Right, Peter asking, I came across a teaching that involves concentrating on the 32 parts of the body individually.
Is this a method you would suggest?
If it is, would it be possible to create a video similar to the how to meditate videos?
I did a video explaining one way of understanding this sort of meditation.
It's the protective meditations.
This video I did a long time ago or some years ago about the protective meditations.
These four protective meditations.
And these are things that in addition to the practice of insight meditation, the practice of trying to see things clearly, you can use conceptual objects from time to time to support your practice of insight meditation.
So the first one is mindfulness of the Buddha.
Thinking about the Buddha, just remembering the Buddha will give you confidence.
The second one is mindfulness of
And the second one is, I don't know the order, but anyway, next one is loving kindness.
So the development, the cultivation of love for all beings.
So at the end of our meditations, we'll often send loving kindness and dedicate the merit to other people.
From time to time sending good thoughts to the person, people you love, to the people that you hate and so on, to try to level out your thoughts about them and to release and to be free from your thoughts of anger, your thoughts of attachment, your thoughts of worry about people.
The third one is asubha, which is this one that you're talking about where a person reflects on the disgusting nature of the body, repulsive nature of the body parts.
This helps to give up lust, helps us to give up our attachments to sexuality, our attachments to our bodies, attachments to food and so on.
And this helps just to give up greed in general.
So metta, loving-kindness meditation, to give up anger.
This one to give up lust or greed.
And the fourth one is death, mindfulness of death.
So from time to time to consider the inevitability of death and that we don't know whether death might come tomorrow or it might come in the next moment.
Reflecting on this from time to time helps to give you encouragement in the practice.
So this is how I would encourage people to use these meditations, because I don't teach a practice that includes intensive development of the 32 parts of the body.
You're welcome to undertake it.
I would recommend undertaking it with a qualified teacher, because given that those are conceptual objects, it's easy to get off track.
There's a story, I think, of some monks who developed this and became totally...
totally averse to their existence and to their life and wanted to kill themselves.
So for the wrong people it can be the wrong sort of meditation, or it can be a meditation that can have potential consequences that should be carefully observed by the teacher.
Now I don't teach this sort of meditation, so
I could think about doing a video for it, but I probably in the end would decide not to.
I might think to do a video for all four of them, but I did a video for all four of them, and it wasn't guided.
It was just explaining how to do it.
It might be nice to do a guided meditation including all four of them, or one for each of the four, with the emphasis on the fact that this isn't meant to be a full-time meditation.
It's just something that from time to time can be useful in various situations.
So we have a question about the 32 parts of the body.
Would we recommend it?
No, I don't have anything to say to that.