Stillness Speaks Book Previews

How Bodyfulness, Kindness Free Us? Christian Dillo Zen Practice

by Sanjiv Manifest | May 29, 2025

bodyfulness, kindness & path of awakening: “… The motivation to do this practice continuously…is maintained through savoring how being present increases our sense of aliveness, joy, and realness …” …

“… Then we contemplated, as the crux of this path {of awakening}, the shift from the contents of mind to the field of mind and identified three practices to facilitate this shift: bodyfulness, kindness, and presence.” ~ Christian Dillo

What is bodyfulness? … and what does it have to do with … freedom … or liberation from suffering … or aliveness … or awakening ?

Turns out, quite a lot ….

In The Path of Aliveness: A Contemporary Zen Approach to Awakening Body and Mind, Zen teacher Christian Dillo posits that bodyfulness is one of three practices that facilitates a transformation in us … that helps us cultivate what he calls the path of aliveness … as underscored by Norman Fischer who says :

“… Christian Dillo astutely provides intelligent explanations and detailed practical examples to show us how Zen Buddhism can be, and perhaps always has been, a path to a luminously embodied sense of being alive …” …

As part of exploring this path of aliveness – which in turn, addresses bodyfulness – Dillo invites us to drop beneath our conditioned responses—beneath the swirl of thoughts—and meet life as it unfolds through sensation, with honesty and warmth. He proposes that transformation is not merely conceptual, but embodied: felt, lived, and practiced.

So in today’s post—Part 1 of a multi-part series—we explore the first two of Dillo’s three path practices to cultivating the path of liberation: bodyfulness and kindness. These practices open a doorway to what Dillo calls the field of mind—an intimate, nonresistant awareness that holds all experience without judgment.

Dillo speaks to something deep and often unnamed in us—the innermost request to live a richer, more aligned life: “Being fully alive is my phrase to give voice to the inmost request … a way to fulfill our wish to live a life that is richer, deeper, more satisfying, and more aligned with our highest intentions.”

For Dillo, this aliveness isn’t found by bypassing our difficulties, but by softening into them with courage and care.

For him, bodyfulness is a return to sensation … and kindness is a warming of the field … together, they dissolve the subtle contraction of the self and return us to – or deepen our – aliveness.

Part 2 will focus on the third practice : presence.

This post is part of our ongoing Shambhala Publications series that offers substantive previews of selections from Shambhala Publications new and classic titles …

All italicized text here is adapted from The Path of Aliveness: A Contemporary Zen Approach to Awakening Body and Mind, © 2022 by Christian Dillo. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.

You can purchase the book at Shambhala Publications or Amazon.

Bodyfulness, Kindness, Presence

Cultivating a path depends on locating oneself more and more in the always already present field of mind, exploring the nuances of awareness and nonreactivity that are its hallmarks and potentials. In this chapter I will present three path practices that can help us with this cultivation: bodyfulness, kindness, and presence.

Bodyfulness

We’ve already discussed bodyfulness, but now let’s look at it from the perspective of how it can become a doorway to intimacy with the field of mind and therefore to freedom from suffering. A first step in this direction is to examine the relationship between bodyfulness and thinking. As I noted earlier in relation to Suzuki Roshi’s meditation instruction “don’t invite your thoughts to tea,” to quiet the mind does not mean to stop the flow of its contents. When attention, instead of being glued to thinking, widens into a field that hosts the whole realm of sensation, we discover a quiet mind in the midst of our thoughts. And through that, thoughts tend to quiet down or stop by themselves.

As thoughts recede, the mind pervades the body—experienced as proprioceptive stirrings, tingles, tensions, prickles, and flows and undergirded and penetrated by the basic buzz and joy of aliveness. When we realize this buzz of aliveness as the always-present background to any and all sensations, we have discovered the feel of the field of mind.

In actual practice, it may take several steps to become bodyful and open ourselves to the field of mind. First you notice the discursive mind’s thick, clogged quality. You step back from this and ask yourself, What am I feeling? Using the word feeling directs attention to the sensation level. The answer might be I’m feeling angry or I’m feeling hungry, but that’s actually still an interpretation of a set of sensations. So the next step can be to ask, How am I feeling this anger/hunger in the body? Now you find your attention traveling to various sensation centers: a pounding heart, clenched fists, heat rising to the head, a stomach that feels hollow, a lightheadedness, and so on.

To deepen your bodyfulness even further, you can ask, How does this feel exactly in my body? How is it changing from moment to moment? With these kinds of questions, you’re attending to an intricacy of sensation—the unnamed and sometimes unnamable energies of the body. Over time, you can get used to just presencing them attentionally.

Sometimes, when our aversion to something is deeply ingrained, it can be very difficult to jump straight to bodyfulness. Though we may wish to “open the hand of thought”—to use a helpful teaching image from the Japanese Zen teacher Uchiyama Roshi—the “hand” can feel impossibly stiff. For this reason, when my students complain about pain in their sitting practice, I often encourage them to take an intermediary step by using an antidotal concept. I ask them to turn their attention toward the pain and speak to the sensations: Wow, this is interesting. In this way, one can inject curiosity into any and all challenging experiences.

Once we have coaxed the mind into giving up its aversive self-position, we can then let go of the antidotal reframe and meet the painful sensation with an unstructured, field-like openness. In that openness, what was pain is not “pain” anymore, and neither is it “interesting”; instead it just is what it is without any form of interpretation.

