“The Body Scan Provides A New, Experiential Way Of Knowing.”
Body Scan Meditation | MBSR Training by Jon Kabat-Zinn
Body Scan Meditation
- Why Body Scan with Mindfulness?
- Getting Up in the Morning Mindfully
- The Body Scan Meditation and the Wandering Mind
A lot of importance is attached to the body scan in our mindfulness training programs; from the very beginning the people participating in these programs spend forty-five minutes a day on this practice, six days a week, for at least the first two weeks, even when, as often happens, they may not feel much immediate benefit.
If you find yourself struggling with keeping up the practice, you might like to follow the advice we give to those attending our training programs: just do it as best you can and stay in the process whether you think it is “working” or not.
The practice itself winds up revealing new possibilities if you just stay with it.
Why?
- Because the body scan meditation provides a wonderful arena to cultivate a new, experiential way of knowing.
- Because the body scan meditation offers us the opportunity to reconnect with our bodies, which play a key role in the experience and expression of emotion.
- Because mindful awareness of sensations in our bodies can uncouple the links between body sensations and thinking that keep the cycle of rumination and unhappiness going.
- Because the body scan meditation teaches us to bring wise and openhearted attention to parts of the body even when they are the site of intensely unpleasant sensations—a skill that can then be generalized to other aspects of our lives.
On the horizon, then, is the possibility of freeing ourselves from some of our most limiting self-imposed constraints on happiness and well being.
Source- The Mindful Way through Depression
Adapted by G Ross Clark
Getting Up In The Morning Mindfully
“As We Get Up In The Morning We May Feel An Unpleasant Heaviness And Fatigue.“
For many of us, dealing with this feeling can be quite difficult. Of course we would rather not experience such feelings. But here is where the practice of the body scan may be of real use. If we practiced the body scan meditation for even a few days, we will have begun relating to the body as it is and not as we may wish it were. In the body scan, we discover the possibility of approaching things from a fresh perspective, and this becomes applicable at all times, even when we don’t have time to do an extended body scan.
So, on waking, how might we approach the situation differently?
We will be able to recognize the early warning signs of what might become a vicious cycle and begin to practice inhabiting the being mode of mind. We will focus our attention directly on our body sensations and rest in the awareness of them as they are. This allows us to be with the uncomfortable sensations without trying to avoid them or making them worse through thinking about them.
Even in the very earliest stages of the body scan meditation, this alternative to doing mind can have an impact on something as common and mundane as early morning weariness. That sense of heaviness is greatly increased by negative thoughts. But mindfulness in the same situation—bringing a gentle and compassionate awareness to the bodily sensations themselves, without trying to change them, and letting go of thoughts about them or about ourselves, or about anything—can be immensely energizing.
Once we have some experience with the body scan, we can bring this kind of awareness to bear in a matter of moments. We can even scan the body for one in-breath and one out-breath or just breathe with the body as a whole for five minutes or so, or even a minute or two, before getting out of bed.
It might just change our whole day.
Source- The Mindful Way through Depression
Adapted by G Ross Clark
The Body Scan Meditation And The Wandering Mind
“One Of The Most Useful Functions Of The Mind Is To Keep Bringing Up Unfinished Business.”
One of the most useful functions of the mind is to keep bringing up unfinished business so that goals that are important to us will not fall by the wayside. This little tickler system can keep us from missing a critical deadline or ensure that we patch up a damaged friendship that’s important to us. But this function has a tendency to volunteer for duty when we don’t need it, as Lauren found during her practice of the body scan.
Quite a lot had been happening in Lauren’s family. Her elderly father-in-law, Phil, had recently fallen and broken his hip, and it had taken a lot of effort to figure out a way to get good care for him, given that all of his children and their partners worked full time. Lauren was focusing on sensations in her hip when she found her mind wandering.
“First I was sensing my hip,” she said, “then I noticed myself thinking about its shape and remembering a picture of the hip in my biology textbook. Then I remembered Phil’s broken hip—and I started to think about him in the hospital.”
We can notice how the first step in the wanderings of Lauren’s mind was relatively subtle; she made a shift from focusing on the direct sensation of the hip to thinking about the hip—from knowing through experience to knowing through ideas.
And once Pandora’s box was opened, all the associations, memories, and other clutter of the doing mind rushed to the surface to take Lauren further and further from her intended focus: first to an association from her past, then to her father-in-law, and from there to the image of him lying in his hospital bed. Her mind’s meanderings did not end there:
“That made me think about Bill’s [her husband’s] sister. She said she’d take time off to look after him, but she hasn’t. Then I was remembering a difficult phone call in which another member of the family said that she just couldn’t cope with the parents anymore.”
Once she had strayed from her intended focus on physical sensations in the body, Lauren’s attention shifted to the unfinished business of care-giving and families. At some stage (she wasn’t sure when) she nodded off to sleep for a few minutes.
At first Lauren was angry when her mind continued to wander. But, after practicing the body scan for about two weeks, she noticed that something was changing in her. “Before,” she said, “I would get into a tizzy and start throwing mental pots and pans about the place—just in my mind, you understand. I’d think and think: Well, no one cares; I’m the only one that knows what to do about Phil and how to look after him, and if Gail can’t do it, then she can stay away for all I care. Well, the pots and pans I was throwing in my mind only hurt me, because no one else saw them being thrown. Now I can feel the stress in my body, but I’m neither running away from it nor getting upset about being upset.”
Lauren found that when her mind wandered off, it was more effective and appropriate to simply smile to herself in recognition of it and just gently bring it back to where she had intended it to be rather than to berate herself.
Furthermore, she said that coming back to the level of sensations allowed her to be in touch with and “feel” the stress of her life but without overreacting.
Source- The Mindful Way through Depression
Adapted by G Ross Clark