Floating Without A Body

Begin by finding the edges of your body. And then, slowly, let them go.

The edges of the body are not as definite as they seem. The skin is a boundary but a permeable one. Heat passes through it. Cold passes through it. Touch and pressure and electricity and sound all move through the boundary we call skin as though it were suggestion rather than wall. The body's edges have always been partly open. Notice this.

The breath is already doing something useful here. Each exhale is a small release of boundary. Breathe out and feel the body's edge soften slightly at the perimeter. Not disappear. Soften. The muscles at the surface releasing their grip on the shape they typically hold.

The weight is the first thing to release. When the body releases its weight into whatever surface supports it, the registration of where the body ends and the surface begins becomes ambiguous. The floor or bed or chair stops being a separate object and becomes an extension of the support the body requires. Gravity is still present. But the effort against gravity has paused.

Let the arms go. Not a direction. An undirecting. The arms cease to be directed and become simply parts of the field. The same with the legs. The same with the head, which is the most controlled thing, the thing we never fully release, the thing that stays slightly above the surface even when the body is lying flat.

Lower the head. Let the neck use the support. Now the skull is resting and the thought that lives in the skull can become less architectural. Less constructed. The thinking that required a head in a particular position at a particular height above the ground , that thinking can soften.

Now. The interior. The felt sense of the body from inside is different from the body as seen from outside. From inside, the body is not a shape. It is a field. A set of sensations with varying intensities distributed in space. Some areas warm. Some areas quiet. Some areas still carrying the residue of the day, tightness or fatigue or the particular carrying of something not yet put down.

Let the field expand slightly beyond the skin. Not a technique. A permission. The felt sense of the body is not actually skin-bounded. The nervous system's awareness extends slightly into the space around the body. Let it expand now. The body becoming a larger soft territory, the edges further out, softer, more like atmosphere than surface.

floating is not the absence of ground. It is the absence of the effortful relationship with ground. You are not weightless. You are weightless in your experience of weight. The body held, completely, by what is beneath it. Nothing needing to brace against falling because falling has been surrendered to.

The consciousness that remains when the body has released its shape , what is that? Not nothing. Not sleep. Something that rests at the edge of both. Aware without object. Present without position.

Let it be formless for this breath. This one.

The body is held. The body knows how to rest. You are not required to be a particular shape right now.

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