The Benefits Of Body Scan Meditation
BODY SCAN MEDITATION BENEFITS
Introduction, To Body Scan Benefits
Body scanning can reveal a great deal about your world and your life.
You also receive an understanding of how to live better even with physical pain and illness.
Through practicing the body scan, you can begin to understand how stress and anxiety affect you.
Bringing mindfulness to the body can help you learn what your body does and doesn’t need in order to thrive.
Body Scan Benefits Include:
Exploring how to work with physical pain
Finding links between emotions and physical sensations
Showing how you can use physical sensations as a key to your emotional state
Helping you open the door to greater mindfulness of the body using a time-honored practice: the body scan
The Advantages Of The Body Scan
The body scan meditation is a deep investigation into the moment-to-moment experiences of the body. By bringing awareness and acknowledgment to whatever you feel or sense in the body, the body scan can be very helpful in working with stress, anxiety, and physical pain.
While you may have heard about meditations that create out-of-body experiences, the object of the body scan is to have an “in-the-body” experience.
In the body scan, you methodically bring attention to the body, beginning with the left foot and ending at the top of the head.
You may notice a wide range of physical feelings:
- pain
- aches
- itches
- tingles
- firmness
- lightness
- heaviness
- warmth & cold
- as well as neutrality
Some of these sensations may be accompanied by thoughts or emotions. As you practice the body scan, this multitude of sensations and internal experiences can be boiled down to three basic feelings:
- Neutral
- Pleasant
- Unpleasant
Since the body is a dynamic organism that’s always changing, no two body scans will ever be completely alike.
Summary
As you continue to practice, you’ll discover what Martha Graham sagely noted: “The body says what words cannot” (Hanna 2006, 33).
The body has its own wisdom, and if you listen, it can communicate where physical tension, thoughts, and emotions lie within your body. This investigation into physical sensations, thoughts, and emotions is sometimes called the triangle of awareness, since it’s a journey into the totality of our human experience.
When you practice the body scan, first simply become aware of physical sensations by exploring their felt sense. This is distinct from thinking about your body. There’s no need to analyze or manipulate your body in any way; just feel and acknowledge whatever sensations are present.
Through this deep investigation, the body may begin to reveal a whole range of feelings. In this way, the body scan can bring you in touch with many aspects of your life.