.

• The breath seems to move in and out, yet on close inspection what is actually known are feelings and perceptions shaped by the mind. There is no solid “breath object,” only impressions of movement, pressure, and expansion. In this way the breath is known as a fabrication.

• Tension and pressure continually appear in awareness. This comes from the activity of nāma attempting to hold and shape rūpa, though in reality it clings only to its own creations.

The interplay of nāma and rūpa is not a clash between two separate things but a process driven by craving for existence within the physical, a repeated creation of “I” and “mine,” an ongoing attempt to establish a self in what is, in reality, only conditioned appearance.

Practice at This Stage of the Gradual Training

At this stage of the Gradual Training, the purpose of dwelling “contemplating the body as body” is to abide in clear, direct awareness with wise attention, allowing the mind to see things as they truly are, free from conceptual overlay and the mental hijacking or overlay that gives rise to delusion.

The aim is to cultivate mindfulness that neither becomes entangled with bodily sensations nor identifies with the body as “me” or “mine,” but remains steady and present, preventing mental proliferation from taking hold.

Once this knowing is established, the body is no longer observed as an object; it knows and experiences itself. From here, we train in calming the bodily formation, gradually releasing clinging and craving for the Form Aggregate, which in practice means releasing clinging to the body as it is experienced.

This is cultivated through the various practices the Tathāgata recommends:

• The perceptions of impermanence, suffering, and not-self.

• Contemplation of the Four Elements.

• Contemplation of Death.

• Mindfulness of Breathing, and many other practices.

When contemplating the body as the body, we turn toward the form aggregate as it is actually experienced, not as an idea but as the living field of sensation. The mind learns to discern causes, conditions, and the results that follow. When this seeing is unobstructed and free from mental proliferation, wisdom arises from recognizing how these conditions come together.

Contemplation of the body is about deepening insight into nāma-rūpa, gradually dismantling false views, emotional bonds, and attachment, so that eventually there is a complete letting go of ingrained views, delight, craving, and clinging to the body. This is a gradual process and depends on progress along the Gradual Training.

To contemplate in the right way, we remain with immediate experience. We notice when the mind begins to overlay or interfere through bodily, verbal, or mental fabrications. With wisdom, these fabrications are recognized as nāma-rūpa, arising and fading, with no substance that can rightly be taken as self.

When tension or stress shows up, instead of holding it or feeding it with attention, we learn to recognize craving at work, the movement of nāma trying to own rūpa. We see how the mind tries to establish itself in the body. We do not get lost in the sensations but see them arise and pass away while turning our attention toward the real source of dissatisfaction, craving, and clinging to the Form Aggregate.

In this way, we neither chase pleasant sensations nor resist painful ones. We discern the process itself, seeing clearly how everything arises and ceases.

No precise instructions can be given to explain how to discern desire and let go of clinging to the Form Aggregate, for this lies beyond the confines of words or logical thought. It is something one will need to contemplate, discover, and practice for oneself.

By seeing things as they truly are, by seeing the underlying reality and contemplating causes and conditions, insight will arise. When insight arises, the way to practice becomes clear. With continued practice, one gradually detaches from clinging to the body.

Right Mindfulness of the Body: The Form Aggregate

To understand Right Mindfulness of the body and to help us contemplate correctly, we first need to understand the Form Aggregate and why it plays a key role in how we practice.

Form refers to the physical aspect of experience. The Form Aggregate, however, is one of the five types of experiences the Tathagata asks us to contemplate, the part of experience that knows and registers physical form.

Regarding the six senses, "form" includes things like smells (from particles), sights (from light waves), sounds (from vibrations), and even mental images. The body itself is also a form; it’s made up of the five senses and the many other physical body parts and cells.

In reality, the physical world is in constant flux, composed of endlessly changing, impermanent elements that lack fixed boundaries or clear edges. Consciousness takes these elements and organizes them into recognizable patterns, which gives rise to the sense of “things” as solid, distinct, and separate.

Understanding the Cognition Process

To better understand the Form Aggregate, let's look at the cognition process itself.

When experience first appears, it appears as simple contact. The senses bring in raw information, but it is incomplete, scattered, and brief. The mind automatically fills in the gaps without us noticing. It uses memory, habit, and expectation to shape that raw information into something familiar.

We never see pure sensation for long. The mind reaches out, grabs a few hints, and turns them into a whole world of existence. It decides that a patch of warmth is a hand, that a shadow is a shape, that a vibration is a car, and that a pressure is “my back.” This happens so quickly that it feels like the world arrives fully formed, but it is almost entirely built by the mind.

This habit of filling in the blanks is not a problem in daily life. It helps us function. In practice, though, it hides the actual nature of experience. The work begins when we start seeing how much the mind adds.

What is the Form Aggregate?

The Form Aggregate refers to the physical aspect of experience, the material side of name-and-form as it appears within awareness. It includes the experience of the body and all tangible qualities such as solidity, warmth, movement, and vibration.

Form on its own is simply matter. When it is known through contact with consciousness, it appears as the Form Aggregate. It represents the physical side of experience, while feeling, perception, volition, and consciousness constitute the mental side that gives it shape and meaning.

The Form Aggregate is the simple field in which physical events appear. When they appear in consciousness, there is no meaning, label, story, or image of the body, only the bare physical aspect of experience showing itself for a moment.

Almost immediately, the mind takes a raw event and begins to build on top of it. This is nama propagating. It turns simple physical contact into a familiar picture.

A few things happen quickly:

• The sensation gets labeled.

• The sensation gets assigned a location.

• The sensation gets included in the whole idea of the body.

• The sensation gets tied to memory and identity.

• The sensation becomes a point you relate to as “me” or “mine.”

By the time all of that has happened, we no longer notice the raw form at all. We only notice the completed picture the mind has built.

In practice, this means we usually experience the finished construction rather than the simple physical base the Tathagata wants us to know.

The Form Aggregate Is Not Physical Reality

It’s important to understand that when practicing mindfulness of the body, we are not trying to attend to physical reality or matter itself, for that cannot be directly known. What the senses receive are only fleeting contacts, light waves, sound waves, and tactile sensations—momentary impressions without inherent meaning.

What we are actually directing attention to is how the mind reconstructs these contacts through feelings, perceptions, and intentions, forming what we call “the body.” This ongoing act of reconstruction is name-and-form in operation, a process continually shaped and sustained by karmic tendencies and volitional energy.

To dwell contemplating in the body, therefore, is to direct attention to this reconstructive process in real time, to see how contact gives rise to feeling, how perception and intention fabricate form as an experience, and how all of it arises and ceases moment by moment.

As knowing deepens, the illusion of solidity and ownership dissolves. We no longer see “my body” but a conditioned stream of events, impermanent, unsatisfactory, and without self. This insight marks the beginning of freedom.

The Purpose of Dwelling Body as Body

As with the other aggregates, the training begins by learning to stay close to the Form Aggregate before the mind adds anything extra. We remain with the raw field of physical experience without becoming lost in interpretation or proliferation. This does not require speed, only steadiness and simplicity.

The goal is not to track every tiny sensation arising in awareness. The goal is to stay with this basic physical layer of experience long enough that we notice when the mind begins to add outlines, labels, locations, and identity. When we stay at the Form Aggregate, only the bare sensations and feeling tone become clearer. When tone is clear, mental reactions stand out, and when reactions are known, the fabrications of nama-rupa become easier to see.

As the mind settles, and we stay with the raw physical experience:

• Sensations feel simple again.

• The body feels less like a solid shape.

• Boundaries feel looser.

• The sense of ownership softens.

• We see the difference between the raw event and the mind’s additions.

We begin to understand the Form Aggregate as the Form Aggregate, which is precisely what the Tathagata describes: nothing mysterious, just the ability to separate the physical appearance from the layers the mind builds on it.

When we stay right at the Form Aggregate without letting nama propagate, we gain the stable footing needed for the rest of the training. We understand the body as a shifting field of physical experiences. We understand feeling tone as the next layer. Likewise, we understand the mind’s movement as another layer, and we begin to see the patterns that hold suffering in place.

The Tathagata has us first start practice from this dwelling for a reason; it is the ground, and everything else grows from it. Learning to rest at this ground is learning how to see clearly.

Right Mindfulness of the Body: Understanding Name-and-form

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To contemplate the Form Aggregate, it helps to understand name and form because this shows how experience is shaped moment by moment, how the mind builds a world that feels personal, and why this leads to stress and suffering.

“Name” includes feeling, perception, intention, contact, and attention. These mental factors meet the material side of experience at contact, which occurs when a sense faculty, consciousness, and the experienced aspect of a physical object come together.

From name and form the six sense bases arise, both internal and external. The internal bases are the living interface between the senses and the Form Aggregate, the experienced side of physical phenomena. The external bases provide the raw material, such as light, sound, or texture, which allows form to appear. Together, these bases make contact possible and allow experience to arise.

Form itself is physical reality, yet the Form Aggregate is the experienced portion of that reality. It shows up as simple sensations and qualities without built-in meaning. It is not purely mental, because it remains the material side of experience, yet it exists as an aggregate only when known through consciousness.

Although we are not yet working with name-and-form directly, it's important to understand it so that our practice is in line with the ultimate goal.

The Coming Together of Body and Mind

Because the mind does not fully understand the suffering, impermanence, and insubstantial nature of the body, it continues through craving to cling to physical form, searching for satisfaction in what cannot truly provide it.

This confusion is compounded by the very nature of experience itself. The mind cannot directly know physical matter; it only constructs a representation of form within consciousness. This interdependence of mentality and materiality is what is meant by nāma-rūpa, the arising of mind and body in mutual dependence.

We encounter the world through sense contact: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and thinking. Our engagement with these experiences occurs through intention, attention, and volition. Yet we mistakenly assume that we are perceiving the world as it truly is, that our experience corresponds directly to physical reality, and that what appears is inherently “mine” or “my reality.”

In truth, what is known is not the thing itself but a mental representation shaped by perception and conditioned by experience, unstable, dependent, and incapable of offering lasting satisfaction. This is why attachment to form and appearance inevitably gives rise to suffering.

Not only does the mind create distorted representations of the world through craving and clinging, but when it tries to interact with what it perceives as an external world, it does so through these very distortions. Conditioned by craving, perception, and intention, the mind mistakes its own fabrications for reality and clings to and acts upon them.

From this deluded foundation, it generates further intentions, reactions, and experiences, constructing an entire world of existence and suffering. What is taken to be “the world out there” is, in truth, a projection arising from within, shaped by craving, clinging, and becoming.

This is how the cycle sustains itself: perception gives rise to craving; craving gives rise to clinging; clinging gives rise to becoming; and becoming gives rise to a whole world of existence. Unaware of its own participation, the mind keeps trying to secure itself within its own creations, its thoughts, emotions, and sense impressions, never realizing that these very efforts are the cause of its bondage.

Seeing this clearly is the beginning of wisdom. When one understands that the “world” arises with the mind and ceases with the mind, craving weakens. The tendency to fabricate and project diminishes, and the mind begins to rest in direct knowing, seeing phenomena as they truly are: conditioned, impermanent, and not-self.

We come to see that the mind is not inherently bound to the body or the physical world. Rather, it is through the continual generation of bodily, verbal, and mental formations, and through clinging to them, that the illusion of attachment is sustained.

Right Mindfulness of the body is seeing through and letting go of this attachment, and in doing so, the mind becomes free.

The Futility of Working with Sensations and Emotions While Clinging to the Body

It is important to keep in mind the Tathagata’s teachings that attention must be placed at the root of the problem, and not in a way that draws us into further entanglement.

The important point is that, as long as identification and clinging to the body remain, aversion and craving inevitably arise. Trying to remove greed or aversion at the level of fabrications, without addressing the root of the problem, clinging to the body (nāma-rūpa), is like trying to dry a cloth that remains soaked in water.

Sensations and emotions are part of the links of birth and death in the chain of dependent arising, expressions of becoming that have already taken shape. Trying to control, suppress, or change them is futile because, by the time they appear, their causes are already set in motion. They are the results, not the causes, in the process. Thus, working with them only entangles the mind further and perpetuates the cycle of craving, clinging, and becoming.

Right Mindfulness, therefore, does not begin by purifying desires, one emotion or sensation at a time, but by disentangling identification with the body and the aggregates themselves. When attachment to the physical form weakens, the subsequent mental processes—contact, feeling, craving, and clinging, which depend on that form—also begin to loosen.

When we become entangled with formations, we reinforce the chain of birth and death. The mind, bound by these processes, naturally inclines toward suffering, decay, and rebirth. But when we turn our attention to the root, examining the underlying views and intentions, and apply Right Effort to guide awareness without clinging to feelings or perceptions, the movement reverses. The mind begins to incline toward liberation, and the forces that drive the cycle of becoming grow weaker.

Right Mindfulness of the Body: Working with Nāma

When the Tathāgata speaks of “dwelling in the body as body,” we may think that the practice involves working directly with the physical body. Yet, the mind never experiences the physical body in its raw form. What it actually knows is the appearance of the body, the felt, perceived version of it. This is the nāma side of rūpa.

The Mind Meets the Body Through Nāma

The physical body exists as a material process, but the mind does not come into direct contact with it. Sensations, qualities, and perceptions produced by the internal sense bases serve as the bridge through which the body is experienced. These appear at the Form Aggregate, and nāma applies meaning and interpretation to them.

Whenever we turn attention toward the body, we are engaging with the mind’s presentation of the body, its image, feeling, and tone. This is the only access point consciousness has. Attempting to direct attention to the purely physical creates strain because it tries to do what is not possible.

When we practice, the breath, posture, movement, and bodily pressures all appear within consciousness as patterns of sensation and perception. These patterns are shaped by attention, intention, and the overall state of the mind.

As the Tathāgata says, “The mind is the forerunner.” Therefore, when we practice calming the body, steadying it, or using it as a dwelling for mindfulness, the real work happens on the side of nāma. As the mental presentation becomes tranquil and unified, the corresponding physical processes naturally follow.

In other words, we should work only with the mental aspects of experience rather than the physical.

Understanding this is essential for knowing why all body-based practices depend on working with nāma. It also explains why the breath is such an effective tool: it connects the physical process with its mental representation.

The Breath as a Bridge

The breath is unique because it touches both sides of name-and-form. Physically, it is a bodily process; mentally, it is known as sensation, rhythm, and perception. When perception softens and the felt breath becomes smooth, the physical breath settles in response.

This is why, when “calming the bodily formation” through the breath, we can work with the physical aspect and notice results, because in reality we are engaging the mental aspect. However, it is far more effective to work directly with the mental aspects of the breath, as this avoids the tension and stress that arise from trying to change the physical, which cannot truly be controlled.

By steadying the mental image of breathing, the entire system inclines toward ease and balance.

Dwelling in the Mental Body

As perception of the body becomes steady and unified, and the habit of clinging to the physical is released, the presence of the mind-made body, nāma, becomes clear. From here we abide in that awareness while the coarse sense of the physical body quietly recedes into the background.

At this stage, mindfulness of the body has matured. We dwell not in the unreachable physical base but in the body as it is known, the mental counterpart of name-and-form.

Thus, every body practice or contemplation is a practice with nāma. The physical body provides the foundation, but the mind operates entirely within its own field of sensations, perceptions, intentions, and attention.

When we mistakenly try to work with the illusion of the purely physical, tension and resistance arise. When we approach the body through nāma, through its felt and perceived nature, the practice becomes gentle, clear, and effective. The breath, bridging both realms, remains the ideal means for this knowing, though the same principle applies to all contemplations of the body.

Right Mindfulness of the Body: How Nama Clings to Rupa

Since the main goal of practicing Right Mindfulness of the body is to release clinging to the body, it is useful to understand how nāma clings to rūpa.

When following the Tathāgata’s teachings, it is easy to assume that practice involves changing or transcending the body or the material world, perhaps by working directly with physical sensations or tension. While such approaches can be helpful at the beginning, they address only the symptoms, not the cause.

To truly let go, we must address clinging to form itself, not the by-products of that clinging. Yet rūpa, form, cannot be worked with directly. It is passive, insentient, and conditioned by causes such as heat, touch, and nutrition. It does not cling.

Clinging arises only in nāma, the mental side of experience: feeling, perception, intention, contact, and attention. It is nāma that clings to rūpa, the mind that claims the body, sensations, and appearances as “I,” “mine,” or “myself.”

Under the influence of ignorance (avijjā) and formations (saṅkhārā), the relationship between nāma and rūpa becomes distorted by the conceit “I am.” Though nāma-rūpa are simply interdependent, impermanent, and ownerless phenomena, ignorance gives rise to the illusion of possession.

Thus, nāma becomes clinging to rūpa:

• Intention inclines toward or away, generating the momentum of becoming; this is the seed of karma.

• Attention directs awareness, turning the mind toward what intention seeks.

• Contact binds the senses to objects, forming the meeting ground for feeling.

• Feeling delights in the pleasant and resists the painful.

• Perception labels and fixes the world as “this is that.”

From this come craving and clinging, the tightening of identification. Therefore, nāma-rūpa is not clinging itself, but the field in which clinging arises. This clinging arises from volitional formations, which, driven by craving and intentional energy, distort nāma into a mistaken sense of ownership over rūpa.

In other words, nāma creates its own representation of rūpa and clings to it.

This entire process begins with ignorance of suffering, which gives rise to karmic forces and volitional energy that incline toward form, seeking to take shape, to become someone, to have a body, and to exist. When this is fully seen and understood, craving ceases, and the process of becoming comes to an end.

Right Mindfulness of the Body: How the Mind Fabricates Form

Now let's look at the process of how nāma creates its own representation of rūpa and clings to it.

When the Tathāgata speaks of contemplating form, he is not asking us to know the physical body as it appears in awareness. He is pointing to how nāma fabricates rūpa in experience, how the mind shapes, distorts, and confines the sense of the body through subtle constructions. These constructions give rise to the felt sense of being "inside" the body, of looking out from a fixed position, or operating from a point. Seeing this clearly marks the beginning of releasing attachment to the form aggregate.

How Nāma Fabricates Form

The body as we experience it is not the raw sensing of pressure, warmth, vibration, or tension. It is those sensations shaped by attention, perception, intention, and feeling. Together, these mental factors weave a coherent “body image” that appears as a container, a location, or a dwelling place for the self.

These constructions are not inherently wrong; they simply become restrictive when taken as reality. They bind the mind to the body by sustaining the illusion of a watcher inside a physical shell.

Looking closely at how the mind relates to the body, we discover that the sense of being “inside” it is not an intrinsic truth but a habit of fabrication. Nāma continuously builds rūpa in experience, reinforcing it with subtle cues, angles, and imagined perspectives that make awareness seem lodged within the physical frame. Contemplating the form aggregate means seeing these constructions as they are and loosening the hold they have on attention.

The mind generates countless impressions to make form feel inhabited. These are not random; they are conditioned patterns shaped by perception, intention, and attention. When unnoticed, they tighten the identification between awareness and the body, producing the felt weight of embodiment. Seeing them clearly releases that heaviness and restores a natural ease in awareness.

Common Constraining Fabrications

There are countless ways the mind fabricates form, and they show up in both contemplation and daily life so quietly that we usually never question them. Take a moment to look at a few common examples of how the mind builds the sense of being inside the body:

• Feeling as if awareness is sitting behind the face or forehead, watching from a small room.

• Sensing that you are located behind the eyes, directing attention forward.

• Feeling like you are inside the head, with the rest of the body located "outside" that inner room.

• Imagining the breath as something happening inside the chest cavity, as if the mind is positioned at the lungs.

• Believing that breathing happens in a specific internal location, instead of simply noticing movement, pressure, and sensation.

• Feeling like you are listening from inside the ears, as though experience is filtered through two small openings.

• Feeling that you are in the body, moving it from inside, like a driver sitting in a vehicle.

• Imagining that the mind is located in the brain, and awareness originates from a physical point.

