Mindfulness: The Body Scan
Welcome back to our weekly mindfulness and wellbeing blog. Today’s blog will continue our how to meditate series by introducing the body scan. Let’s get into it!
The Body Scan
Are you wearing shoes or socks?
Mindfulness practices always begin with where we place our attention. In the body scan, we will practice placing our attention in different parts of our body. Start by placing your attention — like a beam of light from a torch or spotlight — right into your left foot. Try to be curious and inquisitive with your attention, and use it to ‘investigate’ everything about your left foot — your toes, the sole of your foot, your heel, the ankles, the top of the foot. What does your skin feel like? Are you wearing socks or shoes? What does that feel like? Is your foot hot or cold? Is it sore, maybe from walking around all day? Maybe there are pins and needles. Try to bring your attention, as best as possible, right into the left foot, so that you are directly experiencing and feeling the left foot, rather than ‘thinking’ about the foot.
Wandering thoughts? Try ‘beginner’s mind’
You might notice that your attention will wander — that you drift into ‘thinking’, into what people call the ‘thought stream’, which is where your attention shifts into thinking rather than on direct experience. This is the heart of the practice, and is completely normal and natural. Whenever you have noticed that your attention has drifted into ‘thinking’, just gently, and if you can, with kindness towards yourself, direct your attention back to your left foot. That’s it! Mindfulness, at the heart of the practice, is doing this over and over again. Even the most experienced teachers do this over and over again, so much so that it’s referred to as ‘beginner’s mind’ and is the quality that experienced mindfulness teachers encourage everyone to have. Each moment of the practice is an opportunity to return to the present moment, to direct back to experience and to feeling. Sometimes your mind will wander for a few seconds; at other times it may be wandering for a few (or many!) minutes. Notice how easy it is to drift and get lost in thought. Mindfulness is realising when we have been thinking and returning, in that moment of realisation, to our object of focus — the left foot.
The whole body in totality
The body scan moves across each body part sequentially and takes about half an hour to do the whole body in totality. We move from the left foot, the left shin and knee, the left thigh, the right foot, right shin and knee, the right thigh, the pelvis, the back and shoulders, the abdomen and chest, the neck, and finally face and head. The practice concludes by taking in all the body in the awareness or attention — expanding the narrow focus of attention that we had been maintaining to include the entire body, resting here in this moment.
Applying attention to the pain, tension and difficulty
You may notice that in some parts of the body, usually the back, shoulders, head, or the abdomen, there is pain, tension and difficulty. Try to stay with the pain and difficulty as much as possible — try to keep the air of curiosity and investigation of your experience. Try to bring your attention right into to the discomfort, ‘meeting’ it wherever it is at, and be curious about it — what is the pain like? What is the discomfort like? Investigate it and follow it through with your attention. Of course, mindfulness should not be suffering, and if you feel like any pain or discomfort you experience is too much, you can always stop the practice. Or it might be that you can stay with the difficulty for only a few seconds — if that’s the case, that’s fine too. Sometimes being still and silent can also bring up difficult emotions, memories or thoughts from within. If this happens, try to do the same as with difficult feelings in the body. Try to ‘stay with’ the difficulty as best as you can, but if at any stage it feels like too much, then stop the practice, or shorten the time you try to stay with the experience. We will talk in more detail about experiences within meditation, including difficult and challenging experiences, in the next blog series.
That’s all for now. Remember to watch out for next weeks blog where we will cover the mindfulness of breath and mindfulness of sounds practices. And remember to join us every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 19:30GMT in the Secondary School FocusRoom (we use this as a combined session for both rooms) for live and free mindfulness sessions. We look forward to seeing you there!
