"Now, lady, what are fabrications?"

"These three fabrications, friend Visakha: bodily fabrications, verbal fabrications, & mental fabrications."

"But what are bodily fabrications? What are verbal fabrications? What are mental fabrications?"

"In-&-out breaths are bodily fabrications. Directed thought & evaluation are verbal fabrications. Perceptions & feelings are mental fabrications."

—Culavedella Sutta, MN44 

 

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The above quotation comes from a Buddhist scripture. It’s a conversation between Dhammadinna, who was the foremost among the Buddha’s nun disciples, and the layman Visakha. Dhammadinna is sharing the Buddha’s teaching on the three “fabrications,” or ways we shape our experience: namely, through our bodily, verbal, and mental activity.

According to this teaching, we influence our present-moment experience through the way we breathe (this is bodily fabrication); through the way we talk to ourselves (verbal fabrication, which is technically referred to as “directed thought and evaluation”); and through our perceptions and feelings (mental fabrication).

My question—and maybe yours as well!—is: How can I perform these three activities so that they shape my experience in a way that supports me, nourishes me, brings me ease and insight?

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Meditation is the ideal environment to train our three modes of fabrication. It all starts with the breath, our bodily fabrication. How we breathe influences how we experience the body; breathing conditions our sense of body-ness. So, if we want to be able to inhabit our bodies with ease and skill, it’s essential that we’re breathing in a conducive way!

If we’re tight and tense, we want to let the breath relax us; if we’re dull and sleepy, we can let it energize us. We can play with the breath—we can adjust the inhale, the exhale, or both the inhale and exhale, fine-tuning them to be more deep or shallow, fast or slow, heavy or light. As we do this, we are refining our “bodily fabrication”—shaping how we experience the body by engaging with the breath.

The second way we shape our experience is through our internal speech (verbal fabrication). We’re always talking to ourselves; often many conversations are happening at the same time! In meditation, we can start to peel away the unnecessary (and often detrimental) layers of commentary. In the context of breath meditation, we can guide our inner speech in the direction of the breath. We’re “directing thought and evaluation” toward our breathing by asking questions: “What is the breath like right now? Where does the breath feel good, solid, reliable? Can I spread that sensation elsewhere? Where am I feeling tension or discomfort? Can I bring a soothing breath-energy there?”

The Buddha instructed his students to bring attention to the breathing body “in and of itself”—not to the narratives about how it relates to the outside world, but just as it is on its own, right here and now. So, we’re directing our internal chatter toward this breathing body, evaluating its present-moment qualities, and cultivating interest in how the relevant phenomena (inhale and exhale, bodily sensations, mental formations, and so on) are arising and passing away. This use of our verbal faculty supports our focused absorption in the bodily experience.

The third way we shape our reality is through mental fabrication. This encompasses our feelings and perceptions. When we talk about feelings in this context, we’re simply referring to pleasant, unpleasant, and neither-pleasant-nor-unpleasant feelings. Just these three feeling tones: “Am I feeling positive, negative, or neutral?” In the context of our breath meditation, we want the experience to be pleasant, so we make whatever adjustments are appropriate. We let the breath be refreshing, easeful, nourishing. If our bodily experience is pleasant, we’ll be much more likely to want to hang out there. In other words, if we’re finding “nourishment” in this breathing body, we’re less likely to need to look outside for things to “feed” on, whether it’s over-eating, over-imbibing, over-working, over-surfing-the-web, and on and on.

And as for perceptions (the second component of mental fabrication), we’re working with our mental images and labels. We have power over how we perceive our experience, and so we want to leverage that power. Instead of perceiving the breath as merely the air molecules coming in and out of the respiratory tract, we can choose to perceive it as a whole-body energy flow. We can give it color and texture. We can imagine the breath as rivers that flow into the ocean of the torso on the inhale and stream out the limbs on the exhale. Or we can imagine the body as a sponge, with pores spanning front to back, side to side, top to bottom, each pore letting the breath in and out. We want to use whatever images are useful in making the experience whole-bodied.

