Body Scan - 10 Minutes

The body scan meditation has many benefits. It helps with "attention training" as one directs their attention to different parts of the body. It improves the awareness of body sensations -feelings- and consequently one's emotional state. Also treating each part the same, whether the sensations are pleasant or unpleasant, cultivates 'equanimity'. This particular meditation recording takes a gentle approach.

Transcript

Let's settle into a position that we're going to stay in for the next 10 minutes. This can be sitting or lying down and tuning in to the whole body and taking a a few deliberate breaths so bringing the sensation of breathing a bit more into the foreground and this can simply be by extending the inhale and the exhale by a tiny bit and now drawing our attention to the left foot in the left foot there may be sensations in the points of contact what about between the toes what's the contact like there there may be some sense of humidity if we're wearing socks or maybe we may not feel much at all either way it doesn't matter the point of the exercise is that we simply bring attention to different parts of our body irrespective of what is felt in the way it's an attention training exercise and then we move up to the lower left leg the calf muscles the shin the left knee and the left thigh and our mind is bound to wander off see if it hasn't already it's bound to do so and this is part of the exercise the mind wanders off and at some point we notice and gently and deliberately we're bringing back to the point of reference in this case the left thigh and now letting go of the left leg and we go to the right leg so down to the right foot the lower right leg and the upper right leg any sensations in the body are painful or uncomfortable in any way we just use our discretion we can either pass them quickly or explore the edges and now to the pelvic area and the belly and if we find ourselves judging our experience perhaps assessing whether it's good or bad or we're doing it right or wrong these are just thoughts we recognize them in the same way as we do with any thoughts and then bring our attention back to the sensations of the body whilst acknowledging that they're there no need to push them away and now we move on to the torso recognizing all the organs in the body whilst we can't feel them they're there doing their job and we can recognize the back at the same time moving on to the left shoulder and down the left arm all the way to the left hand and left fingers and on to the right hand and up the right arm lower arm elbow joint upper arm and right shoulders you're now on to the neck and the jaw the mouth inside the mouth the cheeks the nose and the eyes all the little muscles around the eyes which form our expression the forehead and the scalp and the ears the whole head and now widening our attention to the whole body in fact letting go of any effort whatsoever and gradually finishing this meditation