| Body Scan | Practitioners who want a clear, repeatable structure and a guided route through the body to hold their attention. | For people whose effortful scanning creates tension or expectation-driven sensations, the structured search may add strain rather than ease it. | EVIDENCE | A body scan moves attention deliberately through the body in a set order, resting on each region in turn. Receptive Sensing does the opposite: there is no route, no target region, and no systematic procedure. Instead of going to each sensation, the practitioner softens effort and lets whatever arises, breath movement, warmth, a flicker of tension, come to awareness on its own. Its non-directive quality is what most distinguishes it from the structured scan. |
| Sensation Tracking | Following how one sensation, such as an area of tension or an emotional charge, changes and resolves over the course of a session. | | EVIDENCE | Sensation tracking follows a chosen sensation over time, staying with it as it shifts, grows, or fades. Receptive Sensing has no target sensation to track and no intention to pursue anything in particular; the stance is pure reception, allowing signals to present themselves rather than selecting one to observe. Tracking is active and directed toward a single thread; receptive sensing stays open and choiceless. |
| Open-Monitoring Meditation | Cultivating an open, allowing awareness across all experience, thoughts and sounds included, not only body sensation. | | moderate EVIDENCE | Open-monitoring meditation cultivates a broad, non-directive awareness of whatever arises, thoughts, sounds, feelings, and sensations alike. Receptive Sensing applies that same receptive, choiceless stance specifically to the body's signals rather than to the whole field of experience. It is best understood as open monitoring narrowed to somatic experience, sharing the family's attitude of allowing rather than the whole-mind scope. |
| Focused-Attention Meditation | Building steadiness of attention by repeatedly returning focus to one anchor, useful when the mind feels scattered. | | EVIDENCE | Focused-attention meditation trains attention by returning it, again and again, to a single anchor such as the breath. Receptive Sensing is defined by the absence of that effort: rather than steering attention back to a chosen object, the practitioner lets sensations arrive without directing toward or away from anything. The two differ at the level of intention, concentrative and directed versus receptive and non-directive. |
