First morning instructions- inviting the body to be available to attention.

Body as a construct. On touch (phassa) and touching and being touched (phusati). Differing senses create a different relationship - 'seeing', 'hearing' and 'touching' as analogies for attending to something create a different kind of relationship to ourselves. The visual is overdetermined, often at the expense of touch. Feeling the body as an experience of touch rather than being 'observed'.'.

reflections on the first full day of practice

The challenge of attending and being mindful. Mindfulness (sati) and Attention (manasikāra) are different things. Attention comes in two forms: voluntary and involuntary attention.

“As you call into the first, so the first answers’ How to approach your mediation object

Practicing resting in and receiving the loving attention of a loving figure.

Kafka and the girl with a lost doll. Satipaṭṭhāna and Suttas in general – a little history. Satipaṭṭhāna as a cartography of human expericence: the 'raw materials' to establish mindfulness in. (This is not the satipaṭṭhāna as exercise but their use as a map of the somatic, hedonic, affective and discursive aspects of mind.) This orientation helps greatly with the actual practice of satipatthana exercises outline elsewhere.

Morning Instructions day 4.