08/09/2025
This is a brilliant piece by my teacher and mentor Mimi Kuo Deemer of you feel like a deep dive into mind body connection - I’ll share it on my next newsletter with my thoughts on it but it was illuminating x
How important is the body in Buddhist teachings? The question is a good one, as mindfulness has landed primarily in the domain of a head-centered practice, especially in the West. Some of the most popular mindfulness platforms, such as Headspace and Healthy Minds, reinforce this distinction. The reasons for this are also understandable: why call something mindfulness if it’s not to do with the mind? And yet, in the Buddha’s original teachings on mindfulness, the body is where the practice of liberation begins—as well as where it ends.
Let’s consider why this question persists, and how we can draw mindfulness out of the head and back into the body, where much of our experience unfolds.
Lost in Translation?
In the Buddhist text The Establishment of Mindfulness (Satipaṭṭhāna), it is the body, not the thoughts or emotions, which is the first of four foundational teachings. Sati—translated as mindfulness—literally means memory or recollection, a calling back to the wholeness of a body that feels, breathes, and remembers its fundamental changing nature. Yet in Western scholarship, sati became primarily associated with mental discipline.
Why this head-heavy focus? Part of the answer lies in history. When 19th-century scholars like T.W. Rhys Davids, who coined the term mindfulness, first rendered Pali texts into English, their work was influenced by colonial-era frameworks that typically prioritized intellect over embodiment. For the Enlightenment-era thinker, the reasoning mind was seen as separate from the mechanical, passive body. Scholars reframed Eastern concepts through a Western lens, privileging intellect over somatic wisdom.
In the West, we also have a bifurcated understanding of heart and mind: the heart is emotional and therefore less trustworthy than the rational mind. This preference likely skewed standard translations of another key term in mindfulness and Buddhist teachings: citta.
Citta—often translated as mind, but better understood as heart-mind— is the ground of experience: our body, emotions, and the luminous space where wisdom and compassion awaken. It illuminates our entire somatic field, and is where our potential for the liberating qualities of wisdom and compassion opens us to freedom. By only emphasizing our mind in mindfulness, we risk losing this connection to the heart’s central purpose and potential. We may also lessen the body’s importance, which is where the heart and the vast network of our nervous system abides.
Inroads in neuroscience are now shifting to a more complex understanding of the relationship between the heart and mind. For example, studies have shown the heart is far more than a pump; with its own extensive neural network consisting of about 40,000 brain-like neurons, it sends more messages to the brain than vice versa1. In other words, the heart is informing how and what we think in far more ways than we may give it credit for.
The Buddhist teacher Ajahn Sucitto prefers heart as the translation of citta. It is also what I find most valuable. Heart feels more embodied than head. When I meditate, I also notice my heart’s capacity for meeting experience is far more nuanced and sensitive than my data-filled brain.
Mindfully Aware? Or Receptively Present?
In the Buddha’s instructions on Mindfulness of Breathing (Ānāpānasati Sutta), we have another opportunity to establish a more body-focused rather than head-centered experience. This is through a reframing of how we meet bodily life, including thoughts and emotions.
Many modern interpretations of this text, including those by teachers like Jon Kabat-Zinn and Thích Nhất Hạnh, frame the practice of mindful breathing as cultivating awareness—a term that, while valuable, leans toward cognitive observation. Thích Nhất Hạnh’s well-known guidance, for example, offers:
“Breathing in, I am aware of my whole body... Breathing out, I am aware of my whole body... Breathing in, I am aware of my mind... Breathing out, I am aware of my mind.”
This approach helps us become present to bodily sensations and mental states through attention. Yet awareness, as the Cambridge Dictionary defines it, emphasizes “knowledge or understanding based on information,” which can subtly reinforce a top-down dynamic—the mind observes the body rather than fully inhabiting it.
The Pali term paṭisaṃvedī, however—which is the original word used for “awareness”—invites a different engagement. Composed of paṭi (to return) and saṃvedī (one who feels or perceives), it evokes a felt, participatory presence—direct experiencing rather than detached observation.
Contemporary teachers like Kabat-Zinn adapted terms such as paṭisaṃvedī for secular, scientifically leaning audiences. Likewise, Thích Nhất Hạnh—who was experiential in his choice of language and often emphasized the accessibility of Buddhist teachings—also chose to use awareness.
A translation by the respected Buddhist monk Ajahn Sucitto reflects a return to the term’s roots in classical Buddhism. His rendering of the same sutta replaces aware with sensitive to:
“Breathe in fully and completely sensitive to the entire body… Breathe out fully and completely sensitive to the entire body... Breathe in fully and completely sensitive to heart... Breathe out fully and completely sensitive to heart.”
The difference is subtle but profound. Where awareness can feel like a mental checkpoint, sensitive to grounds us in the living texture of experience—a quality central to the Buddha’s original teachings.
I’ve witnessed the power of this shift. At the end of a qigong and mindfulness retreat, a mindfulness teacher confessed to me that she had never felt so embodied. It led her to reconsider how to teach—moving from a head-centered approach to one rooted in the body.
Meeting the Embodied Grip
When we replace awareness with sensitivity, we’re not just changing words—we’re shifting how we meet experience itself. This shift in terminology can radically transform meditation. Why? Because every thought, emotion, or sensation that enters our mind and heart has an embodied grip: the restless agitation of worry, the whirlpool of doubt, the hardening of anger and rage. Often, these physical expressions of experience go unresolved, leaving many of us feeling like we’re doing lots of practice but not much changes for the good.
The problem, as Ajahn Sucitto once observed in an email exchange, is that “Meditators tend to leave out the body, and qigong people tend to leave out the heart. This results in a gap that makes it harder to look after our peace of mind.” The answer is to attend to both. When the heart is flooded with distress, the body tightens and constricts, making it difficult to summon goodwill or compassion. Likewise, a depleted body strains the heart’s capacity for steadiness.
The agitation generated by distress cannot be resolved through mental observation alone. Intellectual understanding and willpower are not enough. We must also tend to the body’s whispers—the clenched jaw, the shallow breath—before they become shouts.
The key is to start with the body’s energies, not the mind’s commentary. This can be done through quiet sitting, breathing, walking, and movement. For me—as for Ajahn Sucitto—qigong has played an indispensable role in attending to the body first. Unlike passive observation, qigong’s meditative movements invite the mind to settle into the body’s rhythms—not just noticing sensations, but coaxing their unfolding. As an energy practice and branch of Chinese medicine, qigong does more than cultivate awareness; it directly nurtures the organ and meridian systems, releasing stagnation where mental focus alone cannot reach. This physiological engagement reshapes our capacity for sensitivity, turning abstract concepts like balance into lived experience. When the body’s intelligence awakens this way, the mind’s turbulence naturally quietens—not through force, but through the body’s innate orientation toward wholeness.
Where Liberation Begins and Ends
The body is not just the vehicle to liberation—it is the path itself. When we can learn to cultivate greater sensitivity and heart-focused attention, mindfulness becomes less about thinking and more about remembering—recollecting ourselves into wholeness, breath by breath, sensation by sensation. In that remembering, we rediscover what’s always been here: a body that breathes, a heart that knows, and the Earth beneath our feet—steady, grounded, and waiting.
Footnote:
1. Alshami, A: Pain: Is It All in the Brain or the Heart? in National Institute of Medicine (2019).
(This piece was originally published on Commune's 'Commusings'. I've included the full text here, with a link to the original piece in the comments below. )
