With our toolbox, we have a lot of tools, and some of them are not going to fit perfectly for each one of you. So that's nice to remember. If you feel you can't do the basic awareness practice that well, don't get too worried about it, work on the techniques that you can do well. Allow the awareness practice to come along on the side, so to speak. At times though, it can be helpful, make the effort to slow down, try to be very mindful. Many years ago in order to make that effort in my walking meditation, I went so slow, really slow, I went so slow that in thirty minutes I walked one length. When my leg was up, and it was moving, I was trying every bit to feel every single muscle, and it would take three minutes to get one foot over, three minutes for the other. It was an interesting experiment.
I don't do it any more, because I have more interest, I have more awareness of my walking now, but I found it was very interesting to force myself to slow down, to really see if I can watch these muscles move so slightly. Can I hold my leg in the air even for that amount of time, slowly moving it, which is also quite difficult. What I learned from it, was more body awareness. And this is what we often stress to many of you who don't have enough body awareness, try to work more on it, try to develop more body awareness.
The body is very neutral, this is something very nice, when I talk the first night in the regular retreat about the fact that the breath is a neutral object, the body is neutral also. Now even if the arm gets cut off, the arm is still neutral, our reaction in the mind might be filled with pain and anguish and fear and whatever, but the arm is still neutral, the body is still neutral. This whole business about working with Unpleasant Physical Sensations is be able to see more that sensations are just sensations. The more we can see this, the more we have less reaction in our mind towards it. More body awareness helps us greatly, to be very objective with what is happening to the body.
Now if we can be more objective with our physical sensations, it carries over into our hearing, into our sight, into our tasting, into our smelling. So this is all part of the practice, can we be more objective with our sight, with our hearing, and so on? Starting with the body, it's easier to be objective. When we have sight, hearing, etc. it's not so easy. Often what happens in a retreat like this; somebody snores, someone else is kept awake in the night, they don't get much sleep, they are angry all during the night, they come into the interview with this anger. Fine, we try to explain to them, as they have probably experienced themselves, that they are able to sleep on the train going to Bangkok, ch-ch-chck-ch-ch-chck, with all the noise on the train and they are able to sleep, yet with somebody snoring they can't sleep. We point out to them that there is one big difference, that it is a human being making the noise, it's not a train, not a machine. Most people are not so equanimous with human beings, compared with machinery. It can be noisier on that train, but people will go to sleep, they won't get angry at the train. Same with the eye contact, knowing that there is this person right over in that bed snoring or right above me, that eye contact actually makes thoughts not so objective. So being more objective with your body and putting it over into your eye contact, your ear contact and so on, this will help you a lot with many aversions, many desires and so on.