The body-scan meditation is described in Chapter 5 of "Full Catastrophe Living":
When we put energy into actually experiencing our body and we refuse to get caught up in the overlay of judgmental thinking about it, our whole view of it and of ourself can change dramatically. To begin with, what it does is remarkable! It can walk and talk and sit up and reach for things; it can judge distance and digest food and know things through touch. Usually we take these abilities completely for granted and don't appreciate what our bodies can actually do until we are injured or sick. Then we realize how nice it was when we could do the things we can't do anymore. So before we convince ourselves that our bodies are too this or too that, shouldn't we get more in touch with how wonderful it is to have a body in the first place, no matter what it looks or feels like? The way to do this is to tune in to your body and be mindful of it without judging it...
One very powerful technique we use to reestablish contact with the body is known as body scanning. Because of the thorough and minute focus on the body in body scanning, it is an effective technique for developing both concentration and flexibility of attention simultaneously. It involves lying on your back and moving through your mind through the different regions of your body.
... By the time we have completed the body scan, it can feel as if the entire body has dropped away or has become transparent, as if its substance were in some way erased. It can feel as if there is nothing but breath flowing freely across all the boundaries of the body.(FCL Ch. 5.) The idea of "body scanning" for forty-five minutes every day sounded like a major challenge to me. In my limited experiences with meditation (and yoga too), I have never really gotten much out of the mini-"body scans" the meditation leaders do. In fact I usually find this part especially uncomfortable, as I don't really want to think about body parts as a group activity. I also have to resist the urge to be a middle-schooler when the leader talks about the butt area, and I always wonder what word they'll use for it.
Augmenting my anxiety about the body scan tape was the book's anecdote of a woman in the clinic for whom the body scan meditation allowed her to recover repressed traumatic memories of her father sexually molesting her after she suddenly became mindful of the word "genitals" on the tape. The timing of my reading this section was interesting, as I had just gotten done with a book called "Brain Bugs" that talks about how rare and unlikely it is for people to actually have such repressed memories. I wasn't terribly fond of this anecdote's inclusion in the book, although I enjoyed many of the others. But putting that whole thing aside, this passage caused me to be anxious about the idea of the tape saying "genitals" and wonder really, what is this guy going to be saying on the tape?
Also, one of the purposes of this passage was to illustrate that the woman had not even heard the word "genitals" on the tapes until several weeks of having done the body-scan meditation. What words would my consciousness decline to hear for awhile? (After that passage in the book, you could bet that it wouldn't be "genitals.")
So, I listened to the body-scan recording for the first time today. I had wanted to try at least some of the tapes before the experiment officially started, to at least know a bit of what I was getting into. Interestingly, I haven't been very inspired to do this so far. For some reason I was this afternoon, even though many things made my circumstances less than optimal. I am in a new location - my boyfriend's brother & sister-in-law's house in Memphis. And my timing was interesting - when everyone except me decided to go out for a run, after taking an excessive two-hour nap in the middle of the afternoon.
Of course, my boyfriend's run was only about 15 minutes long so I got interrupted midway through ("are you asleep AGAIN!?") but otherwise I think it was a good first effort. (Note: post about the tension between mindfulness and evaluation/analysis of mindfulness is forthcoming.)
The meditation is to be done lying down, ideally on a floor. I plan to do this on my carpeted floor at home, but I just used the bed this time.
At the time I began the body-scan meditation I felt lazy and antisocial and was probably in an unconscious state of judging my body for its lack of energy, and of judging my mind for being a bookworm and always wanting to read. The recording effectively emphasizes acceptance, and I felt much more positive at the end.
I did feel some anticipatory anxiety about the whole "genitals" thing, but for anyone curious, it turned out to be passing and unobtrusive - just a quick mention as part of the general pelvis area. And actually, I felt that the recording went too fast at times. It asks you to pay attention to certain regions of the body and any sensations there, but I rarely felt anything anywhere. I looked for pain, stiffness, tension, anything - but even in my recently-injured neck, I found little. Kabat-Zinn recognizes this among certain other "initial problems," but resolves it with acceptance of it:
When some people practice the body scan, they sometimes have a hard time feeling their toes at first or other parts of their body...[i]f, for instance, you tune in to your toes and you don't feel anything, then "not feeling anything" is your experience of your toes at that particular time. That is neither bad nor good, it's simply your experience in that moment. So we note it and accept it and move on. It is not necessary to wiggle your toes to try to stir up sensations in that region so that you can feel them, although that is okay, too, at the beginning.The tape makes this point early on - that if you don't feel anything, just note that - so that is generally the way I approached things. I remember noticing some tension in the forehead while I was concentrating on that area, and I was just starting to notice some sensation in the left toes when the tape moved on from that area. Nothing much else.
I also was pleased that I did not have too much trouble concentrating. This was probably because it was my first time trying this out. My thoughts did not wander too much, although there was a little difficulty initially settling down--I cast off my glasses and fidgeted several times in the first minutes of the tape--and I did have some anxiety when interrupted. Also, Kabat-Zinn's voice isn't the epitome of uber-meditative (my boyfriend, for example, sounds pretty uber-meditative when he leads meditations). But although it took a little getting used to, I liked that - he sounded human.
OK, I just got told to put my computer away and have dinner. Until next body scan...
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