Balance Lab Body Scan
This 20-minute body scan invites you to explore present moment awareness by practicing the skills of focusing the attention, letting go, and beginning again. With the influence of the Alexander Technique, this awareness practice invites the mind to be with the body, here and now.
Transcript
This is Patrick Mellon for Balance Lab.
This exercise asks us to find ourselves in constructive rest,
Whatever that posture might be for you in this moment.
A position that you can easily maintain for 20 minutes while remaining alert and awake.
Traditionally,
Constructive rest is lying on the floor or a yoga mat with our head on a small pillow or maybe a paperback book.
Our feet,
Flat on the floor with your knees in the air and our arms comfortably on our sides or resting on the torso or belly.
Other options also include loosely tying a scarf around your upper legs or resting the backs of your lower legs on a bed or a chair in what some folks have called astronaut posture.
As we find ourselves settling into this position,
Taking a moment to welcome ourselves to this moment of practice,
Allowing an inhale and an exhale to come and go,
And then,
Of course,
The next inhale,
The next exhale.
Welcoming each new breath with kindness and curiosity.
Inhaling and exhaling,
Experiencing the weight of the body in whatever position the body has taken.
This exercise guides our attention to focus on what is happening in this present moment,
Asking ourselves,
How is it with me in this specific spot of the body?
So even at the outset of this time we have intentionally set aside to practice,
We can ask,
How is it with me right here,
Right now?
And we can pause and sense into today's response to that question.
What's new in this moment?
How is it with me now?
And all the while we're still inhaling and exhaling,
Now gathering our attention and asking our focus to surround our heels where they make contact with support,
Playing with even asking our heels,
What's new,
And pausing,
Sensing into a response.
A brief reminder here that our heels don't speak English.
They communicate through heat or cold,
Pressure or lightness,
Tingles or pulsations.
When we ask our heels,
What's new,
How is it with me,
We sense into these types of responses and then we let that go and move on to directing our attention to the soles of the feet,
The skin at the very bottom of our bodies,
Sensing into the soles of our feet,
All the way back to the heels,
All the way up to the toes,
Letting that attention dissolve and bringing our attention to our big toes,
Our left big toe,
Our right big toe,
The bottoms of our big toes,
The tops of our big toes.
What's new with our big toes today?
If anything.
And then letting that attention dissolve and gathering up in this cradle of attention the baby toes,
The bottoms of our baby toes,
The sides of our baby toes,
The tops of our baby toes,
Checking in with even those little tiny toenails on our baby toes,
Letting that dissolve,
Bringing our attention now to the tops of our feet,
Allowing our attention to take in the whole of our foot there,
Perhaps where it's making contact with support,
From our heels all the way to our toes,
And then releasing this attention on the feet and bringing our focus to our shins,
These great long shin bones in the front of the lower legs,
The muscles just underneath that shin bone,
Checking in,
How is it with my shin bones today?
And then letting that dissolve,
Moving around the backs of our lower legs,
Checking in with our calf muscles.
And if the sound of my voice in this present moment brings you back from a thought about the future or the past,
Or if we are recognizing that our brains have been doing some thinking other than checking in with our shins and our calves,
We have this moment to be kind to ourselves,
To let go of those thoughts and begin again,
Bringing our attention back now to our calf muscles,
The sides of our calves,
The tops of our calves,
That sort of miraculous space where our calf muscles attach to our Achilles tendons,
Bringing our attention to the full length of these calf muscles and then letting it go,
And bringing our attention to our knees,
The crooks of our knees that we don't often see,
The sides of our knees,
The outsides of our knees,
The insides of our knees,
The very tops of our knees,
Our kneecaps,
These patellas.
How is it with our knees?
What is the response?
Is there heat?
Is there cold?
Letting go of any judgment of whatever sensation or response that we might have,
If it's hot or if it's cold,
It just is a sensation.
We can release that and move on to thinking about bringing our attention to our quadricep muscles,
These muscles of the upper legs,
All the way coming into our pelvis,
The sides of our legs,
These great long IT bands,
Bringing our attention to our hamstrings,
The backs of our upper legs,
Bringing our attention to the muscles of our inner upper legs,
To the insides of our knees,
All the way up to where they greet the pelvic floor.