• Experiencing touch as if it is happening to a solid body owned by a center, instead of being simple contact.

• Feeling as if attention is projected outward from within, like a flashlight beam.

• Imagining that emotions arise in the chest or stomach as if these are their actual physical locations, instead of patterns of feeling and perception.

These fabrications are subtle, automatic, and deeply conditioned. They are not problems in themselves, but they reinforce the illusion of a fixed observer inside the form.

Why These Fabrications Matter

Every one of these constructions creates a dual setup: a watcher somewhere inside the body and a world somewhere outside. This internal positioning makes the mind feel enclosed, limited, and tethered to physical form. This reconstruction process also creates a lot of stress.

The problem is not the sensations themselves, but the interpretation layered on top. Sensations are simple. The constructions are what create the sense of a confined self.

How Contemplation Loosens the Grip

Contemplating form means noticing the raw sensations and also the mental activity that turns those sensations into a meaningful picture, our perceived sense of the body. When this construction is seen for what it is, it becomes lighter and less convincing.

The familiar sense of being centered in the head or chest fades, and awareness feels less confined. The body shows up more as a changing field of sensations rather than a solid container.

This clarity does not come from adjusting the body or adopting a special posture. It comes from recognizing the shape the mind keeps forming and letting that habitual shaping loosen on its own.

The purpose of contemplating the Form Aggregate is not to escape the body or reject it. It is to see how the mind builds a self inside it. When these fabrications are recognized and released, the relationship between mind and body becomes lighter. Experience becomes more open. The sense of being confined to a physical center weakens.

The body is still here, but the mental architecture that makes it feel like a home for the self begins to dissolve. This is where freedom starts to show itself.

Right Mindfulness of the Body: The Physical, Mental, and Formless Body

The Tathāgata teaches that as long as we remain bound to the physical body, we cannot truly make progress in destroying the taints. In Dīgha Nikāya 9, he offers a clear path: first, letting go of attachment to the gross physical body; then, releasing identification with the subtle mind-made body. From there, he guides us toward formless existence, ultimately leading to unobstructed liberation:

There are, Potthapada, three acquisitions of self for me: the gross acquisition of self, the mind-made acquisition of self, and the formless acquisition of self.

And what, Potthapada, is the gross acquisition of self? It is the one with form, composed of the four great elements, feeding on physical food; this is called the gross acquisition of self.

And what is the mind-made acquisition of self? It is the one with form, mind-made, complete in all its parts, not deficient in any sense organ; this is called the mind-made acquisition of self.

And what is the formless acquisition of self? It is the one without form, made of perception; this is called the formless acquisition of self.

And, Potthapada, I teach the Dhamma for the abandoning of the gross acquisition of self... And, Potthapada, I teach the Dhamma for the abandoning of the mind-made acquisition of self... And, Poṭṭhapāda, I teach the Dhamma for the abandoning of the formless acquisition of self...

As you practice, defiling qualities will be abandoned, and wholesome qualities will grow, leading to the fulfillment of wisdom and the attainment of full knowing in this very life, living having realized it with your own insight.

DN9

To lessen clinging to the body and the sense of self tied up with it, we need to contemplate and discern the physical body, the form or mental body, and the formless body.

The physical body is what most people understand as the body, what they can observe, touch, smell, hear, and taste through their senses.

The form or mental body is the feelings, perceptions, volitional formations, and consciousness free from the objectification created by the mind regarding physical existence. Without the hijacking or projecting of fabrications into physical experience.

The formless body is awareness that is free from mentally created physical constraints. There is only the perception of infinite space, infinite consciousness, nothingness, or neither perception nor non-perception.

Through practice, it is possible to release attachment to the physical body and abide in the mental body, as experienced in the Jhanas. By further letting go of attachment to the mental body, one can abide in the formless body, experiencing the formless realms.

In other words, rather than struggling against clinging to physical existence, one can, through Right Effort, abandon unwholesome attachment to the physical body and cultivate wholesome qualities by directing and sustaining attention on subtler experience, dwelling in the mental or form body.

However, it's important to understand that these bodies are still assumptions, still constructed, because they're based on perception and conditions. So if we cling to them, thinking, "This is me, this is what I want to be," we are caught in the cycle of suffering and rebirth.

Instead, the purpose of abiding in the mental and formless bodies is to help us release attachment to all conditioned phenomena as “me” or “mine.”

Right Mindfulness: Training for the Higher Mind

Right Mindfulness is training the mind for more profound insight by developing a steady awareness, quieting the coarse fabrications tied to the body and the senses, and establishing the clarity needed for seeing things as they truly are. When mindfulness is trained in this way, the mind becomes capable of rising above the habitual patterns that keep it entangled in form.

When there is no clinging to the Five Aggregates, when they remain in their natural, non-proliferated state, free from clinging to body, feeling, perception, intention, or attention, the mind becomes unobstructed. In this unobstructed clarity, not clouded by fixation or fabrication, the mind can see things as they truly are.

On the other hand, when the mind is confined by the physical body, taking the bodily formation as me or mine, this is nama clinging to rupa. Because of this clinging, the mind becomes bound to all the karmic volitions connected to that coarse layer. Every tension, every fear, and every form of craving tied to bodily identity becomes activated.

Trying to release these fabrications while remaining immersed in them is like trying to pull weeds in a field where new ones keep sprouting. No matter how carefully we work, we are still inside the conditions that feed their growth. The underlying pattern of nama clinging to rupa remains, sustaining the patterns that keep the mind entangled in its own weeds.

By applying the Tathagata’s teaching on dependent arising, we begin to see directly that when any link in the chain is no longer sustained, all that depends on it fades. We see that our entire experience is constructed from simple, conditioned aggregates. As the causes for clinging weaken, the fabrications built on them naturally fall away.

To counter this entanglement and see things as they truly are, the Tathagata urges us to develop the higher mind. “Higher” is not a direction or a place; it is a mind that is refined, clear, and not obstructed, not lost in the weeds. Ordinary consciousness feels dense, heavy, shaped by the physical, and lost in fabrications. The refined awareness of the higher mind feels light and open. It is easier to work with a mind that is steady and subtle than a mind entangled in coarse bodily formations.

The Mind Recreates the Body and Governs the Physical

A key part of developing the higher mind is seeing nama-rupa, recognizing that we do not experience the physical body directly. What we call the body is the mind’s own reconstruction, shaped by feeling, perception, patterns of attention and intention, and by contact events interpreted as “my body”.

And what is the mind-made acquisition of self? It is the one with form, mind-made, complete in all its parts, not deficient in any sense organ; this is called the mind-made acquisition of self.

DN9

What we experience from moment to moment is the mind-made body, the body constructed through feeling, perception, intention, attention, and contact. This mental body is the interface that governs how the slow and heavy physical body is held, moved, and sensed through the six internal sense bases.

The important point is that to recreate the physical, the mind builds upon these simple aggregates and recreates physical reality. This is the root of much ignorance and suffering. We believe we are interacting with a physical world, yet what we actually meet is the mind-made version.

In truth there are only the bare aggregates, bare form, feeling, perception, intention, and attention. All of reality is reconstructed from these ingredients based on sense contact.

When there is tension in the body, we look for it in the physical, but it is the mind that creates this tension and projects it into three-dimensional space as if it were located somewhere in the body. When we try to work with this tension or anything else that appears in the body formation, we are working with shadows. Science calls this referred pain or referred tension. The real source is in the mind.

This becomes clear when we contemplate the bodily formation. When we look at the projection itself, it disappears. There is nothing there, because it is only a creation of the mind.

For example:

• Breathing changes when perception changes.

• Tension releases when feelings change.

• Posture shifts when intention shifts.

A self controlling the physical body is an illusion. At the core, there are only the bare aggregates. Any control that appears is based on intention, on choices rooted in right or wrong views. Right view sees with wisdom, understanding not-self, impermanence, and the unsatisfactory nature of holding. Wrong view is being caught in the fabrications themselves and experiencing everything as happening to a "self".

Seeing Through the Physical Body

We need to understand that practice develops through working with the mental body, not by trying to manipulate the physical structure itself. This is why the bodily formation is mental, for it is the shaping of this inner reconstruction that moves and governs the physical body.

When the mental body grows quiet, the weight of the physical body naturally lightens. The mind begins to see that the heaviness it felt did not come from flesh and bone, but from the way it constructed and clung to its experience of them.

Most people, including many practitioners, remain unaware of this mental body because it is hidden beneath the thick layers of fabrication that cover experience: the bodily formation and the mental and verbal formations that depend on it.

As practice deepens and the bodily formation fades, the sense of being located inside the flesh grows weaker. Awareness is no longer confined to the bodily formation, and places like the top of the head, the back, or the body’s edges no longer feel like boundaries. This softening is the first sign of freedom.

Why This Is Relevant for Practice

Once it becomes clear that practice is not directed at the physical body but at the mind’s reconstructed version of it, the training becomes far more subtle and effective. When the body fabrication quiets, the mental body stands out on its own, revealing that the physical body was never the true arena of practice. It was the mind that shaped, governed, and fabricated the whole process from the beginning.

This is how the burden of the coarse body is released, not by rejecting the physical form, but by seeing that the weight was held in the mind’s recreation of it, nama-rupa. When that recreation loosens, the sense of heaviness naturally falls away.

Developing the higher mind means refining consciousness until it becomes bright, soft, and free from the disturbances created by clinging to bodily fabrication. This refinement comes from letting go of craving, releasing the physical body as a container, and withdrawing participation from both gross and subtle fabrications.

The mind becomes clear enough to see its own fabrications and the suffering caused by clinging to them, and through wisdom, instead of participating in this process, naturally lets go, and as a result, there is the fading and cessation of the "gross acquisition of self".

Abiding in the Mental Body

A skillful way to practice is to relate to the mental body in the same way we relate to the physical body: by abiding in it directly. As the bodily formation weakens and the subtle mental body becomes clearer, the dependence on the physical frame naturally relaxes. We no longer rest in “body as body” in the coarse sense; instead, we settle into the mental body itself, abiding, knowing, and allowing its processes to reveal themselves.

As we practice resting in this subtler field, the refined mind eventually settles into jhāna and, later in the practice, the formless realms. These states reflect the natural potential of the mind when agitation caused by clinging to the coarse physical body fades. The mental body stands unobstructed.

Jhāna is not a different type of experience. It is the same stream of experience temporarily purified of clinging, especially clinging to physical form. On the supra-mundane path, this clarity is not a fabricated state but a state free of fabrication.

Developing the higher mind is what opens the door to jhāna. The mind now abides in a mental body that is clear, bright, steady, and not burdened by the flesh. This is why the Tathagata calls it a “body.” It is structured, dimensional, and lived in, yet made entirely of mental factors.

Becoming Invisible

Another way to understand this whole process and to practice is to see it as the mind becoming "invisible". This “invisibility” does not mean that the mind disappears, but that it stops leaving heavy imprints on experience. Instead of pushing, grasping, or reacting, the mind begins to meet experience with lightness and ease.

When the mental body becomes clear and the coarse identification with the physical body fades, this quality arises naturally. The mind reacts only lightly, sometimes not at all. It no longer holds sensations or thoughts with tightness. It rests in clarity without resistance and moves without burden. In this state, the mind becomes unobtrusive, unentangled, and quietly present.

Right Mindfulness of the Body: Hidden in Plain View

Many people assume the Tathagata’s teachings point to something hidden deep within, something that requires special effort to uncover. But a closer look at his words reveals a different message. He repeatedly points to what is already present in the field of experience. What obscures it is not depth or distance, but the mind’s division of the field into self and world. This split creates blindness on both sides.

The first point is that nothing the Tathagata teaches lies outside direct experience. The second is understanding how the mind creates the conditions for becoming a being, which requires the sense of inside and outside. The third is understanding nama-rupa, revealing the machinery that constructs this field.

Let’s explore these points in turn.

Nothing is outside experience

When the Tathagata defines the "All", he makes a radical claim: everything necessary for understanding and liberation is already here, in the six sense fields.

What is the All? Eye and forms, ear and sounds, nose and odors, tongue and flavors, body and touches, mind and mental objects. If anyone were to say that they will reject this All and proclaim another All, that would be groundless.

SN35.23

This closes the door on searching elsewhere. There is no hidden dimension to access; the path unfolds entirely within the field that is already operating.

The problem is not that reality is hidden, but that the mind overlooks what is in plain sight. It constructs a self within and a world outside, and by clinging to this duality, it obscures what is already present. The Tathagata identifies this process directly:

A person regards form internally as self or externally as self or both internally and externally as self. This view arises from not seeing clearly.

SN22.33

This highlights the core distortion. The inner assumption of ownership blinds us to our own mind, while the outer assumption blinds us to the constructed nature of the world, making it seem independently “out there.” Both are created in experience, arising from the same ignorance, and both obscure what is otherwise plainly evident.

Becoming requires inside and outside

Becoming is the state in which consciousness finds footing, establishes itself, and grows. For consciousness to become a being, it requires support, nourishment, and a structure to operate within.

Consciousness becomes established when there is something for it to land on. Where there is landing, there is growth. Where there is growth, there is accumulation.

SN12.64

Every form of becoming depends on nutriment. The Tathagata categorizes this into four types:

There are four kinds of food for the maintenance of beings: physical food, contact, intention, and consciousness.

SN12.63

The very idea of food introduces separation: there is a one who consumes and what is consumed. This marks the earliest formation of inside and outside.

This split is not merely conceptual; it becomes embodied. The Form Aggregate forms the first boundary, the body becomes the container around which experience organizes itself, and consciousness finds support there.

Because of form and because of clinging to form, consciousness finds a footing.

SN22.79

The sense of being located inside the body is not inherent. It is shaped through experience, beginning with form. From that outline, the world appears as what lies beyond. This boundary is continually reinforced by bodily fabrication. Insight begins when the barrier softens, when bodily fabrication fades, and when the body calms. Awareness is no longer confined behind the boundary, and this softening allows deeper ignorance to be seen.

Nama-rupa reveals how the mind creates the entire field

In nama-rupa, name is intention, attention, feeling, perception, and contact; form is material form. These are the ingredients the mind uses to assemble the field of experience. They are present now, not hidden or distant, actively building the world we experience.

Consciousness and nama-rupa depend on one another; they arise together, shape each other, and sustain each other.

The Tathagata does not ask disciples to uncover hidden layers. He asks them to see how experience is assembled. The path is a matter of understanding this creation in real time.

When intention calms and attention steadies, volition quiets and the field becomes clear; when contact is known, feeling understood, and perception recognized as fabrication, reactivity weakens, craving loses its pull, and the world becomes transparent.

At that point, the mind sees name and form directly, recognizes that both self and world are constructed, understands that the boundary of inside and outside was built rather than discovered, and perceives that everything the Tathagata described has always been occurring in the open field of experience. This marks the beginning of genuine insight.

Right Mindfulness of the Body: Direction of the Practice

Whatever pleasure and joy arise dependent on form, that is the gratification in form. Whatever is impermanent, suffering, and subject to change in form, that is the danger in form. The removal and abandonment of desire and lust for form, that is the escape from form.

SN22.57

Before practicing Right Mindfulness of the body, it is helpful to have a clear sense of direction regarding the practice.

The training develops two complementary skills: insight and calm. Insight grows as we see the body as a process, which softens the bodily formation. Calm develops as we directly ease the bodily formation so that experience becomes clear and undistorted. Each supports the other, creating a steady and balanced practice.

Beginning with Right View

Right View sets the course. It turns the mind toward understanding the body as a conditioned process rather than a self. The Tathagata does not frame the body in terms of existence or non-existence, but in terms of causes, conditions, and their results.

Letting go of clinging to the body is not a matter of adopting a belief. It arises from seeing how the body is fabricated in experience, how clinging sustains that fabrication, and how the mode of fabrication we call “the body” fades when clinging fades.

With Right View, the body is no longer assumed to be solid or reliable. It is understood as a shifting bundle of sensations, insubstantial and subject to change, like a lump of foam on a river. This understanding grows through steady contemplation and clear attention.

Reflections on the 32 body parts, the unattractive, and death help loosen assumptions that the body is mine, that awareness is housed within it, or that it contains something lasting.

Right View includes the cultivation of Wise Attention, seeing the impermanent, unsatisfactory, and not-self nature of experience. Using dependent arising as the framework for practice deepens this knowing. Any insights strengthen Right View, and Right View in turn calms the bodily formation by weakening craving and clinging.

This is the foundation. Without this clarity at the beginning, the deeper stages of practice cannot be firmly established.

Right Intention and the Inclination Toward Letting Go

As the body is seen as a conditioned process, the intention to let go naturally takes shape. Instead of reacting with craving or aversion toward the body, the mind begins to incline toward release.

Because intention is the energy that gives the practice momentum, we cultivate goodwill and non-harming to steady the mind. This supports the gradual abandoning of the craving that makes the body appear as “me” or “mine.” The practice turns toward fading, relinquishment, and cessation.

Right Effort and Right Mindfulness as the Working Tools

The practical work unfolds through Right Effort and Right Mindfulness. These stabilize the mind and reveal the basic fabrications around the body. Right Effort removes unwholesome impulses that pull the mind back into identification while strengthening what fosters calm and steadiness.

Right Mindfulness sustains clarity. Here, mindfulness of the body is not limited to posture or breath. It is the observation of sensations arising and passing, tensions forming and dissolving, and impulses appearing and fading. This reveals the body as a dynamic process rather than a lasting thing. As mindfulness matures, the mind becomes concentrated and ready for deeper release.

Using Dependent Arising as the Framework for Bodily Practice

Dependent arising provides a precise framework for practicing mindfulness of the body. It allows us to work directly with the conditions that shape experience while calming bodily formations.

Instead of being caught in bodily fabrications already formed on the physical side of experience, we turn attention toward the mental processes that build those forms. In doing so, the practice releases entanglement with the bodily formation and reveals how the mind constructs experience. The aim is to understand each link well enough that there is no hidden point where craving and clinging can take hold.

The bodily formation feels solid only because the mind supplies it with the energy of becoming, the push of craving, the glue of clinging, and the shaping influences of feeling, perception, attention, and intention.

By tracing this construction backward, we can rest at any point along the chain and release the conditions that keep the body formation active. Each link becomes a place of practice, a vantage point from which the rest of the chain can be seen and understood.

Craving for Becoming

This is the origin of suffering; it is craving, which brings renewed existence, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there, that is, craving for sensual pleasure, craving for becoming, and craving for non-becoming.

SN56.11

Becoming is the craving energy that seeks to establish itself in the aggregates so it can take birth in experience. It appears as an energetic shaping of the field of experience, making the body stiffen or hold itself in a pattern while the mind takes on a stance, such as being the one who is practicing. When this energy is not recognized, it continually turns toward the body, settles into the physical frame, and gives it an unnecessary sense of weight. Sensations that would normally arise and pass begin to feel charged and held together, turning the body into something that must be maintained and shaped. This is the bodily fabrication animated by craving for being.

When mindfulness becomes clear enough to notice this energy of becoming as it tries to land on form, the whole pattern loosens. The intention to land can be sensed as a subtle pressure or activation. Instead of following this movement, we recognize it as a conditioned impulse and stay with the raw field of sensations. Seeing its impermanence, the stance is not fed, the body stops lighting up, and the sequence collapses. With nothing for the craving to connect to, the fabrication fades on its own. As the impulse to become loses its footing, the body settles, sensations lose their inflated charge, and the frame becomes simple again, just a flow of conditions. The calm that appears supports clear insight.

Clinging to the Body

When becoming weakens, clinging is exposed. Clinging is the grasping that tries to stabilize experience, to hold it in place. It appears as the subtle effort to secure sensations, to freeze the shifting field so it can be taken as something definite. Here we can watch how the idea of the body is maintained through grasping at sensations, perceptions, and feelings. Recognizing this grasping breaks the illusion of solidity.

