This is your resting spot for a healing awareness: this awareness that suffuses the body, allows the energy in the mind to move in ways that feel right. You allow this healing awareness to have the space it needs to do the healing work it needs to do. You make this your home base.

"Like the whole issue of inhabiting your body: We know that ultimately you have to let go of your attachment to the body, but in the meantime, learn how to inhabit it purposely. Be fully aware of the whole body. This is part of the path. Breathe into the body. Think of the whole body breathing. Every cell in the body, your whole nervous system, is engaged in the flow of energy. Think about that. Then look at what sensations you have in the body that would correspond to that. Look at whatever sensations are blocking that sensation. In other words, there may be tightness here, tightness there, that’s getting in the way of the sense of flow in the body. Well, relax the tightness. As long as you’re going to identify with something, identify with this sense of the whole body, inhabit the whole body, and then learn how to stay there.

What usually happens is that we inhabit part of the body for a while, then we run off to something else. If you could take a picture of your sense of your self, it would be like an amoeba oozing around, or like a reflection skittering across the water — all very erratic. And because it’s so erratic, you can’t really observe it. You need to give it a good place to stay for a longer time so that you can start observing: What is it to inhabit the body? What is it to identify with the body? Learn to get some use out of that habit. If you’re with the body, then when thoughts come, you have a better place to stay where you can just watch the thoughts come and go, and not get involved. You see people saying other things and it goes right past you. It doesn’t have to get sucked in.

Most of us have a mind like a vacuum cleaner. It picks up all the dirt in the room and leaves all the good things behind. That’s because it’s out there hungry. But if it’s in here inhabiting the body, it’s not hungry anymore. It’s not sucking up the dirt. It’s fully inhabiting the body. You begin to notice that the words people say, the things they do, just go past, past, past. You notice them but you don’t get involved. You don’t put yourself in the line of fire, and you don’t run with them. You have no inner emptiness that would create the vacuum that would suck them in. This puts you in a position of strength.

In this way, you take this occasional habit you have of inhabiting your body, having a sense of identifying with the body, and you put it to good use. You’re deliberate about it. It gives you a place to take a stand and watch your thoughts and gain a better sense of what’s the time and place for a particular kind of thinking.

In other words, an important lesson in meditation is being more deliberate in what you do. Be more deliberate in your thinking. Be more deliberate in how you inhabit your body. Gain a sense of time and place, so that your thinking becomes right thinking, just like right speech. You think what’s true. You think what’s beneficial, when it’s beneficial. Otherwise, you drop it.

That way, when the time comes that you really do have to think through difficult problems, the mind has the strength it needs. It hasn’t been worn down by all its random, chaotic thoughts, the random ways you inhabit the body, inhabit the breath. Keep your grounding here as much as you can because this is your resting spot for a healing awareness: this awareness that suffuses the body, allows the energy in the mind to move in ways that feel right. You allow this healing awareness to have the space it needs to do the healing work it needs to do. You make this your home base."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Mind Control"