This is a meditation for body scanning.
It's important to remember that the quality of your perception of any particular area of the body is not as important as the mere act of noticing it.
For the sake of this practice,
Be light and gentle with how you place your awareness in any particular part of the body.
It is the awareness alone that makes the most difference.
Firstly,
Get a sense of how you perceive the whole of your physical body.
Just take notice.
Perceive the whole physical body at once.
What sticks out to you?
What areas are prominent and easy to perceive?
And what areas are hard to perceive?
Now notice you have a front body and a back body.
So take notice of the front of the body.
And here noticing the whole of the front of the body.
Where is perception easy and where is perception challenging?
And now perceive the back body.
Again,
Doing this with ease,
With as little effort as required.
And just taking note of the quality of perception,
What it is that you see and feel.
Now notice how the body has a right side and a left side.
First,
Perceive the entire right side of the body.
The face,
The shoulders,
The arms,
The leg.
And now move to the left side of the body.
Perceive the whole of the left.
Now working your attention on the surface of the skin,
Let's go over and trace the entire body.
Starting on the head,
Move your attention around the skull,
The back of the head,
The sides,
And the front.
Doing a once over on the head area on the surface of the skin.
Now move to the neck.
Scan the front and the back and the sides of the neck.
And now the shoulders and the chest and the upper back.
The front of the chest,
The sides of the chest,
The armpits,
And then to the back,
The shoulder blades.
And now move to the right arm.
Move your attention down the right arm,
All the way to the hands,
And then back up the right arm.
And then going across the shoulders to the left arm.
Move your attention down the left arm,
All through the hand on the left side,
And then back up the left arm.
And now let's move our attention to the abdomen.
So there's the front of the belly,
The navel,
The bottom of the ribcage,
And then there's the sides of the abdomen,
The right and the left.
And then we have our mid and lower back.
Just noticing.
And now let's take our attention on the surface of the skin into the pelvis.
Here we have the pubic bone and the genitals in the front,
The groins to the left and the right.
We have the sides of the buttocks and then the back of the buttocks.
And now let's go down the right leg,
Moving your attention around all the skin of the right leg as you go down and connecting to the right foot.
And all the way back up the right leg to the right buttocks,
Crossing over to the left and extending your attention down the left leg.
Down through the left foot and back up the left leg.
Now coming back to the front and back of the body,
Let's move our attention from the base of the spine on the surface of the skin and move along our back,
Up our back.
From the perineum up the sacrum and then up the vertebra.
Keeping our attention on the surface of the skin,
Going up the vertebra from the lower back to the mid-back,
Between the shoulder blades,
Up the neck,
Up the back of the skull,
Following the midline of the body and coming on the top of the head all the way to the hairline and then down the face,
Between the eyebrows,
Down the center of the nose,
Over the lips,
And then tracing down the center of the neck,
To the base of the neck,
And down the breastplate,
All the way to the diaphragm and approaching the navel and the pubic bone,
All the way back down to the perineum where we started at the base of the spine.
Now from there we'll switch from noticing the skin of the body and we're going to go into the body and bring our awareness to the central axis of the body.
So the body has a central axis anatomically and the closest anatomy to that is the physical spine.
So imagine a vertical tube,
A central vertical channel where we start at the perineum and extend our awareness straight up inside the center of the physical body,
Extending from the pelvis,
Up through the abdomen,
To the chest,
To the base of the neck,
Up through the neck,
Through the center of the skull,
Up to the ground of the head,
And then letting it go.
And once more briefly,
Let's notice that we have a right side of the body and a left side of the body.
Again,
A right side of the body and a left side of the body.
Also,
We have a back body and a front,
Noticing again the back and noticing again the front.
Lastly,
And returning to our first scan,
Perceive the entirety of your body at once.
What is it like to be aware of the totality of the physical body?
Has your perception of it changed from the beginning?
If so,
What's different?
This concludes the practice and meditation on foundational body scanning.