Similarly, we can apply labels to our experience to help keep us grounded in the breath. For instance, we can label the breath itself by internally whispering “breathing” as we breathe; or we can whisper “in” with the inhale and “out” with the exhale, or “bud” on the inhale and “dho” on the exhale (“buddho” meaning “awake”). Or, we can use the label “thinking” when we’re caught up in a strong thought stream. That simple act of labeling our thoughts as thinking can have a profound effect.

Lastly, if we’re in the midst of a difficult emotion, we can use labels like the “three characteristics” (consisting of impermanence, suffering, and non-self, which you can learn about here) to help calm the mind. When we label a phenomenon like anger as impermanent, we start to “poke holes” in it—we start to deprive it of its lasting power over us by recognizing that it is conditioned and temporary; that it only leads to stress and suffering; and that is no more “me” than this fleeting sound or sensation or memory. This type of labeling practice leads us toward becoming less passionate about our emotion; it cools and clarifies the mind.

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When we’re inhabiting the whole body with calmness and clarity, there’s nowhere for us to hide from ourselves. Often, in everyday life, we stash away our stresses, our unprocessed emotions, in various parts of the body. We allow dark, dusty corners of our bodily experience to remain foreign to ourselves. We cement our suffering by perpetuating agitated breathing, incessant internal chatter, and frivolous mental formations.

But by training in these three ways of shaping our experience, we’re opening the shades, letting the light in.

And we can put these “fabrications” to work beyond the meditation cushion. Notice the quality of your breathing when someone wrongs you—maybe they cut you off in traffic or use harsh speech toward you. Your breathing’s not so smooth anymore, right? Notice how the quality of your inner speech changes, how the way you feel and perceive become distorted. These activities, in turn, have effects—chain reactions of unskillful behaviors. When we’re triggered by an event, we might lash out at the offending person or tense ourselves up in a knot. We might replay the images from the event again and again in our minds. We might clutch on to unpleasant feelings out of a sense of grievance. All of these only entrench us in our suffering. 

When difficult emotions, like anger, arise, we tend to respond in one of two ways: either by bottling them up, or by pushing them outward at others through our words and actions. But, as Thanissaro Bhikkhu says:

The Buddha provides a third, more skillful alternative: Breathe through your discomfort and dissolve it away. Let the breath create physical feelings of ease and fullness, and allow those feelings to saturate your whole body. This physical ease helps put the mind at ease as well. When you’re operating from a sense of ease, it’s easier to fabricate skillful perceptions as you evaluate your response to the issue with which you’re faced. 

Now, if we’re already emotionally activated, we’ll likely need to ride out the corresponding hormonal wave. But as this practice of bringing our fabrications into the light of awareness develops, we become less susceptible to being inundated by emotional tsunamis. Things slow down; they become more manageable. We’re safer, more protected. We can find refuge in the breath; we can re-direct our inner monologue (say, from focusing on a person’s bad characteristics to their good ones); and we can can refine our perceptions (such as remembering to label “impermanent” an object of lust so as to cool down a state of passionate desire). We’re becoming more flexible and attuned. With the practice of bringing calmness and insight into our bodily, verbal, and mental experience, we’re planting the seeds of responding skillfully to whatever arises.

 

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Note: “Fabrication” is a translation of the Pali term sankhara (samskara in Sanskrit). Sankhara, like the term dharma, has many meanings, depending on context. You might see it translated as “fabrication,” “formation,” “volitional formation,” “determination,” “constructive activity,” or “conditioned things.” You might even see it as a synonym of karma. At root, the term refers the process of “putting together”—the conditions, activity, and entities involved in the creative process. In the context of this post, we’re using sankhara to refer to how we can “fabricate”—shape, influence, condition—our experience through our bodily, verbal, and mental activity. My understanding of this concept primarily comes from Buddhist teacher Thanissaro Bhikkhu.