The process begins simply: we let go of clinging wherever it appears. When this release happens naturally and effortlessly, nothing more is required. There is no need to make the practice complicated. The key is to remain present with phenomena, to observe the complete passing away that follows letting go, and to rest in the quiet that arises after the release.

When clinging does not release on its own, insight-based perceptions such as impermanence, not-self, fading, and relinquishment help illuminate its conditioned nature. This is not an intellectual effort. It is a way of shining light on a pattern so the mind can relax around it and put it down.

This clear seeing alone is often enough to release the clinging, like setting down a weight we hadn’t realized we were carrying.

Craving

Craving is the movement of mind toward or away. It manifests as attraction, resistance, or the dull grasping of ignorance. Working here is simpler. Instead of dealing with what craving has produced, we attend to the raw impulse itself. When craving is seen clearly, it does not shape anything further. Without craving, clinging has no fuel and becoming has no direction.

As clinging weakens, craving appears as the underlying movement. It manifests as pushing, pulling, tightening, warming, resisting, or grasping toward experience. The task is not to fight it, but to recognize it as a conditioned movement that can be released without struggle.

When craving fades, the cooling that follows is unmistakable. Feeling becomes peaceful rather than reactive, and the mind gains confidence in the possibility of cessation.

Again, it's important to feel the cooling that naturally follows release, and not get attached to it. As the mind becomes sensitive to this cooling, it begins to recognize cause and effect directly: when craving ceases, calm arises. This marks the growth of wisdom, seeing for oneself that letting go brings peace, and that this peace is the true relief.

At this stage, the emphasis shifts from seeing all phenomena in terms of “there is clinging” to recognizing, more precisely, “there is craving.”

Feelings

When craving weakens, feeling is revealed as the quiet turning point. Feeling is the seed that can grow into craving if attended to unwisely. It is also the doorway out of the cycle when known as it is. Pleasant, painful, and neutral tones arise on their own. They do not compel anything. By resting with feeling directly, without leaning in any direction, the chain does not proceed. Here practice becomes very steady and simple, resting where the process is still pliable and transparent.

More Advanced Practices

When the coarse clinging to the physical body has settled, subtler forms of identification begin to appear. Beneath feeling, perception, attention, and intention shape the very first moments of experience. These are the quiet builders of the world. They determine what is noticed, what is ignored, how the sense of the body is formed, and how space is perceived.

When these factors are seen clearly, the physical body is understood as a mental reconstruction rather than an independently existing structure. Experience becomes lighter, more open, and easier to observe, with nothing solid enough to grasp.

The advanced stage of practice works directly with these finer fabrications:

• Expanding awareness so it is no longer confined by the sense of living inside a physical body.

• Contemplating the Six Sense Bases to loosen identification and reveal the conditioned nature of contact.

• Seeing how nama shapes and maintains rupa internally, and allowing this inner form to fade.

• Understanding how conceiving produces the sense of “I am this body,” and letting that conceiving stop.

These advanced practices do not replace the earlier ones, they refine them. The same pattern continues at every level: recognize the fabrication, see its conditioned nature, let it fade, notice the peace that follows, and remain with that peace without clinging.

The Direction of the Whole Path

Seen in this way, the cessation of the Form Aggregate is not a jump to formless states or an escape from the body. It is the natural result of cultivating Right View, Right Intention, Right Effort, and Right Mindfulness, and then allowing insight to reveal and calm the layers of fabrication that make the body feel like self.

Dependent arising becomes both the map and the method. It shows where experience is built and gives precise points where the building can be released. With steady practice, the mind is no longer compelled along the chain. Without anything to land on, the field of experience opens. Nothing solid remains for clinging to take hold of.

This is the direction of the practice, culminating in the fading, cessation, and release of the Form Aggregate.

Practicing Mindfulness of the Body: Overview

Now that we have covered important concepts about mindfulness of the body, let's now turn our attention to actually putting these concepts into practice.

To start practicing Right Mindfulness of the body, we can continue with the practices already introduced earlier in the Gradual Training, in the practice of Wakefulness.

For example, we may begin with mindfulness in the four postures or mindfulness of breathing. At this stage, however, instead of directing mindfulness outward toward the objects of the “world,” attention is directed towards the root of these fabrications, the Five Aggregates themselves, beginning with the body.

No matter what practice we undertake, for it to be considered Right Mindfulness of the body, it must include the following components:

• Abiding completely within the body as body. In this abiding, awareness is gathered fully within the body, not as an object observed by the mind, but as direct, immediate experience, awareness resting in awareness. Abiding fully in the body takes practice and develops gradually.

• Continuous, uninterrupted memory. This means keeping track of objects as they arise, change, and, most importantly, completely pass away.

• Attention free from the mind’s proliferation. We stay with the raw sensations, not participating, letting go of the urge to turn them into bodily, mental, or verbal fabrications.

• Continual subduing of desire and aversion begins with releasing the craving energy and not letting new craving turn into clinging that distorts perception.

• Contemplation of suffering and its cessation. This can be as simple as seeing suffering, looking for the craving or clinging beneath it, and realizing temporary cessation through letting go.

• Wise attention. Depending on our level of practice, we are constantly orienting toward seeing phenomena as impermanent, unsatisfactory, and not-self.

When all these components are present, and there is Right Effort, any practice becomes a skillful practice.

Practicing Mindfulness of the Body: Practices

When practicing Right Mindfulness of the Body, we can choose from a number of practices to strengthen awareness, steady attention, and reveal the true nature of experience. Each practice has its own distinct advantage, suited to countering particular tendencies of mind. The following are some examples:

Mindfulness of Walking

Mindfulness of walking is especially helpful for counteracting the dullness that sometimes arises in sitting or lying down. Walking itself is healthy and enlivening, and the variety of sensations in movement gives the mind plenty to attend to, which prevents sluggishness.

By placing awareness in the body as it moves and noticing posture step by step, mindfulness becomes steadier and more embodied. Mindfulness of walking calms restlessness, grounds attention, and shows us that mindfulness is not limited to formal sitting but can be sustained in the midst of ordinary activity.

Mindfulness of Breathing

Mindfulness of breathing is the Tathāgata’s most complete practice, as it contains all Four Dwellings of Mindfulness and leads step by step toward liberation. The breath is both a bodily and mental process, making it a unique object that can be used as a single practice to encompass the whole path of mindfulness. By attending to the breath carefully, impermanence is revealed, and bodily and mental formations are seen. This loosens clinging and gives the mind a steady anchor for calming. As mindfulness deepens, energy and joy arise, supporting concentration, clarity, and insight.

Mindfulness of Death

Contemplating death brings a sense of urgency, cutting through complacency and procrastination. It counteracts drowsiness and dullness by reminding us that time is short and uncertain. At this stage of the Gradual Training, Mindfulness of Death is not only about the death of the body but about directly seeing the continuous cycle of arising and passing, that death is happening in every instant.

Contemplation of the 32 Body Parts

By contemplating the body as composed of hair, skin, blood, bones, organs, and fluids, we weaken attachment to it as an object of beauty or pride. This reflection reveals the body’s true nature—unattractive, impermanent, and impure, dissolving lust and vanity. Mindfulness of the body’s parts cultivates Right View, cutting clinging to the physical body at its root.

The Four Elements

Abiding in the body as earth (solidity), water (cohesion), fire (temperature), and air (movement) penetrates the illusion of the body as a single, solid, personal possession. Instead, the body is seen as processes and qualities, without a lasting core. This practice leads to a clear perception of the body as not-self. Since the Four Elements are perceptions, this practice undermines seeing the body as something existing physically but instead fabricated in the mind.

Contemplation of Impermanence

Mindfulness of change reveals that all conditioned things are unstable, arising and passing without rest. Seeing impermanence loosens attachment and inclines the heart toward dispassion. As this insight deepens, letting go happens naturally, for nothing in this world can be held onto securely.

Contemplation of Suffering

By attending to the stress inherent in all conditioned experience, mindfulness reveals that nothing provides lasting satisfaction. This undermines craving by showing its futility. The advantage here is a sober, balanced view that guards against being deceived by temporary pleasure.

Contemplation of Not-Self

When mindfulness observes that the body, feelings, perceptions, thoughts, and consciousness are not “I” or “mine,” the sense of ownership begins to dissolve. This cuts at the root of clinging and opens the way to true release.

Each of these practices addresses a specific weakness, whether it is lust, drowsiness, restlessness, or clinging to self. By using these different practices, we keep the practice fresh, not only by the clarity they bring but also in how they balance one another, developing the mind for deeper concentration and liberating wisdom.

Practicing Right Mindfulness of the Body: Knowing the Body

The practice of Right Mindfulness of the Body begins by establishing ourselves in the body. When we first start practicing, we are intent on settling the mind, what the Tathāgata describes as subduing greed and aversion. In practical terms, this means softening the habitual tendency to crave what is liked and resist what is disliked.

This tendency is not random; it is shaped by volitional formations, by past craving and intention. It is an undercurrent of desire or will that seeks somewhere to land. When this current tries to settle in the body, nāma-rūpa begins to light up: consciousness shapes the experience, the body responds, and the construction gains momentum. If we hold on to this current, the construction strengthens, and the body becomes tight and restless. If we release it, it fades and becomes light.

The key to subduing greed and aversion lies in attention itself. Because past volitional formations have imbued our attention with subtle desire or resistance, the way we pay attention carries these tendencies. There is no other path to work with greed and aversion but through nama: through feelings, perceptions, intentions, and the quality of attention we bring. By cultivating attention imbued with goodwill, harmlessness, and letting go, we counter aversion and prevent desire from taking root.

One way to visualize this process is by imagining the breath or the fire element moving through the system. This current lights up as desire or intention and tries to attach itself through attention to bodily sensations. If it lands, it spreads, proliferates, and turns a simple sensation into a chain of reactions. But if we see it clearly and do not hold it, we let it calm, it dissolves, and the energy releases on its own.

This is where knowing the body becomes the key. Direct knowing meets the breath or the body before anything can build. Raw sensations are known simply as they are. The energy that seeks to land on them is known simply as energy. Because raw sensations are seen directly without proliferation, craving has nowhere to settle; the fire cannot catch; it calms on its own.

When the mind leans, reacts, or tightens, we let go of that movement. Nothing is held, nothing is pushed away. We allow each moment to reveal itself and pass without adding extra layers. As the mind stops feeding the process, the body naturally settles.

The instruction is simple: if practicing mindfulness of breathing, "breathing in deep, he knows; breathing subtle, he knows". The point is not the breath itself but about attending wisely and not getting lost in fabrications.

Direct knowing keeps the fire from catching hold of sensations. It prevents proliferation and reveals everything as a continuous flow, arising and fading on its own, resulting in calm.

At first, this calming appears as longer, deeper breaths, the natural long breaths that show the system unwinding. As the settling deepens, the breath becomes subtle, quiet, and light; these are the natural short breaths. “Short” here means refined and delicate, not forced.

The deep and subtle breaths are not the goal; they simply appear when the mind releases its grip on the coarse body, when clinging to rūpa fades.

This principle extends beyond mindfulness of breath. The same can be seen in contemplation of the four elements, mindfulness of death, or any grounding practice. You attend to the energy of desire and intention moving through the system, seeking something to cling to. You see how it tries to turn a single moment into a chain of becoming and birth. By meeting it with clear knowing, you do not let it propagate. The energy fades, the body settles, and the mind grows steady.

This marks the mind becoming balanced and ready for the next stage of mindfulness.

Practicing Right Mindfulness of the Body: Experiencing the Whole Body

When the Tathagata speaks of “experiencing the whole body” in the third step of mindfulness of breathing, the instruction is not about collecting more sensations or stretching attention across the body. It points to how the mind creates experience itself. This step works on the basic illusion that the mind occupies a location and looks out at something. Once that illusion is active, the subject-object split appears, and fabrication runs on its own momentum.

In reality, the mind does not sit anywhere. It has no fixed point. But out of habit, it tries to establish itself inside the body. The moment it does that, it has to create a vantage point. There is a subtle sense of “here,” where the knowing is supposed to be, and a more obvious sense of “there,” where the breath or the body is supposed to be known. That small move already shapes experience into two sides.

This is the beginning of fabrication. The mind quietly produces the posture of a knower who occupies a position, then treats everything else as something to be observed. Even if the breath is calm, that split keeps the fabricating machinery running.

Softening the Illusion of a Vantage Point

Experiencing the whole body loosens this habit. It is not a technique of expanding attention from a point. It is a release of the idea of the point itself. When the mind stops trying to perch somewhere, the duality that comes with that perching weakens.

The body is not being watched from inside the head or from a small spot in the chest. It is known directly, without a watcher peering at it. The sense of being located fades, and with it the sense of looking toward something. The field becomes simple, open, and unforced.

The Body Knowing Itself

When that contraction eases, the body seems to experience itself. Sensations are not coming toward a mental observer. They are simply present in one unified field. The mind is not leaning out toward anything. It is not turned inward toward itself. It is open in a way that does not split experience into two sides.

This does not erase the body. It removes the mind’s habit of turning the body into an object. Without that stance, the extra layering that creates shape, distance, commentary, and interpretation has nowhere to form.

The Breath as a Full-Body Process

Breathing naturally involves the whole body. Once the vantage point dissolves, this becomes obvious. The breath is not a sensation at the nose or a movement in the chest. It is one integrated process, felt as a single unfolding. You are not spreading attention across it. You are no longer dividing it by standing somewhere and looking at it.

This is why the Tathagata says, Dwell in the body as body. It takes the practice from narrow focus into unified knowing. Attention becomes whole and collected without tightening and without collapsing into a point.

Where there is a watcher, fabrication has a foothold. Where there is no watcher, the habit loses energy. Experiencing the whole body weakens that basic act of creating a perspective. Without that act, the mind is not busy shaping, grabbing, or reacting. Contact stays simple. Experience stays straightforward.

This is not about chasing specific sensations or clearing the mind of thoughts. It is about dissolving the split that turns simple knowing into a constructed scene.

This step trains the mind to rest without locating itself. It is steady and natural. As the mind stops narrowing into a small position, it opens into a unified field that is supportive of both calm and insight. This is what allows the deeper stages to unfold. The body is present. The breath flows. The mind stays open without building.

This is the foundation the Tathagata is pointing to. A mind that is not busy establishing itself anywhere is a mind that does not divide experience. And a mind that does not divide experience can see clearly.

Practicing Right Mindfulness of the Body: Calming the Bodily Fabrication

There is a reason the Tathāgata instructs us to calm the bodily formation only after experiencing the whole body. When awareness expands to encompass the entire field of bodily experience, perception shifts from fragmented sensations and reactions to a unified process of breathing and being.

The body is no longer viewed as a collection of parts to be corrected but as a single process shaped by craving and clinging.

So, instead of trying to calm individual formations such as tension, emotion, or perception, which only deepen entanglement, the Tathāgata instructs us to calm the bodily formation not by acting upon form, but through the training of mind.

The calming of the bodily formation does not occur merely because the body grows still or the mind drifts into ease. We are training in how feeling, perception, attention, and intention relate to the process of breathing and the experience of the body. When feeling is not propagated, when perception no longer objectifies, when attention rests gently without grasping at rūpa, and when intention ceases to manipulate, the breath and body become calm naturally.

This is the calming of the bodily formation, not through controlling form, but through the quieting of the mental activities that sustain craving and clinging. As perception and attention are calmed, the distinction between breath and breather fades, and body and mind settle into a single rhythm of stillness.

What are we calming?

After the mind begins to experience the whole body without shrinking into a vantage point, clinging has already softened. The subject-object split is weaker, and the active habit of locating the mind inside the body is no longer driving the experience in the same way.

But this shift does not clear away every layer of conditioning. Even when the direct contraction is eased, deeply ingrained perceptions remain. These are the background habits that assume, “I am inside this body,” “I am located behind the eyes,” and “this shape is where I live.” They form subtle boundaries that shape how the body is known.

Mindfulness now moves into calming the body fabrication. We are now working directly on these remaining patterns.

Although the mind has no true location, it tries to create one through ingrained conditioning. The sense of peering out through the eyes, occupying the head, or being bounded by the skin has been reinforced for decades. Even when the active subject-object habit fades, this deeper frame stays in the background. It subtly shapes the body into something held, guarded, or owned. It also influences the breath and the tone of awareness.

As long as this frame is active, bodily fabrication based on it continues. The mind keeps shaping the breathing-body system around assumptions that were never questioned.

This is why calming bodily fabrication starts after experiencing the whole body. The groundwork has already been laid. Now the more subtle layers come into view.

What It Means to Calm the Bodily Fabrication

The bodily fabrication is not limited to the physical movement of breathing. It includes the entire breathing-body complex shaped by the mind’s assumptions. Calming it means letting the breath settle in a way that eases the sense of ownership, boundary, and inner location. The body is not being forced into stillness. The mind is simply no longer pressing its identity into it.

This release allows the body to be known without the old frames tightening around it. The breath becomes gentle. The sense of holding or managing the body fades. Awareness rests without defining itself through a position.

It is important to understand that calming is the result of practice, not something applied directly to the formations themselves, since working on the formations after they appear means operating within the birth and death side of dependent arising. Calming arises naturally from using the appropriate practices and perceptions, such as seeing impermanence and not self. These practices are applied at different points along the chain of dependent arising, and their effect is the gradual easing and settling of the body formation.

At this stage of the path, the aim is functional calm, not total dissolution of every bodily illusion. The purpose of mindfulness of the body is to prepare the ground for the next dwelling of mindfulness, feelings as feelings. For this to be possible, feeling tones must be seen clearly. If the body fabrication frame is still loud, feelings become blurred through tension, identity, and boundary.

Calming bodily fabrication here means settling things just enough so that feeling tone can stand out cleanly. We are not eliminating every trace of the body-based frame. We are quieting it so that it no longer distorts what comes next.

This level of calm is sufficient for the practice to move forward.

Through practices like mindfulness of breathing, contemplating the elements, and others, these patterns soften, and the body feels lighter and less defined by old habits. The breath flows without being shaped. Awareness rests without needing to hold anything. The background sense of ownership weakens because the habits that maintain it are no longer being fed.

This brings mindfulness of the body to a natural point of completion. The body has been steadied. Fabrication has been calmed to a workable level. Now, feeling tone can be met directly, without being drowned out by the body’s leftover shaping.

Practicing Right Mindfulness of the Body: Right Effort

Like all other practices, Mindfulness of the Body requires Right Effort.

Right effort is often explained as preventing and abandoning the unwholesome, then cultivating and maintaining the wholesome. This is accurate, but when we practice Mindfulness of the Body, the practice needs to be more subtle; it needs to be rooted at the source of the fabrications, which is nama.

Nama, by its nature, is always trying to establish itself in rupa. It does this through feeling, perception, intention, and especially attention. When attention lands on form and begins to build meaning, the mind has rooted itself in rupa, and propagation starts.

Our practice is to recognize this movement and gently incline the mind back to a state where it is not establishing itself, not propagating, and not constructing. This return is peace. This is the direction of Right Effort.

Working with Nama Through Attention

Nama includes contact, feeling, perception, intention, and attention. Of these, attention is the part we can work with most directly. Wherever attention settles, the mind begins to shape experience. If attention lands on a sensation and immediately begins to add meaning, prefer or reject, or create a sense of location, nama has already established itself in rupa.

Right effort is turning attention back to the raw level where no extra meaning has formed. This is how nama is drawn away from clinging to form and rested back in its unpropagated condition.

For example:

• A sound appears. If attention goes straight into identifying, comparing, or reacting, nama has planted itself in rupa. Right effort returns to the simple vibration.

• A sensation arises. If attention turns it into comfort, discomfort, tension, or narrative, nama has established itself. Right effort rests with the bare contact.

• A visual form is seen. If attention makes it personal, attractive, or threatening, nama is shaping form. Right effort stays with color and light without building on it.

