Adventures in Awareness Dr Shamil Chandaria: The body as a full path to awakening
Dec 17, 2025
Dr. Shamil Chandaria, a seasoned researcher at Oxford specializing in consciousness and meditation, shares his insights on utilizing the energy body for awakening. He discusses joyful practices that blend shamatha and vipassana for deeper awareness and emotional self-liberation. Shamil emphasizes the importance of bodily awareness, using techniques like auto-vipassana to effortlessly digest emotions. He advocates for daily practice and the role of contraction as an opportunity for mindfulness. His approach merges ancient contemplative traditions with modern neuroscience, making the journey both enlightening and accessible.
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Use Body Energy As A Meditation Object
- Do use the body’s energy and the feeling of release as a shamatha object to stabilize attention.
- Combine that joyful energetic focus with vipassana to unwind patterns and transform emotions into relief and pleasure.
Joy Can Be Path And Fruit
- Insight: Tuning into purification joy accelerates both concentration and insight on the path.
- The felt sense of self-liberation (chit-ananda) becomes both the path and the fruit of practice.
Make The Body Your Refuge
- Do make the body your primary refuge by bringing awareness into the whole body during daily life and meditation.
- When emotions arise, hold them as energy in the body and welcome them rather than avoiding or pushing away.