Embodiment · “Being Precedes Having”
Yoga Meditation
To explore the body as it is actually felt from within — bare sensation rather than a remembered image — so that the felt boundary between self, body, and world relaxes and the body is sensed as open, transparent space within awareness.
Yoga Meditation in 5 lines: Let attention sink from thinking into feeling. Take a region of the body and notice the bare sensation (tingling, warmth, pressure), dropping the mental picture of its shape. Without the image, the sensation has no clear edge. Move slowly through the whole body this way, and look for the felt skin-line between “inside” and “outside” — finding none. Rest as the open, knowing space in which all sensation and perception appear.
What it is
Spira’s Yoga Meditations are somatic contemplations: not physical postures, but a guided exploration of the body as it is actually experienced from the inside — pure sensation — rather than as the solid, bounded object we imagine it to be.
(He uses “yoga” in its root sense of union.) The premise is that most of our sense of being a separate self is built not only from thought but from a felt body-image: a tight, contoured “me” located inside a skin, looking out at a world.
This practice meets that felt sense directly. By bringing relaxed attention into the raw sensations of the body, the rigid conceptual outline softens; in Spira’s words, “the borders between our self and the object, other or world dissolve, until we can no longer locate ourselves as someone, somewhere,” and the body comes to be felt “as made of permeable space, in direct contact with everyone and everything.” Where the awareness practices work with thought, this one works with feeling-perception, gently shifting state and self-sense through the body.
It operationalizes the recognition of a deeper self beneath the contracted me (All Is One) and the felt sense of oneness (All Is One).
The Method
Spira guides this as a slow, spacious contemplation. Faithfully, in outline:
- Settle and let attention sink into the body. Sit or lie comfortably. Let attention drop from thinking into sensing. The field of this meditation is “bodily sensations and perception, rather than thought.”
- Feel a sensation as it actually is, not as an image. Choose a region — say, the hands. Notice that what is actually present is a tingling, warmth, or pressure — a bare sensation. The familiar picture of a hand (shape, size, outline) is a thought added on top. Stay with the raw sensation, dropping the image.
- Let the sensation lose its outline. Without a superimposed image, a sensation has no clear edge — it is just feeling appearing in awareness. Spira invites you to notice that the sensation does not, by itself, define a border where “the body” ends.
- Move slowly through the whole body. Visit each region — feet, legs, torso, arms, face — meeting each as bare sensation with no conceptual shape. Areas that were “numb” or absent in the body-image are simply spaces with no current sensation, not solid parts.
- Notice there is no felt skin-line between inside and outside. Examine the supposed boundary between the body’s sensation and the perceptions of sound, light, and space “outside.” Spira reports that, felt directly, “the well-defined borders or contours that seem to separate the body from others and the environment are seen and experienced to be non-existent.”
- Let the body be felt as open, transparent space. As the conceptual outline relaxes, the body is felt as “permeable space, in direct contact with everyone and everything” — sensations and perceptions arising in one seamless field of awareness, with no inside/outside division.
- Rest as the knowing in which it all appears. The practice is “revealed as a simple abidance as the knowing presence that we are”: sensations and perceptions come and go within an awareness that itself has no location or edge. Rest there. (Sourcing note: quoted phrases — “the borders between our self and the object… dissolve,” “permeable space, in direct contact with everyone and everything,” “a simple abidance as the knowing presence that we are” — are short, attributed renderings from Spira’s published Yoga Meditation descriptions and talks; the protocol is a faithful description, not a reproduction.)
Source & Lineage
Rupert Spira’s Yoga Meditations descend from the “body approach” of Jean Klein (a French Direct-Path teacher and student of Atmananda’s lineage), transmitted to Spira via Francis Lucille, who studied with Klein.
Klein, himself influenced by Kashmir Shaivism’s tantric somatics and by his background in music and medicine, taught a non-postural “bodywork” of feeling the body from within rather than imposing shapes on it. Spira adapted this into his “Yoga Meditations,” complementing his thought-based contemplations with a felt, somatic route to the same recognition.
The Traditions' versions
Vipassana body scan — sweeping attention through the body sensing bare sensation.
- Inner-body awareness (Eckhart Tolle) — feeling the “inner body” energy field.
- Kashmir Shaivism — somatic tantric attention to sensation and the gaps within it.
- Focusing (Gendlin) — attending to the bodily “felt sense.”
- Bliss-body / koshic meditations — dwelling in the subtle felt body.
- Loch Kelly’s “embodied awakening” — locating awareness as open, boundaryless space.
Common refinements
Visualizing instead of feeling. The practice is to feel bare sensation, not to picture body parts. The moment you see a shape, you’re back in the image — return to raw feeling.
- Forcing the boundary to dissolve. The dissolving is noticed, not manufactured. Striving for a “boundaryless” experience re-tightens the self. Stay with honest sensation and let it happen on its own.
- Rushing. The shift depends on slow, patient attention; sweeping through quickly keeps the conceptual body intact.
- Treating “permeable space” as a belief to assert. Keep it experiential — feel what is actually here.
- Ignoring rising emotion. Body work can surface stored feeling; meet it gently rather than pushing through (see Safety).