Right Effort is the movement of drawing the mind back to the level where nothing is being constructed.

Inclining the Mind Toward the Non-fabricated

The mind is always inclining toward something. Without mindfulness, it inclines toward the places where nama can plant itself, which means toward propagation, meaning, location, identity, and story. With Right Effort, the inclination becomes intentional. The mind is repeatedly directed toward what is simple, quiet, and free from fabrication.

This is where the practice becomes clear:

• When the mind creates a sense of location, that location is a fabrication built on form. Nama has established itself. Right effort inclines the mind back to what is known without location.

• When meaning starts forming around a sensation, nama is anchoring itself in rupa. Right effort returns to the raw contact before meaning appears.

• When feeling pulls attention into emotional interpretation, nama is rooting itself again. Right effort orients the mind toward the quiet space where feeling is simply known but not developed.

Inclining the mind toward the non-fabricated is the steady movement of taking nama out of its habits of planting itself in form.

Sustaining the Inclination

Once attention touches a place where the mind is not establishing itself in form, the task becomes sustaining that direction. Not with strain, but with gentle continuity. The mind does not rest in peace through force. It rests there by not moving into fabrication.

Examples:

• Attention stays with the breath as movement, rather than turning it into a measure of progress or comfort.

• The mind stays with the quiet background of experience, rather than letting perception build structures around the moment.

• A feeling arises, but attention rests with its texture rather than letting intention or perception expand it into personal meaning.

This steady returning prevents nama from rooting itself in rupa and builds familiarity with the mind’s natural, unestablished state.

Right Effort as Continual Returning

Seen through this frame, Right Effort becomes the practice of recognizing when nama has planted itself in form and guiding it back to the unplanted state. This continuous returning is the heart of the path. Every moment of redirection removes momentum from fabrication and strengthens the inclination toward peace.

Right effort is the willingness to notice propagation at the instant it begins and gently incline the mind toward what does not propagate. It is the ongoing movement away from constructed experience and toward simplicity, quiet, and freedom.

Linmu: Minding the Body as Treading on Thin Ice

Author: Linmu

Before I understood the simile of the beauty queen in the scriptures, I contemplated how to avoid generating delusions and how to achieve complete right mindfulness regarding all phenomena occurring at my feet during walking meditation.

At that time, I thought of the phrase "as treading on thin ice."

Imagine walking on the fragile surface of a frozen lake. A momentary lapse in concentration, and you could fall through the ice. One must be extremely cautious, lightly touch the ice with their feet, slowly shift their weight, and only once one foot is steady can you raise the other foot, move it, and touch the ice again.

Throughout this process, even during moments of standing still, attention is completely alert to all sensory perceptions underfoot. It's neither lax nor fixated, and certainly not distracted. Upon finding this sensation, I frequently practiced walking meditation in this manner.

On one occasion, with a mind of extraordinary clarity and right mindfulness, I recognized that when the sensation of my foot touching the ground arises, I immediately know that it's been touched. At that moment, various feelings arise, all independently arising, unentangled, and fleeting. They didn't exist before arising, and they don't persist after ceasing. They have no inherent existence, and they're devoid of substantiality.

When I mindlessly attached to these feelings, the perception of my foot, my movement, my awareness of movement, the intention, and the perceived cause and effect between them would give rise to thoughts. And within those thoughts existed craving and aversion.

Similarly, during movement and when standing still, my legs and body experienced various sensations, all of which were discrete and continually vanishing. When I mindlessly attached to these sensations, perceptions of my legs, my bodily movement, and my standing, corresponding thoughts rooted in craving and aversion would also arise.

I came to realize that the so-called "body" consists solely of diverse feelings originating from contact. These feelings are momentary and ever-changing, vanishing and reappearing. The various perceptions and thoughts that arise from these feelings have no intrinsic reality. They may appear rich and colorful, yet they are ultimately empty illusions.

During this time, I practiced right mindfulness by not attaching to feelings. I didn't cling to the arising perceptions or thoughts related to my body or movement. I refrained from speculative thinking and craving. My mind abided in liberation.

In the past, during my practice of Theravada Buddhism, I once believed that there was an intention for movement, and thus, movement of the legs existed. There was also a knowing mind that recognized this movement. But now, as I directly face the present, I understand that the only true reality is the arising of feelings due to contact. The concepts of "feet," "movement," "awareness of movement," "intention," and the causal relationships between them are simply perceptions and thoughts that arise from a lack of insight into the nature of feelings. When all feelings are mindfully acknowledged without clinging, all these illusory perceptions and thoughts vanish.

This is akin to an old-fashioned television, where the electrical impulses and the flickering of the screen only give rise to momentary flashes. The countless fleeting flashes create the illusion of a continuous image in our minds. It's due to people's thinking and memories about these ever-changing images that various narratives form. Yet, the only true reality within that TV is the instantaneous flickering of the electrons and the screen.

The movement of foot parts is no different. The sensations in the feet and the contact with the ground give rise to momentary feelings. Numerous fleeting feelings create the perception of having feet. It's due to people's thoughts and memories about these changing perceptions that the concept of movement forms.

Subsequent analytical thoughts and the conception of intention cause movement. However, in reality, the only true phenomenon in the present moment is the diverse, fleeting feelings due to the contact of the feet.

This understanding applies to all sensory experiences: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and mental phenomena. As the Tathagata stated, "Eye and visible form, eye consciousness, and eye contact give rise to eye-feeling. The same principle applies to the ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind, as well as their respective sensory experiences, awareness, and contact, which give rise to feeling. This is what the Tathagata termed all phenomena."

However, because people don't correctly perceive these real phenomena, scriptures can, sometimes, mistake many illusory phenomena for reality. This confusion can mislead people onto the wrong path to liberation.

So, do not attempt to observe the body with a mind tainted by wrong views. Cultivate Right View. With the similes of the beauty queen and treading on thin ice, consistently keep your mind on the body. Practice right mindfulness and right understanding. This is the contemplation of the body.

With much practice in contemplating the body, you'll be able to perceive feelings accurately. By contemplating feelings, you'll be able to perceive the mind accurately. With the contemplation of the mind, you can perceive all true phenomena accurately. And when you perceive them accurately, you'll cease to give rise to craving and aversion, and your mind will attain liberation.

Practicing Mindfulness of the Body: Simile of the Beauty Queen

Simile Of The Beauty Queen

Imagine, disciple, a beauty queen, the most graceful in the land, adorned with garlands and scented with the finest perfumes, paraded through the streets before a vast crowd. Now suppose you are tasked with carrying a bowl brimming full of oil on your head, and behind you walks a man with a drawn sword, ready to strike you down if you spill even a single drop.

This is how you should practice, with mindfulness so vigilant and undistracted that you see danger from all sides. Any craving or clinging to form, feeling, perception, fabrication, or consciousness in regard to the body is the danger.

Keeping track of these dangers arising from inside, this is awareness abiding in memory.

The bowl of oil is your practice. The sword is the consequence of heedlessness.

With Right View, you set the Right Intention to purify the mind of any clinging to the physical body by using Right Effort.

The Tathāgata teaches us to use the Four Right Efforts:

1. Prevent unwholesome states from arising.

This is your complete, all-encompassing mindfulness: vigilant, undistracted, seeing danger from all directions, not clinging to anything, keeping track in memory, seeing things fade and pass away.

2. Abandon unwholesome states that have arisen.

Wherever in experience there is clinging to perception, sensation, or thought, use one of the practices, such as perception of impermanence, to see through the perception, sensation, or thought.

3. Arouse wholesome states not yet arisen.

This is inclining to an awareness unobstructed, not hampered by any fabrication or perception such as:

• 'I am in this body'.
• 'This is my pain'.
• 'Am I doing this right?'

4. Maintain wholesome states that have arisen.

Wherever clear, unobstructed awareness is present, you maintain it. Do not let it be obstructed.

When practicing Mindfulness of the Body in any posture, walking, standing, sitting, lying down, attend carefully where there is clinging to fabrication: where the subtle sense of self-making clings.

The Perception of Impermanence becomes the sword of wisdom. Tracking experience in memory, you see not only that sensations fade, but that even the impulse to hold them, to be them, to avoid them, that too is fabricated.

You may also apply any other perceptions, mindfulness of breathing, contemplation of the Four Elements, or others, in this same way.

Seeing with Right View, we don’t try to change experience. We watch it arise and pass away like a mirage.

We practice this over and over, walking, sitting, lying down, standing, until the lingering perception of the physical no longer establishes itself anywhere in awareness. We are now dwelling in the mental body, not clinging to physical existence, abiding in jhana.

Practicing Mindfulness of the Body: Mindfulness of Breathing

In modern times, it is often taught, based on later commentaries, that when practicing Mindfulness of Breathing, one should never control the breath but simply observe it as it is. Yet when we look at the discourses, we find that the Tathāgata himself never gives such an instruction. Instead, he teaches Mindfulness of Breathing as a complete and profound training: a training that leads to the letting go of desire and craving for the world, the abandonment of unwholesome states, and the full cultivation of the seven factors of enlightenment.

Mindfulness of breathing, when developed and cultivated, is of great fruit and great benefit. Mindfulness of breathing, when developed and cultivated, brings the four establishments of mindfulness to their culmination. The four establishments of mindfulness, when developed and cultivated, bring the seven factors of awakening to their culmination. The seven factors of awakening, when developed and cultivated, bring true knowledge and liberation to their culmination.

MN118

Thus, the purpose of Mindfulness of Breathing is not the breath in itself. The breath is a means; it is the vehicle. The true purpose is the training of the mind so that craving, aversion, and delusion are gradually subdued, giving way to clarity, peace, and ultimately to liberation.

Let's now look at why Mindfulness of Breathing is such a powerful practice.

The Breath Is Both a Physical and Mental Process

Of all the processes in the body, the breath is unique. It is both physical and mental, and we can guide it with intention. We can shape it through how we place our attention and through how we perceive it.

Much of what we experience as the breath is, in fact, fabricated in the mind. By working with this fabrication of the breath, a bodily formation, we learn how to apply intention, attention, and perception in skillful ways.

For example, instead of limiting the experience of the breath to the lungs, we can direct attention to different parts of the body, gently spreading awareness so that the fabrication of the breath encompasses the entire body.

By directing breath energy, whether to specific areas or to the whole body, we uncover where there is tension, a sense of permanence, or clinging. In these places, we can then apply perceptions, such as impermanence or not-self, to gently dissolve clinging.

With patience, the breath helps settle restlessness. It softens clinging. It opens the space to see clearly and calmly the arising and passing away of sensations, the fading of perceptions, and the cessation of what once appeared solid.

Abiding Body in the Body

For the practice of Right Mindfulness, we abide in one of the Four Dwellings of Mindfulness, beginning with dwelling “body as body.”

The Tathāgata describes Right Mindfulness of the body as “A disciple dwells contemplating the body in the body, ardent, fully aware, and mindful, having put away covetousness and grief for the world.”

In the case of Mindfulness of Breathing, the instructions are more profound than simply watching the breath as an object. We do not observe the breath through the mind. Rather, awareness itself is gathered fully within the breath as an embodied experience.

In other words, we do not stand apart and observe; we abide as the breath.

To contemplate “the body in the body” is to abide in embodied presence, a steady and unbroken awareness of breathing dwelling in the body, not as an abstraction viewed from outside. In this dwelling, the breath is no longer something we experience as separate; the breath becomes the entirety of our experience itself.

Mindfulness of Breathing and the Four Right Efforts

In truth, the Tathāgata taught that mindfulness of breathing is never a matter of passively watching the breath. Every practice, he said, is to be supported by the Four Right Efforts:

• The effort to prevent unarisen unwholesome states from arising.

• The effort to abandon unwholesome states that have already arisen.

• The effort to arouse wholesome states, not yet present.

• The effort to maintain and perfect wholesome states that have already arisen.

Mindfulness of breathing is the abiding where these four efforts are cultivated moment by moment.

When mindfulness is firmly established in the breath, the mind is guarded. Distractions like sensual desire and ill will find no foothold; they are prevented at the gate.

If agitation, dullness, or other unwholesome states do arise, we do not cling to them. Instead, by returning to the breath, by seeing with wise attention the impermanence of such states, their unsatisfactory nature, and their lack of self, we abandon them.

At the same time, the breath becomes a vehicle for the growth of wholesome qualities. Steady attention gives rise to energy, and energy blossoms into joy. Through skillful intention, attention, and perception, this joy can be gently spread throughout the body and mind.

As we abide in the breath with wisdom, working with it skillfully, these wholesome states become stabilized, strengthened, and gradually perfected, ripening into equanimity and opening the way to liberating insight.

Thus, mindfulness of breathing is not neutral observation. It is active cultivation: turning the mind away from desire, aversion, and delusion, while nourishing and sustaining the qualities that lead directly to freedom.

Just as a skilled bathman or bathmans apprentice might sprinkle bath powder in a metal basin and knead it together, adding water from time to time, so that his ball of bath powder: saturated, moisture-laden, permeated within and without: would nevertheless not drip; even so, the disciple pervades... this very body with the joy and happiness born of seclusion.

AN5.28

Using the Breath Skillfully

One of the remarkable qualities of the breath is its dual nature. It belongs to both the physical and the mental domains. Like the heart beating, the breath breathes on its own, yet unlike the heart, it can be consciously known and gently guided by intention and attention. The breath is a bridge between body and mind.

For example, when the mind is restless, the breath is coarse and uneven. When the mind is tranquil, the breath becomes refined and subtle. By calming the breath, the body too is calmed. When the body is calm, the mind naturally steadies. Thus, mindfulness of breathing is not mere watching; it is a vehicle to harmonize body and mind.

With a calm body and a steady mind, we can use the breath to cultivate what the Tathāgata calls the Seven Factors of Enlightenment. These arise gradually, supported by mindfulness and nurtured through practice. For example, by directing the breath, we can saturate and permeate the body with joy, countering dullness.

A disciple saturates, permeates, fills, and overflows this body with the joy and happiness born of concentration, so that there is not a single spot in his body that is not touched by this joy and happiness.

MN119

The Breath as a Teacher of Wisdom

The breath is a perfect foundation for insight because when practiced skillfully, it never remains the same. Each breath arises and passes away. Along with all breath sensations. Nothing in the breath endures. By observing this ceaseless change, it becomes difficult to fall into the illusion of permanence or to cling to the breath as “I” or “mine.”

This is how the breath itself becomes the vehicle for insight. It reveals the body's impermanence, its lack of ownership, and its fragile, conditioned nature. To dwell with the breath is therefore not only to calm the mind but also to steadily train perception in impermanence, suffering, and not-self.

Also, because the breath is both continuous and ever-changing, it forms an ideal basis for layering other contemplations, for example:

• Mindfulness of Death: With each inhalation and exhalation, life grows shorter. Nothing lasts. “This breath may be my last.”

• Perception of Impermanence: Every cycle of breathing displays arising and vanishing.

Through these reflections, mindfulness of breathing transforms into far more than a technique of calming. It becomes the path to wisdom, a direct training ground for insight into the nature of reality.

In short, mindfulness of breathing is not about passively watching the breath. It is about subduing desire, cutting through delusion, abandoning clinging, and cultivating the path of liberation.

Practice: Anapanasati Part 1

Practicing Mindfulness of the Body: Two Ways to Contemplate the Four Elements

We can contemplate the Four Elements in two general ways. The first is to directly discern, to see the body (rūpa) as it actually is. Here, the purpose is to recognize the body and all material form as conditions that can be sensed but are not “mine.” We do this to gain direct insight into the nature of the body.

When awareness contacts the body, the mind discerns four universal tactile qualities, which can be described by the Four Elements:

• Earth: felt as hardness, solidity, resistance, heaviness, and roughness.

• Water: perceived as cohesion, fluidity, stickiness, and smoothness.

• Fire: experienced as warmth, temperature, digestion, maturation, and energy.

• Air: sensed as motion, pressure, vibration, expansion, and contraction.

These are not symbolic. The Tathāgata pointed his disciples to the immediate tactile field that sustains the notion of “body.”

By attending to these qualities that arise and cease—heat changing, pressure shifting, solidity softening—we directly see impermanence. Because these experiences change without command, the conceit “I am” is undermined.

Using the Elements as a Contemplative Perception

The second way is to use the elements as a contemplative perception. Here, the aim is to reshape perception so that the mind habitually views the body as impersonal processes. This is the conceptual use of the elements, a skillful perception that supports detachment and calm.

We deliberately hold a mental image or perception, such as:

• “This body is merely earth element, water element, fire element, and air element.”

• “There is nothing here that is a man or a woman, nothing owned or controlling.”

• “The same elements occur in a corpse, in clay, and in the mountains.”

This perception is not fantasy but a chosen frame of attention that purifies habitual mis-seeing. It is used in the same way as the perception of unattractiveness or the recollection of death, to dissolve sensual delight and self-reference.

Practicing Mindfulness of the Body: Mindfulness of Death

At this stage of the Gradual Training, Mindfulness of Death is not only about preparing for a distant end but about directly seeing the continuous cycle of arising and passing that is happening in every instant.

At the heart of this process are fabrications, volitional formations that shape both mind and body. Each time a formation arises, the mind has a choice: to observe without attachment or to crave and cling. Clinging to these formations, even subtly, is an act of participation that inclines the mind toward death in the very moment, because every craving reinforces the cycle of becoming and decay.

We practice seeing that death is not a far-off event but the immediate consequence of the mind’s habitual tendencies. Every thought, feeling, and perception that we attach to triggers a subtle movement toward dissolution. By seeing fabrications arise and pass without identification or clinging, we recognize that this process of death is unfolding right now.

Each moment of craving reinforces the momentum of rebirth, and each moment of non-clinging weakens it, leading to liberation.

Through mindful observation, we begin to discern the intimate link between participation and mortality. It is not theoretical or symbolic; it is immediate. The rising of a volitional formation, the subtle craving for a feeling or perception, and the impulse to sustain or resist experience—all of these are points where the mind is inclined toward death. By practicing awareness without clinging, we stop feeding this momentum, allowing the natural cessation of formations to be seen clearly, moment by moment.

This is how to practice Mindfulness of Death so that it cultivates a living insight: death is always present, not only at the end of life, and our habitual clinging continually fuels its momentum. True freedom arises from seeing this process directly and learning not to participate, observing the arising and passing of fabrications as they are, letting go, and turning the mind toward liberation.

Practicing Mindfulness of the Body: The Perception of Suffering

When we contemplate suffering, it is not for the sake of dwelling on pain, but for understanding it. Usually, the mind resists suffering, trying to escape, suppress, or replace it with pleasant experiences. Yet this reaction only sustains the cycle. The Tathāgata taught that suffering must be understood, not avoided. When suffering is seen as a conditioned process arising from craving and clinging, it begins to lose its weight. The illusion of a personal “I who suffers” starts to fade, and what remains is a simple knowing of cause and effect.

To perceive suffering as it really is transforms our relationship with it. Instead of seeing it as something wrong, we see it as a natural expression of dependent arising. Every moment of discomfort reveals the mind’s tendency to cling, and by understanding that, the clinging weakens. Suffering is not something to be feared but something to be known.

The Role of Perception

Contemplation of suffering refines perception. The ordinary mind perceives experience through craving and aversion, distorting what is seen. But when perception is trained through the perception of suffering, it begins to reflect reality more faithfully. The mind learns to recognize aspects of experience, impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and not-self—in each moment.

When perception becomes accurate, suffering loses its sting. We still feel what is unpleasant, but it no longer defines or overwhelms us. Pain arises and passes within awareness, just as pleasure does. What was once personal becomes impersonal; what was once heavy becomes light. This is not detachment through indifference, but wisdom through direct seeing.

Not Clinging to Insight

The peace that follows clear perception can easily become another object of attachment. The mind may begin to cling to the comfort of understanding or to the identity of being “one who knows.” This subtle clinging quietly revives the same process that insight had begun to dissolve.

