Since thoughts are the main distractors from the present moment during daily activities, why did the Buddha put an emphasis on watching the body postures?
When you walk, while you're walking, etc.
It seems like watching my thoughts helps me catch them.
Well, he didn't put any particular emphasis on watching the bodily postures.
For instance, saying that it's better than watching the mind.
But he put it first, and I think we can infer from that something important that it's
easier and more basic.
The body is always there, easy to find.
And so it's what most meditation teachers advise their students to focus on, because it's most obvious and most easy to put your attention on, to keep your attention on.
Thoughts are fleeting and hard to catch, especially for a beginner, and so they are better relegated to a later, more advanced, you know, somewhat more advanced.
Like let's say, for example, in an instruction of meditation, we would explain the body first,
And then the feelings and then the mind.
So by the time we got to our explanation of the mind, the meditator already had some basic idea of how to be mindful of something quite coarse and obvious, which is the body, watching the breath, watching the seated position.
That's much easier than having them watch the mind.
So no, I'd say he didn't put an emphasis on the body postures but he put them first and we shouldn't ignore that fact.
And when teaching the meditation to others or with ourselves when
determining a base to come back to in our meditation, to start at in our meditation.
We should find something bodily, something physical, because it's more obvious and more easy to base ourselves on it.
At any given time, you can watch the foot or you can watch the stomach or you can watch the body in whatever posture that it's in.
The mind is not like that.
The mind is fleeting and you can't say what thought is going to come next.
it's unstable in a way that the body is not, is more stable.