And here we are,
Just inhaling and exhaling,
Wondering what's new with this body of ours,
Releasing any of that attention from the upper legs and asking,
What's new with the sides of our pelvis?
What we are pleased to call perhaps our hips,
The sides of our pelvis.
What's new with the back of the pelvis there against the floor?
As we inhale and exhale,
Perhaps we feel the changes in pressure,
Perhaps a gentle rocking.
Perhaps today we don't feel a thing and our pelvis is simply our pelvis.
Releasing that attention,
Asking our attention to come to the front of our pelvis,
Moving up into the muscles behind the belly button and our internal organs there.
Inhaling and exhaling,
Experiencing this ephemeral nature of the shape of our bodies,
The shape that is changing with the breath inhaling and exhaling.
And then letting that go,
Asking our attention to come to the sides of our bodies between our hips and our armpits,
Feeling the length of our torso on the side of the body.
And then of course letting that go,
Bringing our attention now to the backs of our bodies against whatever support you have found.
As we inhale and exhale,
Perhaps feeling more than anywhere else in the body where this pressure can change to ebb and flow on this breath.
And then we can give a slight massage perhaps to those muscles between our ribcage and the floor.
Sensing into the full width and breadth of our backs,
Recognizing that our backs are just as wide as our fronts.
Sensing into the backs of our shoulders and all the way down just above our hips,
All the way out to our left side,
All the way out to our right side.
Bringing our attention to the full width and breadth of this back today.
Sensing into any response to this question,
What's new?
And then letting it go,
Bringing our attention now to the backs of our shoulders,
Perhaps against the floor or support,
Allowing our attention to go to the upper arms,
The length of our upper arm bones,
All the way down to our elbows and all the way up to our shoulders.
Can we sense into the true length of our upper arm bones and just take in any sensation that attention stimulates?
Can we let go and sense into the joints of our elbows where our lower arms meet our upper arms?
Can we simply bring our attention there and see what response to this question comes today?
What's new,
Elbows?
And then releasing that attention as we begin to dwell in our lower arms,
The length of our lower arm bones,
The space between our two lower arm bones.
Releasing that attention and asking what's new with our wrists,
This highly articulated space between the lower arms and the bones of the hand?
And what's new with our hands,
The skin of our palms,
The skin of the backs of our hands,
Our thumbs,
Our fingers?
Bringing our attention to the substance and fact of our bodies and then letting it go.
Allowing our whole arms to be held in our attention from the tips of our fingers all the way up through the lower arms,
Through the upper arms,
Through the shoulders to the clavicles where they almost meet by our sternum,
Our breastbone.
And then we can ask our attention to take in the front of our chests riding the breath on this inhale and exhale.
Again,
If our attention has turned toward a fantasy of the future or a conversation from the past,
Simply acknowledging that in this present moment,
Our perfectly lovely wandering mind can let those thoughts pass and can begin again by bringing our attention to the chest,
To the rising and falling of our sternum,
The movement of the inhale and the exhale in the front of the ribs,
And then we can let that go and ask ourselves to bring our attention to the front of our neck,
The muscles on the sides of our necks,
Letting that go and asking our attention to come to the muscles at the back of the neck,
Releasing the muscles at the back of the neck and bringing our attention to the weight of our head,
Sensing into perhaps where our head is meeting support,
Feeling any kind of pressure from the external world,
Bringing our attention to any pressure from our own internal world,
Bringing our attention to the full width and breadth of our heads,
And then letting that go,
Inhaling and exhaling,
Allowing our attention to take in this entire body.
We've been doing close-ups for most of this exercise,
Now we can pan back to a wide shot of this entire body,
Inhaling and exhaling.
We can ask,
How is it with me now in this moment?
Taking a moment to think about the and thanking ourselves for this time,
Continuing to ask this question,
How is it with me as we move through this day?
We can wiggle our fingers and wiggle our toes,
Taking all the time in the world to inhale and exhale and be present to what is happening in this moment of transition into the rest of our lucky day.