Therefore, the practice does not stop with seeing suffering clearly; it continues with letting go even of insight itself. When perception arises, it is known; when it passes, it is released. The practitioner learns not to rest on any view, even the correct one. Freedom deepens not through gaining, but through relinquishing.

The Fruit of Contemplating Suffering

When suffering is rightly understood, it no longer dominates the heart. We do not need to resist, defend, or explain it. There is a growing steadiness, a balance that remains even as experience changes. This is equanimity, the quiet strength born from wisdom.

By seeing like this, compassion naturally arises. Recognizing that all beings are bound by the same processes softens the heart. What once caused bitterness now becomes a source of understanding.

And most of all, suffering turns from something to escape into something that teaches. Each moment of dukkha becomes an invitation to know the mind, to see its clinging, and to let go.

This is why contemplation of suffering does not increase pain; it reveals the path beyond it. When things are seen as they truly are, the illusion fades, and what remains is a calm knowing, untouched by gain or loss, pleasure or pain.

Practicing Mindfulness of the Body: Recreating the Mental Body

From this body he creates another body, mind-made, complete in all its parts, not lacking any faculty.

DN2

The way the body is normally perceived is not a neutral fact. It is a layered construction shaped by long habits, memories, tensions, and the sense of ownership. Because this construction is taken for granted, it becomes the ground on which clinging forms. The mind leans on it, reacts to it, and builds identity around it.

When the physical frame is held as the only reference point, every feeling tone and every perception must pass through the dense patterns tied to it. Pleasant and unpleasant tones get amplified. Identity becomes involved. The mind cannot see clearly because the frame it is using is already loaded with impressions.

Recreating a mental body works because it removes the old frame and replaces it with one that is clean, light, and free of those accumulated impressions. The mind now has a body to reference that does not carry tension, age, pain, or history. This changes the entire structure of experience.

Once a new reference frame is established, several changes happen at once:

• Feeling tones appear in their bare form. They are no longer pushed through the old channels in the head, face, chest, or gut where they usually trigger reactions.

• Perception becomes thin and transparent. What once appeared solid shows itself to be a set of impressions the mind was holding together through habit.

• Clinging loses its support. The usual anchors for clinging no longer function because the mental body offers no place for them to latch onto. At the same time, the physical body is not being rejected. It is simply no longer the sole foundation for experience.

The key point is that by shifting the reference frame from a dense construction to a lighter, deliberately formed one, the mind can see how all bodily perception is fabricated. Once this is seen directly, dependence on both bodies drops away. The result is a field of experience where feeling and perception stand on their own, without drawing the mind into old patterns.

Creating the mind-made body:

1. Settle the field of awareness

Allow the sense of the physical body to be known in a broad way, not by zooming in on any one spot. The point here is to establish a wide frame so mindfulness stays with the whole field instead of tightening around the head or chest. When the frame is wide, tension has nowhere to accumulate.

2. Soften the hold on the physical body

Without pushing anything away, let the physical frame be known as something felt rather than something owned. Do not analyze it. Simply allow the heaviness, solidity, and long-held impressions to be seen as just that—feelings. This is where the dependency begins to loosen.

3. Bring to mind the inner counterpart

Using the line from the discourse as your reference, let a lighter body appear in awareness. It is not imagined in vivid detail. It is sensed as an inner presence that is complete, intact, and free from the weight, pressure, or history of the physical form. It has all faculties, meaning it is fully suitable as a dwelling for awareness.

This counterpart is not made of flesh. It is a clean, smooth field, simple and unburdened. You can see it as an energy field, a field of glowing light, or one of the four elements. We are simply trying to purify perception by overlaying it with a skill means.

4. Establish mindfulness over this whole mental body

Let attention spread through it in one sweep, not by scanning. The aim is a unified sense of presence. Because this body is light, mindfulness can hold the whole of it without strain. This prevents the mind from collapsing into the head area, the spot where tension often collects when the sense of embodiment becomes narrow.

5. Notice how perception shifts

With the mental body as the frame, perceptions become clearer. Feeling tones appear directly instead of being filtered through the physical structure. What seemed solid becomes thin. What seemed fixed becomes fluid. This reveals how much of the old sense of “body” was a construction laid over raw experience.

6. See how clinging weakens

As the physical frame fades into the background, the usual anchors for clinging lose their grip. Clinging to pain, age, health, identity, posture, and all the subtle reactions tied to flesh and bone have no footing here. Clinging to perception also weakens, because even this inner body is recognized as a perception shaped by conditions, not a hidden essence.

7. Recognize the mental body as a tool, not a truth

The point is not to hold the mental body or adopt it as a new home. The point is to use it to uncover the constructed nature of the old body perception. Once this is clear, both are seen as dependently arisen. With this insight, the mind no longer leans on either one.

8. Return to simple knowing

When the dependence on the physical form relaxes, awareness no longer feels trapped inside anything. Experience arises freely. Feeling tones are recognized as they appear. Perceptions show their nature. Clinging loses its supports.

Practicing Right Mindfulness of the Body: Contemplating Internal, External, and Both

Thus, he dwells contemplating the body in the body internally, or he dwells contemplating the body in the body externally, or he dwells contemplating the body in the body both internally and externally.

DN22

The traditional explanation of "internally, externally, internally and externally" is often framed very literally. Many teachers say that "internally" means watching your own body and mind, and "externally" means observing other people's bodies and minds. On the surface, this sounds possible, but it does not match the subtlety of the Tathagata's instructions or the actual structure of experience.

The Pāli terms ajjhatta (internally) and bahiddhā (externally) do not indicate a change of physical object but point to different ways the same body can be experienced.

The Tathagata was pointing to something far more refined. His instructions are about how the mind divides experience into “in here” and “out there,” or “subject and object,” and then suffers in the tension created between them. By understanding this, the instruction becomes a powerful way to see fabrication and release the stress created by separation and duality.

At the beginning of practice, it may be understood simply as attending to the body in two ways:

Internally: The Lived Side of Bodily Experience

Internal contemplation is the body known from within. The body is experiencing itself. This is the lived field of sensation and movement. Breathing is felt directly, posture is known as it unfolds, and the overall sense of the body is present as pressure, temperature, vibration, heaviness, lightness, and subtle shifts.

Here the body is neither an image nor a conceptual outline; it is simply the immediate, felt, embodied presence. This is the subject angle, the side of experience that feels like “I am in here.” This internal view shows how the bodily formation appears from the inside and how the mind naturally centers itself in that formation.

Externally: The Body as an Object in Experience

External contemplation is the shift in which the same body is seen as something happening rather than something occupied. Instead of being the center, the body is treated as an object within awareness, appearing according to causes and conditions.

In other words, how the body is created in the mind.

This includes:

• How the mind constructs a picture of the body.

• How sensations combine into a sense of outline.

• How tension rises and falls without any owner.

• How the body reacts to contact and posture changes.

• How the sense of boundary forms and dissolves.

This is not observing someone else’s body. It is de-centering. The body is known the way any other object is known, with no special privilege. This is the object angle.

Both: Contemplating Internal and External Form in One Field

Contemplating both internally and externally means the body is experienced together as one seamless field of sensation. Holding both at once allows the body to be known fully. The felt side and the object side are recognized together. When this happens, the usual split between “in here” and “out there” begins to soften. The body is simply a changing process, viewed without clinging to either a subjective center or an external shell.

The main purpose of these perspectives is to understand bodily fabrication itself. The sense of body is not a single thing. It is assembled from sensations, mental images, reactions, and underlying tendencies. By viewing the body from the internal subject side and the external object side, the formation becomes clearer.

Internal contemplation shows how the body feels from within, how the mind occupies it, and how identification forms. External contemplation shows how the body appears as a conditioned pattern, how it is displayed through the senses, and how it behaves without any controller.

Together they reveal that what we call “the body” is an active construction, a layered process shaped by contact, attention, feeling, and perception. They arise, persist for a moment, and fade. Nothing makes them inside or outside. Understanding this fabrication weakens the instinct to treat the body as a solid home or a fixed identity.

The body becomes something known rather than something claimed.

Keeping attention on the Body

Although the senses play a role in how the body is formed, there is no need to analyze the senses themselves; this will be covered later in the Gradual Training. Instead, the senses are simply recognized as part of how the body shows itself. Touch provides warmth and pressure, sight provides outline, internal sensing gives location, and mental image ties everything together. All of these belong to the single task of seeing how bodily fabrication is constructed and how it relaxes when attention no longer clings to one perspective.

One perceives form internally, and external forms are seen. This is the first liberation.

DN15

When this practice matures, we can also include external forms as part of the seamless field of perception. Internal and external are known together as one continuous field, open in all directions.

Practicing Right Mindfulness of the Body: The Problem With Forcing an Inward View

In the modern world, many people assume that "meditation" requires closing the eyes and looking inward, yet this was not what the Tathagata taught; he taught "seeing things as they really are" not meditation, and because of that misunderstanding, people can spend their whole lives practicing in the wrong way with very little progress. This idea of an inner direction creates more confusion than clarity.

How Fabrication Sneaks In

When the mind tries to create an "inner space" to contemplate, it must also create a watcher who does the inspecting. This duality feels subtle, but it sets off a chain reaction. Inside and outside become two different realms, and now the practitioner puts effort in keeping attention pointed at the correct one. The effort of maintaining that construction becomes stressful.

The body tightens, the breath becomes artificial, and the mind becomes busy with managing the stance it invented. None of this has anything to do with clear seeing. All of it comes from imagining a vantage point that is not needed.

Why This Leads in the Wrong Direction

The more energy goes into building the idea of an inward observer, the farther we drift from what is actually happening. Instead of recognizing the flow of feelings, perceptions, and intentions as they arise, we end up chasing a fabricated space that doesn't exist. It is like trying to examine a reflection by squeezing the mirror.

This is where suffering quietly increases. The tension of trying to sustain the inner watcher pulls attention away from the simple knowing already happening. Practice starts to feel frustrating or stagnant not because awareness is weak, but because we are directing it toward something imaginary. All kinds of tension result, which makes the whole experience unsatisfactory.

Seeing things as they are does not depend on fancy maneuvers of attention

Awareness is already present. It already knows whatever appears. There is no need to build an inner zone. There is no need to turn attention around. The moment we drop the idea of an inward act, things settle. Sensations show themselves, feelings show themselves, and perceptions show themselves. They do this naturally.

Clarity comes from not erecting the barrier between inside and outside. When we stop feeding that boundary, experience becomes a single, seamless field. The mind does not have to choose between inner and outer. It only has to stop forcing a separation.

Practicing Without the Extra Layer

Instead of trying to look inward, we simply allow what is present to be known. No inward turn, no special posture of mind. The breath is felt because it is already there. A mood is known because it is already showing itself. The work is not constructing a direction but releasing the habit of inventing one.

While dwelling in the body as body internally, the body is known from its own side. It is the lived presence, not something you turn toward as an object. The experience is entirely subjective, the body knowing itself without an inward turn to observe it.

This shift changes everything. Tension falls away. The sense of being a watcher loosens. The mind stops searching for a place to stand. What remains is a clean knowing that does not interfere with what it knows.

This is the direction that actually frees rather than binds.

Practicing Right Mindfulness of the Body: Softening the Subject Object Tension

To understand the body in Right Mindfulness, we need to see how craving continually creates the sense of “subject” and “object.” This molding is part of how the body is constructed and held in experience. Craving is the force in nāma that keeps trying to land on rūpa, to occupy it, to animate it, to make it “mine.” Each time this happens, the body becomes a place inhabited from within, organized around a center, and held in a subtle field of tension.

Craving not only seeks an object; it also produces the entire framework of “knower” and “known,” and this framework is experienced through the body itself.

Why Craving Creates Strain in the Body

Establishing a subject separate from its object requires continuous effort. This effort manifests as micro-formations in the body, small contractions, pressures, and adjustments that maintain the sense of a knower located “here” and an object “over there.” At the same time, craving pushes toward the pleasant and away from the unpleasant, adding another layer of pressure and narrowing.

On the side of the subject, craving produces tightening in the face, head, or chest, drawing attention into a focal point and creating the sense of being located somewhere inside the body. Awareness feels small, directional, even compressed. In stillness, these effects become strikingly clear.

On the side of the object, craving colors perception. What is felt or seen becomes charged with preference or resistance. As soon as the mind meets the body in this way, the push or pull intensifies, and the bodily fabrication grows heavier.

Craving doesn’t merely agitate the mind. It actively builds and maintains the body fabrication, moment after moment.

Recognizing Craving in Bodily Fabrication

Craving always produces a subject–object split, and this can be recognized through both physical and mental cues:

• A sense of residing behind the eyes, a contraction that impersonates “the observer.”
• The feeling of looking out from a center that becomes recognizably artificial when examined.
• The presence of an inner watcher whose shape is defined by tension in the head or chest.
• The impulse to hold a viewpoint, which is felt as pressure the moment it appears.
• The subtle effort required to maintain a center; when this effort stops, the center dissolves.

As craving quiets, the split between knower and known softens. The bodily formations that kept them apart lose force, and experience becomes spacious, simple, and undivided.

Seeing the Mechanics Clearly

Softening the tension does not come from trying to relax the body. It comes from understanding how craving builds the body formation in real time. When the mechanics are seen, the mind no longer supports them. The tension then releases by itself. With repetition, the habit of forming a center weakens, and the body becomes more fluid, less rigid, and more naturally at ease.

How Habit Shapes the Body Over Time

When craving repeatedly lands in the same place, the body slowly conforms to that pattern. The mind continually selects a position for the “knower,” and the body stabilizes around it through micro-contractions. This produces:

• Tightness behind the eyes
• Pressure in the forehead
• Compression in the chest
• Tension in the neck and shoulders
• A clenched jaw or stiff temples

These feel like physical problems, but they often begin as mental positions. Because the mind is the forerunner, the body simply responds. Over time, this repeated tightening influences posture, breathing, circulation, and energetic balance. Much of the discomfort we attribute to structural issues is actually the body reshaping itself around the same mental stance again and again. This constant tightening restricts movement, impedes blood flow, and, when sustained over long periods, can contribute to illness.

Working With Deep or Recurrent Tension

1. Look for the mental position, not just the muscle.** The muscle is the outcome; the mental stance is the cause.
2. Notice where the mind places the center: behind the eyes, in the forehead, in the chest, or elsewhere. Seeing this clearly softens the physical bracing.
3. Let the positioning drop rather than trying to relax the body directly. When the center is not maintained, the body unwinds naturally.
4. Let sensations be just sensations. When they are not claimed, they do not reinforce the pattern.
5. Meet the pattern each time it returns. Each reappearance is another chance to watch the formation arise and fade.
6. Trust the body’s intelligence. When the mental habit dissolves, the body reorganizes around a healthier baseline.

Muscles are not released through force. They release when the mental stance that tightens them is no longer held. When craving stops maintaining a center, the bodily fabrication unravels on its own. This is how deep tension dissolves in a stable and lasting way.

Practicing Right Mindfulness of the Body: Conceiving

Even subtler than the bodily fabrication is the way consciousness conceives a self in relation to that body.

The Tathāgata described conceiving as the quiet mental activity of “I-making” and “mine-making,” the moment consciousness organizes experience around a sense of a subject and a world that subject inhabits.

He perceives earth as earth. Having perceived earth as earth, he conceives himself as earth, he conceives himself in earth, he conceives himself apart from earth, he conceives ‘earth is mine,’ and he delights in earth. Why is that? Because he has not fully understood it, I say.

MN1

Conceiving takes simple contact, feeling, and perception and arranges them into “me” and “mine.” Instantly, consciousness creates a position (“I am here”), an identity (“I exist in this place”), and a world structured around that identity (“I live in this world”). This framing happens before the specific contents of experience fully form.

Conceiving depends on name and form, but it is not identical with them. Name and form provide the sensing, feeling, perception, and intention that make up the field. Conceiving is the act within consciousness that turns that field into a personal standpoint. When consciousness conceives, the entire field becomes animated by the sense of “someone” in the midst of experience.

Rooted in ignorance, conceiving appears as identification: “I am in this body,” “I am the one who knows,” “I live inside this world.” When it is seen clearly, it becomes obvious how clinging takes hold in the very moment this framing appears.

How conceiving builds a world

Conceiving layers experience with:

• Location: The sense of being inside a point in the body, usually the head or behind the eyes.
• Boundary: A felt line dividing “me” from what is outside.
• Directionality: Experience seems to come toward a center or radiate from one.
• Relevance: Events appear important to a person who is navigating a situation.

These layers create a lived world that feels inhabited, interpreted, and managed by someone.

How conceiving reinforces clinging

Once a center is formed, craving finds a place to act. Pleasant feeling becomes something to secure; unpleasant feeling becomes something to avoid. Even neutral feeling becomes something to ignore.

Conceiving is the platform on which clinging stands. Without the frame of “I am here in this body and this world,” craving has no location to land on.

Conceiving renews itself in small ways: a tightening that marks a center, a quick defense of a view, a quiet assumption that an experience belongs to someone, or a subtle return to a personal stance. These tiny shifts keep the frame alive.

A helpful way to see conceiving is to compare it to the unseen frame of a camera lens. Most attention goes to what appears inside the frame, not to the frame that shapes everything.

The role of contemplation

Contemplation means seeing the frame itself, not just what appears inside it. We cannot stare at it directly, because looking from a position already assumes the frame. Instead, we observe how the frame is felt in the body and how it assembles in consciousness.

Three areas help reveal it:

• Seeing the beginning: The moment a center forms, such as a slight gathering behind the eyes or a sense of “here I am.”

• Seeing the influence: How sensations, moods, and thoughts shift once the center is active. Pleasant tones become something to acquire; unpleasant tones, something to escape.

• Seeing the instability: The frame flickers and collapses when not fueled. It does not hold itself up.

Usually we cling to this frame all the time. However, by seeing it clearly for what it is—mind-made and impermanent, like any mind-made formation—we can let it go by sustaining attention on its full passing away and cessation. When the mind repeatedly sees the ceasing of what is being conceived, through dispassion it eventually learns to release conceiving on its own.

Right Mindfulness of Feelings: Overview

When we understand the body’s true nature as a fabrication of nāma-rūpa, attachment naturally fades and disenchantment arises. Through mindfulness of the body, as the body formation grows quiet, we begin to dwell more in the mental body, and feeling tones are no longer blurred by tension, identity, or boundary.

With the physical overlay softened, feeling tones can be discerned clearly, without distortion, interference, and without the habitual coloring of craving or aversion tied to the body fabrication.

From this clarity, the practice naturally transitions to the practice of mindfulness of feeling: meeting each tone, pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, simply as it is, moment by moment, without grasping, resisting, or proliferating.

Disciples, when touched by a painful feeling, the unlearned ordinary person becomes distressed, laments, and becomes confused. He feels two kinds of feelings: physical and mental. Just as if a man were pierced by an arrow and, following the first arrow, he were pierced by a second arrow, so that person would feel feelings caused by two arrows...

However, when touched by a painful feeling, the learned noble disciple does not become distressed, does not lament, and does not become confused. He feels one kind of feeling: physical, not mental...

Being touched by that painful feeling, he does not harbor aversion towards it. When he does not harbor aversion towards painful feelings, the underlying tendency to aversion does not lie within him. Being touched by painful feeling, he does not desire sensual pleasure.

Why is that? Because the learned, noble disciple knows of an escape from painful feelings other than sensual pleasure. As he does not desire sensual pleasure, the underlying tendency to lust does not lie within him. He knows, as they actually are the origin and passing away, the gratification, danger, and escape in regard to these feelings.

Because he knows these things, the underlying tendency to ignorance does not lie within him. If he feels a pleasant feeling, he feels it detached. If he feels a painful feeling, he feels it detached. If he feels a neither-painful-nor-pleasant feeling, he feels it detached.

