CMP Discussion: Introduction To Body Scan

This practice offers a highly informative discussion of what Body Scan meditation is, and why and how it is practiced. It is helpful to listen to this if you are new to Body Scan meditation, before listening to a guided Body Scan meditation.

Transcript

Welcome to Community Mindfulness Project's introduction to the practice of body scan meditation.

In this discussion,

We're going to talk about what body scan meditation is,

Why we do it,

And how we do it.

So just to get started,

Let's back up and talk about what mindfulness is.

We love Jon Kabat-Zinn's definition that mindfulness is sustained attention to a chosen object in the present moment with curiosity and kindness.

That really captures it in our view.

So in a body scan meditation,

We're using the body as our object of attention.

We are familiarizing ourselves with the very house we live in,

Our body,

In a new way with beginner's mind.

So we approach this practice with an attitude of acceptance and kindness to whatever experience arises,

Developing the capacity to behold things in life with a non-reactive awareness.

Now why do we engage in body scan meditation?

So interestingly,

There's a long tradition in recognizing the mind-body connection.

Both the Indian yogis and the Taoist yogis in China noticed a correlation between particular emotions and certain areas of the body.

Fear is centered in the kidneys,

For example,

Or anger in the liver,

Or worry in the stomach.

Fright is in the heart,

And grief was thought to be correlated with the lungs.

So these associations make a lot of intuitive sense,

Even to Westerners.

When we grieve,

Our lungs go into spasm,

Which we call crying.

When we're frightened,

Suddenly our heart skips a beat,

Or maybe we suffer a heart attack and become frightened to death.

When we fret,

The rate of ulcers rises,

And when our liver becomes damaged,

We may subject our loved ones to bouts of extreme rage.

And lastly,

When we're afraid,

Our adrenal glands activate,

Readying us to run away or fight that which confronts us.

So when we engage in a body scan meditation practice,

We're cultivating the healthy habit of listening to our body.

And our body often reflects our emotional states before our conscious mind does.

For example,

As we pay attention to our body,

We may notice that the legs are tired and the jaw is tight.

We might ponder,

Perhaps something is causing me more stress than I was aware.

Research supports the notion that we are most happy when we are living an embodied experience.

So when various areas of the brain are integrated,

And when the mind and the body are integrated.

Additionally,

We tend to be much more aware of discomfort in the body than comfort.

So a body scan practice can help us balance the mental air time that we give to those moments when we're experiencing discomfort with an awareness of when we're feeling no discomfort.

So when we listen to our bodies,

We may realize,

Wow,

The various parts of my body feel loose and relaxed.

I'm going to pause and appreciate this feeling of peace.

Or if we've gone through a medical procedure recently and we're very aware,

Maybe we had a knee operation,

We're very aware of when our knee is in pain.

As we actually move our attention through our body,

We may realize that the knee's not actually in pain at the moment.

We're just sort of remembering that the knee is typically in pain or has recently been in pain,

But now it's not.

Or we may say,

You know,

This knee is really uncomfortable,

But when we bring our attention to our other knee,

That one is functioning just fine.

And so balancing out our awareness of what is serving us and working well in the body with that which is in some ways suffering can be really helpful.

Familiarizing ourselves with our body through the sensations we experience can also offer therapeutic benefits.

So there's reason to believe that strong physical or emotional experiences,

Including traumas,

Can be imprinted in different parts of the body.

And paying close attention to our body's sensations in a fine-grained and systematic way can be a fascinating learning experience with profound healing potential.

By being open to what our experience is,

We can unblock trapped emotions and unlearn the habit of stuffing unprocessed emotions down into the body.

Like other mindfulness practices,

Body scan meditation creates a habit of self-acceptance and letting go of self-judgment.

It builds an awareness of reactive thinking,

And it helps us to accept the reality of now.

So as we move our attention through our body and we get to an area of the body maybe that,

I don't know,

We don't feel really good about.

