You can learn how to take moments in each day to come away from automatic pilot and drop into mindful awareness. That can be powerfully renewing and enriching.
You can begin to notice some of the inner unhelpful automatic-pilot routines that you run. You might catch yourself ruminating, or catastrophising, or being unduly self-critical or whatever your particular predisposition may be. You may then begin to learn the art of recognising such thoughts simply as thoughts and to treat yourself and all your patterns and habits with warmth and kindness.
When you notice what you’re doing in your mind at such times it begins to be easier to switch your attention to somewhere else. After all, if there was that much to experience in a single raisin, what else might there be to explore and mindfully engage with?
Please note, though: mindfulness isn’t about doing things slowly. It’s about doing them with full attention. Novak Djokovic, one of the world’s most formidable tennis players, uses yoga and meditation to keep himself in good physical, mental and emotional shape – and he’s one of the fastest guys on the court!
The Body-Scan Meditation
Our next meditation is the body scan. I’ve provided two versions of this as audio files. There’s a longer version that takes around 35 minutes to complete and a shorter version of 15 minutes. The version you use for home practice will depend on which home-practice stream you’re undertaking. It would be good, though, the first time you do the practice, to try the longer version – at least once. You may, in fact, try to do that right now. If you have 35 to 40 minutes to spare and you’re not going to be disturbed, you could choose to do the body-scan practice.
The instructions we’ll be working with now are on the track entitled ‘The Body Scan (Longer Version)’ (
In the body scan, you bring mindful attention to each of the different parts of your body in turn. The intention of the practice is to be awake and aware. It isn’t intended to help you be more relaxed or calm. That may happen, or it may not. Rather, the aim of the practice is to become more aware, directly sensing whatever bodily sensations (or lack of them) you find in each moment as you focus your attention on different parts of the body in turn.
Before doing the body scan, try this very brief exercise, right now, for a few moments.
Begin by looking at your hands for a few moments.
Now, spend a few moments thinking about your hands. Just let your thoughts go wherever they take you while you’re thinking about your hands.
Now, put the book to one side and clap your hands together twice – quite forcefully.
Now, feel what is going on in your hands. What sensations do you find? Tingling? Stinging? Warmth ...?
Notice the difference here between thinking about your hands and feeling your hands. It is the latter that you’re going to focus on in the body scan – your actual body sensations, in each changing moment.
In the exercise above, I first of all asked you to create a fairly obvious sensation in your hands that you could pay attention to. Most of us don’t find that extent of sensation in every part of our bodies when we do the body scan. That’s fine. The aim of the practice is simply to feel whatever sensations you actually feel, from moment to moment, even if it’s not very much at all. You might even find that there are parts of the body where it seems there is almost no sensation at all. That’s fine, it’s perfectly normal and the intention is just to notice whatever is there.
You can do the body scan either lying down on a mat or a rug on the floor or on your bed. You can also do it sitting upright in a chair. Many of us today suffer from some degree of sleep deprivation, and when you do the body scan it can be very easy to fall asleep. Although that might be refreshing, it’s not the intention of the practice. Instead, the intention is to remain as awake and as aware as you can be. If you do fall asleep for a few moments you can always just pick the practice up again. If sleepiness becomes a problem, you might find it helps to prop your head up with a pillow, to open your eyes, or to do the practice sitting up rather than lying down.
So decide how you want to do the practice now – lying down or sitting up – and when you’re ready, play the audio file ‘The Body Scan (Longer Version)’ (
Settling
To begin with, take whatever time you need to settle into the posture you have chosen for the practice. If you’re doing this lying down, perhaps lying in a fairly symmetrical posture, with your legs uncrossed and your arms by your side. Prop your head up with a small pillow or cushion if you need to. Make sure you’re warm or cool enough and that you won’t be disturbed.
Focusing on the Breath
When you’re ready, begin to become aware of the movement of your breath and the sensations in your body. In particular, perhaps, start by becoming aware of the sensations in your belly, feeling the changing patterns of sensation there as you breathe in and out. Take a few minutes to really feel and explore those sensations. Then, become aware of any sense of touch and pressure where your body meets whatever you’re lying or sitting on. Now, you might try taking a few more deliberate out-breaths and in-breaths, maybe placing a hand on your belly to help you track the breath. With each out-breath, let yourself settle more fully into the floor or bed or chair. After a few such breaths, when you’re settled, move your hand away from your belly and just allow the breath to come and go as it does.
Scanning the Body
When you’re ready, begin to explore the changing physical sensations in your body, right now. Start by bringing the spotlight of your awareness to the big toe of your left foot. What sensations do you find there right now? Warmth, coolness, tingling, tickling? Nothing much at all? Just notice whatever’s there. As much as you can, bring a warm and kindly curiosity to whatever you find. Then, move that focus to each of the toes in turn, bringing a gentle, interested, affectionate attention to what you find, perhaps noticing the sense of contact between the toes, a sense of tingling, warmth, perhaps numbness – whatever’s there.
Then, when you are ready, on an in-breath, feel or imagine the breath entering the lungs, and passing all the way down the body, down the left leg, all the way to the toes of the left foot. And, on the out-breath, feel or imagine the breath coming all the way back up from the toes, to the foot, right up the leg and torso and out through the nose. Continue breathing in this way for a few breaths, breathing down to the toes on each in-breath, and back out from the toes on each out-breath. Practise this ‘breathing into’ as best you can, approaching it playfully, imaginatively, experimentally.
When you’re ready, on an out-breath,