This is called a learned noble disciple who is detached from birth, aging, death, sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, and despairs, detached from suffering, I say.

SN36.6

The Purpose of Abiding in Feelings

In the Gradual Training, abiding "feelings as feelings" is the main practice for cutting the chain of dependent arising at the link between feeling and craving.

The aim of abiding fully within feelings is to see their arising and passing without constructing proliferations upon them. Abiding in this way leads to seclusion, tranquility, and ultimately to insight and liberation.

Feelings, whether pleasant, painful, or neutral, are the direct result of contact. If we don't examine them, they trigger craving and fuel the cycle of samsara. To "abide feelings as feelings" means to remain fully present within them, all six sense bases, including the mind sense. We allow them to manifest completely without being drawn towards them, which is craving, or away from them, which is aversion.

If the mind is unaware, it craves the feeling. But if the mind is aware, the process stops there. The mind “abides with feelings as feelings,” knowing them clearly, seeing their arising and passing, without adding craving or resistance.

The purpose of dwelling in "feelings as feelings" is to directly see the causal relationship between feelings, craving, and clinging, and to break the habitual reaction of craving turning into clinging.

By dwelling feelings as feelings, having subdued desire and aversion for the world, we allow feelings to cease naturally by seeing their impermanence and insubstantiality. Through clearly and directly seeing the causal relationship that not clinging to feelings brings release, dispassion arises again and again, wisdom becomes established, and the mind no longer seeks to cling.

When a pleasant feeling arises in a disciple, he knows: A pleasant feeling has arisen in me. That is dependent, not independent. Dependent on what? Dependent on contact.

SN36.6

It’s important to understand that while abiding in feeling as feeling can interrupt craving in the moment, it does not erase the deeper currents that cause craving to arise again. Those currents are shaped by long-standing habits, views, and the underlying impulse to take experience as “mine.” As long as these forces remain, craving will return, even if it subsides temporarily.

At this stage of practice, mindfulness of feeling trains the mind to stop feeding the chain of propagation. It develops the higher mind so that contemplation becomes unobstructed by clinging to feeling, allowing insight to deepen without being pulled back into fabrications.

Feelings - The Gateway to Seclusion

As we make progress along the Gradual Training, something subtle yet profound begins to unfold. By abiding purely in feelings, we withdraw our attention from the coarse physical body, and instead, we settle into the mental or "form body." This shift is what the Tathāgata describes as being “secluded from sensual desire, secluded from unwholesome states.”

The mind is no longer dwelling or abiding in the "physical body"; it's now in the "form body," which is the domain of feelings and mental experience.

To seclude ourselves from sensual desires and from unwholesome states:

• We withdraw from the five cords of sensual pleasure.

• The mind disengages from discursive, wandering thoughts.

• Only the bare experience of feeling remains, without mental elaboration or proliferation.

In practical terms, this means we’re no longer entangled in the physical realm. Instead, we abide in the mental realm. This abiding in the form body leads to abiding in Jhana.

At any stage of the practice, the key to practicing "feelings as feelings" is to dwell at the level of pure feelings without the mind hijacking, overlaying, or creating mental formations based on physical contact. When we dwell this way, the usual cycle is interrupted. Craving, aversion, and delusion lose their grip; what arises in their place is clarity.

Right Mindfulness of Feelings: Understanding Feelings

Although the aim of dwelling feelings as feelings is to see them simply as arising based on contact, when we first start to practice, even though the body formation has been quieted, past volitional patterns still echo through the system, and these echoes will appear as waves of bodily and mental reactions.

Therefore, when dwelling feelings as feelings, it's important to recognize how feelings manifest themselves when there is craving so that we can work with them more effectively.

Here, disciples, a disciple dwells contemplating feelings as feelings... when feeling arises, he knows: ‘Feeling has arisen in me’; when feeling persists, he knows: ‘Feeling persists in me’; when feeling subsides, he knows: ‘Feeling has subsided in me.’

MN10

Feeling and Their Propagation

Feeling arises first at contact. This initial feeling is raw and simple: it can be pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. At this stage, it is just the bare tone, without any addition from the mind.

The second layer is replayed feeling. This is the mind’s subtle reinforcement or recollection of the initial tone. It makes the feeling stronger or continuous in time, but it is not a gross fabrication. This replay is where craving begins to find its footing, because the mind is mentally prolonging the experience of the initial tone.

The third layer is propagation into sensations and emotions. Here, the repeated feeling begins to manifest as physical sensations, bodily tension, and emotional reactions. The original tone now fuels emotional coloring, liking, disliking, agitation, or attachment, and can present as irritation, desire, sadness, or happiness. These emotional qualities arise together with perceptual shaping, such as tightness, pressure, or the mind’s labeling of sensations. This is the full propagation, where the mind-body complex has constructed a tangible experience around the replayed feeling. Craving is fully visible here because it rides on this emotional and sensory manifestation.

Understanding these layers helps distinguish between the raw feeling itself, the mind’s replay of it, and the more developed emotional and bodily propagation where craving gains strength.

We Do Not Work on the Physical Layer

Once craving has appeared, the physical aspect is not the place to work. Trying to settle craving through physical sensation keeps attention tied to form. This strengthens the habit of treating the reaction as solid and located.

Instead of following the physical dimension, we place our attention on the mental tones underneath. These tones are lighter and do not require any location. They are simply the bare feeling tone and the simple perception that accompany the reaction. Here we are working with the second layer, feelings propagated and replayed by the mind.

This is dwelling feelings as feelings, where all experience is seen simply as feelings.

The key to working with the second layer is to see the replay for what it is, a continuation made by the mind. The task is to recognize it the moment it begins to appear. Once seen, we shift attention gently back to the raw tone. This is done by noticing the exact quality of the tone right now, not the version the mind is prolonging.

For example, an unpleasant tone may already be replaying. Instead of following the replay, we shift attention to the bare feeling tones that are appearing right now. These bare tones are lighter, thinner, and brief compared to the replayed ones. Each time we recognize the bare tone, the replay loses its fuel. When the replay is not fed, the propagation that would have grown into tension or emotion weakens on its own.

Seeing the Propagated Reaction as Fabrication

When an emotion or urge is active, it looks large and convincing. But when attention rests on the underlying feeling and perception, the emotion reveals itself as something built. It depends entirely on these mental tones. By seeing this, the structure no longer appears solid.

Wise attention means noticing the reaction as it is made, noticing its change, and not giving it support. The exact physical presentation is ignored. Only the feeling tone and the perception behind it are known.

Allowing the Fabrication to Fade

When attention stays with the mental tones without tying them to a body or place, the propagated reaction cannot hold together. It fades because the mind is no longer feeding the construction that kept it active. As the construction fades, craving fades with it.

We then stay with the bare feelings, without letting the mind build anything on top of them. The bare tones rise and fall quickly on their own. By remaining with these short, simple tones, the mind no longer has material to replay or extend. Without replay, there is no continuity for craving to hold on to, and the movement toward tension or emotion cannot take shape.

Right Mindfulness of Feelings: Understanding Two Aspects of Contact

If there were no designation by which, by whatever features, by whatever signs, by whatever symbols, by whatever descriptions the name-body is recognized, could material-body's designation-contact be discerned? No, venerable sir.

If there were no designation by which the material body is recognized, could name-body's resistance-contact be discerned? No, venerable sir.

If there were no designation by which both name-body and material-body are recognized, could either designation-contact or resistance-contact be discerned? No, venerable sir.

DN15

When examining contact, it is helpful to see that every experience has two aspects. The Tathagata’s teachings distinguish between the rūpa side and the nāma side of contact, each working differently within the six senses. Understanding this makes it easier to let go of attachment to the body and develop isolation from physical experience (viveka).

The Two Aspects of Contact

Every moment of contact involves:

• The resistance/pressure side (Paṭigha): This is the rūpa side aspect of contact, which registers the physical qualities of experience, solidity, pressure, shape, and location in the body. It arises whenever the mind engages with tactile or material phenomena.

• The recognition/naming side (Adhivacana): This is the nāma side of contact, which involves awareness, perception, and the structuring of experience. It is the knowing side of contact, where nāma interprets, organizes, and names what is occurring.

Both aspects are interdependent. The rūpa side depends on nāma being active to provide a framework for experience, just as the nāma side depends on rūpa to supply the material conditions in which recognition can occur. Neither can appear completely in isolation, and this mutual dependence is emphasized in the above sutta discussing designation and contact.

Rūpa: Coarse and Subtle Layers

As we have covered, Rūpa itself is layered:

• The coarse physical body (kāya-rūpa): the tangible, tactile, visible body we normally experience. This is the layer to which we most commonly cling.

• Subtle material dimension (the mental body): the underlying support or continuity of materiality, which persists even when coarse bodily sensation fades.

• Interdependent formations with nāma (the formless body): the structural relationship between physical and mental processes. Rūpa never exists entirely independent of nāma.

At this stage of the practice, the coarse body is our primary target for releasing physical clinging, while the subtle and interdependent layers (bodies) remain as a support from which we release clinging to the coarse or physical body.

Letting Go of Physical Clinging

Our practice is to shift attention away from the coarse bodily layer:

• The rūpa side of contact diminishes as attention no longer fixes on solidity, pressure, or tactile boundaries.

• The nāma side remains, because the mind continues to know, feel, and perceive. Nāma becomes the dominant mode of contact.

Even while dwelling mostly in nāma, the body and subtle rūpa continue to exist. This is precisely what the Tathagata describes as isolation (viveka): the mind rests experimentally independent of coarse bodily formations without annihilating them.

Nāma Contact and Volitional Formations

To fully understand the nāma side of contact, we need to see it as conditioned by volitional formations (saṅkhāra). These formations shape how the mind organizes, interprets, and responds to experience.

• Without these volitional formations, there is no active nāma to recognize, perceive, or structure what arises through the six senses.

• These formations are not indiscriminate; they are relational and contingent, meaning that their activation depends on the presence of compatible conditions in rūpa contact.

Think of it as seeds needing fertile soil: volitional formations only manifest if there is a corresponding physical field that supports their expression. When the coarse physical body is released, the formations linked to rūpa contact diminish because the “soil” is no longer present, while formations aligned with nāma remain active.

In other words, when we let go of clinging to the physical body, the conditions that allow volitional formations to arise and take hold are removed, and all formations dependent on the physical body no longer find a foothold.

5. Why Understanding This Matters

Recognizing the built-in duality of contact clarifies several points critical for practice:

• Contact is not one-dimensional; it has intertwined physical and mental aspects.

• Releasing clinging does not require elimination of the body, only the relinquishment of attachment to its coarse qualities.

• Nāma side of contact continues because volitional formations remain active where conditions exist.

• This selective weakening of rūpa-linked formations enables the mind to experience seclusion (viveka), calm, clarity, and insight.

Contact in Practice

When practicing:

• Observe the physical qualities of contact and recognize them as one aspect among others.

• Allow attention to soften around the coarse body, releasing identification with solidity, boundaries, location, and pressure.

• Notice how awareness, perception, and feeling continue to function independently of the coarse physical layer.

• Start to become aware of how volitional formations influence nāma, conditioned by both karmic potential and compatible contact.

The purpose of practicing in this way is to cultivate experiential isolation, leaning on nāma contact while the coarse rūpa recedes, creating conditions for deepening insight and abiding in Jhana.

Right Mindfulness of Feelings: Subduing Craving and Aversion

To isolate ourselves from sense desire and find seclusion from unwholesome states, we must learn how to subdue two potent forces: craving and aversion.

In the untrained mind, every feeling is met with a reaction. We like it, dislike it, or drift into indifference. These reactions form the raw fuel of craving and keep its momentum alive.

And so, without feelings, there can be no liking or disliking. And without liking or disliking, there is no craving, no clinging to fleeting experiences, no fuel for becoming, and no seed for birth and death.

This is why feeling is more than a passing experience; it is the hinge upon which the entire wheel of samsara turns.

Whatever feeling one feels, whether pleasant, painful, or neither-painful-nor-pleasant, one sees it as impermanent, as suffering, as not-self.

SN36.7

Because feeling is the point where experience tips into craving, the Tathāgata repeatedly urges us to meet feelings with wisdom, not by indulging or resisting them, but through clear and steady knowing.

Most teachings on dealing with craving tell us to stay with feeling as feeling. This is true, but often understood too narrowly. People hear “observe pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral” and assume this alone is enough to end craving. It does interrupt the chain for a moment, but it does not touch the deeper forces that renew it.

To work with craving at a meaningful depth, we have to understand what the Tathagata actually meant by knowing feelings. He was not pointing to a simple feeling. He was pointing to the complex makeup of feeling that the mind rarely sees clearly. When this complexity is seen, craving loses the momentum it depends on.

Notice the short life of the bare tone

A feeling tone is thin and brief, arising and vanishing quickly. Craving makes this flicker something solid and substantial. When its momentary nature is seen over and over again, the mind is less likely to build on it.

See the automatic tilt that follows the tone

Each feeling tone produces a slight inclination: pleasant leans forward, unpleasant leans back, and neutral drifts. This tilt is the earliest form of craving and aversion. Recognizing it before it shapes perception or action is key to breaking the habit.

Discern the shaping that gathers around the tone

The mind rarely leaves a feeling tone alone. It adds significance, or subtle evaluation. This shaping is part of the aggregate’s function and feeds craving. Seeing it early weakens its pull.

Observe the quiet sense of ownership

With each tone comes a subtle reflex: “This is happening to me.” This sense of ownership binds craving. When this ownership is seen, the feeling loses its weight.

Watch how attention bends

Attention tilts with the tone of the feeling; pleasant draws it in, unpleasant tightens it, and neutral slackens it. This bending is one of the main channels through which craving operates. Seeing it prevents the automatic sliding into craving.

Notice the link between tone and intention

After the tone and the tilt comes a small impulse, the first stir of intention. Here feeling and volitional formations meet. When this impulse is recognized, it does not mature into craving or aversion.

See the fading of the tone and the mind reaching back

A tone ends on its own, yet the mind often returns to it, replaying pleasure, resisting pain, or trying to hold neutrality. This reaching back is a hidden source of renewed craving. Knowing feeling includes knowing its ending and the mind’s attempt to cling to it.

Working with craving requires meeting the bare tone, and then looking deeper: at the tilt, the shaping, the sense of ownership, the bending of attention, the first movement of intention, and the mind’s habit of replaying. This is how craving builds its structure. When they are seen clearly, that structure weakens, and craving loses its footing.

When the tone is known along with these deeper movements, craving dissolves in the moment, and its deeper tendencies gradually thin out. The mind learns to stand in the middle of feeling without leaning forward or back. In this steadiness, craving cannot take form, and its momentum loses strength.

Right Mindfulness of Feelings: Understanding Clinging

It's important to understand how feelings give rise to clinging. It’s not the sense bases themselves that cling. The eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind simply serve as points of contact. They meet their objects, and in that meeting, contact arises. From contact comes feeling, and from contact comes perception.

But these early moments aren’t clinging. Clinging begins only when the mind gets involved, when it grabs hold of a sensation, elaborates upon it, and says, “This is me, this is mine.” This is identification, and that’s where suffering begins.

As the Tathāgata teaches, uninstructed worldlings take form, feeling, perception, volition, and consciousness as self. They see these impermanent processes as “I am this,” “This is myself,” or “This is my experience.”

But it’s not raw contact that binds us to samsāra; it’s what the mind does with that contact. It seizes the impression, spins it into craving, aversion, or delusion, and holds it close. This is clinging: keeping an experience alive beyond its natural end.

Through practice and wise attention, we begin to see this clearly. We train the mind to let experiences come and go without grabbing, without pushing, without seeing them as “mine.”

In other words, we learn to witness how the mind hijacks bare experience and how to let go when it does. To see through the hijacking, we need to recognize causes and conditions, the process unfolding moment by moment:

• Contact: when the senses touch the world.

• Feeling: the mind colors that contact—pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.

• Craving: that flavor draws us in, to hold, to push away, or to tune out.

• Clinging: the mind starts spinning stories ownership, identity, and permanence.

• Becoming: a “me” arises, constructed around what was just a passing moment.

This is the upward spiral of suffering. To not get swept up in this mental fabrication, the Tathāgata urges us to cultivate wise attention.

He teaches that with wise attention, the mind doesn’t simply react; it sees and it discerns conditions, it watches experience rise and fall without turning it into a self.

We train to pause long enough to witness the moment before clinging kicks in. Long enough to see that experience is just that: momentary, conditioned, and impersonal.

In the seen, there is only the seen… in the sensed, only the sensed… this is how one should train.

SN35.95

We learn to stay with what is just present. A sound is heard; just know “sound.” A sensation arises; just know “touch.” No commentary, no story, no identity.

This is radical mindfulness. Not passive, not detached, but deeply engaged, without clinging.

Feeling tones emerge quickly: pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral. If we catch them in that first moment, before craving sets in, we stand at the razor’s edge, a moment of choice: to cling or to release.

Training the mind to be non-reactive is not the same as being numb. It’s about precision, not adding desire or aversion, not layering suppression or indulgence.

Purification comes through clarity, not control. We watch intimately the moment the mind begins to construct a “self.” We don’t need to deny the experience; we only need to see it before the hijacking: before thought says, “This is mine,” before emotion says, “This defines me,” before clinging takes hold.

Right Mindfulness of Feelings: The Role of Attention

In the Tathagata’s teaching, every moment of experience arises through the coming together of conditions. When the sense organ, its object, and consciousness meet, there is contact. From this meeting arises the tone of feeling: pleasant, painful, or neutral.

At that same instant, perception recognizes and marks the object, attention turns toward it, and consciousness lights it up. These arise together, interdependent and inseparable, different aspects of a single moment of knowing.

While feeling is the spark that begins the process, the seed from which craving can grow, when a pleasant feeling is attended to unwisely, the mind delights in it, craves it, and clings to it. When a painful feeling is attended to unwisely, the mind resists and struggles, and craving for escape appears. Even neutral feeling, when not seen clearly, becomes the ground for ignorance and dullness.

In each case, it is attention that determines the direction of the mind.

When one attends unwisely, unarisen taints arise, and arisen taints increase; when one attends wisely, unarisen taints do not arise, and arisen taints are abandoned.

MN2

Thus, feeling is the root condition for craving, but clinging arises only when attention keeps returning to and feeding that craving. Sustained attention on the unwholesome object, on desire, aversion, or ignorance, hardens craving into clinging.

The key to ending this process lies in dwelling at the level of feeling and perception before proliferation begins. Here, mindfulness remains with the raw tone of experience:

“This is pleasant,” “This is painful,” “This is neutral.”

Perception knows the sign of the object just enough for awareness to stay grounded, but not enough to fabricate stories about it. Attention remains wise, seeing the arising and passing of feeling as impersonal, conditioned, and fleeting.

This is the middle point where the stream of dependent arising can be turned. If attention stays clear and balanced, craving does not arise, clinging does not form, and the mind remains free.

When one is touched by a pleasant feeling, if one does not delight in it, welcome it, or remain holding to it, then craving does not arise.

SN36.6

Right Mindfulness of Feelings: How Feeling Builds Becoming

Even without a strong sense of a body boundary, experience does not stop. Contact still happens, feeling still arises, and perception still labels. But when the body formation is light, these arise like patterns in open space rather than events happening to an inner person. This shift exposes something important: feeling and perception do not need a physical anchor to sustain the sense of becoming. They can build a structure on their own.

Feeling creates the tilt toward becoming

Pleasant feeling creates a tilt: a subtle leaning toward. Unpleasant creates a tilt: a subtle leaning away, and neutral invites drifting or dulling. These tilts are very small, but they are enough to create a beginning of momentum. This momentum is already the seed of becoming, even without a solid bodily platform.