The self-position we habitually retreat into is, among other things, a protective mechanism; it shields us from feeling vulnerable. Vulnerability is the cousin of bodyful openness. There is no practice of bodyfulness without feeling vulnerable. For example, when I’m moved to tears, I may be afraid that I will be ridiculed or humiliated. When I feel anxious, I may be afraid others will judge me as weak. To protect ourselves, we often prefer a closed, thickened, disembodied mind over an open and bodyful one—even though this causes us and others an enormous amount of suffering. To step out of this vicious cycle, it is helpful to complement the practice of bodyful openness with the practice of kindness. Kindness functions as an antidote to the self-aggressive tendency that resists or even combats the sensations that are already the truth of our experience.

Kindness

My experiential definition of the practice of kindness is “making space and adding a little bit of warmth.” Or actually, a lot of warmth! But we can allow ourselves to proceed slowly. This slowness in itself is an expression of kindness. It is useful to understand kindness as a spectrum ranging from tolerating and accepting to welcoming and maybe and hopefully loving our experience on the sensation level as it is.

We have already established that making space for our painful sensations is a counter-instinctual practice. So, at first, all we might be able to muster is to tolerate our pain—maybe rather begrudgingly. However, when we are tolerant of our unpleasant sensations, meaning we see ourselves as willing and able to bear them, it is already a transformation, a turning toward. This is fundamentally different from struggling against the sensations, trying to run away from them, or becoming paralyzed in their presence—the biological fight, flight, or freeze reactions.

The next counter-instinctual step up from tolerating is to accept our sensations. Accepting means to receive and acknowledge what is already the case. We might find that the still slightly resentful attitude present in tolerance is unnecessary, and we can actually allow the sensations to be what they are with a genuinely accepting mind. Obviously, this is difficult at first, because some of these intense sensations are precisely what we haven’t been wanting to feel all of our lives. So, at times, we may fall back into resistance and need to begin again with first tolerating and then accepting. Watching ourselves getting caught in reactivity again and again needs our kind attitude as well. Eventually, we will feel a tremendous release; we can allow ourselves to stop the subtle struggle of only tolerating without yet fully accepting. We can feel how much energy was bound up in that struggle.

Now we are at the juncture of being able to add a little bit of warmth. What would it feel like to actually welcome our heretofore unwanted, then tolerated, and now accepted sensations? What would it feel like to shift from a self-aggressive stance to a warm, actively welcoming mind field? Even if we just practice with the sensation of our breath, Suzuki Roshi points out that just “to follow your breath doesn’t make sense.” He continues, “If you are very kind with your breathing, then, one [breath] after another, you will have a refreshed warm feeling in your zazen. . . . And when you have a warm feeling in your practice, that is a good example of the great mercy of Buddha.” The word buddha doesn’t refer to anything external. It is the nirvanic quality of our own minds—not cool and aloof, but warm and engaged.

To welcome means to actively say yes to what is. When we realize that the sensations manifesting in our awareness right now are always already the truth of our experience, we can genuinely want to have both our enjoyable and challenging experiences.

While, in the future, we might be able to change certain habits in our lives and lessen the frequency of painful experiencing, right this moment, just now, our experience is what it is. It’s too late to prevent the sensations that have already arisen. So why not welcome them? Saying yes to them as the truth of our experience doesn’t mean we have to say yes on the behavioral level. The spiritual teacher A. H. Almaas gives the wonderful example of eating a rotten peach. To make space for and welcome the rotten taste in your mouth, which cannot be changed once you have bitten into it, doesn’t mean you are obligated to continue eating the peach.

The more we see that it is a waste of energy to fight, run away from, or deny the truth of our experience, the more we make peace with our existence as it is. This peace, which is the result of releasing ourselves from reactivity, can flower into love. Love is such a supercharged and often idealized concept—both romantically and spiritually. And that’s understandable, because when love is truly actualized, it really is a transcending experience. But if we want to practice it—and that’s what I am emphasizing in this book—then it is important to just let it emerge, to let it grace our process of being kind. Usually, we cannot begin with loving our most feared, painful, and intense sensations. Instead, we begin with noticing and making space for them, we learn to tolerate and accept them, then we welcome them more and more often with a yes where there used to be a rigid or subtle no. Eventually, we may find that it’s actually possible to love them—the welcoming yes finally flowers into love. Before we’ve integrated our so-called negative feelings in this way—on the sensation level—we don’t truly love ourselves; we only love an image of ourselves.

Without the loving warmth of kindness, the practice of nonreactivity can remain rather sterile. Though we may discover a spacious, field-like awareness, we can remain somewhat aloof, stuck in only tolerating experiential intensity instead of moving into truly accepting and welcoming our experience as it is. When we only notice our experience rather than warmly embracing it, we tend to subtly perpetuate the self-position that divides us from ourselves. Many Buddhist mindfulness instructions emphasize the mere attentional nonthinking noticing of sensations, sometimes aided by naming, or “labeling” as it is commonly called. The practice of kindness deepens this nonreactive noticing by bringing additional dimensions of openness to those sensations we want to experience the least. In this way, we recognize them as fully belonging to our aliveness.

~ Christian Dillo

Here’s a “haiku” like summation of Dillo’s first two practices:

Beneath thought, sensation.
Beneath resistance, kindness.
This is the path:
to feel, to soften,
to be.

Stay tuned for the 3rd path practice of Presence … in the next part of this ongoing Shambhala Publications series …

All italicized text here is adapted from The Path of Aliveness: A Contemporary Zen Approach to Awakening Body and Mind, © 2022 by Christian Dillo. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.

You can purchase the book at Shambhala Publications or Amazon.