The body scan is designed to bring us more in touch with our bodies. “Why would we need to do that?” you might ask. Well the fact is, many of us reject our body in some way or other. We are too fat or too thin, our nose is too big, we’re misshapen, too tall, too short. Some of us feel as if our body has rejected us. We’re getting older and we object to the fact that our “get up and go” got up and went, our body is disabled or filled with pain, it lets us down when we most need it, and so on. Either way it goes, when we have negative thoughts about our body, our experience of our body may be limited to just those thoughts. We may never have really taken the time to experience our body fully. But wouldn’t it be a good idea to do that before passing judgment? Enter the body scan. The body scan allows us to visit each part of our body and to experience it fully without judging it. We reclaim our body and make it more completely a part of us.
To do this meditation, you can lie down or sit, whatever will be most comfortable for you over the half-hour it will take to do the scan. Then you direct your attention to each part of your body, starting with the toes on your left foot and moving slowly up the leg, body part by body part - foot, heel, ankle, shin, knee, thigh - to the hip, then going to the toes of the right foot and moving up to the hip, from there up the torso to the shoulders, then from the fingers of both hands simultaneously back up to the shoulders, then through the neck and throat, face and back of the head, to the top of the head. Then you imagine breathing in through the top of your head and out through your toes, then breathing in through your toes and out through the top of your head. At this point, it may feel as if your body has lost something of its substance. That is OK. You end the body scan by taking a few moments to be in silence and stillness before returning to your body as a whole, letting your experience of it as solid slowly return, and transitioning back to the world of doing.
The idea, as you scan your body, is to feel each part, just as it is, including its pain if it has pain. Linger a few moments with that part, breathing in and out of it, letting any tension and fatigue in that part of your body flow out of you with your outbreaths. Then let that part of your body go and move on to the next.
For some people, the body scan is the first positive experience they have had of their body in many years. The body scan is also highly recommended for people seeking relief from the effects of stress in their lives and for chronic pain patients, although some pain patients may temporarily have some difficulty with the scan. They may find for a while that they “zone out” when the guided meditation starts to take them to the part of their body that hurts or has been damaged in some way, and they only zone back once the meditation is past that part. Or they may find that the pain in that part of their body increases as they look at it. This is generally a temporary effect that diminishes the more they look at that part of their body without fear and without dread and without wishing it were somehow different. As that part of the body is accepted and not given the power to hold them in fear, they may discover that the pain diminishes with meditation rather than increasing. For stress patients, we have already noted the problem with adrenaline withdrawal that they may experience as they being to meditate - again, a temporary negative effect. However, for some stress patients, the body scan can put them in greater touch with how much tension their bodies are really carrying, and may thus be a step towards dealing with that tension and stress. Again, though, we do well to remind ourselves that the work of meditation is to pay attention and be with what is. This means that, whereas we may imagine our bodily tension leaving each body part with our outbreaths and this is fine to do, we need to be careful that we don’t step out of non-doing into trying to force relaxation - or pain reduction or anything else for that matter - to happen.
Sometimes people practising the body scan come to an experience of their body as a whole body, as opposed to the hurting part getting all the attention, or the oversized nose being our focus when we think of our body, or our disabled limb being the part of us we relate to most. This experience of wholeness is a good thing and is sometimes the start of inner healing as people move beyond a fixation on their perceived physical limitations to an experience of personal wholeness in which our diseased or painful or “less than satisfactory” part may be held. This is an experience of knowing that we are so much more than our problems and imperfections, that in the fullness of our being, we transcend all those.
You are going to be asked this week to do only the body scan. As wonderful a meditation as this is, some people find it boring. And repeating it every day for a week may feel like a boring chore. So this is a good time to remind ourselves about non-judging and patience, and to introduce another attitude that is very beneficial in meditation - “beginner’s mind”.
The Christian contemplatives have always insisted that we don’t see God more in our everyday lives, not because He isn’t there to be seen, but because we haven’t learned to pay attention. We do our dishes, for example, thinking we know everything there is to know about doing dishes, not expecting anything other than a mundane and boring chore. And what we expect is what we get. Worse, we may simply do the dishes on auto-pilot. So if God wants to show up in the dishwashing chore, will we see Him? Hear Him? Feel Him? Probably not.
Here is where the meditative practice of beginner’s mind can help,
not only in our meditation practice, but in beginning to open up our awareness
in our ordinary, everyday lives so that we can live the fullness of our lives.
Beginner’s mind means that we lay aside our knowledge about what something is,
and we open ourselves up to the possibility that we may not know it all or have
experienced it all. So we approach the ordinary as if it’s not ordinary. Like a
child. Those of us who have brought up children know what it’s like for a new
human being to see a tree or feel the wind for the first time. They are
enthralled with things we no longer give a second thought to. They have a
“beginner’s mind”. And we, through our young children, experience the wonder of
our world and our ordinary lives all over again. “Beginner’s mind” reminds us
that we don’t have to lose our childlike sense of wonder. All that is required
is that we approach whatever it is we are doing or experiencing free of our
expectations about what we are doing or experiencing that are based on our
previous experiences. We move ahead as if this is our first experience. Try it
with someone you are very familiar with -
your wife or your children or your dog or your boss. Try it when you are doing
something routine like bathing or vacuuming or eating. Try it when problems
arise. And, when you have to do that “boring” old body scan one more time, try
it then.
exercises
Days 21 to 24
Do the body scan each day, either on your own or using the guided meditation. If doing it on your own, bear in mind that this is a 30-minute meditation.