What keeps the tilt going is not the body, but the habit of reacting to these small tonal movements. The mind automatically takes these tiny shifts as signals that something must be secured or avoided. This is where clinging starts to rebuild itself.

Perception gives shape and direction to the tilt

Perception supplies the story, it names the tone, it interprets the shift, and it decides what the leaning is about. Even in a body that feels light or transparent, perception can still form the sense of “something meaningful happening.” This meaning gives the feeling-tone a direction. It takes the bare tone and turns it into a cue. That cue becomes the landmark for clinging.

So even without physical grounding, perception can reconstruct an inner point of reference: a mental location, a sense of “I am here noticing this.” This is how the sense of a self silently rebuilds itself through perception alone.

Feeling and perception together recreate the sense of a world

When pleasant or unpleasant is felt, and perception designates its source, a world is formed. The mind no longer needs the physical body to build an inside and outside. It can build an inside and outside purely through attention to the feeling, interpretation by perception, and reaction by intention.

This mental body is lighter than the physical body, but it still serves as a structure for clinging to tighten around.

This is why the Tathagata singled out feeling and perception as particularly dangerous when not understood. They continue the cycle even after bodily fabrication has been calmed.

Clinging arises whenever feeling becomes personal and perception becomes confirming

Clinging begins the moment feeling is taken as meaningful, and perception confirms the meaning. It does not require a body. It requires only a tone, a designation, and a reaction.

When feeling is seen as mine, becoming continues. When perception verifies the sense of me knowing or reacting, becoming strengthens.

This is why the Tathagata emphasizes seeing feeling as feeling and perception as perception. When feeling is known just as tone, it cannot form the basis for leaning. When perception is recognized simply as labeling, it cannot build a world around a self.

Fabrication grows out of this pairing

Once leaning begins, the mind starts shaping experience. It fabricates; it builds expectations, fears, hopes, and projections. It forms subtle strategies of avoidance or pursuit. Not only that, but it strengthens the sense of a center reacting to an environment.

This construction grows even when the physical body feels absent or open. Feeling and perception can carry the entire architecture by themselves. This reveals one of the deepest insights in practice: becoming is not rooted in the body. The body simply supports and amplifies it. The real engine is the relationship between feeling, perception, and intention.

When these are fully understood, clinging has no support

If feeling is known only as tone, leaning cannot start. If perception is seen only as labeling, the world it builds does not solidify. If intention is seen as a movement rather than a command, momentum dissolves.

At that point, fabrication loses its material, and clinging cannot tighten, becoming cannot form. There is no platform left for the sense of self to rebuild. This is why the understanding of feeling and perception is essential even after bodily fabrication is calmed. The deeper cycle happens here.

Right Mindfulness of Feelings: How Feeling Builds Identity

Whatever one feels, one perceives; whatever one perceives, one thinks about; whatever one thinks about, one mentally proliferates. With mental proliferation as the source, perception and notions tinged by mental proliferation beset a man with respect to past, future, and present forms.

MN18

Now, let’s look more deeply at how feelings shape identity.

Feelings aren’t neutral; they don’t simply pass through us; they ignite perception, recognition, and interpretation. From there, thought arises, the mind begins to proliferate, spinning stories, shaping narratives, and building identity views.

A raw sensation becomes “me.” A fleeting ache becomes “mine.” This is how the process unfolds. Feelings carry energy, and that energy fuels the construction of self.

When we cling to bodily sensations, whether through pleasure or pain, we solidify the body as “who I am,” We make it personal, and we make it permanent, and yet the body is empty of ownership.

The Tathāgata pointed to this with clarity:

• Pleasant feelings spark desire.

• Painful feelings stir aversion.

• Neutral feelings breed ignorance.

We begin to build a self around what was only ever a passing impression. But when we see this clearly, we don’t need to push experience away; we simply stop mistaking it for who we are.

When a person experiences a pleasant feeling, if he delights in it, welcomes it, and remains holding to it, then craving arises... The same with painful and neutral feelings.

SN36.6

And so, all feelings—pleasant, painful, or neutral—are dangerous when not met with wisdom. The untrained mind doesn’t pause; it reacts again and again, and it builds the idea of self, layer upon layer, moment after moment.

The Tathāgata offers a striking image for this:

Disciples, feelings are burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, hatred, and delusion; burning with birth, aging, and death; with sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair.

SN36.6

When we take delight in feelings, we dwell inside this burning. This is why the Tathāgata taught we should know feeling completely:

Feeling should be fully known. When one fully knows feeling, craving is abandoned. With craving abandoned, clinging ceases. With clinging ceasing, becoming ceases. With becoming ceasing, birth, aging, death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair cease.

AN6.63

Thus, contemplating feelings is not optional; it is the very practice of liberation. When wisdom illuminates the nature of feelings:

• Feelings still arise, like ripples on water, but the mind does not cling.

• Without clinging, the illusion of “I” dissolves.

• The mind rests in equanimity, still yet alert, unshaken by waves.

He feels feelings that are born of contact with what is agreeable… disagreeable… neutral… Yet he does not delight in them, welcome them, or remain holding to them. Since he does not do so, delight in feelings ceases. With delight ceasing, clinging ceases…

SN36.6

In other words, feeling is the architect of self, the builder of samsara. To see feeling clearly is to see how "I am" is constructed. To let go of feeling is to let go of self. This is the direct path to Nibbāna.

Right Mindfulness of Feelings: The Self-referencing Process

To understand more clearly how the sense of self is built, let us once again look closely at the process of self-referencing.

Ordinarily, we assume that the world exists “out there” and that we exist “in here.” Yet this sense of being located within a three-dimensional space is not found in raw sensory experience; it is a mental construction.

The eye does not directly perceive space. What we call “distance” or “location” arises through memory and interpretation. In the same way, the feeling of a perceiver, an “I” who sees, and the idea of a seen object are mental fabrications that arise within consciousness itself.

With insight, this becomes clear. As the mind ceases to proliferate, these fabrications begin to dissolve. Concepts of space, time, subject, and object fade away. What remains is simple and direct: bare contact and feeling, pure, immediate, and free from clinging.

In states of collectedness, such as when abiding in the jhānas, this is seen even more distinctly. The mind unifies. The sense of “me here” and “world there” falls away. Experience becomes non-localized, vivid, and continuous, yet without a center.

Proliferation Requires a Location

The mind’s tendency to project objects “out there” provides a useful way to gauge our practice. The moment we notice a sense of “me” in opposition to “that,” we know proliferation has begun. The very creation of an “out there” is the structure upon which suffering is built.

For proliferation to arise, the mind must generate the notion of location, an “out there” distinct from “in here.” But this division is not an inherent truth. It is a fabrication born of perception and thought, rooted in the process of contact, feeling, and conceptualization.

The “out there” is created through the overlay of concepts upon raw experience. Before this overlay, there is only contact, an impersonal event. When proliferation begins, it draws boundaries: “inside” and “outside,” “self” and “other.” This is how the mind projects internal activity as if it were external reality.

Holding the sense of self and objects within space is inherently stressful. It often shows up as tension in the head, chest, or belly. These sensations signal that a simple perception has turned into a story, into "mine-making."

But we can learn to recognize this conceiving process. It is often subtle, yet nearly always present in experience.

By staying with direct contact, before the mind turns sensation into narrative, the tension softens. When feeling is known simply as “feeling felt,” without craving or aversion, perception no longer projects. The “out there” collapses. What remains is vivid, direct experience, without location, without ownership.

Right Mindfulness of Feelings: Dismantling I-making and Mine-making

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By observing how experience is structured spatially, how a perceiver is imagined “here” and a perceived object “out there,” we’re not just noticing a habitual mental pattern. We are directly encountering and deconstructing “I-making” and “mine-making.”

This view appears in many forms: “I am the one who sees,” “I am the observer,” or “this experience is happening to me.” These aren’t just surface-level thoughts. They’re deeply ingrained assumptions, shaping the felt sense of self from moment to moment, primarily through spatial and narrative fabrication.

When we begin to discern the tension and mental effort required to maintain the perception of an "out there", of a subject in space, and when we see that this "me" is nowhere to be found in raw contact or feeling, the foundation of “I-making” and “mine-making” starts to loosen.

Form is not self… feeling is not self… perception is not self… formations are not self… consciousness is not self. Seeing this as it actually is, with correct wisdom, one becomes disenchanted… and through dispassion, one is liberated.

SN22.1

By letting go of the mind’s tendency to hijack perception, we are letting go of “I-making” and “mine-making.” We’re not dismantling the self intellectually. We’re letting go of belief in it by observing, in real time, how it’s fabricated.

As the spatial narratives collapse and the inner tension relaxes, eventually, the conceit “I am” begins to fade from experience, even if subtle traces remain. This unfolding is both insight and purification.

There’s no need to adopt a belief like “there is no self.” Rather, one sees with clarity, “There is only contact and feeling, no owner.” This is wisdom that cuts through identity view, not through argument or theory, but through direct seeing.

Distinguishing Bodily and Mental Feelings

To strengthen our ability to see how the mind hijacks awareness, it's helpful to recognize that there are two distinct types of feeling: bodily and mental.

A sensation might arise in the body, like a cool breeze brushing the skin or light entering the eyes. But the reaction to it—the clinging, the delight, the aversion—doesn't arise in the body. It arises in the mind (heart) as a mental feeling and response. These are separate, discernible events.

With Right Mindfulness and clear knowing, we begin to discern this sequence with increasing precision:

• A contact occurs: For instance, a cool breeze touches the skin. This sensation is experienced in the body.

• A feeling arises: "pleasant" is felt in the body.

• Then, the mind reacts by wanting more or hoping that it doesn’t end. This reaction is not on the skin but an activity in the mind.

• Proliferation begins: Thoughts, craving, planning, or resistance emerge. This signifies clinging.

The bodily location of the sensation and the mental reaction can be discerned as separate entities; they are two distinct links in a causal chain, not a blended, unified experience.

Therefore, the practice involves:

• The contact is known, for example, a sight, sound, or touch.

• Noticing the feeling is either pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.

• Observing the arising of craving, aversion, or identification.

• Disentangling the mind from it by clearly seeing it as not self, impermanent, and a source of suffering.

Working with the Tension of Fabrication

As a result of this mental hijacking, this process of proliferation, we can begin to recognize the two poles that shape our experience:

• The field: What is perceived as “out there,” sights, sounds, and imagined space.

• The sense of observer or self: A subtle contraction, often felt as tension in the head, chest, or belly, which gives rise to the feeling of “me, observing.”

Letting Go of the Polarity:

When we become aware of the tension between “there” and “here,” the key is not to resolve it by collapsing into either side. Instead:

Hold both in awareness; simply let the tension exist within a wider field of knowing. Allow the bodily contraction to be present, not fighting it, not fleeing from it.

Simply see things as they are, without craving, without resisting, without being swept into reaction. No desire, no aversion, only clear and steady seeing. Since the mind’s habits of proliferation are deeply rooted, letting go may not happen all at once. With each patient return to awareness, the grip of reaction softens until release becomes natural.

Right Mindfulness of Feelings: Training for the Higher Mind

At this stage of the Gradual Training, we begin the cultivation of the higher mind.

We start by fully knowing our feelings, clearly recognizing them as they arise, without allowing them to spiral into craving, aversion, or delusion. This inner clarity marks a turning point. It supports the letting go of attachment to the coarse physical body and lays the foundation for seclusion, from both sense desires and unwholesome states.

To support this development, we begin to withdraw from the constant stimulation of the five physical senses. This stimulation agitates the mind. It stirs up restlessness, fuels desire, and deepens clinging.

The five sense doors—the eye, the ear, the nose, the tongue, and the body—are always active, continually delivering one sensory impression after another. And each impression carries the potential to trigger desire, irritation, or unease. As long as the mind remains entangled with these coarse sense contacts, mental development stays unstable, unreliable, and inconsistent.

But as we begin to disengage from this flood of stimulation, something profound happens. The mind grows quieter. It becomes more stable, more capable of settling into a subtler domain, the realm of pure feeling, perception, and consciousness.

In detaching from gross physical contact, we come to see directly: liberation cannot be found while we remain bound to the physical realm. The development of the higher mind, cultivating the Seven Factors of Enlightenment, entering Jhāna, and ultimately realizing Nibbāna only become accessible when we dwell in the form or formless body, purified of bodily agitation and sensory disturbance.

What once appeared as attractive sensual contact begins to show its true nature: stressful, unsatisfying, and fleeting. And what once seemed distant or unfamiliar, this pure mental abiding, now reveals itself as a true dwelling: still, stable, and nourishing. Not a place to cling to, but a ground from which wisdom can arise. A gateway to liberation.

Udāyi, I have taught the path to my disciples, and they, having followed it, create another body from this body, having form, mind-made, complete in all its limbs and faculties. Just as if a man were to draw a reed from its sheath, he would reflect: This is the reed, this is the sheath; the reed is one thing, the sheath is another; the reed has been drawn out from the sheath...

In the same way, Udāyi, I have taught the path to my disciples, and they, having followed it, create another body from this body, having form, mind-made, complete in all its limbs and faculties.

MN77

Right Mindfulness of Feelings: Without Feelings, All of Existence Collapses

When the Tathāgata speaks about existence, he does not describe a fixed, unchanging being. Instead, he points to a dynamic process: “When this exists, that exists. With the arising of this, that arises.”

Among all the conditions that shape this process, feeling holds a central role. Without feeling, the machinery of existence has no place from which it can propagate.

Whenever contact arises, between the sense organs and the world, feeling comes into being: pleasant, painful, or neutral.

But the process does not stop there.

From feeling, perception is stirred. From perception, thoughts emerge. And from these thoughts, the idea of a “self” begins to come together.

The Tathāgata teaches this with clarity: that feeling is the ignition point. It sparks the entire chain of mental proliferation and identity construction. It is here, at the root, that the view of self begins to take form.

Dependent on the eye and forms, eye-consciousness arises. The meeting of the three is contact. With contact as condition, feeling arises. Whatever one feels, that one perceives; whatever one perceives, that one thinks about; whatever one thinks about, that one mentally proliferates. From this proliferation arise desire, attachment, and suffering.

MN18

Thus, without feeling, there is no basis for perception. Without perception, there is no thought, no mental proliferation, and crucially, no sense of “I” or “mine.”

The solidity of the body itself depends on this chain. Without attaching to bodily feelings, the body is simply experienced as processes, elements in flux, not as a self or something substantial.

The solid world we experience is not "out there", it arises dependent on contact and the feeling-tone applied. Without feelings, even the experience of a "world" collapses.

Practicing Dwelling in Feelings

When dwelling feelings in feelings, practice by seeing all physical contact as painful. Dwelling in feelings; do not lean on (make contact) with the mind-made sensations of the physical body; dwell purely in feelings:

And how should the nutriment contact be seen? Suppose a cow with a skin disease would stand leaning against a wall. The creatures living in the wall would bite her. If she stood leaning against a tree, the creatures living in the tree would bite her. If she stood leaning against water, the creatures living in the water would bite her. If she stood leaning against open air, the creatures living in the air would bite her. Wherever that cow with a skin disease stands leaning, the creatures living there would bite her.

In the same way I say that the nutriment contact should be seen. When the nutriment contact is fully understood, the three feelings are fully understood. When the three feelings are fully understood, I say there is nothing further for a noble disciple to do. - SN12.63

Disciples, I declare the destruction of the taints for one who knows and sees, not for one who does not know and does not see. And what does one know and see for the destruction of the taints to occur?

This is form, this is the arising of form, this is the cessation of form;
this is feeling...
this is perception...
these are formations...
this is consciousness, this is the arising of consciousness, this is the cessation of consciousness:

Thus for one who knows and sees in this way, the destruction of the taints occurs.

SN22.126

Do feelings have substance?

Just as in the autumn when the rain pours down in thick drops, a water bubble forms and bursts. A discerning person would observe it, thoroughly investigate it, and examine it wisely. For that person observing, investigating, and examining wisely, it would appear empty, void, and without substance. What substance could there be in a water bubble, disciples?

In the same way whatever feeling, past, future, or present... whether far or near, a disciple observes, investigates, and examines it wisely. For that disciple observing, investigating, and examining wisely, it would appear empty, void, and without substance. What substance could there be in feeling, disciples? SN22.95

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Upāsikā Kee Nanayon: Aware Right at Awareness

Upāsikā Kee Nanayon

The mind, if mindfulness and awareness are watching over it, won’t meet with any suffering as the result of its actions. If suffering does arise, we’ll be immediately aware of it and able to put it out. This is one point of the practice we can work at constantly. And we can test ourselves by seeing how refined and subtle our all-around awareness is inside the mind. Whenever the mind slips away and goes out to receive external sensory contact: Can it maintain its basic stance of mindfulness or internal awareness? The practice we need to work at in our everyday life is to have constant mindfulness, constant all-around present awareness like this. This is something we work at in every posture: sitting, standing, walking, and lying down. Make sure that your mindfulness stays continuous.

Living in this world, the mental and physical phenomena of these five aggregates, gives us plenty to contemplate. We must try to watch them, to contemplate them, so that we can understand them, because the truths we must learn how to read in this body and mind are here to be read with every moment. We don’t have to get wrapped up with any other extraneous themes, because all the themes we need are right here in the body and mind. As long as we can keep the mind constantly aware all around, we can contemplate them.

If you contemplate mental and physical events to see how they arise and disband right in the here and now, and don’t get involved with external things, like sights making contact with the eyes, or sounds with the ears, then there really aren’t a lot of issues. The mind can be at stability, at equilibrium, calm and undisturbed by defilement or the stresses that come from sensory contact. It can look after itself and maintain its balance. You’ll come to sense that if you’re aware right at awareness in and of itself, without going out to get involved in external things like the mental labels and thoughts that will tend to arise, the mind will see their constant arising and disbanding, and won’t be embroiled in anything. This way it can be disengaged, empty, and free. But if it goes out to label things as good or evil, as “me” or “mine,” or gets attached to anything, it’ll become unsettled and disturbed.

You have to know that if the mind can be still, totally and presently aware, and capable of contemplating with every activity, then blatant forms of suffering and stress will dissolve away. Even if they start to form, you can be alert to them and disperse them immediately. Once you see this actually happening, even in only the beginning stages, it can disperse a lot of the confusion and turmoil in your heart. In other words, don’t let yourself dwell on the past or latch onto thoughts of the future. As for the events arising and passing away in the present, you have to leave them alone. Whatever your duties, simply do them as you have to, and the mind won’t get worked up about anything. It will be able, to at least some extent, to be empty and still.

This one thing is something you have to be very careful about. You have to see this for yourself: that if your mindfulness and discernment are constantly in charge, the truths of the arising and disbanding of mental and physical phenomena are always there for you to see, always there for you to know. If you look at the body, you’ll have to see it simply as physical properties. If you look at feelings, you’ll have to see them as changing and inconstant: pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. To see these things is to see the truth within yourself. Don’t let yourself get caught up with your external duties. Simply keep watch in this way inside. If your awareness is the sort that lets you read yourself correctly, the mind will be able to stay at stability, at equilibrium, at stillness, without any resistance.

If the mind can stay with itself and not go out looking for things to criticize or latch onto, it can maintain a natural form of stillness. So this is something we have to try for in our every activity. Keep your conversations to a minimum, and there won’t be a whole lot of issues. Keep watch right at the mind. When you keep watch at the mind and your mindfulness is continuous, your senses can stay restrained.

Being mindful to keep watch in this way is something you have to work at. Try it and see: Can you keep this sort of awareness continuous? What sort of things can still get the mind engaged? What sorts of thoughts and labels of good and bad, me and mine does it think up? Then look to see if these things arise and disband.

The sensations that arise from external contact and internal contact all have the same sorts of characteristics. You have to look till you can see this. If you know how to look, you’ll see it, and the mind will grow calm.

