Mindfulness Tools Practical Practices for Daily Life

The Body Scan Meditation

Head

Bring your attention to the top of your head, ears, and back of your head. Notice sensations, or lack of sensations, for 1 minute. Face Now move your attention to your face. Your forehead, eyes, cheeks, nose, lips, mouth, and inside of your mouth (gums, tongue) for 1 minute.

Neck and Shoulders

Move your attention to your neck, the inside of your throat, and your shoulders for 1 minute.

Back

Move your attention to your lower back, mid back, and upper back for 1 minute. The back carries a lot of our load and stores a lot of our tension. So let us give our backs the kind and loving attention they deserve.

Front

Now move your attention to the chest and stomach for 1 minute. If it is possible for you, try to bring attention to your internal organs, whatever that means to you.

Entire Body at Once

And now, bring your attention to your entire body all at once for 1 minute.

Source: Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)

More on Body Scan

In the body scan, we are developing a greater intimacy with bare sensation, opening to the give-and-take embedded in the reciprocity between the sensations themselves and our awareness of them. As a result, it is not uncommon to be less disturbed by them, or disturbed by them in a different, a wiser way, even when they are acute. Awareness learns to let them be as they are and to hold them without triggering so much emotional reactivity and also so much inflamed thinking about them. We sometimes speak of awareness and discernment differentiating and perhaps naturally “uncoupling” the sensory dimension of the experience of pain from the emotional and cognitive dimensions of pain. In the process, the intensity of the sensations themselves can sometimes subside. In any event, they may come to be seen as less onerous, less debilitating.

It seems as if awareness itself, holding the sensations without judging them or reacting to them, is healing our view of the body and allowing it to come to terms, at least to some degree, with conditions as they are in the present moment in ways that no longer overwhelmingly erode our quality of life, even in the fact of pain or disease. The awareness of pain really is a different realm from being caught up in pain and struggling with it, and setting foot in that realm, we discover some succor and respite. This is itself is an experience of liberation, a profound freedom in that moment, at least from a narrower way of holding the experience of pain when it is not seen as bare sensation. It is not a cure by any means, but it is a learning and an opening, and an accepting, and a navigating the ups and downs of what previously was impenetrable and unworkable. . .

You can also scan your body much more quickly, depending on your time constraints and the situation you find yourself in. You can do a one in-breath or one out-breath body scan, or a one-, two-, five-, ten-, or twenty-minute body scan. The level of precision and detail will of course vary depending on how quickly you move through the body, but each speed has its virtues, and ultimately, it is about being in touch with the whole of your being and your body in any and every way you can, outside of time altogether.

You can practice body scans, long or short, lying in bed at night or in the morning. You can also practice them sitting or even standing. There are countless creative ways to bring the body scan or any other lying down meditation into your life. If you make use of any of them, it is highly likely that you will find that they will bring new life to you, and bring you to a new appreciation for your body and how much it can serve as a vehicle for embodying here and now what is deepest and best in yourself, including your dignity, your beauty, your vitality, and your mind when it is open and undisturbed.

Physical sensations you might notice with the body scan

tinglyburningpoundingthrobbingtremblinglight/heavy

tight/looseshootingstingingairycuttingtense/relaxed

soft/roughpricklypullingburningvibratingcool/warm

stiff/flexiblenumbnumbachysinkingclammy/dry

airy/denseshakyitchypulsingachydull/sharp

Emotional reactions you might notice

impatience/wanting to stop boredomenjoyment/wanting to continue

releasejoysadnessfeargriefpride

disgustsurpriseangerfrustrationanticipationshame

Thoughts that may occur

Reviewing the pastImagining the futureThinking about others

PlanningEvaluating/analyzingCircular thinking

Wishing/hoping/comparingLabeling/cataloguingJudging your experience

Source: Coming to Our Senses -Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D - 2005