Sensing the Body as Space

Klein guided this slowly, often lying down, as an exploration rather than an exercise. Faithfully, in outline:

1. Lie down and relax completely first. Relaxation is the prerequisite, not the reward. Klein: “The relaxed body is a relaxed mind. In a relaxed body and mind you are open to receiving, available, welcoming, open to the openness.” Let the body release its grip into the support of the floor.
2. Sense, don’t picture. Bring attention into a region — say the right hand — and feel what is actually there: tingling, warmth, pulsing, weight. Drop the mental image of a hand (its shape and outline); stay only with bare sensation. “It is in sensing that we come to the right tuning.” 3. Don’t name or evaluate. Receive each sensation without labelling it pleasant/unpleasant or “stiff/relaxed.” Klein urged approaching the body “like a scientist without presuppositions, just open to the facts” — the same “art of listening,” now through touch and proprioception.
4. Let sensations lose their outline. Bare sensation, without a superimposed image, has no clear edge — it is just feeling appearing in awareness. Notice that the sensation does not, by itself, mark where “the body” stops.
5. Use slow, light gestures to reveal holding. Where Klein introduced gentle movement, it served to feel a contracted area and let it expand, never to stretch by force; the body is freed “from restriction” by gentle discernment, not disciplinary effort.
6. Sense the habitual space between ‘I’ and object. Klein pointed to the cramped gap we keep between the perceiver “in here” and what is sensed “out there.” As sensing deepens, attend to that gap and let it relax — the defensive distance softens.
7. Feel the expanded body. As the contraction releases, the body is felt as light, spacious, even transparent — “experiencing the body as light, space, and globality rather than dense matter.” Sensations and outer perceptions arise in one open field with no firm skin-line between inside and outside.
8. Rest as the awareness in which it appears. The body has, in Klein’s framing, become “a pointer to awareness”: “The purpose of all objects is to remind us of our real nature: awareness, consciousness.” Let body-sensation and perception float in the open awareness that has no edge or location, and abide there. (Sourcing note: quoted phrases — “the I-concept is only a contraction on the level of the body-mind…,” “the relaxed body is a relaxed mind…,” “it is in sensing that we come to the right tuning,” “the purpose of all objects is to remind us of our real nature” — are short, attributed renderings from The Ease of Being and Klein’s published Kashmir-yoga teaching; the protocol is a faithful description, not a reproduction.)

Jean Klein learned this somatic approach within the Kashmir Shaivite stream of his Indian training (alongside Atmananda’s direct path), and — as a physician and lifelong violinist — framed the body as an instrument to be tuned: “Our body is a beautiful musical instrument, like a Stradivarius, but it must be tuned.

We are the tuner.” He taught it for decades as the “yoga of listening” / “bodywork.” It passed to Francis Lucille and then to Rupert Spira, whose “Yoga Meditations” (exploring the body from the inside as permeable space) are an explicit descendant of Klein’s body approach.

Rupert Spira (Direct Path) — “Yoga Meditation,” exploring the body from within as permeable space.

• Kashmir Shaivism (tantra) — sensing subtle body / energy (the source stream Klein drew on).
• Vipassana body scan — sweeping attention through the body as bare sensation.
• Inner-body awareness (Eckhart Tolle) — feeling the “inner body” energy field.
• Yoga Nidra — lying-down rotation of consciousness through the body in deep relaxation.
• Focusing (Gendlin) — attending to the bodily “felt sense” without forcing.

Treating it like stretching. This is not gymnastics. Force and “achieving a pose” reinstate effort and the doer; the gesture is sensing and releasing, not exertion.

• Visualising the body instead of feeling it. A mental picture is exactly the body-image being relaxed. Drop the image; stay with raw sensation.
• Naming and judging. “This is tense / this is good” re-engages the evaluating mind. Receive sensation “like a scientist,” without labels.
• Skipping relaxation. Without genuine relaxation first, the contraction simply persists; Klein made the relaxed body the precondition.
• Chasing the “expanded body.” Striving for the spacious feeling re-creates the seeker. Let it arise on its own as holding releases.