So the point we have to practice in this latter stage doesn’t have a whole lot of issues. There’s nothing you have to do, nothing you have to label, nothing you have to think a whole lot about. Simply look carefully and contemplate, and in this very lifetime you’ll have a chance to be calm and at peace, to know yourself more profoundly within. You’ll come to see that the Dhamma is amazing right here in your own heart. Don’t go searching for the Dhamma outside, for it lies within. Peace lies within, but we have to contemplate so that we’re aware all around, subtly, deep down. If you look just on the surface, you won’t understand anything. Even if the mind is stable on the ordinary, everyday level, you won’t understand much of anything at all.

You have to contemplate so that you’re aware all around in a skillful way. The word “skillful” is something you can’t explain with words, but you can know for yourself when you see the way in which awareness within the heart becomes special, when you see what this special awareness is about. This is something you can know for yourself.

And there’s not really much to it: simply arising, persisting, disbanding. Look until this becomes plain, really, really plain, and everything disappears. All suppositions, all conventional formulations, all those aggregates and properties get swept away, leaving nothing but awareness pure and simple, not involved with anything at all, and there’s nothing you have to do to it. Simply stay still and watch, be aware, letting go with every moment.

Simply watching this one thing is enough to do away with all sorts of defilements, all sorts of suffering and stress. If you don’t know how to watch it, the mind is sure to get disturbed. It’s sure to label things and concoct thoughts. As soon as there’s contact at the senses, it’ll go looking for things to latch onto, liking and disliking the objects it meets in the present and then getting involved with the past and future, spinning a web to entangle itself.

If you truly look at each moment in the present, there’s really nothing at all. You’ll see with every mental moment that things disband, disband, disband, really nothing at all. The important point is that you don’t go forming issues out of nothing. The physical elements perform their duties in line with their elementary physical nature. The mental elements keep sensing in line with their own affairs. But our stupidity is what goes looking for issues to cook up, to label, to think about. It goes looking for things to latch onto and then gets the mind into a turmoil. This point is all we really have to see for ourselves. This is the problem we have to solve for ourselves. If things are left to their nature, pure and simple, there’s no “us,” no “them.” This is a singular truth that will arise for us to know and see. There’s nothing else we can know or see that can match it in any way. Once you know and see this one thing, it extinguishes all suffering and stress. The mind will be empty and free, with no meanings, no attachments, for anything at all.

This is why looking inward is so special in so many ways. Whatever arises, simply stop still to look at it. Don’t get excited by it. If you become excited when any special intuitions arise when the mind is still, you’ll get the mind worked up into a turmoil. If you become afraid that this or that will happen, that too will get you in a turmoil. So you have to stop and look, stop and know. The first thing is simply to look. The first thing is simply to know. And don’t latch onto what you know, because whatever it is, it’s simply a phenomenon that arises and disbands, arises and disbands, changing as part of its nature.

So your awareness has to take a firm stance right at the mind in and of itself. In the beginning stages, you have to know that when mindfulness is standing firm, the mind won’t be affected by the objects of sensory contact. Keep working at maintaining this stance, holding firm to this stance. If you gain a sense of this for yourself, really knowing and seeing for yourself, your mindfulness will become even more firm. If anything arises in any way at all, you’ll be able to let it go, and all the many troubles and turmoils of the mind will dissolve away.

If mindfulness slips and the mind goes out giving meanings to anything, latching onto anything, troubles will arise, so you have to keep checking on this with every moment. There’s nothing else that’s so worth checking on. You have to keep check on the mind in and of itself, contemplating the mind in and of itself. Or else you can contemplate the body in and of itself, feelings in and of themselves, or the phenomenon of arising and disbanding, the Dhamma, in and of itself. All of these things are themes you can keep track of entirely within yourself. You don’t have to keep track of a lot of themes, because having a lot of themes is what will make you restless and distracted. First you’ll practice this theme, then you’ll practice that, then you’ll make comparisons, all of which will keep the mind from growing still.

If you can take your stance at awareness, if you’re skilled at looking, the mind can be at peace. You’ll know how things arise and disband. First practice keeping awareness right within yourself so that your mindfulness can be firm, without being affected by the objects of sensory contact, so that it won’t label things as good or bad, pleasing or displeasing. You have to keep checking to see that when the mind can be stable, centered and neutral as its primary stance, then, whatever it knows or sees, it will be able to contemplate and let go.

The sensations in the mind that we explain at such length are still on the level of labels. Only when there can be awareness right at awareness will you really be able to know that the mind that is aware of awareness in this way doesn’t send it's knowing outside of this awareness. There are no issues. Nothing can be concocted in the mind when it knows in this way. In other words, an inward-staying unentangled knowing, all outward-going knowing cast aside.

The only thing you have to work at maintaining is the state of mind at stability, knowing, seeing, and still in the present. If you don’t maintain it, if you don’t keep looking after it, then when sensory contact comes it will have an effect. The mind will go out with labels of good and bad, liking and disliking. So make sure you maintain the basic awareness that’s aware right at yourself. And don’t let there be any labeling. No matter what sort of sensory contact comes, you have to make sure that this awareness comes first.

If you train yourself correctly in this way, everything will stop. You won’t go straying out through your senses of sight, hearing, etc. The mind will stop and look, stop and be aware right at awareness, so as to know the truth that all things arise and disband. There’s no real truth to anything. Only our stupidity is what latches onto things, giving them meanings and then suffering for it, suffering because of its ignorance, suffering because of its unacquaintance with the five aggregates, form, feelings, perceptions, thought-fabrications, and consciousness, all of which are inconstant, stressful, and not-self.

Use mindfulness to gather your awareness together, and the mind will stop getting unsettled, stop running after things. It will be able to stop and be still. Then make it know in this way, see in this way constantly, at every moment, with every activity. Work at watching and knowing the mind in and of itself: That will be enough to cut away all sorts of issues. You won’t have to concern yourself with them.

If the body is in pain, simply keep watch of it. You can simply keep watch of feelings in the body because the mind that’s aware of itself in this way can keep watch of anything within or without. Or it can simply be aware of itself to the point where it lets go of things outside, lets go of sensory contact, and keeps constant watch on the mind in and of itself. That’s when you’ll know that this is what the mind is like when it’s at peace: It doesn’t give meanings to anything. It’s the emptiness of the mind unattached, uninvolved, unconcerned with anything at all.

These words, unattached, uninvolved, and unconcerned, are things you have to consider carefully, because what they refer to are subtle and deep. “Uninvolved” means uninvolved with sensory contact, undisturbed by the body or feelings. “Unconcerned” means not worried about past, future, or present. You have to contemplate these things until you know them skillfully. Even though they’re subtle, you have to contemplate them until you know them thoroughly. And don’t go concerning yourself with external things, because they’ll keep you unsettled, keep you running, keep you distracted with labels and thoughts of good and bad and all that sort of thing. You have to put a stop to these things. If you don’t, your practice won’t accomplish anything, because these things keep playing up to you and deceiving you. In other words, once you see anything, it will fool you into seeing it as right, wrong, good, bad, and so forth.

Eventually you have to come down to the awareness that everything simply arises, persists, and then disbands. Make sure you keep attention on the disbanding. If you watch just the arising, you may get carried off on a tangent, but if you keep attention on the disbanding you’ll see emptiness: Everything is disbanding every instant. No matter what you look at, no matter what you see, it’s there for just an instant and then disbands. Then it arises again. Then it disbands. There’s simply arising, knowing, disbanding.

So let’s watch what happens of its own accord, because the arising and disbanding that occurs by way of the senses is something that happens of its own accord. You can’t prevent it. You can’t force it. If you look and know it without attachment, there will be none of the harm that comes from joy or sorrow. The mind will stay in relative stability and neutrality. But if you’re forgetful and start latching on, labeling things in pairs in any way at all, good and bad, happy and sad, pleasing and displeasing, the mind will become unsettled: no longer empty, no longer still. When this happens, you have to probe on in to know why.

All the worthless issues that arise in the mind have to be cut away. Then you’ll find that you have less and less to say, less and less to talk about, less and less to think about. These things grow less and less on their own. They stop on their own. But if you get involved in a lot of issues, the mind won’t be able to stay still. So we have to keep watching things that are completely worthless and without substance, to see that they’re not-self. Keep watching them repeatedly, because your awareness, coupled with the mindfulness and discernment that will know the truth, has to see that, “This isn’t my self. There’s no substance or worth to it at all. It simply arises and disbands right here. It’s here for just an instant and then it disbands.”

All we have to do is stop and look, stop and know clearly in this way, and we’ll be able to do away with many, many kinds of suffering and stress. The normal stress of the aggregates will still occur, we can’t prevent it, but we’ll know that it’s the stress of nature and won’t latch onto it as ours.

So we keep watch of things that happen on their own. If we know how to watch, we keep watching things that happen on their own. Don’t latch onto them as being you or yours. Keep this awareness firmly established in itself, as much as you can, and there won’t be much else you’ll have to remember or think about.

When you keep looking, keep knowing like this at all times, you’ll come to see that there are no big issues going on. There’s just the issue of arising, persisting, and disbanding. You don’t have to label anything as good or bad. If you simply look in this way, it’s no great weight on the heart. But if you go dragging in issues of good and bad, self and all that, then suffering starts in a big way. The defilements start in a big way and weigh on the heart, making it troubled and upset. So you have to stop and look, stop and investigate really deep down inside. It’s like water covered with duckweed: Only when we take our hand to part the duckweed and take a look will we see that the water beneath it is crystal clear.

As you look into the mind, you have to part it, you have to stop: stop thinking, stop labeling things as good or bad, stop everything. You can’t go branding anything. Simply keep looking, keep knowing. When the mind is quiet, you’ll see that there’s nothing there. Everything is all still. Everything has all stopped inside. But as soon as there’s labeling, even in the stillness, the stopping, the quiet, it will set things in motion. And as soon as things get set into motion, and you don’t know how to let go right from the start, issues will arise, waves will arise. Once there are issues and waves, they strike the mind and it goes splashing all out of control. This splashing of the mind includes craving and defilement as well, because avijjā, ignorance, lies at its root.

Our major obstacle is this aggregate of perceptions, of labels. If we aren’t aware of the arising and disbanding of perceptions, these labels will take hold. Perceptions are the chief instigators that label things within and without, so we have to be aware of their arising and disbanding. Once we’re aware in this way, perceptions will no longer function as a cause of suffering. In other words, they won’t give rise to any further thought-fabrications. The mind will be aware in itself and able to extinguish these things in itself.

So we have to stop things at the level of perception. If we don’t, thought-fabrications will fashion things into issues and then cause consciousness to wobble and waver in all sorts of ways. But these are things we can stop and look at, things we can know with every mental moment. If we aren’t yet really acquainted with the arising and disbanding in the mind, we won’t be able to let go. We can talk about letting go, but we can’t do it because we don’t yet know. As soon as anything arises we grab hold of it, even when actually it’s already disbanded, but since we don’t really see, we don’t know.

So I ask that you understand this basic principle. Don’t go grasping after this thing or that, or else you’ll get yourself all unsettled. The basic theme is within: look on in, keep knowing on in until you penetrate everything. The mind will then be free from turmoil. Empty. Quiet. Aware. So keep continuous watch of the mind in and of itself, and you’ll come to the point where you simply run out of things to say. Everything will stop on its own, grow still on its own, because the underlying condition that has stopped and is still is already there, simply that we aren’t aware of it yet.

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And what is the passing away of form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness?

Here one does not delight in (get infatuated in), welcome, or remain holding to.

And what does one not delight in, welcome, or remain holding to?

One does not delight in, welcome, or remain holding to form.

For one not delighting in, not welcoming, and not remaining holding to form, the delight in form ceases.

With the cessation of delight, there is the cessation of clinging; with the cessation of clinging, there is the cessation of becoming…thus ceases this entire mass of suffering.

One does not delight in feeling…

One does not delight in perception…

One does not delight in formations, does not welcome, and does not remain holding to.

For one not delighting in, not welcoming, and not remaining holding to formations, the delight in formations ceases.

With the cessation of delight, there is the cessation of clinging; with the cessation of clinging, there is the cessation of becoming… thus ceases this entire mass of suffering.

One does not delight in consciousness, does not welcome, and does not remain holding to.

For one not delighting in, not welcoming, and not remaining holding to consciousness, the delight in consciousness ceases.

With the cessation of delight, there is the cessation of clinging… thus ceases this entire mass of suffering.

This is the passing away of form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness.

SN22.5

Ignorance, ignorance, they say, friend Sāriputta. But what is ignorance, and how is one mired in ignorance?

Here, friend, an uneducated ordinary person does not truly know form as a phenomenon that arises and passes away.

They do not truly know feeling as a phenomenon that arises and passes away. They do not truly know perception as a phenomenon that arises and passes away. They do not truly know choices as phenomena that arise and pass away. They do not truly know consciousness as a phenomenon that arises and passes away.

This is called ignorance, friend, and this is how one is mired in ignorance.

SN22.127

I will teach, the origin and passing away of the four dwellings of mindfulness. Listen to this.

And what, disciples, is the origin of the body?
The origin of the body is from food; with the cessation of food, there is the passing away of the body.

From the origin of contact is the origin of feelings; with the cessation of contact, there is the passing away of feelings.

From the origin of name-and-form is the origin of mind; with the cessation of name-and-form, there is the passing away of mind.

From the origin of attention is the origin of mental phenomena; with the cessation of attention, there is the passing away of mental phenomena.

SN47.42

Right Mindfulness: How Craving Creates Formations

The Tathāgata taught that wherever craving appears, there the sense of “being” gathers and takes shape. Craving is not merely an emotional pull toward what is pleasant. It is the very force that binds momentary processes into the appearance of a “someone” who experiences them.

When craving touches form, feeling, perception, formations, or consciousness, the Five Aggregates harden into a nucleus around which “I” and “mine” crystallize. Without this grasping force, the aggregates are only streams of conditioned events, flickering, discontinuous, and unclaimed.

Thus, the construction of self is not a hidden entity waiting to be discovered; it is an activity being performed. The self appears whenever craving fabricates a center. When craving fades, the fabrication loosens. When craving ceases, the center dissolves.

Right Mindfulness matures when we can observe this activity directly as a living process unfolding in the field of experience right now. This means feeling how craving arises, how it bends attention, and how it pushes the mind into becoming.

In MN 2, the Tathāgata identifies three deep currents responsible for this fabrication:

• sensual desire.

• desire for becoming.

• ignorance.

These are called effluents because they flow out of the mind like currents of energy seeking a foothold in the aggregates. When they succeed, they shape and distort the entire field of experience. When they find no foothold, they release their energy and dissolve.

We must learn to feel these effluents at the point of contact, before they generate fabrications. This is the heart of deep practice: to recognize the energetic birth of the self before it fully forms.

Craving and the Form Aggregate

For him, infatuated, attached, confused, not remaining focused on their drawbacks, the five clinging aggregates head toward future accumulation.

The craving that makes for further becoming, accompanied by passion & delight, relishing now here & now there, grows within him.

His bodily disturbances & mental disturbances grow. His bodily torments & mental torments grow. His bodily distresses & mental distresses grow. He is sensitive both to bodily stress & mental stress.

MN149

Craving for bodily existence is one of the most powerful currents of becoming. The body is not just matter; it is also a landscape of tensions shaped by past intentions. Every tightness, posture, and habit bears the imprint of past clinging.

Even without present craving, the body displays old karmic momentum, tight shoulders, compressed breathing, restless micro-movements, chronic holding. These are not random; they are the residues of intention, the history of grasping written into flesh and nerve.

When new craving arises, “I want” or “I don’t want,” its effect is immediate:

• The breath narrows.

• The abdomen pulls inward.

• The face tightens.

• The whole body contracts around a felt center

This contraction is becoming. It is the body preparing to “be someone” in relation to something. The moment craving touches the body, the sense of self thickens.

Practice means noticing this as it happens. Feeling how the body contracts when a craving appears and how it softens when the craving fades. Seeing bodily tension not as a flaw to be fixed, but as the energetic signature of becoming itself.

Craving in Feeling and Perception

Feeling is the ignition point of craving. Perception is the coloring that makes craving compelling.

A pleasant feeling appears—warmth, ease,  and satisfaction—and craving pulls toward it. An unpleasant feeling appears: tightness, heat, pressure, and aversion pushes away. A neutral feeling appears; flatness, fogginess, and ignorance drifts into distraction.

In each case, craving is woven into the mind’s automatic responses. But on deeper inspection, something more subtle is found: craving is embedded inside the feeling itself. A pleasant feeling already contains the seed of wanting more; an unpleasant feeling already contains the seed of pushing away.

Perception amplifies this. It overlays memory (“This always happens”), identity (“My pain”), and narrative (“Why can’t this stop?”). These layers turn a single sensation into a whole world of tension.

We must learn to distinguish:

• Raw sensation: as a mere vibration arising and ceasing.

• The perception around it as the labeling, shaping, and interpreting.

• Craving within it: as the surge of pull, push, or fog.

• The self built upon it, as the sense of “I who feels.”

When these layers are seen clearly, their power collapses. Feeling loses its stickiness. Perception loses its authority. Craving has nothing to hold. And the sense of “I” dissolves at the root.

Craving and Volition: Where Fabrications Begin

Disciples, I do not see even a single thing on account of which the taints arise and increase as on account of careless attention. I do not see even a single thing on account of which the taints do not arise, and the arisen taints are abandoned on account of careful attention.

Volition is where craving becomes action. But volition itself depends on attention. Before a volition forms, attention has already leaned toward something, and that leaning is guided by craving.

Careless attention attends to the attractive aspect of experience or to the story around it. Perception then distorts: seeing permanence in the impermanent, beauty in the fleeting, self in what is not self. Once perception distorts, volition follows. And once volition forms, the whole chain of karma ignites.

Thus, craving is not only in feelings, not only in the body; it is embedded inside attention itself.

To see craving at the level of attention is a profound stage of practice. It is the moment when the practitioner can feel how the mind inclines before thought, before intention, before identity even forms. It is the moment the chain can be cut before fabrication solidifies.

How Craving Inflames the Aggregates

Disciples, the eye is burning, forms are burning, eye-consciousness is burning, eye-contact is burning… Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion…

SN35.28

Craving does not sit outside experience; it permeates the aggregates themselves. When craving is active, each aggregate becomes dense, heated, and personalized.

• Form becomes “my body.”

• Feeling becomes “my comfort” or “my pain.”

• Perception becomes “my view of the world.”

• Formations become “my choices.”

• Consciousness becomes “my awareness.”

With craving, experience feels thick, heavy, resistant. Without craving, the same aggregates feel weightless, porous, and effortless.

Two kinds of karma fuel this:

• Old karma: The accumulated tendencies that give the body its shape, the mind its habits, the environment its conditions.

• New karma: The fresh fuel added when we identify, “This is mine,” “This is me,” “This is who I am.”

The fire burns because new fuel is continually added. When new fuel is not added, the fire naturally fades.

Cooling the Fire

Mindfulness does not eliminate old karma; it prevents the creation of new karma. When painful feelings, difficult moods, or restless energies arise, we learn to meet them as energetic movements, not personal burdens. This changes everything.

Tightness is no longer “my tension,” but the residue of past intention moving through. Fear is no longer “my anxiety” but a ripple in the field of becoming. Restlessness is no longer “my agitation” but an energetic momentum losing steam. This shift from identification to observation is the beginning of release.

Just as an oil lamp burns in dependence on oil and a wick… with the ending of fuel of craving, the Tathāgata is liberated.

SN44.9

The Tathagata does not say the flame is extinguished by force, suppression, or resistance. It goes out because there is no more fuel to burn.

Right Mindfulness reveals the fuel. Right Effort stops adding more. Right Concentration steadies the mind so the process can be seen. Right Wisdom understands the aggregates as not-self.

Together, these extinguish the fires of becoming, not by destruction, but by ceasing to feed them.

Contemplation Sutta Study