We can notice that sense of,

Ick,

You know,

I wish this looked a little different.

But we can just be aware of it and maybe we can even offer ourselves a little bit of compassion around that.

Lastly,

Body scan meditation builds our ability to intentionally place our awareness where we choose.

So while our right knee might be teeming with sensations during the time when we're directing our attention to our left foot,

We can choose not to shift our attention to the right knee.

And we can just sustain our attention on the left foot.

And this is a skill of the mind that is beneficial in all the waking moments of our life when we decide where we are going to direct our attention.

So to give you a brief overview of how you practice a body scan meditation,

Typically it's done in a supine position,

Very often laying on the back.

And we begin with the sound of the bell,

Holding our attention on the sound of the bell until we can no longer hear it,

Really using that as our gateway into the present moment and into the practice.

And then we systematically invite awareness to different parts of the body,

Usually sort of moving from maybe the foot to the bottom of the leg to the top of the leg,

Sort of moving sequentially through the body.

Parts of the body may be alive with sensations and others might be quieter and some parts might be numb.

These parts with fewer sensations really are an invitation to do two simultaneous and seemingly opposing things to both relax our mind and at the same time to up the vividness of our awareness in order to find the more subtle sensations.

The practice is to place our bare attention on each part of the body.

And so when we're placing our attention on the sole of the foot,

For example,

We're trying not to picture the sole of the foot.

If an image of the sole of the foot comes to us in our mind,

We sort of let that go.

We're trying not to mentally conceive of the sole of the foot or think about what we think we should be feeling and instead we just try to perceive the raw sensations.

Another aspect of the practice is acceptance and it's just being aware of how you feel during the practice and giving yourself permission to feel that way.

At the end of the practice,

We typically end with the sound of the bell,

Bringing movement back into the hands and the feet and really noticing what it feels like to have those added sensations when one hand touches the other or we begin to move the feet around and eventually we open our eyes back up.

You might find it helpful to set an intention before any practice,

Including a body scan meditation.

In this practice,

For example,

It could be,

I intend to attend to my body with kindness,

With a spirit of befriending it.

Or maybe it's I intend to direct awareness to the experience of raw sensations,

Non-conceptual awareness,

Not thinking about or picturing,

But actually feeling the external and internal sensations that arise in different parts of the body.

Or maybe it's just really simply I intend to practice deliberately engaging and disengaging my attention,

Shifting the spotlight from region to region in the body.

In terms of integration into an engaged life,

So how do we sort of take this out into our daily lives with us?

You can season your day with a quick body scan to check in.

Emotions tend to be intertwined with distinct body sensations and tuning ourselves into the tactile sensations in the body can tune us into our own emotional state with greater sensitivity and often more lead time.

Catching strong emotions before they have a chance to overwhelm us potentially.

One way to do this is you can program your phone to chime regularly as a reminder to take a moment to scan the body.

You can also do a quick body scan when you wake up first thing in the morning.

It's a beautiful way to start the day.

And lastly,

On the other end of the day,

A body scan meditation can help you to fall asleep or help you fall back asleep at night,

Particularly if you're finding that you have a really active mind maybe with some looping thoughts.

So giving your mind something to focus on and just moving through the body can help really relax you.

So may you enjoy the process of befriending the body.

Take care.

Reviews

Super clear and easy to understand explanation. Thank you!

Great! Very informative! Thank you!

Very interesting talk giving so many good and new advice on how to do body scan, how to integrate it to daily life, how to pause and listen without involving mind. Will practise next with a different attitude. Many thanks indeed for being new ideas to our practice.

This is fantastic. I've been using body scan and nidra practice for years, but it's so helpful and motivating to really understand how and why it works. Thank you so much for this very clear, efficient, and informative talk

Thank you. Very informative.

I really liked this discussion. It was very informative. I could have used a little time between concepts so I could try to absorb them. I know that I lost a lot of useful information because we were moving on quickly to the next idea. Thank you!